Domestic Violence Refuges: Charities and Local Government

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, in the last couple of months we have given £600 million extra to local authorities because we understand the pressures they are under. We are keeping an eye on those pressures, and we encourage all local authorities which have difficulties with their budgets to talk to us early on, so that we can work with them. Local authority budgets have been increased by 7.5% this year, and as my noble friend said, local authorities prioritise domestic abuse victims in their budgeting.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a founder and patron of Survivors Against Domestic Abuse. Last Thursday, my honourable friend Jess Phillips read out in the other place—as she does every year—the names of 98 women killed as a result of violence over the last year: a heartbreaking tribute to lives broken and lost to violence. After every case of domestic homicide, we are told that lessons will be learned. Does the Minister agree that providing safe spaces to live for women who flee violence—a project we started in Stevenage, and which now provides 35 homes across Hertfordshire—is vital? However, it is in serious danger of being stopped because such local authority spending is discretionary. Will she meet with me to hear more about this work?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I would be more than happy to meet the noble Baroness to learn about that, and I thank her for everything she is doing in her county. As recently as this weekend, we heard so much about violence against women. The Home Office is taking this issue extremely seriously and a large amount of money is going into extra police training, particularly on tackling domestic abuse. Some £3.3 million has been committed over the next three years to support delivery of Domestic Abuse Matters training to police officers. Let us hope that this changes things.

Housebuilding

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

As I have said previously, SMEs play a critical role in housebuilding and in the housing market in this country. Through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, we have made changes to the planning system that will support SMEs to build more homes by making the planning process easier to navigate, faster and more predictable. The Government have recently announced policies that will support SME housebuilders, including an expansion of the ENABLE Build guarantee scheme, Homes England’s pilots of SME-only land sales and updating the community infrastructure levy guidance. So we are in the same place as my noble friend and we will be working with this sector very closely in the future.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a specific recommendation in the excellent CMA report regarding targets:

“More objective and effective use of targets to ensure housing need is met”


are needed. With the Government caving in to pressure from Back-Benchers in the other place and scrapping housing targets, and the developers putting profit before people’s homes, will the Government now reinstate those housing targets and make a long-term plan to deliver the homes we need, preferably in the new “new towns” that the Labour Party is promoting?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, let me make it clear that we have delivered 2.5 million extra homes in the last 14 years. Since 2018, we have also delivered the four highest annual building numbers for 30 years, and we are on target for 1 million more homes in this Parliament. We are delivering, but we have been through an economic crisis. We are coming out of it, and we will start to build more homes in the future.

Non-Domestic Rating (Rates Retention: Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2024

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I draw the Committee’s attention to my interests as a councillor and a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the Minister for her detailed introduction. The Liberal Democrats support these technical changes. I do not know how we could oppose them without having a very detailed understanding of all the complexities of the changes that the Minister has outlined today. As she said, the purpose is to ensure that local authorities receive the correct payments from business rates, which are a very important source of income for local authorities.

This is indeed a very technical SI, and the formulae for calculating the redistributive mechanisms are also very complex, as I have read in the paper that we are considering. However, it seems to me that the greater the complexity, the greater the likelihood of unintended inequities creeping in. So my first point to the Minister is this: the Explanatory Memorandum states:

“There is no, or no significant, foreseen impact on the public sector”


and that the intention is to

“minimise the impacts on local authorities as far as is practicable”.

Now, as the Minister will know, local authorities are in very challenging financial times, so every penny in the council coffers will make a difference. Can the Minister put parameters on

“as far as is practicable”?

Are we talking thousands or hundreds of thousands of pounds? I hope it is not millions. What are the parameters that the Government have used for describing

“as far as is practicable”?

I appreciate it will never be absolutely precise, because it is so complex.

The Minister will appreciate that business rate income is a very important source of funding. On the other hand, councils have a responsibility to ensure vibrant high streets. The result of that is councils wanting business rate bills to be reduced to help retailers. There were some changes in the last piece of legislation to which this SI refers to do that. It was reported last year in the Times, and referenced on Report on the Bill, that some retailers have business rates bills that are equal to or higher than their rental costs. That cannot be right. It leads me to suggest that root and branch reform of the business rates system is urgently needed.

