Housing (London)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Slaughter]

Will the Minister give way?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Will the Minister give way?

Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I will, I hope, be a little briefer than the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). I just want to make a few remarks arising from his comments and amendments.

I am absolutely with the right hon. Gentleman on the general principle that in going ahead with the Bill, which I believe has all-party support—I am not sure about him but he is not pressing his amendment—we must protect both public money and the money of the public. By public money, I mean, first, any underwriting of major capital schemes, such as the Thames tunnel. Secondly, this is a large private multinational company—I appreciate his research into its holdings and complex structure—and we must ensure that it pays taxes in the UK.

At the same time, however, we must also look after the money of the public and ensure that not a penny more is paid in increased water charges, particularly given that water charges are already rising above the rate of inflation for all water users across the UK, including Thames Water customers. I was somewhat reassured on Second Reading when the Minister said that the Government shared those concerns and that he was sceptical about the project—at least about whether its financing was what Thames Water said it was. There would be broad agreement on that.

I also agree with many of the comments of the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark about Thames Water, particularly under the ownership of RWE. During my first two or three years in the House, Thames Water was my bête noir, partly because of how it dealt with leaks—digging up roads all around London in a completely ad hoc, unconcerned way and leaving workings for months at a time—while still not getting to grips with the problem. Furthermore, the problem of sewer flooding, particularly in west London, has been a blight on people’s lives. Year on year, thousands of basement and ground-floor properties in my constituency are flooded by sewers, yet little attention is paid to it. And, indeed, there are Thames Water’s financial arrangements, which the right hon. Gentleman spoke about.

It is only right to balance that, however, by mentioning that Thames Water’s performance has improved markedly in the past few years in many of those areas, although we should continue to be concerned about its financial structures. A lot has been written in the papers in the past few days about the current drought and impending hosepipe ban and other possible measures, and the water companies are rightly under scrutiny. I note that in total—this is not just Thames Water—water companies are likely to report annual profits of £1.5 billion and that they are currently leaking about one quarter of the water they provide. They provide about 14.6 billion litres daily, and about one quarter of that is being leaked. It has been pointed out quite correctly that the hosepipe ban will save only 20% of the water being leaked daily.

The water companies, then, have a long way to go. Many of their problems were caused by the botched privatisation under the then Conservative Government and the fact that, as the right hon. Gentleman said, there has been an incentive for companies to beef up their profits to make themselves ripe for takeover, to sell on at a profit and not to worry during those years about their consumers and the cash cow that comes from having an effective local water monopoly.

Everyone will be grateful for the research that the right hon. Gentleman has done into the financing structures. I am less sure, however, that his amendments would deal with that. I will not spend long on this because I suspect that the Front-Bench spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker), will explain, not as eloquently as me but forensically and analytically, how the Labour amendments would provide the necessary safeguards in a less prescriptive and detailed but more effective way to ensure that if any projects come forward for financial assistance, they are tested in the House first to ensure that the assistance is necessary.

I depart from the right hon. Gentleman in respect of the effect that his amendment might have on the clause. In the end, we need a project in London that will resolve the daily, sometimes weekly, regular flow of huge quantities of sewage into the Thames. On this, I am not sure where he is coming from. When we debated this matter last September in Westminster Hall, he said:

“I also put in a short response to the private commission that was set up by some interested local authorities and chaired by Lord Selborne.”—

in fact, it was set up by Hammersmith and Fulham council—

“The commission has argued that we must have a totally different direction. I am not persuaded by that. The Thames tunnel is the best direction. The previous Government came to that view and the present Government have held to it.”—[Official Report, 14 September 2011; Vol. 532, c. 316WH.]

That was in September. In February, he said:

“I am now clear that, since the end of the first round of consultations in 2011, the arguments for a review of the full tunnel proposal and possible alternatives have substantially increased.”—[Official Report, 29 February 2012; Vol. 541, c. 391.]

I am not sure what happened between September and February. This is important because we must find an effective solution. There is no point putting forward half measures.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I have met Thames Water and looked at the situation. Pollution of the Thames is totally unacceptable—as are the levels of sewage going into the Thames. There has to be a better drainage system to ensure that that does not continue. However, does my hon. Friend agree that after this process we need much tougher regulations to deal with the paving over of large areas of London and the Thames basin, which leads to excessive water run-off from rainfall, which then joins the sewage, becoming a sewage surge in the Thames? That water should be replenishing ground water, not being flushed away with the sewage and thus causing pollution in our river.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Slaughter]

I am grateful for that clarification. I have never signed up to the concept of the tunnel uncritically or without reservations—or, indeed, at all—because I have always held open the option that there might be a better solution, and if that is what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, then we are on all fours with each other. That is why I have looked in some detail at proposals such as the “Binnie Bubbler”, SUDS and the idea of separate rainwater and sewerage networks, which would also create the problem of huge disruption and much additional cost. Some of those projects, including water conservation, can be done and should be effective, both environmentally and from a cost perspective; the difficult thing is to find an alternative that does what the Thames tunnel would do.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend represents a riverside constituency, and therefore must have studied the issue in detail. I understand that the tunnel will not last for all time and will become overloaded within the next three or four decades. Therefore, we need to examine how we use water and how drainage systems operate, rather than hitting another crisis in three or four decades’ time.

