Safe Streets for All

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

So much of the legislation and policy that we discuss in this House is experienced by people through the filter of local government: it is experienced locally rather than through a national framework. Councils, which are at the forefront of dealing with so many of the challenges that we face, have stepped up, particularly in this last year of covid, and delivered on everything from supporting the vaccination programme and vulnerable people shielding to the Everyone In homelessness programme and so much more.

It is depressing to see that once again the Queen’s Speech reinforces the existing trend that councils are not rewarded for the service that they provide to their local communities. They are treated with indifference, stripped of the resources that they need and increasingly stripped of the vital defensive functions that they can fulfil in supporting their communities. They have lost core funding of more than £16 billion over the past decade; 60p out of every £1 that the Government provided a decade ago is no longer provided.

We have heard many times, from Conservative Members as much as from the Opposition, that councils’ defence of communities through their planning role is being seriously undermined, as we have already seen with permitted development, and will be undermined further. Where we want swift action from the Government, we have seen delays in everything from the protection of leaseholders to building safety four years after Grenfell, with no progress on social care at all—and so much more.

I want to spend a minute on community safety. Again, local government is very much at the forefront, from community cohesion in the light of the appalling events that we saw over this weekend to supporting safety on our streets and working with our local police. Sadly, county lines gangs and serious youth violence do not get the attention in this Chamber that I think they deserve. I am pleased that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will place a new statutory duty on local authorities and partners to prevent serious violence. I hope that the widest possible approach will be taken and that it will be fully funded, given that youth services, with their vital preventive role, have been stripped of 70% of their funding over the past 10 years.

However, despite all these unmet needs, the Government are giving priority to dealing with a problem that we all know hardly exists through the proposals to introduce a new layer of bureaucracy for voting that will cost councils tens of millions of pounds. I say to the Minister that this is not a problem that deserves our attention, and it is certainly not a problem that deserves the resources of local government. Can that money instead be devoted to where it belongs: community safety, and supporting young people into the diversion and prevention activities that we need to keep our streets safe?

Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her support on the Bill, because, as she knows, the introduction of part 4 of the Bill puts particular duties on tier 1 local authorities to provide support services as part of their package of care towards people who are having to live in safe accommodation and refuge spaces. However, we also need to focus not just on refuge spaces. Although those are absolutely critical, as part of our work in the future I very much want us to focus on trying, where safe, to keep victims and children in their homes, with perpetrators being required to leave their home addresses. It is simply unacceptable that someone who has suffered trauma for years and years feels, in moments of crisis, that they must be the ones to leave their home, their family, their friends, their GPs and their schools while the perpetrator gets to stay in the home address. That is wrong. Wherever it is safe and possible to do so, we want to change that culture.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

What steps she is taking to tackle county lines drug trafficking and safeguard vulnerable children from exploitation.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

What steps she is taking to tackle county lines drug trafficking and safeguard vulnerable children from exploitation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

We are determined to tackle the harm caused by county lines exploitation. In addition to the establishment of violence reduction units, the extensive operations conducted by British Transport Police on transport networks and other targeted policing across the country, this year we have significantly increased our investment in one-to-one specialist support for county lines victims and their families to help them to leave the clutches of these criminal gangs. We are also funding the helpline Safecall run by the Missing People charity, which provides specialist advice and support to young people, parents and professionals who are worried about a young person who may be in trouble and being exploited.

[Ms Buck]

In my constituency there is one estate where it is believed that at least 20 county lines are being run. We have had a spate of killings this year, including two teenagers, one of whom died only a few weeks ago. Does the Minister think that the loss of over a third of our police services and 80% of our youth services, and the halving of our early intervention services, have helped or hindered in dealing with county lines?

[Victoria Atkins]

We should be clear that the fault for the terrible facts that the hon. Lady describes in an estate in her constituency lies in the hands of the criminal gangs who are exploiting our children and peddling drugs. It is that demand for those illegal substances that is driving this market force of county line gangs across the country. She will, I am sure, be delighted about the recruitment of extra officers to the Met. She will also, I am sure, be pleased about the targeted investment that we are putting into one-to-one specialist support for children and young people, including in London. But the message is clear: it is criminal gangs who are responsible for this and we need to work together to drive them out.

Fire Safety Bill (First sitting)

Karen Buck Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Daisy Cooper]

Q This question is to Mr Davis. In your written evidence, you talked about the standard of risk assessor training being “infinitely variable” and said that only some people may be “competent”. Could you expand on that and explain what the lowest end of being competent is, compared with the highest end, in order that we can understand what you are saying? For people at the lowest end of being qualified or competent, are you saying that they need one day’s training or two years’ training? What is the gap? If you could explain it, that would be helpful.

I also have a quick question for Mr Carpenter, following up on your last point. What do you think is the fairest way of managing the costs? I say that as an MP with constituents who are being asked to pay 20 grand or more as an up-front, one-off cost, as well as having their service charges increased sixfold. Some of them are trapped financially because they cannot fight, and they have no mechanism to raise the money that is needed to pay for the remedial work. So that is a question for each of you, quickly.

Dennis Davis: It is difficult to give you a very quick answer. There could be 50,000 people who call themselves risk assessors. Some of them will be employed by a company specific to their premises and will help to maintain the integrity of that company’s building facility etc. They will be trained, maybe on a week’s course and maybe in particular areas, and that will be their skill base and they will do that.

The fire safety order, when it was brought in, was deliberately intended to be applied by individuals if they so wished. Part of the phrasing, I think, at the time was that it was not intended by the Government to be a consultants charter. The inference from that is that you should be able to apply a lot of common sense, and the Government published a very detailed series of guides to assist in that.