Part of the solution to this gross unfairness is the way that the existing system overly favours online retailers that operate from very large warehouses. An example could be Amazon. The Minister will repeat that the Government have adjusted business rates so that these giants of the retail world pay a bigger share towards the local services they use, but these changes were minimal, resulting in a drop in the financial ocean for large online retailers. For example, it cost Amazon £29 million when its business model is in the billions. Yet the system still overwhelmingly favours online retail, despite government commitments in the levelling-up Act to reinvigorate the high street.

A radical change to create a fairer balance between what is known as “bricks and clicks” would go a long way to achieving what the Government are committed to doing—and which I support—as regards the high street. So can the Minister provide any hope at all that such a change is somewhere on the agenda? It is a key lever in reinvigorating our high streets and ensuring that major online retailers pay a fair share.

The Minister in response may point to small business rate relief. She would be absolutely right that many small shops have 100% rate relief, but that just further emphasises the point that I make. Any system that relies on substantial reliefs and complex redistribution mechanisms while failing to capture income from completely new business types—the online businesses—is ripe for fundamental reform.

I appreciate that this has gone slightly off-piste but, when we are considering the redistribution of business rates, which are a very important element of local government funding, it seems to me that we should use any opportunity we can to remind the Government that, to achieve some of their key objectives, a fundamental reform of business rates is absolutely essential. However, I support the technical changes that are introduced by this statutory instrument.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a serving councillor on Stevenage Borough Council and Hertfordshire County Council. I thank the Minister for her introduction to this statutory instrument and I am very grateful for her explanation of the relaying of it, which was informative.

I suppose that this instrument is necessarily complex and technical in content, but, if we look through it, we see that in many ways it demonstrates exactly how far business rates—or non-domestic rates, as we have to call them—have got from their objectives. They are intended to ensure that businesses make a contribution to the communities that allow them to thrive, to link them with the people and public services of their local area. They should recognise the differentiation between small, start-up and local businesses and the multinational corporates, when in fact non-domestic rates sometimes penalise them in inverse proportion to their ability to pay. They should also ensure that areas wishing to improve, increase or regenerate economic activity are able to vary the business rates to incentivise according to local circumstances.

Looking through the pages of mathematical formulae and complex calculations in this SI, I say that it would not be surprising if any average business doing so felt that we had somewhat lost the plot. The complexities of the system do not really benefit most councils, either, although we appreciate the funding that comes from them. For example, my borough raises over £61 million in non-domestic rates but, after all these calculations and the turning of the Government’s sausage machine, we get around £4 million of that—in spite of having three of the most deprived wards in the country.

So we need to refocus business rates back on to what they were intended to do. That is why they are part of Labour’s plan to support the vast majority of businesses in this country that are SMEs. They employ 16.7 million people and boost our economy by £2.4 trillion; they breathe life into our high streets; they deliver services that make our life easier: and they provide the goods we need to thrive. While SMEs welcomed the support they got during Covid, many of them now feel neglected as they struggle to survive the cost of living crisis, the recession and the complexities of this business rates system, which can seem utterly overwhelming, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, set out.

Labour’s plan for small businesses will be an important milestone in recognising their value to the economy and the essential role that they have in ensuring the economic growth that we need. We will undertake a fundamental reform of business rates, which will reshape this antiquated system and refocus it on business not bureaucrats’ objectives. We want to make sure that bricks-and-mortar businesses do not continue to pay disproportionately more than their online competitors. We want to take the burden from high streets and the businesses that sit at the heart of our communities, such as the local café that makes our morning coffee, the mortgage broker on our high street who went above and beyond to help you get your first home, the plumbers who come out of hours when you have water pouring through the ceiling. We want a new system that incentivises businesses to invest, rather than discourages them doing so. Our plan for business rates sits within a comprehensive plan for small business, which tackles all the issues that our many conversations with those businesses have told us are key to their future.

We had the chance to speak on the wasted opportunity to revise non-domestic rates during last year’s debates on the Bill, as the Minister said. We recognise that, for now, this technical paper is necessary to put in place the mechanism for the current system, so we will not be putting forward any formal objections, but I have some questions for the Minister. Can she comment any further on the Government’s plans to shift the current disproportionate burden of non-domestic rates taxation from small local businesses to online corporates or, potentially, on alternative forms of income for local government, including an e-commerce levy, with the funding retained by local government?