[Mr Slaughter]

I agree, and something that is effectively a large sewer pipe stuck under the River Thames can sometimes look like old technology in some ways. There has to be a more organic and continuing process of developing solutions to avoid tunnelling, but it remains the case, first, that this solution has been preferred in many other capital cities around the world and, secondly, that at the end of the day, it is the simplest, clearest and most effective solution. Therefore, as well as considering other, additional measures, all our attention should be focused on how the Thames tunnel can be contained as a project, particularly financially, but also in terms of the disruption that it would cause.

However, I take my hon. Friend’s point entirely, and conclude by going back to basics and why we need this project. When I spoke on Second Reading last week, I invited my hon. Friend the Member for Luton South to join me last Saturday on the foreshore of the Thames by the CSOs—combined sewer overflows—in Hammersmith for the Thames21 clear-up. I was very disappointed to see that he obviously had pressing constituency business, because he would otherwise have joined me and about 100 of my constituents—although they might have been from Bermondsey and Old Southwark or Cities of London and Westminster. However, they were all hard-working people—they worked longer than I did. Together, they cleared up several skips of industrial, commercial and consumer waste—if I can put it that way.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I rise to intervene on my hon. Friend for the last time and to thank him, because I visited the Hammersmith shoreline on Saturday evening, and it was absolutely brilliantly clean. I looked over that pristine area of mud and sand, and thought, “This is amazing! This is how the Thames can be. I wonder which guardian angel has been here and cleaned it up”—and now I know.

[Mr Slaughter]

Modesty forbids; all I would say, without going into too much graphic detail, is that when I left, I washed everything that I was wearing, yet it was still Monday morning before I got the smell out of my nostrils. Unfortunately, I did not go and wash everything I was wearing immediately, because I had to go canvassing for Mr Livingstone in between. I cannot think how many votes I must have lost in the condition I was in, following my outing on the foreshore.

It is a lot cleaner on the foreshore, and I appreciate absolutely what the Thames tunnel coalition, Thames21, has done, and all the fantastic consumer groups involved, in organising the clear-up. I pay tribute to them, although I wish that they did not have to do that work in those appalling conditions.

One of the people who was working hard there on that morning was a young man called Conor Newman-Walley, aged 15. He and his dad were there, working away. He goes to the same school in Hammersmith that I went to many years ago, and he is in the rowing team. It is a very good rowing team, as it was then. He is a founder member of Rowers Against Thames Sewage—RATS—and this is what he has said to the Thames tunnel organisation:

“In Victorian times, the people of London solved the first sewage crisis by implementing one of the most influential engineering projects of its time. As young people we learn and marvel about these feats in history at school. The challenge of sewage in the Thames today is too big for our generation. We look to those above us to put the projects in place that will solve this problem for generations to come. Our call to you is to build something amazing that our children will learn about in school.”

That attitude is one that we should adopt as we contemplate the Bill.

It is our duty to scrutinise the Bill and, more importantly, when it is passed, to scrutinise the project and any public money that might be committed to it and possibly put at risk. I hope that the amendments are not designed to stand in the way of ensuring that the clean-up of the Thames takes place. For Conor, a regular user of the Thames, this is not a lifestyle question, or a matter of the river looking pretty or smelling nice; it is a question of health, and of whether he can feel pride in his community when he goes to the river to take part in his sport. He needs to be able to take part in that sport without feeling personally inconvenienced or put at risk.

The Thames brings huge benefits to people, particularly my constituents who live alongside it and use it regularly. We have a duty to the public purse, as well as to ensuring that London has a river that is fit to look at, to use and to enjoy. I appreciate the attention paid by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark’s to the financial detail, but I hope that he has not strayed so far from the path that he cannot also commit to those aims.

Pay and Consultants (Public Sector)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Slaughter]

I suspect that it goes back even beyond then and that the tradition of public service and people doing jobs not primarily for the remuneration changed in the 1980s, when a lot of moral values went out of the window in the era of Gordon Gekko and Margaret Thatcher. We could talk about that all night if we wanted to, but I would rather talk about the current situation—and the issue is very contemporary. At 8 pm this evening on Radio 4, “File on 4” will cover tax avoidance through personal service companies. I think—I am never quite sure, with the BBC—that it will cover some of the same examples that I will give today. The brief for that programme begins:

“How strong is the government’s commitment to ending schemes set up to minimise tax? A number of schemes have proved popular in the private sector, including Employee Benefit Trusts. These have been used by football clubs for tax planning purposes, but are now in the sights of HMRC as it attempts to recoup what it sees as unpaid tax. But how widespread are these trust schemes and why are they so popular with companies that have large government contracts?

As the Treasury reviews tax avoidance by senior government employees, it has emerged that employees in other parts of the public sector are using payment schemes that keep them off the payroll. There is growing concern that paying public servants through personal service companies may be inappropriate.”

I have received briefings in advance of the debate from the TaxPayers Alliance and the Public and Commercial Services Union. The concern that these issues cause across the political spectrum is such that I could read a paragraph from each briefing, seamlessly, without affecting the flow of my argument. That is not something that can be said about every topic.

The Treasury review, to which the “File on 4” blurb refers, is the one announced in the main Chamber on 2 February by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in response to an urgent question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown). That, in turn, was a response to the exposé of the funding of the head of the Student Loans Company. The investigation at the time was, I think, by “Newsnight”, but I am now referring to a report in The Daily Telegraph. The investigation showed that the

“chief executive of the Student Loans Company, was paid through a private firm he had established rather than being paid direct—a tax avoidance mechanism which could reduce his income tax liability by £40,000 a year.

The disclosure threatens to undermine Coalition pledges to crack down on tax avoidance in the private sector and opens ministers up to accusations of double standards.”

