Private Renting: Homeless and Vulnerable People

Debate between Lord Benyon and Daniel Kawczynski

Wednesday 8th February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend will come on to talk about various organisations that help people with homelessness. Shrewsbury Homes for All in my constituency does a good job of trying to help homeless people. Does he agree that the Government ought to do more to help such organisations?

[Richard Benyon]

Unless we are extremely hard-hearted, we are all moved not only by the huddled figures in doorways and the cases that come to us of people who are either homeless or likely to be homeless but by organisations in our constituencies such as the one my hon. Friend mentions. It is when those organisations work with local authorities and a Government and all point in the same direction that we can get real solutions to this problem, and I am sure that that happens in his constituency.

The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research found that 55% of landlords said they were unwilling to let to tenants in receipt of housing benefit, and even more—82%—were unwilling to rent to homeless people. The majority of local authorities agree that it has become more difficult for single homeless people to access private rented accommodation.

The FCO and the Spending Review 2015

Debate between Lord Benyon and Daniel Kawczynski

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon]

The right hon. Gentleman must have read the next page of my speech. I shall answer that question precisely in a moment; I think he will agree with what I have to say.

What President Putin would want first is for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget to be curtailed. He would also want a weaker NATO that was riven by infighting and that continued to run down its armed forces, as it has done in years gone by. He would also want a NATO that did not respond to an escalation in aggressive actions against states on Russia’s western border. He has had a bit of bad news in that regard, however, because there has been a reversal in the decline in defence spending, not least by Britain but also by some of our allies. This situation requires massive efforts of diplomacy to keep our alliances moving in the right direction, showing resolve and showing the ability to stand up to the actions of his regime.

To answer the question from the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), Putin wants a west in which influential countries such as Britain become less influential. I think the right hon. Gentleman can see where I am going here. Putin wants a weakened European Union. Let us remember that it is the EU, not NATO, that can impose damaging sanctions against his regime. He hates having an economic rule-setter on his western border.

As the leader of the UK delegation to NATO, I recently attended a meeting with other delegation leaders at NATO headquarters. Informally and formally, our allies crossed the floor to ask me, with varying degrees of incredulity, whether Britain was really going to leave the EU. I hope that the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report will look not only at the costs of a possible Brexit but at the impact it would have on the geopolitics of our European foreign policy. These people, including Americans, were coming up to me and saying, “Now? At this time? Really? With all that threatens Europe, economically, militarily and societally?” There is much that our diplomats and intelligence services have to do in the coming years: shore up our alliances, particularly NATO; encourage more spending on defence among our allies; and use all methods, through both our hard and soft power postures, to deter Russia. This is about how we invest; how we work with our allies; and how we exercise our armed forces and show strength.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

When we met Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels last week, he not only concurred with a lot of what my hon. Friend is saying, but discussed the other side of the coin, which is the importance of dialogue with Russia. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important to attempt to engage with Russia, despite these tensions, to try to defuse them?

[Richard Benyon]

I entirely agree with that. I am certainly not somebody who believes in confrontation; my hon. Friend probably knows that well, as he knows how I operate in this House, and exactly the same applies in how we deal with a potential aggressor. The purpose of what I am saying today is that not only should we be strong, showing that our alliance is strong and that we are not going to see the envelope of article 5 pushed by people such as President Putin, but we should engage diplomatically with him and with his regime to try to get some common sense. We should use resources such as the World Service and the British Council, which my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay talked about earlier. Very movingly last week, a Romanian who works at NATO said that the greatest treat of her day used to be sitting under her bedcovers listening to the British World Service, as it kept her in touch with what was going on in the west and the freedoms that we enjoy, and she just used to want some of that—she has now got it. Through such means, we can also influence people in Russia.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

When I used to go back to Warsaw to see my grandfather in communist times, we always listened to the BBC World Service, albeit very quietly and with the curtains drawn, as of course it was illegal to do so. That was a great comfort to my grandfather and his generation of Poles, as they knew there were people outside, beyond the iron curtain, who were struggling for them and ensuring that they were kept informed.

[Richard Benyon]

As always, my hon. Friend makes a very powerful point, and he and his family perhaps understand this more than any of us in this House.

Let me conclude by talking about one concept in foreign policy, which is our will—our will to make a better world and to extol the virtues of the kind of society that we enjoy in this country and that most of our European colleagues also enjoy in the west. We face difficulties in that; we get on with our lives as independent members of different alliances, be it NATO, the EU or other arrangements we have, whereas an aggressor such as Russia is one country controlled pretty much by one individual, and so our will is tested. On the face of it, we should not be alarmed, because across NATO 3.2 million troops are under arms and the four largest NATO members spend $740 billion a year on defence compared with Russia’s figure of £65.6 billion. But that statistic, stark as it is, does not describe the depth of the problem we are seeing in places such as Ukraine, Georgia and Syria, and the threats, be they actual or subversive, faced by NATO countries such as the Baltic states. We have to have a strong will, and proving that we have it requires resources, commitment and the hard slog of soft power and diplomatic efforts. It requires language skills and a real in-depth understanding. Of course there are other problems in the world, for example, in the South China sea, in Africa and elsewhere, which draw many of those resources away from a particular problem.

As so many people have said in this debate, we do not know what is coming round the corner next, but I am certain about one thing: Russia will tweak NATO’s nose, push the envelope of article 5, be it through cyber, by playing on Russian-speaking nationals in certain countries or just by threatening countries that are friendly to us but not members of NATO, such as Sweden, through incursions into their waters or airspace. Today, in the Defence Committee, we were told that

“any weakness on our part, Russia exploits.”

Making sure that Russia understands that the west will respond and will punish it if it attacks a NATO state must remain a key foreign policy objective—but it is one that needs proper resourcing.