Building Homes

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Best, not just for his question but for his long-term championing of housing in this Chamber. I look forward to working with him, particularly on the provision of some of the specialist housing which I know is of great interest to him.

In terms of restocking—or should it be restaffing?—planning departments, there are plans to allow full cost recovery on residential applications, which is one part in the detail of the Statement today and is really encouraging. We have plans to increase the number of planners. I know that planners take a long time to train and are experts in what they do, so it is not an overnight job, but we are determined to strengthen planning departments, which are responsible for the whole of this process.

On development corporations, further announcements are coming forward tomorrow on the issue of new towns, but I take the noble Lord’s point on the wider aspects of development corporations. With his permission, I will take that back, give it some further consideration and respond to him in writing. But I think he will be interested to hear the announcements on new towns tomorrow.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, there is a lot in this Statement to welcome. I agree with the noble Baroness on the need to look at the green belt and at grey areas in particular. I attempted to do this 14 years ago but was stopped by the tsunami to save our green belt. We need a proper understanding of the green belt, recognising that there are plenty of brownfield sites within the green belt and greenfield sites in the brown belt, so this kind of rationalisation is necessary. I also very much welcome the commitment to council housing. It must be of some embarrassment to Labour that the Blair-Brown years never reached the number of council houses that Baroness Thatcher built or, indeed, the level built during the Cameron to Sunak years.

I make two suggestions about where we could speed up the process. I am pleased that the Minister wants to speed up planning applications, but the delay is actually at the other end in implementing the conditions. She should look very hard at that. My second suggestion is that, given that it will take some time to get this in place, the Government should look at ways of encouraging, either fiscally or through planning policy, off-site construction. That is the best way to get more houses that are better, more environmentally friendly and more secure in terms of power. Doing that requires a fair amount of investment from developers, but it would be able to give the numbers that the noble Baroness is looking for.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for his comments and suggestions, which were helpful as ever, and I look forward to working with him as we go through this programme. I am passionate about council housing, having grown up in a council house—it was actually a development corporation house, to be clear—and I want to see that programme develop. I thank the noble Lord for his suggestions and look forward to moving the whole programme forward.

I will just make a correction on the affordable homes programme. Let me clarify that the Government have committed today to bring forward details of future government investment in social and affordable housing at the spending review, enabling providers to plan for the future as they help to deliver the biggest increase in affordable housing in a generation. I might have muddled my wording slightly on that, so that is just for clarification.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Friday 2nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entries in the register of interest, particularly those relating to Holocaust remembrance. That is a particularly fine speech to follow. I have to say that all the speeches have been really good today. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, talked about the exhibition at the Bundestag. Perhaps I could give notice that it is his intention to bring that exhibition to these Parliaments. By joining the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in that regard, I hope that I can make up for the appalling reference that I made to him the other day, when I described him as the very epitome of a dapper English gentleman.

I thank the usual channels for arranging this debate, which I hope will be a regular feature of Holocaust memorial week, like the long-established one in the other place. I also thank the Lord Speaker for organising, in conjunction with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a thoughtful discussion on the nature of genocide last week. I join in thanks to Karen Pollock for her excellent work with the Holocaust Educational Trust and to Olivia Marks-Woldman of the HMDT for organising so much in a very difficult year: 5,000 different organisations putting together local events, 3,000 buildings lit up, including the Blackpool Tower and the London Eye; thousands of candles in peoples’ windows and 6 million digital candles on billboards across the United Kingdom.

I am also grateful for the commitment given by the Government, the Leader of the Opposition, the Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party to the building of a memorial to the Holocaust and a learning centre next to Parliament in Victoria Tower Gardens. We will soon have an opportunity to debate this long overdue measure, and I look forward to debating it with some vigour—though I am mindful of the very wise words of Sir Peter Bottomley, the Father of the House of Commons, when he said that perhaps this debate was not an appropriate place to spend much time on that, and that we should concentrate on the Holocaust.