Heaven forbid!

“Documents show the deal was signed off by David Willetts, the Universities minister, who said in a letter that it had been ‘agreed by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’ Danny Alexander.

Mr Alexander insisted he did not know that the arrangement allowed him to avoid tax, and has ordered an urgent investigation across Whitehall to see if the practice is widespread.”

I am sure that many hon. Members remember that urgent question and that many took part in the debate. I could not be there, but I have of course looked at the Hansard and will outline what the review was said to entail. After, rightly, quoting the Treasury’s “Managing Public Money” guidance, which states that

“public sector organisations should avoid using tax advisers or tax avoidance schemes as any apparent savings can only be made at the expense of other taxpayers or other parts of the public sector”

and making the bold assertion that

“There is no place for tax avoidance in Government”,

the Chief Secretary said in relation to his review:

“I have asked the Treasury urgently to review the appropriateness of allowing public sector appointees to be paid through that mechanism”—

the one used by the chief executive of the Student Loans Company. After being interrupted, the Chief Secretary continued:

“I have also asked the Treasury officer of accounts to write to all accounting officers across Whitehall to remind them that all appointments should, in line with existing guidance, consider the wider cost of lost revenue to the Exchequer when considering value for money.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2012; Vol. 539, c. 1001.]

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend not go further and say that anyone working directly for the public sector in any capacity should be employed by, and accountable to, the public sector? There should be utter transparency about their employment, and we should not have these ludicrous schemes that are probably to do with tax avoidance and lack of accountability.

[Mr Slaughter]

As always, my hon. Friend has summed up my 40-minute speech in about 40 words. I agree with him, but I will not sit down.

Extradition

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 24th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Slaughter]

Indeed, and I will go on to discuss that point.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), who secured this debate, quite rightly concluded his remarks by saying that the fact that Babar Ahmad has been in prison for so long was damaging to the image and traditions of British justice; that is absolutely true. I think that the media have missed the point; perceptions, particularly in the Muslim community across the whole country, are that Babar Ahmad has been so badly treated because of his faith and religion, suffering terrible abuse as a result. I have had a large number of contacts and e-mails from people who attend local mosques, as well as from people who attend churches and other organisations, and who are deeply concerned that somebody should languish for eight years in prison on a case that cannot be brought to court in this country, all because of the very strange arrangement that we have with the United States. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we do not mend the arrangement, this will be the image of British justice, not what we want it to be?

[Mr Slaughter]

As so often, I agree with everything that my hon. Friend has said, and I will discuss the length of incarceration in a moment. However, I think that my hon. Friend was also perhaps alluding to the circumstances of the treatment of Babar Ahmad: he was first arrested in 2003, and by the time he reached the police station he had sustained at least 73 forensically recorded injuries, including bleeding in his ears and urine. Six days later, he was released without charge. As we know, he was subsequently paid £60,000 compensation by the Metropolitan police for the assaults, although there was no apology and, I think, no admission. That would be shocking enough in itself, but of course in August 2004 Babar Ahmad was rearrested and he has remained in custody ever since.

I am addressing my comments effectively to the text of the petition, not to the offences alleged against Babar Ahmad but to the case that is being put by his family and the 140,000 people who have signed the petition, which I shall read as it is fairly short:

“Babar Ahmad is a British Citizen who has been detained in the UK for 7 years without trial fighting extradition to the USA under the controversial no-evidence-required Extradition Act 2003. In June 2011, the Houses of Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights urged the UK government to change the law so that Babar Ahmad’s perpetual threat of extradition is ended without further delay. Since all of the allegations against Babar Ahmad are said to have taken place in the UK, we call upon the British Government to put him on trial in the UK and support British Justice for British Citizens.”

That is the petition that has attracted 140,000 signatures.

The word Kafkaesque is somewhat overused in the media and in Parliament too, but it probably does apply to this case, where somebody has been arrested and held in high-security prisons for seven years without—clearly—any charge and without, as far as we are aware, any intention by the British authorities to charge. Therefore, the petition asks that the British prosecuting authorities take the lead and make a decision to go ahead and charge him here, if there is sufficient evidence to do so.

The excellent report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights that was published in June deals with many of these issues; a key one is forum. We know that there is provision on the statute book that would allow a forum test to be introduced. The introduction of such a test would immediately deal with cases such as that of Babar Ahmad and resolve the issue. Again, I strongly believe that the House should have an opportunity to make a decision on that matter if the Government are not prepared to make that decision.

Babar Ahmad’s situation is intolerable. It has been described by one of the judges who considered the case as an “ordeal”. As I have already said, I am making no comment at all, and indeed the petition makes no comment at all, about the strength of the evidence about the nature of the offences, because that evidence has not been made publicly available. I am making a comment that somebody—a British citizen—has spent seven years in high-security prisons without any charge being brought against them. That fact alone should shock all Members who are present in Westminster Hall today.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

It is pleasure to have the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), at the Government Dispatch Box this evening. It is a shame that the Lord Chancellor is not here, but of course he was also absent when the provision was announced by the Prime Minister at the famous press conference on 21 June, when most of today’s business first saw the light of day, including the clause we have just debated. At times it appears that there is a parallel Bill: the agenda that the Government wish to present to the media, or which the media dictate to the Government.