So at one level you need no qualification; you can do this yourself, provided that the premises are simple. At the other end of the spectrum, you certainly would need degree-level education—level 4 and above—to be able to apply the standards to complex buildings. In addition to that, you might need a high level of granularity, as I have said, in a particular system. That might be the installation—that is, the cladding system—or the fire alarm system.

This spectrum is very wide. The problem, as we foresee it, is that there are people going around who say that they are fire risk assessors, but they do not have a qualification. They have not attended any form of course, training and so on, yet they purport to offer this service. Our worry is that the public are then placed in a situation where they think that they have received good advice, but they may not have done. There is certainly anecdotal evidence of that sort of application.

James Carpenter: One of our asks is that we want to be able to reassure housing association residents that they will not need to foot the bill for these works. Obviously, there is the £1 billion building safety fund at the moment, but that is predicated on where the viability of the owners may be threatened by funding the works themselves, and it will involve submitting a business case and so on as to why they would be at risk without support.

We are currently assessing our position. However, it would be unlikely that large associations such as L&Q would be eligible under this particular scheme, and those that are would then have to notify the Regulator of Social Housing, which may in turn result in a downgrade of their viability. We are working jointly with the G15 on this. Neither our leaseholders nor tenants should pay the price for systemic issues in relation to building safety. We need to exhaust all possible options to claim the costs, or to get those that were responsible to pay for those things. Failing that, and in the absence of Government funding, we will have no choice but to consider those legal obligations that are set out in leases with residents. However, that is the last point. We have not done it with the buildings that we have remediated; we have not done it with leaseholders, but it is there as the last resort.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Q I want to return to the issue of access, because I feel that the Government underestimated fairly consistently the complexities of access, be it in respect of fire doors or the issue of retrofitting sprinklers. There were local authorities that wanted to retrofit sprinklers, and even set aside money, but were unable to do so because of this issue of uncertainty of access. Could you two give us an idea of what you feel to be the scale of the problem?

It was widely believed that leaseholders would want to co-operate, for example, after the Lakanal fire, yet lawyers were saying that as many as one in three simply did not and would not. So can you give us an idea about the scale of the problem and the complexities? In London, there are particular issues with things such as the overseas ownership of property, which makes it difficult to track the true owners of properties. Can you also comment on why enforcement is difficult, for example, for housing associations and local government, in terms of the cost and the length of time it takes to take people to court?

[The Chair]

Mr Carpenter, for some fairly concise answers, if you will, please.

James Carpenter: On the challenge, we have got more than 100,000 homes and there are tenants in a lot of those. The issue of access is not just in relation to leaseholders; we also have issues with tenants, where they do not want to help us to meet those demands. With leases, we have a separate issue. It is not just about inspecting; we can also have challenges where we want to make improvements to buildings, but they are objected to by residents, because they do not want sprinklers in their home or a fire alarm system. We may then manage to put a fire alarm system in someone’s home, and it is linked to the building to raise warning to others, and they unscrew detector heads and so on. So the challenge is a huge and, as a landlord, there is very little power we can take without going through a lengthy and costly court process—often the costs of that are not recoverable. That is the challenge, but I point out that that is not all tenants and all leaseholders. Obviously, we do get people who co-operate and understand, but there are also people who don’t want you accessing their home.

[Ms Buck]

Q Is that a significant minority, and we are not just talking about this being very rare?

James Carpenter: Access is a significant problem for building owners to manage—it is not small in any sense. It is not all tenants who cause those issues, but this is a significant challenge for landlords.

[The Chair]

A quick answer from you, Mr Davis.

Dennis Davis: I am very sorry but I cannot give you a scale on this, which is what you asked for. The anecdotal evidence certainly is that there are tenants, whether leaseholders or not, who do not like you to have access. In addition, there are difficulties in any case for everyone, because people work and so on. Therefore, access outside normal working hours can often be the norm if you are trying to visit inside someone’s dwelling. You can understand why those arrangements have to be made, but it is a serious issue for those seeking to maintain systems—there is absolutely no doubt about that.

Policing and Crime

Karen Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes that since 2010 police officer numbers have been reduced by almost 21,000; further notes that some violent crime, including knife crime, has risen to record levels; notes that youth services, including early intervention, have been decimated by a decade of austerity; notes that prosecution rates have fallen sharply; notes that on current plans many police forces will still be left with fewer officers than in 2010; and therefore calls on the Government to recruit 2,000 more frontline police officers than they plan and re-establish neighbourhood policing.

There is no more emotive issue than crime and punishment. We have asked for this debate today because these issues matter so much to all our constituents, and because the first duty of every Government is to defend the safety and security of their citizens. Of course, that does not mean there will be no crime. What it means is that every Government should use their best endeavours to ensure that safety and security. That does not mean dog-whistle rhetoric on law and order; it means genuinely making people safer. Ministers like to trumpet their enthusiasm for stop-and-search. Labour supports evidence-based stop-and-search, but random stop-and-search can poison police-community relations, rather than necessarily making anybody safer.

Instead of fulfilling their duty, the Government have tried to ensure safety and security on the cheap. Labour Members have repeatedly warned that cuts have consequences.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

On that point, does my right hon. Friend agree that the public value safer neighbourhood policing above almost everything else? They like to see the police out and about, building good community relations. Does she share my regret that a five-ward cluster in my constituency, which had 30 police on duty a few years back, recently had as few as seven? No wonder the public no longer feel that the police are present on our streets.

[Ms Abbott]

I am familiar with my hon. Friend’s part of London and I share her regret that the amount of visible policing on the ground has lessened because of Government cuts.