The retailers that we know and love on our high street, such as M&S, Boots, WHSmith and small, local businesses, seem to have a dramatic penalty in the business rates system over big online retailers such as Amazon. The current top-up and tariffs system is now outdated and, in view of the extraordinary cuts to which local government has been subjected, it often penalises areas of deprivation just because areas around them may be more economically vibrant. Can the Minister comment on what recent assessment has been carried out on the validity of the tariffs and top-up system?

What progress has been made on the Government’s promised consultation on business rates avoidance and evasion? The LGA, for example, has called for a review of exemptions, such as where businesses happen to be located on farms, and further clamp-downs on business rates avoidance, along the lines of those introduced in Wales and Scotland, to ensure that the rules on reliefs, such as empty property and charitable relief, are applied fairly.

The Minister knows that the LGA is also in favour of giving councils more flexibility on business rates reliefs, such as charitable and empty property relief, and the ability to set their own business rates multipliers or, at the very least, to set a multiplier above and below the nationally set multiplier. Have the Government given any further consideration to those proposals? Lastly, could she comment on the glacial speed of the appeals process, which distorts council finances and reserves, as councils often have to hold funds for not just months but years while they wait for the outcome of business rate appeals?

As I said, we understand that this instrument is necessary to move forward non-domestic rates for this year, but we hope that there is an understanding that sticking plasters, even complicated and technical ones such as this, are the problem and not the solution.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses seated opposite for their contributions. A number of questions came up. First, the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and, I think, also the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, asked about complexity. We accept that the administration of the system has become necessarily complex over time in response to all the changes to policy and tax that have happened. This will be an ongoing thing. Whatever the system is, as changes happen, it becomes more complex. While every mechanism cannot be made accurate pound to pound, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, would like, we minimise the risks to the system from any major changes that would affect a local authority’s budget as much as possible. Of course, we are always happy to talk to local authorities if they feel that they have a problem with their business rates.

Hate Crimes

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that working at a local level is key to giving people more confidence in reporting, but it is also really important in thinking about solutions to these issues. One of the things that my department has been doing, in particular since 7 October, is regular engagement with local authorities to understand what is going on in their area, examples of best practice we can help share, and any particular issues that they are aware of that we can provide more support on.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, news reports this week of a baby’s passport application being returned from the Home Office to its parents with its birthplace, Israel, scribbled out and the application torn, and a statue of Amy Winehouse being defaced with a Palestinian flag sticker placed over her Star of David, are more evidence of the increase in anti-Semitic incidents reported by the CST. The Government’s downgrading of recording of non-crime hate incidents limits the police’s ability to monitor and prevent escalation within communities. Can the Minister tell the House whether the Government will support Labour’s plan to reinstate full collection details for all hate incidents?

Housing: Section 21 Evictions

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to implement a ban on section 21 evictions before the end of this parliamentary session.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Penn) (Con)]

My Lords, the Renters (Reform) Bill is progressing through Parliament. The Bill will bring an end to Section 21 evictions, and our priority is to pass this vital legislation before the end of this Parliament. We will work with the relevant sectors to implement these changes effectively.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the Secretary of State told the BBC on Sunday 11 February that the Government’s proposed ban on Section 21 eviction would be operational before a general election. However, the Government have repeatedly told parliamentarians that this ban cannot be enacted before reforms to the court system are in place. In response to a Select Committee report in October 2023, the Government said that they would not commence the abolition of Section 21 until stronger possession grounds and a new court process were in place. In Committee on the Renters (Reform) Bill, the Minister has said that the ban cannot be enacted until court reforms are complete. Can the Minister please set out what court reforms are to be put in place and the timetable for delivering them, so that the ban on Section 21 can be operational before a general election?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, we have always set out our intention, in the White Paper that preceded the Bill and in the guidance that goes alongside the Bill, that we will need to give six months’ notice for implementing Section 21 for new tenancies. That is to give time for a number of things to happen. The noble Baroness is right that we need to allow time for the courts to prepare for this, to allow evictions, court rules, forms and administrative systems to be updated. It is also to allow for secondary legislation that flows from the primary legislation to be laid, and for guidance to be put in place. But we are working hard, and we have already provided upfront money to the court system to kick-start that process, so that we can move towards implementation as soon as possible.