Sadly, the consequence for the House is that we do not have the opportunity to scrutinise the legislation properly. I do not know whether that is because the Government have no confidence in or commitment to their own legislation and are simply going through the motions, as we saw a little while ago, but the process of formulating the policy has been absurdly rushed, even by their standards. It is wholly inappropriate to introduce major changes to criminal law on Report. For that reason, among others, I suspect that the provisions will have a rather more torrid time in the other place than they will have here tonight.

Squatters are a nightmare for homeowners and tenants alike. The Criminal Law Act 1977, which the Minister mentioned, makes it a criminal offence for any person not to leave premises when required to do so by “a displaced residential occupier” or “protected intending occupier” of the premises. Furthermore, parts 55(1) and 55(3) of the Civil Procedure Rules allow owners to evict someone from a residence they do not occupy. An interim possession order, backed up by powers in section 76 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, mean that a criminal offence is committed if an individual does not leave within 24 hours of such an expedited order being granted.

As the Minister confirmed in his opening remarks, new clause 26 seeks to deal with squatting in vacant properties for which there is no imminent plan for residency. The clause, as drafted, applies only to residential properties and will not apply where there has been a previous landlord and tenant relationship between the occupier and the owner. Those are not the cases that typically attract the media’s attention. For example, the case of Dr Cockerell and his wife, who was pregnant at the time, was widely reported this September, in the Evening Standard and other newspapers. In that case the police wrongly said that the case was a civil issue and not one for them. As I understand the facts as reported, Dr Cockerell and his wife would have been protected intending occupiers and the police should have intervened. I fear that their failure to do so is not atypical. I remarked in Committee that if we had a pound for every time the police said that something was a civil matter when someone goes to them, we would probably be able to build affordable housing in the country, unlike what the Government are doing. I worry that the Government are trying to introduce new legislation without implementing the legislation that already exists, which is clearly the case in the examples I have given so far.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend is old enough to recall the lengthy consultation that took place before the 1977 Act was introduced. It specifically distinguished between an occupied property and a property that had been left empty for a very long time. The issue at the time, particularly in London, was that vast numbers of empty properties were being squatted. That law was a product of consultation. There has been no consultation on this—[Interruption.] Well, there has been very limited consultation, but certainly not in the House, about criminalising people who are actually extremely desperate for all the reasons pointed out by my friend the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas).

[Mr Slaughter]

I think I was doing my politics A-level at the time, so I might have studied the Act as part of that. My hon. Friend makes an important point about housing need that the Minister, to be fair to him, also addressed, and I will move on to that in a moment. I will not say what grade I got in my politics A-level—[Interruption.] Let us just say that it probably would not impress the Education Secretary.

We share the anger of people whose properties are damaged or vandalised by squatters. That is always wrong, and it is right to decry such behaviour. It is also right to say that there are, for want of a better term, lifestyle squatters—people who are part of the something-for-nothing society. We disagree with that, and we support the criminalisation of their activities. However, many squatters are homeless, and often have severe mental health or addiction problems.

It may be a sign of the Government’s topsy-turvy logic that in one part of the Bill, which we support, they seek to divert those with mental health and drug problems from the criminal justice system, but this part may criminalise those very people. At the same time, we are seeing some of the most swingeing benefit cuts in history. Housing benefit has been mentioned. In constituencies like mine, thousands of families will be forced to move because of the cuts in housing benefit, or may lose their properties. Incompetence by the Department for Work and Pensions and its private sector agents, such as Atos Healthcare, is causing a rise in poverty and homelessness. We are seeing a massive increase in appeals on welfare benefits, and 170 extra staff have been hired by first-tier tribunals to deal with those appeals, many of which are successful. That is one reason why we oppose the Government’s proposals on social welfare legal aid.

I wish that yesterday we had had the luxury that we have today—a timetabled programme with knives to grandstand some of the Government’s proposals. The House is thinly attended and the debate is frankly low key, whereas yesterday the Government engaged in talking out important measures on which many hon. Members wanted to speak. I noted what the Secretary of State, or it may have been the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), said about our debates tomorrow. I hope that we will have the debates that we want tomorrow, including those on part 2, and that Government Whips will not employ their tawdry tactics again.

Some 40% of homeless people have squatted, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) said, and 6% of homeless people are squatting at any one time. There is a significant prevalence of mental health problems, learning difficulties and substance addiction in those who are homeless.

This afternoon, I opened a new project for homeless people in my constituency. Very experienced people from organisations for the homeless—they were not trying to be party political in any way—asked me a question that I could not answer. They said that the Work and Pensions Secretary talks about an underclass, or a feral class as the Justice Secretary also said, and says that the Government want to take action to help problem families and to relieve poverty at the bottom of society, so why do they wish to take measures that could criminalise those same people?

The Government are clearly being tough on squatting, and we have no objection to that, but they are being incredibly weak, contrary to what the Minister said, on the causes of squatting. In fact, their impact assessment gives a hint of who the people are who often end up squatting. It says:

“Local authorities and homelessness…charities may face increased pressure on their services if more squatters are arrested/convicted and/or deterred from squatting. Local authorities may be required to provide alternative accommodation for these individuals and could also face costs related to increases in rough sleeping in their areas. An increase in demand for charities’ services (food/shelter etc.) may negatively impact current charity service users…There may also be a cost to society if this option is perceived to”

be

“unfair and/or leads to increases in rough sleeping.”

The pièce de résistance is:

“It has not been possible to quantify these costs.”