I took over the post of the Holocaust envoy in 2015. In that time, I have visited many death camps in Europe, had the opportunity of listening to very distinguished historians and met many survivors. But there is one thing I have never entirely understood—something I have never been able to get my mind around. Why did we not do something about Hitler, when it was there and it was plain? The nature of what was happening in Nazi Germany and the death camps was known to the authorities in the United Kingdom many years before the liberation—and even at the time when we decided to announce that they were occurring, we underestimated the number of people who had been killed at that point by 1 million.

However, by midday on 7 October, I knew exactly why we did nothing. Before Israel had an opportunity to get much of a defence and before Israel did anything in Gaza, people were dancing in the streets throughout the world—and, to our eternal shame, in the United Kingdom—celebrating the murder of children. I came to the conclusion that the world is very happy to bow its head once a year in remembrance of long dead Jews, but it is indifferent to the fate of living Jews and hostile to the thought that Jews might defend themselves.

Even when they saw the full extent of the horrors that Hamas committed—many Members will have seen the film and heard testimony this week—many of the #MeToo campaigners and the campaigners against female genital mutilation turned a blind eye to Israeli suffering. We were asked to consider these mutilations “in context”. Have we really become a country in which parents are advised not to send their children to Jewish schools in school uniform; where Jewish students are reluctant to wear a kippah on campus; where travellers are advised not to wear a Star of David on the Tube; where Hebrew-speaking tourists are assaulted on London streets; or where a decent, hard-working MP is hounded out of office for standing up for his Jewish constituents? The very nature of liberal democracy is at risk.

So I hope we will not hear any statements in future from university vice-chancellors, from police commissioners or politicians, about having a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism, because it is clearly not the case. It is a lie. Casual anti-Semitism is widespread in modern Britain: you need only to look, every Saturday, to see those useful idiots marching alongside Jew-hating anti-Semites, giving them credibility and credence and inadvertently encouraging them on to even greater depravity.

Before Israel had a chance to defend itself, even while the crowds in major cities were dancing with glee at the murder of children, the twin pillars of denial and distortion were working to form an alternate reality, a distorted truth. The term “genocide” is habitually misused and distorted. My noble friend the Minister read out the definition, so I will not repeat it—but from their mouths Hamas are condemned. United States President Joe Biden summed it up well when he said that Hamas’s goal had always been to annihilate Israel and to murder Jews. The South African attempt to subvert the meaning of genocide at the ICJ and to use it against Israel is a distortion of the truth. For the victims to be guilty of the crimes committed by the perpetrators is a perversion of reality. The Foreign Secretary is correct when he says:

“I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack of 7 October”,


and that the argument that Israel has

“the intent to commit genocide, I think … is nonsense”.

Denial is the first stage of genocide. That process was truncated in the October pogrom. I participated in an interview on LBC with an imam from east London who laughingly told me and the listeners, a few days after the massacre, that no children had been murdered by Hamas. Queen’s College Muslim Association went one step further, saying that there was a great deal of video evidence that Hamas deliberately avoided targeting women and children. Denial and distortion are formidable obstacles to the truth when there are plenty of witnesses about; consider their potency when the number of survivors who witnessed the Holocaust is diminishing. That is why the presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which the UK begins this month, will strengthen the coalition that rebuts denial and distortion. One of the first events will be a gathering of experts to examine the possibility and pitfalls of artificial intelligence on the digital records of the Holocaust.

The last 15 years have focused on gathering testimony from survivors, including from many people who experienced the Holocaust as children. A great effort has gone into digitising records. The amount and the depth of the material is impressive. The worry is that the very strength of this evidence might be our Achilles heel. We live in an era of seeing is not believing. Images and testimony are vulnerable. History is up for grabs.

The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are already with us. Holocaust survivors were recent recently distressed by a photograph of the then Home Secretary laughing at the gates of Auschwitz. It was a photoshop. It was not a very good fake, but it was good enough to cause hurt. Misleading words might be put into the mouths of survivors, mimicking their voices and trivialising the Holocaust. “The food might have been a bit bland, but there was plenty of it”. “On Sundays, we used to play football with our SS guards”. “Tuesday night was bridge night”. The fake recording of Sir Keir Starmer shouting at staff is a harbinger of what is to come on the road to a zero-trust society. AI will enable Jew haters to identify and target anti-Semites with a precision previously not thought possible—an echo chamber of bigotry that encourages deeper hatred.