Leasehold: Property Management Companies

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Government believe that forfeiture is an extreme measure and should be used only as a last resort. In practice, it happens very rarely and is subject to the right to relief. However, any changes to forfeiture would require a careful balancing of the rights and responsibilities of landlords and those of leaseholders. As a first step, we have asked the Law Commission to update its 2006 report on this matter, given the passage of time since then, and to take into account the implications of the reforms currently under way, so that we can consider what action should be taken.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, it is not just leaseholders who face these practices. What response can the Minister give to freeholders who face the imposition of private management companies charging extortionate and unregulated yearly fees, instead of having public areas adopted by local authorities? I believe this practice is known as “fleecehold”. Effectively, this means freeholders paying twice for maintenance: once through their council tax and again through fees to private management companies. What measures will the Government take to regulate these practices?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Bill aims to grant freehold homeowners on private or mixed-tenure estates the same rights of redress as leaseholders in this area—equivalent rights to transparency on estate charges and the ability to challenge those charges at tribunal. I believe the CMA is also looking into this matter, and we look forward to receiving its final report.

East Midlands Combined County Authority Regulations 2024

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 19th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has raised a number of pertinent points and I am looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response to them. She particularly raised the consultation and the responses. There has been a continuing problem with consultation on combined authorities because the number of people who respond is very low. In the case of the East Midlands, I think Ministers have taken the view that elected councillors would have to make the decision about the mayor. Nevertheless, there is a question about how the Government and combined authorities can engage with people to a much greater degree so that response rates to any question would be much higher than in this case. Having said that, I thank the Minister for her explanation of these regulations. It is very good to see the close working of the local authorities in the East Midlands Combined County Authority. I wish it every success in its work. We want it to succeed.

I have previously raised issues of scrutiny, audit and risk in relation to this combined county authority and other mayoral combined authorities. I noticed that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee commented on this public consultation. Paragraph 45 of the report cites the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities explaining that

“the Secretary of State has noted respondents’ concerns about the EMCCA’s governance model and the position of a Mayor but is satisfied that these draft Regulations would ‘provide the necessary check and balances on the governance of the EMCCA and its Mayor’”.

I draw the Minister’s attention to the Tees Valley Review dated 23 January 2024. I will quote from it, because what it says is important to all combined authorities. The question I pose to the Minister relates to whether any of the deficiencies identified in that report, published a few weeks ago, could occur in the East Midlands Combined County Authority. I quote specifically from paragraph 1.7 of the report’s executive summary, which said that

“there are issues of governance and transparency that need to be addressed and a number of decisions taken by the bodies involved do not meet the standards expected when managing public funds. The Panel have therefore concluded that the systems of governance and finance in place within”

the Tees Valley Combined Authority and the South Tees Development Corporation

“at present do not include the expected sufficiency of transparency and oversight across the system to evidence value for money”.

Recommendation 6 then went on to say that the Tees Valley Combined Authority cabinet should

“review its current delegations and directions to STDC to ensure it meets its statutory obligations, including appropriate oversight by Overview and Scrutiny Committees, to enable value for money to be delivered and evidenced through effective scrutiny of significant decisions”.

The Secretary of State has said that the draft regulations would

“provide the necessary check and balances on the governance of the EMCCA and its Mayor”.

Can the Minister, either now or perhaps later in writing, explain how these draft regulations actually provide the checks and balances necessary to ensure that a report such as that written on Tees Valley could not be written on the East Midlands?

The Minister is aware that I have raised issues of security, audit and risk repeatedly during the passage of the levelling-up Bill and on other occasions, and I find those words in the Tees Valley Review worrying. I hope that this cannot possibly happen elsewhere. I am surprised by what has been said on Tees Valley but, given that, what structure is in place—I cannot find it in these regulations—to prevent a repetition of what seems to have occurred in the Tees Valley from happening in the East Midlands or in any of the other mayoral combined or combined county authorities?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for setting out the basis for this new type of mayoral combined county authority. The regulations establish the East Midlands combined authority and are required in advance of the first planned combined authority mayoral elections in May this year. We consider them to be very important for the economic and social development of the region and its population, so we will not be objecting to this important SI, but that does not mean that we do not have any questions about it. Indeed, we are very excited and hopeful that our candidate, Claire Ward, will be the first East Midlands mayor elected and, as mayors do up and down the country, will make a great difference to communities in the areas that the Minister set out—housing, transport, public health, and education and skills.