The Government accept that there will be pressure on services, but say that they cannot quantify the cost. Why? They do not know how many people squat. I believe—the Minister will no doubt correct me if I am wrong—that the civil servants have used figures from squatters’ organisations to estimate how many squatters there may be. The Government’s estimate is that there are between 340 and 4,200 criminal squatting cases across England and Wales, and that the Crown Prosecution Service will charge between 850 and 10,600 offenders.

The Government accept in their response to the consultation that

“as with any criminal offence there would be an operational discretion as to whether a person should be charged with an offence.”

I think that goes without saying, but they say it in particular with respect to hikers who take refuge in a house to take shelter from the elements. [Interruption.] I am glad that the Government Whip, the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), is interested, and I will say a bit more about that. It is a problem that the Government see as a possible unintended consequence of the new legislation. They state:

“The Government accepts that hikers who occupy a residential building in these circumstances might be committing an offence as a result of its proposals. In practice, however, it seems unlikely that the property owner would make a complaint”,

so that is all right. They continue:

“Even if a complaint were made, as with any criminal offence there would be an operational discretion as to whether a person should be charged with an offence. The Government considered creating a ‘reasonable excuse’ defence to allow for this type of situation, but was concerned that such a defence would be open to abuse and might render the new offence toothless.”

I have seen some pretty shoddily justified legislation in my time, but that really is an “on the one hand, on the other hand” explanation.

I hope that at the very least the Minister will tell us whether his intention is to apply the discretion that he wishes to see applied to hikers, an important category of citizen, to those who occupy empty properties out of desperation—the people the Government’s own impact assessment states would now have to resort to sleeping rough. They could include people with mental health or addiction problems whom it may be more appropriate to treat than to detain in jail. I have heard the Minister make that argument in another context in Committee. I note that this farrago and confusion would not have happened had the appropriate parliamentary process been followed.

It is common practice in a Second Reading debate—this increasingly feels like Second Reading, when we see measures for the first time and pass general comments on them—for a proposal that has some merit but needs refinement to be allowed through. That is what we intend to do today. We support the idea that there may be categories of squatters who need to be criminalised, although we say that the current criminal law is not being properly used in that respect.

I hope that the Minister will not think that our decision to allow matters to proceed is an unthinking endorsement of his position. Those who think squatting an acceptable lifestyle choice should be under no illusion about the fact that we disagree, and we support the criminalisation of what is, frankly, arrogant behaviour. For that reason, we believe it is right to allow the matter to be scrutinised in another place. However, there remain issues to consider and more thought and deliberation to be done before the new clause reaches the statute book.

I hope that the Government will at the very least consider the issues that I have raised today, and those that other hon. Members will no doubt raise, and keep them in mind when they feel the endorphin rush of a few cheap tabloid headlines again. I hope that they will think seriously about all the implications of the new clause and come up with something a little clearer, better defined and less vague.

The Minister will no doubt say that I am giving less than wholehearted support. Not true. We support the Government’s intention, but we believe that because they have once again rushed matters towards the statute book, they have not given them proper and clear consideration thus far. Once again, they leave it to another place to do that.

Social Housing in London

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 5th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Obviously people on what are seen as relatively high incomes do have housing needs and are paying, as I outlined earlier, incredibly high levels of rent in order to survive, as a result of which they cannot save and therefore, even if they wanted to get into the owner-occupied market, simply could not do so. A young couple or single person in London earning £25,000 a year and paying £500 a week for a flat has only a limited ability to save and so will stay in the private rented sector for a very long time, if not for ever. People who do buy into the owner-occupied market usually rely on modest levels of inheritance to put down the deposit to do so. We are making housing unattainable for people on relatively high incomes, as the hon. Gentleman points out.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The definition of “affordable” in Hammersmith and Fulham now goes up to £80,000 a year, and I am sorry but I do not accept that that is reasonable. Let us put one myth to bed today, and that is that Boris Johnson is in some way committed to affordable housing in London. His own figures show that there will be fewer than 2,000 affordable housing starts this year and none next year.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the way in which he has represented his constituency and pointed out what the council in Hammersmith and Fulham is doing, and what he is trying to do to meet the needs of people who are in desperate housing need.

I come back to the issue of people on housing waiting lists. What is the route for a homeless family, or a concealed homeless or about-to-be-evicted homeless family, in an inner-London borough, or probably any other London borough? If they go to the council and present themselves as homeless, they will probably get a hostel place. Hostels are grim places and have a devastating effect on the psychology and well-being of children who go into them. If they are there for a long time, it is an awful experience. If they knew it was for one, two, three weeks or a month, and that at the end of that they would have a secure council flat, that would probably be bearable. But if they are there for six months or longer and are told that the only pathway out is to go into private rented accommodation, and they ask me as their MP whether to accept that, I have to say that they must, because if they do not the council will have absolved itself of its responsibility to them.

A member of that family will say, “But Jeremy, housing benefit will have to pay this huge rent, and that means I can’t get a job, otherwise I will lose the housing benefit.” They are moving into the most awful bind. Quite often they are placed in flats in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton—no reflection on him; quite the opposite—and they then come and tell me what the flat is like: slum landlord, inefficient heating, badly maintained, possibly vermin infested. They can get no redress from the landlord because the landlord knows for certain that there will be no problem in renting it again through an agency. We report the matter to the local authority but this can go on for years. They move from one private rented property to another until, perhaps five or 10 years down the line, they achieve the gold medal of a council flat. That is a lifetime for a child. They will move primary schools several times, lose their friends and social contacts, their youth club and their networks. That is what is happening to dozens and dozens of children and families all over the city at this time.