Our presidential year will bring perpetrators of violence and the conditions that caused the Holocaust more into focus. Our theme this year is “In Plain Sight”. It comes from something profound that my friend and Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl said to me on a visit to Auschwitz. We first met on the March of the Living, an annual event taking place in Poland. People attend from all over the world and they are of all ages and backgrounds. There are plenty of enthusiastic youngsters about, which makes it a more uplifting experience than I would have expected. Gradually working our way through Poland, we arrived at the end of the march at Auschwitz.

I am on the international committee supervising the preservation of the Nazi concentration camp and consequently I am a regular visitor. While Ivor had visited the camp since he was a prisoner there, it had been some time. We stood as a group on the separation ramp, where families were torn apart. Ivor movingly describes this moment in his memoir Chicken Soup Under the Tree. For the first and only time that week, Ivor looked vulnerable, and I went up to him and said possibly the world’s most stupid thing, which was, “Are you all right, Ivor?” He firmly gripped my wrist and said, “Listen, Eric, don’t believe all that crap about ‘The birds never sing in Auschwitz’. It was a day like this when we first came here, a warm, sunny day, blue skies with cotton-wool clouds, birds were singing and butterflies were fluttering between the lines. The Holocaust did not happen in dark corners, hidden away; the Holocaust happened in broad daylight, in plain sight, with the whole world watching”.

We will anchor historic memory with a schools project across member countries addressing what happened in the Second World War in their home towns. The best projects will be presented to a special youth conference in London later this year. The 80th anniversary of the camps’ liberation will be explored in short clips on social media in 80 objects. Countering anti-Semitism in sport will be launched in Scotland in the summer. Our legacy project will be a data portal that unites and combines testimony and digital records from around the world. It will be easier to find out the truth of the Holocaust.

In conclusion, today the words “Never again” ring hollow and false. We have work to do. Let people of good will work together to make the UK a beacon of hope and tolerance. We will have succeeded only when we can say “Never again” in our hearts as well as our mouths. I hope that better times will come.

Recall Petitions: Voter ID

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the Electoral Commission report clearly demonstrates that all the fuss about the effect of voter ID has proved to be an exaggeration? We are talking about less than a percentage point. Does my noble friend further agree that, given that it is part of our voting system, it would now make some sense to re-examine the qualifications for voter ID, particularly among the young? Will she keep those categories constantly under review?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My noble friend is right. We are very encouraged by the first interim report from the Electoral Commission, but there is a lot more work to be done. It was only an interim analysis; the final analysis will be published in the autumn. The Government are looking both qualitatively and quantitatively at the May elections, and the report will be out by the end of November. When we get those reviews, we need to see if any changes need to be made, including on voter ID and young people.

Holocaust Memorial

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords—

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, could we hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and then the noble Lord, Lord Pickles?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I know how strongly the noble Baroness feels about this issue, and I respect everything she has to say. We have had meetings and we are willing to have more; she only has to get in touch with me. However, the planning inquiry in October 2022 enabled all interested parties to express their views on the proposed Holocaust memorial and learning centre, and a full list of witnesses is available in the planning inspector’s report on GOV.UK. Officials regularly meet organisations representing survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution and those representing the survivors of subsequent genocides to discuss the latest developments, and we will continue to do so.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my register of interests, particularly those relating to Holocaust remembrance. I join my noble friend in her tribute to Sir Ben Helfgott. He was, beside other things, a leading light in Holocaust remembrance and a strong advocate of the site in Victoria Tower Gardens. In fact, the last conversation I had with Ben was about his concerns that the Government and Opposition might not fulfil their promise. Does my noble friend agree with me that the announcement made by the Leader of the House in another place that there will be a Second Reading next Wednesday is very welcome? The time for talking is over; it is time for action.

International Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Pickles]

That this House takes note of International Holocaust Memorial Day.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, it is with respect and sombre reflection that I move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register of interests, particularly those concerned with Holocaust remembrance and tackling anti-Semitism.

I start the debate in some sadness as, yesterday morning, a friend of many of us in this Chamber, Zigi Shipper, passed away, on his 93rd birthday. He survived the ghetto, concentration camps and the death march. He devoted the latter part of this life to telling his story. His Majesty the King had his portrait commissioned and hung in Buckingham Palace. Zigi guided the present Prince and Princess of Wales around Stutthof concentration camp. Whether he was greeting royalty or giving his testimony in the classroom, he was always the same old Zigi. He will be very much on my mind when I light my candle on Holocaust Memorial Day. I will particularly remember his motto: “Do not hate”. May his memory be a blessing.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Ordinary People”. I think all of us in this Chamber could imagine ourselves being victims of the Holocaust, but few of us could imagine ourselves being perpetrators of the Holocaust. Unless we understand that both victims and perpetrators were ordinary people who led ordinary lives, we run the risk ourselves of Holocaust distortion. The Holocaust turned ordinary people into monsters.

The Nazis had a powerful propaganda machine, which was deadly effective, but curiously, from small villages nestling in the Pyrenees to the impenetrable forests of Belarus, the Nazis never needed to explain to anyone what Jew hatred was. Nor would it have been possible to murder 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma, people with a disability, homosexuals or political and religious dissidents without the active collaboration of others. Thankfully, there were of course many ordinary men and women willing to stand up to this hatred. Ordinary people often showed extraordinary bravery to save victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. But we delude ourselves if we think this is the norm.

Across Europe today, we see collaborators rehabilitated as national resistance leaders. History is being rinsed, and countries are recasting themselves as Nazi victims. As this decade progresses, the last survivors who witnessed the Holocaust as children will move from contemporary memory to the pages of history. We owe it to them and to ourselves to keep their memory, and that of their parents and grandparents, alive.

The destruction wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators was so great that, for hundreds of thousands of victims, the only reminder of their existence in this world is a very ordinary item of clothing: a shoe. Many of us are familiar with the piles of shoes at Auschwitz-Birkenau or at Holocaust museums worldwide. They are stark reminders of the fragile nature of life during the Holocaust. Shoes were described by the Polish poet, Moshe Szulsztein, as “the last witnesses”.

As a Minister, I presented to Auschwitz a cheque on behalf of the UK Government to restore some of these shoes. I witnessed the process. When you looked at the shoes carefully, you saw that they were not so different from the footwear that might be worn by Members in the Chamber today. These shoes were not bought to board cattle-trucks to travel to death camps; they were bought as expressions of optimism and of the future: maybe they were bought for a wedding, a promotion, the first day at school or a summer picnic. Within the shoes were often hidden objects: money, love letters and photographs of children and spouses.

The hardest thing to look at are the children’s shoes. I remember a small pair of shoes, where a carefully folded piece of paper was found in the heel. It was a maths test. Can you imagine how precious this piece of paper was to a child? It symbolised, despite the conditions, that there was still hope and the prospect of survival and a future. The tiny shoes of the youngsters of Auschwitz are a special symbol of the crimes perpetrated there. They are a reminder that, in many cases, they were the only witnesses to the murder of 232,000 children at that death camp.

The memories contained in shoes and other footwear remains important in remembering other genocides. In Rwanda, in the absence of DNA and dental records, shoes and clothing were used to identify the dead found in mass graves following the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. In Cambodia, piles of sandals are a reminder of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. In 2010, 16,000 pairs of shoes were put on display to mark the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, each pair representing a victim of Europe’s worst genocide since the Second World War. The memorial of shoes was a

“warning for all future U.N. employees never again just to stand by when genocide unfolds”—

an allusion to the failure of UN peacekeepers to protect the Srebrenica victims during the Bosnian war. Shoes worn by ordinary people; the final witness.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion. Today, we still see people who actively deny the historical reality of the Holocaust and seek to minimise the extent of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis and their collaborators. They cast doubt on the existence of the gas chambers and the mass shootings, and on deliberate working to death and starvation being used as a tool of government policy. The simple goal of Holocaust denial is to recast history to erase the legacy and reality of the mass murder of Jewish people.

