King’s Speech
Lord Bailey of Paddington Excerpts(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Winston.
London’s housing crisis is no longer a warning sign; it is a full-blown social failure. The Government and the Mayor of London are failing the people of this city. While politicians issue press releases and make grand announcements, ordinary Londoners have been priced out, pushed out and left behind. One in every 50 Londoners is homeless or living in temporary accommodation. Over 100,000 children are growing up without a stable home. I want your Lordships to think about that for a minute. At least one child in every London classroom is homeless. This is not merely disappointing; it is morally unacceptable. While this crisis deepens, London boroughs are struggling with a £5.5 million bill every single day for temporary accommodation—money that is spent on managing, not solving, a problem.
The single biggest failure in London housing today is simple: not enough homes are being built. The Government say that London should deliver 88,000 homes per annum, but last year London delivered only 32,000 homes—not even close. Even the Mayor of London’s own lower target of 52,000 homes was missed by a wide margin. This is not a small shortfall; this is systematic failure, and Londoners are paying the price.
Rents are exploding, families are overcrowded, young people cannot buy and working people are forced to live and work further and further away from the communities in which they grew up. At the same time, private rental lettings are down nearly 40% over a five-year period. The average rent is now £2,280 per month. The average house price in London is £542,000. The Mayor of London talks endlessly about housing targets, but housing targets do not home families; houses do. Londoners can now clearly see the gap between rhetoric and delivery.
Another glaring omission from the King’s Speech is proper action on short-term lets. Across London, entire neighbourhoods are being hollowed out. Residents are regularly dealing with noise, anti-social behaviour, waste, transient occupancy and, in some cases, criminal activity. Meanwhile, permanent housing stock is disappearing from London’s local communities. Councils need real powers, not token gestures. They need mandatory registration, real-time platform data sharing, punitive fines for rogue operators and proper enforcement funding. That is why I have introduced a Private Member’s Bill that will come before this House on 18 June. Communities deserve protection too and, if this Government will not act decisively, Parliament should push them to do so.
Britain’s housing market is jammed shut and stamp duty is one of the reasons for this. It punishes aspiration, traps older people in homes too large for them, prevents growing families moving and blocks younger people from taking their first step on the housing ladder. That is why the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, was right to propose the abolishment of stamp duty on family homes. Research shows that up to 2 million people would consider downsizing if stamp duty was removed. If only half of them did this, over 1 million additional homes would come back on the market. That is how the Government can get movement again: not through slogans, headlines and fantasy targets but through actual movement, homes and opportunities. The wider economic boost to local economies could be up to £1.2 billion for local tradesmen and professionals.
In conclusion, Londoners are tired of excuses. They are tired of hearing promises without delivery, targets without homes and announcements without action. This crisis is destroying aspiration and social mobility in our capital city. Young people cannot buy, families cannot move and councils are overwhelmed. Children are growing up in homelessness in one of the richest cities in the world. That should be a disgrace to all levels of government. We need radical housebuilding, functional rental markets and policies that reward work and aspiration, because housing is not a luxury; it is the foundation on which stable lives are built.
North Sea Vessel Collision
Lord Bailey of Paddington Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
As I have said, we should wait for the investigation to draw conclusions, because that is the proper and only way of dealing with this. On the defects of the motor vessel “Solong”, I did not say that the defects identified in the inspection made in July last year in Dublin were not rectified until the more recent inspection; I said they had all been rectified by the time of a more recent inspection. Again, we should not draw conclusions. The investigation will look widely at all the causes of this and the conditions of these vessels. Speculation on some of this is, frankly, very unhelpful. We need to leave all the professional and brave people to deal with this incident as it is occurring, and we need to leave the Marine Accident Investigation Branch the time and space to carry out the proper investigation so that we learn all the things that need to be done as a consequence of this incident.
Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)
My Lords, as the Minister has rightly said, we should not leap to any conclusions or make any speculative changes right now, but these two maritime ships surely would have contained black box recorders. Where are we on finding those recorders to mitigate these disasters in the future?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My understanding is that vessels such as these have such a thing, but currently neither has any crew on board, clearly, and the activities are primarily based on keeping the vessels floating and preventing the terrible consequences of any part of what is on them or in them polluting the environment. Of course, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch will look for those as a matter of urgency, will hopefully find them intact and will therefore be able to have a really good understanding of what went on on each vessel in the hours and days leading up to the incident.