I ask the Government: please think through what is happening. Think of the desire for somewhere safe and secure to live. Think of the housing benefit that is being wasted in excessive rents to private landlords, and allow local authorities to do what the old London county council, the Greater London council, and lots of London boroughs of all political parties did, which was to invest in good-quality bricks and mortar of secure housing for people to live in, which they could call their own home and know is their own home. That is what brings about stability in communities. The alternative leads to underachievement, homelessness, crime and the misery of unsustainable communities.

I do not call such building a waste. I listen with interest when building workers tell me that they are being laid off because there is nothing for them to do. There is a housing crisis out there that can be solved by the building of new properties that can put those people to good work and solve the social problems at the same time. London is crying out for a socially responsible approach to housing. Let us not leave it all to the market; The market is what created the problem in the first place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Having listened to the whole debate this afternoon, I hope that the rest of the country leaves us to it more often, because it has been a very interesting debate. I have enjoyed all the speeches, from both sides of the House. I would make particular mention of the contributions from the Government Benches, because we have heard some of the more thoughtful and compassionate speeches from Conservative Members—that is probably why there were only three of them.

I would also like again to thank the sponsor of the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who really does know his onions on this issue. He has driven many debates on the issue over the six years that I have been in this House, and we are all grateful that he keeps it at the top of the agenda.

Without embarrassing him, I would also like to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who reminded us what this issue is all about. Those of us who are housing anoraks can get tied up in housing benefit regulations—particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck)—and how the housing revenue account works, but in the end, this debate is about human beings. It is about our constituents. We would not think of half-teaching someone to read or performing half an operation, so it genuinely puzzles me that we should be content as politicians to leave people living in the most appalling conditions in our capital city. Not only has that happened throughout the tenure of all recent Governments, but it is getting worse. That is why the Government cannot afford to be complacent today.

The period when I was born, 50 years ago in Fulham, was what we would probably now call the heyday of social housing, following the Bevan period, when he was the Minister responsible for both health and housing in the 1945 Government. He genuinely understood the importance of housing as a public service, and although he probably would not have used the phrase “life chances”, he knew that housing is important to people’s life chances, just as it is to their basic health. That period was followed by Macmillan and other Tory Governments who would also have prided themselves on building a sufficient supply of housing—and doing so in what were, quite frankly, much more difficult economic times than today—to meet the nation’s need. Why that is no longer an ambition I do not understand. When I was growing up, council housing was the kind of housing that people aspired to. The houses had plumbing, for God’s sake! They had central heating and running hot water. They had inside toilets. In the ’60s and ’70s in Fulham, those things were not to be found in the private rented sector or even in the owner-occupied sector.

Yes, that was the era of estates, and there were good estates and bad ones, but—to follow up on a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington—they did not start leaking and falling down after four years, as they do now. An example of that is the South Acton estate, which I used to represent. The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) might want to have a look at that. Many of the estates were very good ones, and they are still standing to this day and providing good-quality, affordable homes with a good space standard.

That was also the era of acquiring properties. Councils around London—Hammersmith, Islington and others—bought up private sector slum properties, renovated them and converted them into housing, sometimes with several flats in one Victorian house. There are now thousands of those properties in boroughs around London. Those boroughs are now being targeted by the designated sales policies of Conservative councils, but those were the mixed communities. When we walk down the street in Hammersmith, we see council and housing association accommodation and privately rented and owner-occupied houses next to each other in a row. Ironically, those are the mixed communities that the Government are seeking to destroy.

Fifty years ago, there were also housing action areas. Grants were available not only to private sector tenants but to poorer owner-occupiers to ensure that they had basic facilities in their homes. That was also the era that saw the start of the housing associations.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Does my hon. Friend acknowledge that housing action areas came in at the end of the wholesale building clearance policy and did a great deal to preserve London’s Victorian heritage and, at the same time, to preserve communities? They are something that we should applaud and welcome.

[Mr Slaughter]

Absolutely. Those areas presented a win-win situation. They maintained buildings that we now value, which some politicians and planners in the ’60s and ’70s did not value, and they also provided good-quality homes in which people could live and bring up their families while enjoying the facilities that most of us take for granted today.

Housing (London)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Local authorities have powers in this respect, if they care to use them, and some authorities do. Indeed, the local authority in my area is extremely proactive in pursuing empty properties and trying to bring them into rented use or have them taken over by a housing association or somebody else. Typically, these are places such as flats above shops. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: there is something criminally wrong about large numbers of good-quality homes being deliberately kept empty across London. Some owners see them as long-term, reserve places that they might live in at some distant point in the future. Some see them as an investment and will wait for property prices to go up. In a society where there is so much homelessness and housing stress, it is simply immoral for places to be kept deliberately empty. I would therefore support effective measures to bring those homes back into use by people who are in desperate housing need.

Where the previous Government did act rather belatedly was on the construction of housing association and council properties. There was an increase in housing association build, most of which came about under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and planning agreements on particular local sites. However, there was not enough intervention, and the previous Government were not proactive enough. Only rather belatedly did we start building council housing. I am pleased to say that my local authority is now building council housing again. That started during the latter period of the previous Government, when the then Liberal-controlled council brought the programme into being. That programme has continued and is being expanded under the current Labour-run administration in Islington. However, the authority lacks the capital that it requires from the Homes and Communities Agency. When the Minister replies, therefore, I hope he will understand that housing and building costs are high in London, that housing need is desperate and that the only long-term, efficient way out of the housing crisis is to construct council housing at fixed rents and with permanent tenure, which gives people a sense of security, a decent home and an environment in which to grow up.