Holocaust distortion is more mainstream and just as pernicious. It casts doubts. It assigns different descriptions to places, with death camps redesignated as transit camps. Contemporary events are compared to the Holocaust. Collaborators of the Nazis are wiped out of national memory. Holocaust distortion can be found at all levels of society and is far from a fringe phenomenon—from facts being twisted on the internet to opportunistic statements by politicians, misleading exhibitions at museums and, most recently, comparing measures to combat Covid-19 or climate change to the Holocaust.

A few years ago, I visited Treblinka, a death camp not unlike Auschwitz. People were murdered there within a couple of hours of arriving. I recall putting on social media, as you do, how moving it was. Within minutes, I was swamped by people saying, “Nobody died at Treblinka; it was a transit camp. Maybe the odd person died of flu, but that was all.” I have no idea whether those people believed that or not.

We are obviously concerned about the growth in the number of anti-Semitic incidents being reported on our university campuses. Our universities must be welcoming and inclusive environments for all students. I welcome the Tuck report into anti-Semitism, published last Thursday. This important report includes details of some quite shocking episodes and illustrates how prevalent anti-Semitism is within the ranks of the National Union of Students. The NUS will have to work hard to ensure that it represents all students in future. This was further underlined by today’s report from the Community Security Trust, which saw a 22% rise in anti-Semitic incidents on campus in the last two years.

The Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine have further fuelled the soaring levels of online anti-Semitism. Understanding the ways in which hate permeates the online space is not easy. The Online Safety Bill, which arrived here yesterday, will give this House an opportunity to address that hatred.

Close to 80 years since the Holocaust, there are still people waiting for justice and recognition of their property that was stolen by the Nazis. It has been 13 years since 47 countries signed the Terezin Declaration in June 2009. There has been progress: 13 countries in Europe have adopted legislation that either addresses or partially addresses heirless and unclaimed property from the Holocaust era. However, sadly, only Serbia has put together legislation on heirless and unclaimed property. Poland, the anvil of the Holocaust, is the only democracy refusing to address the concerns of dispossessed Holocaust survivors and their heirs. Time is running out; it has a moral obligation to ensure that Holocaust survivors and their families receive justice.

I co-chair with Ed Balls the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. Our role is to oversee the British promise to remember and to build a striking and prominent new national memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. I am most encouraged by the pledges from the Government and the Official Opposition to introduce a Bill to facilitate the memorial’s construction. It is possible that your Lordships will have an opportunity to debate the merits of its location at greater length than in this brief debate.

We are clear that the learning centre will adopt a warts and all approach. Our narrative will be balanced, addressing the complexities of Britain’s response to the Holocaust, avoiding simplistic judgments and encouraging visitors to reflect critically on whether more could have been done by both policymakers and society. We are determined to face history honestly. I am conscious that 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust, and that every day which passes means that fewer Holocaust survivors will be around to see that we honour our pledge.

Finally, I thank Olivia Marks-Woldman, the CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, for her marvellous work in delivering the UK’s national Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony and thousands of local activities. I also pay tribute to Karen Pollock, the CEO of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which is the driving force behind Lessons from Auschwitz. Professor Stuart Foster and Associate Professor Ruth-Anne Lenga from the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education have ensured that the UK leads the way in teaching and learning about the Holocaust. Many other organisations provide help in understanding the Holocaust, and I thank them.

The Holocaust and subsequent genocides show that ordinary people have choices. It is up to all of us to ensure that the choices that we make today and tomorrow ensure that our statement of “Never again” is not a single empty pledge.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. I will be brief but I want to say a couple of things.