We also noted the degree of consultation that took place from 14 November last year to 9 January this year, but further note, as did the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that the numbers are very low in these consultations. We need to think about how we engage the public more in these very important discussions about the future of their areas. We also noted that there is a distinctive emphasis in this devolution deal on the combined authority reflecting the local communities within the combined authority area. We can do more of that, and I think that might help to engage people even more.

Local Authorities: Financial Difficulties

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 14th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend. We made changes to local government financing in January, and we listened to local government and its priorities: £500 million of the £600 million extra that was given is going into social care.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, this weekend, the Local Government Association Labour Group published its latest version of 101 Achievements of Labour in Power, featuring a huge range of initiatives: street support partnerships tackling homelessness in Leeds, Food On Our Doorstep clubs in Mansfield, delivering over 83,000 square feet of lab space to support life sciences in Stevenage, new models of fostering in South Tyneside, and Plymouth City Council launching the first ever national marine park to support conservation of our seas. Remarkably, all this innovation has taken place against the backdrop of a reduction in core spending power of 11% compared with 2010-11. Is it not time the Government recognised the huge value that people place on local services and worked with the sector to deliver a sustainable funding model to support them?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The Government do appreciate what local government can do, and it is not just Labour local government that is delivering this innovation and great services for local people. At this point, I should thank local government for everything it does. As I said earlier, we listen to local authorities all the time, which is why we put in £600 million more in January.

Local Planning Authorities: Staffing

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 12th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, we do not think that the answer is for local planning authorities to set their own fees. There is no guarantee that additional income would go into planning services or deliver efficiencies, and it would risk a variation in fees between different areas, dissuading home owners and small developers from undertaking development. The substantial increases in fees and the indexing of fees that we have provided for this December will go a long way to supporting local authorities to increase staffing in their planning departments and the skills of those already there.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I hear what the Minister is saying, but it will not touch the sides. The local government funding crisis has seen planning departments, even those in shared services, with ever-diminishing resources. Economic growth absolutely depends on a quick and efficient planning service, delivered at local level. Labour will increase planning capacity by hiring more than 300 new planners, funded by increasing the surcharge on stamp duty paid by non-UK residents, to ensure that every local planning authority has at least one full-time planner. Does she agree that every local planning authority should have at least one full-time planner?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, as I have said, we have made provision for increased resources to go into local planning. I am glad the noble Baroness opposite has recognised the success of the surcharge on stamp duty charged to non-resident purchasers of property, which was introduced by this Government.

Local Authority Finances

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, we are committed to broader reform of local government finance, but we have said, in recognition of the disruption and uncertainty caused by the pandemic, that this will be something for the next Parliament. We have also set out ambitious proposals when it comes to devolution of greater powers and greater financial decision-making to local government. That starts with the trail-blazer authorities in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands but will be on offer more widely across the country.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, whenever there are questions about local government funding in your Lordships’ House, we consistently hear Ministers tell us how much more funding has been granted, but I cannot help wondering if someone in DLUHC needs a new battery for their calculator. The data from the House of Commons Library reveals that there will be a £5.8 billion shortfall in the coming financial year, when prices are adjusted for inflation. Every council bar one—the Greater London Authority —is expected to experience a real-terms cut in funding, with 218 authorities, which is more than two-thirds, experiencing a reduction of more than 30%. We heard the Minister’s figures again today, but what would she say to the leader of Plymouth City Council, whose funding has reduced from £110 million in 2010 to £12 million in 2024?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I do not recognise the figures that the noble Baroness has put forward. The settlement, which we announced in its final form, represents a real-terms increase for councils compared to last year. There is also a funding floor in place to ensure that, before decisions on council tax are taken into account, councils across the board have certainty. I would be interested to know what additional finance the party on the Benches opposite is planning to put into local government.