Before I come to housing benefit, let me say one thing. If we go to any primary school, secondary school, police station or social worker in London and ask what the biggest problem is that we face, we will be told that it is related to housing in one way or another. Young people are growing up in small, overcrowded flats, with two or three siblings sharing a bedroom. That is no way to grow up. Young people in those circumstances cannot bring friends home and they cannot do their homework. There are fights over the television, there are fights over when the lights should be switched on and off—there are fights the whole time simply about space. Anyone who goes into a flat where three teenagers are sharing a room will see the arguments that go on and the stress that is caused to the whole family. What happens as a result? The teenagers do not stay home of an evening; they go out. They do not have a lot of money, so they get into bad company when they go out, and problems result from that. These teenagers underachieve in school. Illness runs rife throughout the whole family. The family breaks up. There is a huge cost to us all in terms of wasted lives, underachieving children, broken families, divorce and everything else. We must recognise that unless we provide all our young people with decent, secure, clean, dry and properly repaired accommodation, it is very unlikely that they will achieve their full potential in school, college or university. We are wasting a whole generation as a result of our failure to address the housing crisis in London.

Local authorities have great difficulty fulfilling their statutory housing obligations to house homeless families or those in desperate need. They do not have enough council or housing association allocations to do that. Incidentally, there is a whole science around allocation, with people looking at the choice of bidding or desperately looking on internet sites and reading newspapers to find out how many points they need to get which flat, how many steps are involved and all the other details, which are so important. However, most of those people, most of the time, will be desperately disappointed because they will fail even to be selected to look at a place, never mind to be shortlisted for possible allocation. For thousands and thousands of people, it is like losing a lottery every week, but the consequences are desperate. We therefore need to address the issue.

Local authorities often place families in private rented accommodation. I do not blame them for that; they have no choice. A whole industry has therefore grown up around the housing shortage, with letting agencies and private landlords charging as much as they can get away with. The housing benefit system will usually pay the rent. Although it varies slightly from borough to borough, the rent for a typical two-bedroom local authority flat in central London is of the order of £100 a week. A two-bedroom flat in poor condition in the private sector costs at least £250 a week, and £300 is quite common. For a house, we are looking at £500 or £600 a week. The difference is paid through housing benefit, so we are all paying the exorbitant profits made by letting agencies and private landlords; they are the people who are living off the housing benefit system.

When the Government say, as the previous Government did, that they have to address the problem of the cost of housing benefit, particularly in London, I absolutely agree, because pouring money into the private sector in this way simply is not a good use of public funds.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

A two-bedroom flat in the private sector in my constituency would actually be about £350 a week, so it is even more perplexing that the Government insist that the rent in new social lettings will be 80% of market rent. That means that the rent payable by new tenants will be three to three and a half times what it would be in existing social tenancies. That, of course, will have to be covered by housing benefit in many cases.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a good point and is extremely experienced in dealing with those issues, both as an MP and as the former leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, where he did a great deal to try to improve the quality and quantity of the housing stock.

We all do advice surgeries and hear sad and difficult cases. I was talking last week to a lady in my constituency who has discovered that her private sector rent has gone up from £315 a week to £475 a week. I do not blame the local authority, because the housing benefit that she is paid is fixed by the Government through the local housing allowance. My constituent is not in work and receives benefits, and she has been told that she must contribute £145 a week to make up the shortfall between what the local housing allowance will pay and the rent that is expected or demanded from the landlord. She is expected to pay more than the rent that she would pay if she lived in equivalent council accommodation. It is clearly impossible for her to find £145 a week, which is more than her benefits. She would have nothing to eat and nothing for the children, so the only solution is to move away.

What effect will moving away from the area have on my constituent, her family and all the rest of us? She will lose her place and will have to try to find, if she can, a two or three-bedroom flat, probably in the far suburbs of London or outside London. She will lose her family network; her children’s education will be disrupted; she will not have access to the doctors, hospital or community network and support that she is used to; her whole life will be completely uprooted. Wherever she goes, she will have no security of tenure. She will have six months, or perhaps a year if she is lucky, before the landlord decides to allow her to stay or increases the rent because it is possible to get more in the private sector, in which case she will have to up sticks and move on again. Imagine how that feels for the children—the insecurity, changing schools, mum and dad moving the whole time and nowhere permanent to stay or build up a network of friends. It is that sense of insecurity that is so bad for the children of many families living in London.

The Government have decided to address excessive housing benefit costs, and I agree with them. There are two ways of doing it. One is to let the market sort things out, and the other is to bring in some form of regulation, so that there is permanency of tenure and greater security, and so that we spend less money. Unsurprisingly the Government have decided to go for the market option, so they have set local housing allowance limits. I have some figures from James Murray, who is the executive member for housing in Islington and does an extremely good job in difficult circumstances. Bizarrely, Islington falls into four broad rental market areas—inner-east London, central London, outer-north London and inner-north London. The figures for a two-bedroom flat vary. In inner-east London, the figure is £300 a week; in central London, it is £500 a week; in outer-north London, it is £230 a week; and in inner-north London, it is £329 a week.

James Murray also makes the point that in the past 10 years

“demand for private rented accommodation in the borough has gone up by about 20%”.

My observation is that it continues to rise very quickly.

Legal Aid Reform

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) on securing this debate, which has been an excellent example of Back-Bench debates focusing on an issue that is causing great concern in constituencies around the country. We have heard many good speeches from both sides of the House.