This is the first time the House of Lords has had an opportunity to debate Holocaust Memorial Day, and it has been a very big success. I say with much love and affection to the Front Benches that this could become a regular part of the calendar. I will give some evidence for that. There is no padding in a speech on the Holocaust and Holocaust Memorial Day. You do not do it just to take up a little bit of time; it is well thought out and it comes from the heart, and that has been very clear today. It also says a lot about people as individuals and what is important to them. I do not want to sound too soppy, but I feel that I have got to know people a little bit better today. It is particularly effective when we talk about the impact on our families, as shown in the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, and my noble friend Lady Altmann.

I will not mention everybody, but I refer in particular to speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, who talked about his experience in Ukraine. It struck me a little while into doing this job that the legacy of the Holocaust is a great gaping hole inside Europe. You see it particularly in Poland: the heart has been almost ripped out of that country. A noble Lord—forgive me, I cannot remember who—spoke about the people who would have been born, and all the possibilities.

I was talking to the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, in the downstairs cloakroom before the debate. Like him, I was around when Holocaust Memorial Day began. It was essentially three men and a dog to start with, but gradually, we managed to get something going nationally. Now, there is not a community in the United Kingdom that will not have a commemoration involving schools. We do this not just because the Holocaust framed the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of this century, but because the Holocaust speaks to us all.

That is why, following on from the Stockholm declaration, Malmö renewed that in 2021, and this next year is going to be enormously about dealing with Holocaust distortion. It is why the definitions that IHRA has put together, both in terms of anti-Semitism, Holocaust distortion and anti-Roma sentiment, are so important.

I thank noble Lords very much for their contributions, and look forward to this time next year—with a slightly longer debate.

Motion agreed.

Social Housing Standards

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

It is indeed a defining moment. The Secretary of State has made it very clear that he thinks that this is a defining moment and that he is not going to let this go.

I was also surprised by how dangerous mould can be. I have concerns about the sharing of information in these cases, because a health visitor and a visiting midwife both noticed this mould. They put forward a report to the council, which did not seem to go as far as it should have. Sadly, communication is often an issue in these cases and we need to make sure that those problems are dealt with as well as the issues of the housing.

Obviously, this case was two years ago, but I am concerned about fuel—of course I am. However, I am mostly concerned about whether some of these tenants know what they can get from the Government to help them. I am not sure that they do. Through wearing my other hat as a Faith Minister, I am working very closely with the faith communities to make sure that when they talk to their communities and have their warm hubs and so on, they ensure that everybody knows exactly what the Government are offering to help them, because that sometimes is not the case. This case was not so much about heating but about ventilation, but that is another issue we need to look at across the sector, because mould often grows when ventilation is not correct.

Lastly, the noble Lord is absolutely right that not enough people know about the ombudsman. We had the Make Things Right campaign, which reached millions of social housing residents. This family obviously did not know about that, but I would then ask: where was the housing association to say that the family could go to the ombudsman when they first complained? There is more that we need to do, both the Government, in telling social housing residents about what they can get, and others who have contact with these families, by suggesting to them that the ombudsman is there to help them.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, mould was causing death to children when Charles Dickens explored the inequities in the rookeries, so it is particularly shocking that this should occur in our own century. My noble friend talked about the rights of tenants and their inability to understand the role of the ombudsman, but this tenant family did the right thing: they got legal advice and their lawyer approached the council. For some reason, the council thought that was a reason to do nothing and not to attend to the mould. Will my noble friend make it clear that this is not a reasonable excuse not to act to provide safe and secure housing? This is particularly important because she talked about the culture. There is a disturbingly high level of churn among officials doing this kind of work in housing associations, looking at maintenance and the like. You can get it right for a while and then someone else comes along. Can my noble friend be unambiguous and say that this is clearly a misunderstanding of how the law operates and not a reasonable excuse?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend. When I read about this, I was also very surprised by the timeline: once Awaab’s father had instructed solicitors, the housing association then said it could do nothing further. I understand that many housing providers have a policy to routinely pause addressing complaints through their process when legal proceedings are commenced, and that this stays in place until agreements are reached between solicitors. I do not think that is right. We need to look at this. Repairs should not be stopped. When rehousing is necessary, I do not think that should be stopped. I understand that this is in the hands of the housing providers; if they want to keep going with maintenance, rehousing or whatever is required, they can. They have decided to have this policy, but personally I do not think it is acceptable.