It is appropriate that Members on both sides of the House speak in defence of legal aid, because it was on the recommendation of a Committee headed by a Conservative peer Lord Rushcliffe that legal aid was first proposed in 1943, and it was a Labour Government and a Labour Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, who piloted the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 through Parliament. The Secretary of State for Justice says that he wishes to return to the original intent of legal aid, but the original intent of legal aid is captured in paragraph 40 of Magna Carta:

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”

Those were the very words that Sir Hartley Shawcross had in mind when he said on Second Reading of the 1949 Act:

“It is a Bill which will open the doors of the courts freely to all persons who may wish to avail themselves of British justice without regard to the question of their wealth or ability to pay.”—[Official Report, 15 December 1948; Vol. 459, c. 1221.]

The Government’s Green Paper presents their plans as a return to the founding intent of legal aid, but they are in fact the exact opposite. They will remove the average person’s ability to seek justice.

I wish to focus on the cuts that will cause most damage—those to social welfare legal aid—but that is not to say that there are no problems with other aspects of the Government’s proposals. The narrow definition of domestic violence cases will leave women and children vulnerable and less able to seek help; the failure sufficiently to address the costs of very high-cost criminal cases is a mistake and a missed opportunity; and taking clinical negligence out of scope, alongside proposed changes to civil litigation funding, will end the ability of many people to challenge negligence and malpractice. However, it is the cuts to social welfare legal aid that we find most unacceptable. They will result in the complete collapse of the social welfare advisory sector, and do so, ironically, at huge cost to the state.

In the short time that I have, let me give five reasons why those cuts are wrong. First, the advisory sector will all but disappear. The Government propose to eliminate almost all legal aid for social welfare, including legal aid for debt, housing, education, welfare, employment and immigration cases. They will cut funding for many advisory services, such as citizens advice bureaux and law centres.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Is my Friend aware that the High Court this week found in favour of the Mary Ward centre and other voluntary organisations that were threatened with a huge cut by London Councils on the ground that inadequate equality assessments were made in advance of the proposed cuts? That is a taster of what is to come if the Government try to put those cuts through.

Localism Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Jeremy Corbyn

Monday 17th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I fear that the Bill is a hotch-potch of unco-ordinated policies, as Labour Front Benchers have said, and it will not deliver a strengthened voluntary and community sector. It will instead deliver punitive sanctions on those least able to stand up to them, particularly in the area of housing. I know that from experience in my local authority of Hammersmith and Fulham, which is doted on by the Secretary of State and Ministers. As mentioned previously, that council was said to have showed the way by merging backroom services and cutting senior salaries rather than making front-line cuts.

I urge the Secretary of State to look at the budget for the next three years, which last week was published—or sneaked out, I should say—by the council. Less than 1% of cuts will come from mergers with other councils, as was trumpeted, and less than 1% will come from cuts in senior salaries. Yet fully 50%—more than £13 million in the first year—will come from cuts in children’s services and adult social services, including the closure of most Sure Start centres.

The Mail on Sunday reported just before Christmas that one officer in Hammersmith and Fulham has been paid £1,000 a day for three years—£700,000 paid into a private business run by that single officer, which is more than all the other cuts in senior management put together. That has been described as “good value for money” by the Conservative council. Since this officer’s job is the systematic demolition of council estates in the borough and the redevelopment of needed community assets, I suppose that the Conservative council would think that that was good value for money, but I wonder whether that is what the Secretary of State meant by looking at high salaries.

Three aspects of the Bill have been greeted by hollow laughter by my constituents. One is the community right to challenge. What local organisations taking over community assets means in Hammersmith and Fulham is that all the money is withdrawn, the staff are sacked and in some cases the premises are sold—Sure Start centres and libraries, for example. Then the community is told, “If you want to run these centres on your own behalf with no money from the council, and sometimes with no premises, then go ahead”. That is called the big society.

As for assets of community value, what use is that policy if there is no right of first refusal and no support from the council? What we have seen in Hammersmith is a fire sale of all community buildings—buildings in which literally hundreds of voluntary sector organisations operate. I heard just this morning that Palingswick house in the middle of Hammersmith—a building that 22 active local voluntary groups have made their home for many years—is to be sold off to open a free school for children from outside the borough. Nobody in the constituency has asked for that. The same is true of the Irish cultural centre in Hammersmith, of Shepherd’s Bush village hall and the Sands End centre. Those are vibrant and successful community assets and there is no opportunity for the local community to continue to run them.

As for neighbourhood planning, almost every planning scheme is a joint venture between the council and a developer. In order to build new luxury offices for councillors and senior officers, we have 15-storey tower blocks along the riverside on the site of a community cinema and homes provided by the Pocklington trust for people with visual impairments.

The 100-year-old Shepherd’s Bush market is being destroyed to make way for luxury housing. The air rights relating to the car park of an old people’s home in my constituency are being sold to a private school, which means that no light will reach the old people, but it will make £200,000 or so for the council. Furthermore, in west Kensington the right of local people to take over their own estate, provided by legislation that the Government claim to support, is being vetoed by the council so that a private developer can demolish 750 good-quality council homes in one of the largest developments in the country. I wish that I had more time in which to talk about the impact on my constituents’ housing: about the lack of security of tenure, and about the lack of a duty in relation to homeless people.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend’s constituency and mine have similar characteristics. For instance, 30% of members of our communities live in private rented accommodation. Does my hon. Friend share my horror about the prospect that the Bill will force more people into unregulated private tenancies?