Anti-Semitic Attacks

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests. The Jew haters and the women-despising thugs who threatened murder and sexual violence on our streets brought great shame to our nation. At the first chance, they exposed the thin veneer between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Does my noble friend share my sadness that many of the car convoys of violence came from my native city of Bradford, a city that has a proud record of co-operation between communities, not least through the Near Neighbours programme? Does he agree that we cannot allow the men of violence to define the relationship between communities? Will he commit to measures that combine strict policing and a strong social cohesion? We must, as a priority, remove fear from our streets.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My noble friend, with his experience as a leader of Bradford, is absolutely right. We need to combine that strict policing, where we do more than engage and the police act to ensure that we take the hate off our streets and online wherever it occurs, with an equally strong and robust approach to social cohesion. In fact, Bradford pioneered the Near Neighbours programme, which brings different communities, such as the Muslim and Jewish communities, closer together. We can learn from that.

Churches: Reopening of Buildings

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh]

My Lords, I wholeheartedly agree, which is why the faith round tables engaged with leaders of all our major faiths and those of the belief groups, recognising the importance of engaging with everyone.

[Lord Pickles (Con) [V]]

My Lords, noble Lords have been quite right to point to the way in which various religious groups have managed to keep their congregations together and to outreach in the wider community, particularly to the vulnerable. As one local religious organiser said to me, in many ways they have been able to go out further than was possible before the outbreak. What will the Government do to help co-ordinate and ensure that this level of contact with the vulnerable is kept up?

[Lord Greenhalgh]

My Lords, that is precisely the point of the review being conducted by Danny Kruger MP to look at how we can sustain the tremendous effort during the pandemic into the recovery phase; I will not pre-empt his report.

Homelessness

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh]

I note the noble Lord’s raising of the issue of support for our Armed Forces and will write to him on the initiatives that we as a Government are taking on that front.

[Lord Pickles (Con) [V]]

My Lords, given the current uncertainties, would it not make sense to extend the moratorium on evictions beyond September to allow three things to happen: first, for the consequences of the Government’s stimulus to the job market to be felt; secondly, for the amendment to the pre-action protocol overseen by the Master of the Rolls to be delivered and understood; and, finally, to give time to amend housing legislation to allow judges greater discretion with regard to eviction cases? Does my noble friend agree that this action is preferable to introducing measures against a rising tide of evictions in the autumn?

[Lord Greenhalgh]

My noble friend will know that we are exploring a number of options to further protect tenants, including a pre-action protocol for claims for possession by private landlords. This might not be the way to achieve our objective, so our priority is to work with the judicial working group convened by the Master of the Rolls on arrangements, including new rules, that will mean that courts are better able to address the need for appropriate protection of all parties once the stay on possession proceedings ends in August.

Covid-19: Local Democracy

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh]

I note the noble Baroness’s comments about the functioning of local democracy. Certainly, in my 20 years, I always felt that we had one of the best examples of local democratic accountability through our councillors and engagement with local business groups. I will look at the noble Baroness’s comments. We continue to work with other bodies, including citizens’ and other assembly groups to ensure that their voices are heard.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, while there has, on occasion, been excessive delegation to officers and a paucity of democratic scrutiny, remote working has generally worked extraordinarily well. I think there are lessons to be learned beyond the pandemic. Will my noble friend the Minister undertake to review the use of videoconferencing for council and committee meetings? Will he undertake to look at pilots to extend this beyond the pandemic, to make it a normal part of local government life?

[Lord Greenhalgh]

My noble friend is right that remote working and videoconferencing have been broadly well accepted by local councils up and down the land. I will undertake that we conduct that review and look at how this can be continued. Obviously, these regulations have been brought in and are effective only until next May.