Respect Orders and Antisocial Behaviour
Marsha De Cordova Excerpts(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Dame Diana Johnson
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her comments and questions. First, the specific issue we want to address is giving the police the powers they need to deal with the antisocial behaviour that is being caused by off-road bikes and e-bikes. The hon. Lady also spoke about what else the police need to be able to implement those changes effectively, and I will contact her with more details on that. I will certainly talk to the police about what more we can do to support them.
As to the neighbourhood policing guarantee and our commitment to put 13,000 police officers, PCSOs and specials into our neighbourhoods, I am sure the hon. Lady will recognise that we are five months into this Government. We are working as hard as we can to get plans in place. We are doing this work with policing. We want to ensure that the police are with us on this and that we have everything set up to allow that to happen smoothly, and those announcements will be made in due course. I want to reassure the House that making that happen is probably my No. 1 priority.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
I welcome the Government’s plans to introduce respect orders to tackle the scourge of antisocial behaviour. I hear from my constituents in Battersea all the time on their concerns and worries about antisocial behaviour in parts of our community. Can the Minister confirm that the new orders will also include public drinking and drug use to ensure that our communities are safe and free from harm and nuisance?
Dame Diana Johnson
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we want to address issues such as street drinking and taking drugs. The whole idea of a respect order will be restrictive in the sense that an individual may be told that they can no longer be in a certain area, such as on the high street, in a town centre or in a park. However, positive conditions will also be attached: if there were issues around someone street drinking, they could attend courses for alcohol addiction; they could attend courses or treatment for drug addiction; if it was appropriate, they could attend courses on anger. In that way, we will be dealing with the problem in the area, but also trying to treat the underlying issue with the individual who has caused the antisocial behaviour.
Oral Answers to Questions
Marsha De Cordova Excerpts(4 weeks ago)
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Yvette Cooper
I have to tell the hon. Member that unfortunately the previous Government cut asylum decision making by 75% in the run-up to the election, and they took away caseworkers. That is why the backlog was soaring. We have now put caseworkers back in place so that we can start clearing the backlog, because asylum hotels are costing the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
Disabled women are almost three times more likely to experience domestic abuse and almost twice as likely to report sexual violence. Does the Minister agree that it is important for not only her Department but the police to work with disabled women-led organisations to understand the intersection with gender-based violence and the double whammy that affects disabled women?
Jess Phillips
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I pay tribute to Stay Safe East, one of very few specialist disability and domestic abuse charities. Without “by and for” services, we simply would not be serving most of the women in our country who need support.
Immigration and Home Affairs
Marsha De Cordova Excerpts(5 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a surprise to be called so early, but I am absolutely delighted.
I welcome the King’s Speech and its focus on fairness and opportunity for all—quite the antidote to the last 14 years when things have been anything but fair. The UK now has the highest level of income inequalities in Europe and the ninth highest of 38 OECD countries. Inequality in wealth is even worse, with the top fifth of the population having over one third of the country’s income but two thirds of the country’s wealth. These inequalities in income and wealth are particularly concentrated in the north but also among disabled people and ethnic minority communities.
The impact of these inequalities on health has been described by Professor Sir Micheal Marmot in his latest report, “Lives Cut Short.” He wrote in The BMJ:
“if everyone had the good health of the least deprived 10% of the population, there would have been 1 million fewer deaths in England in the period 2012 to 2019.”
Poverty and inequality are not inevitable; they are the result of political choices. The choices of consecutive Conservative Governments over the past 14 years have led to not only our flatlining economy, but our flatlining life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. In deprived areas such as mine, life expectancy and healthy life expectancy are actually declining.
We also have growing levels of economic inactivity due to this ill health, and the International Monetary Fund has revealed that there is a causal impact from these health inequalities on economic growth. For every 1% increase in the income share of the richest 20%, growth is reduced, whereas increasing the income share of the poorest 20% increases growth. Ensuring a vibrant, stable and fair economy with sustainable growth will enable us to renew and restore our overstretched public services. With fair funding formula and public spending allocations based on need, there is an opportunity to improve health in areas, such as Oldham, that have fallen behind.
There are many Bills and initiatives that will make a positive difference to our lives and living standards, and these include the new deal for working people that will make work pay, ending the outrage of over 8 million working people living in poverty and 3 million children in poverty living in working households, transforming the lives of millions of people up and down the country, including in Oldham East and Saddleworth.
The new GB Energy company will not only support new quality jobs but provide cheaper, cleaner energy, reducing the energy bills of my constituents and millions of others. The children’s wellbeing Bill, with free breakfast clubs and 100,000 extra nursery places, will also help to reduce cost pressures for young families while making life a bit easier for families. Our plans to enable 1.5 million new quality homes to be built while at the same time ensuring legislation to end no-fault evictions will be a huge relief to tenants and mortgage holders everywhere.
Collectively, these measures will help improve the living standards of millions of people, but they will not happen overnight or for all people. Some 2.6 million working-age people are out of work because of an illness or disability. While many sick and disabled people want to work and will benefit from the extra NHS appointments and therapies, it will be many months before we see inroads into these waiting lists. Similarly, I would like to think that the attitudes of employers towards hiring disabled workers will shift quickly, but we recognise that is unlikely to be the case. And then there are other disabled people for whom the possibility of working is unrealistic.
Those who are disabled or who live in a household with a disabled adult or child are more likely to live in poverty. Over the past 14 years, disabled people have been absolutely battered by consecutive Conservative Governments. As the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities described, there have been systematic violations of their rights under the UN convention.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Six years on, that Committee did a follow-up report which found that things had in fact got even worse for disabled people, so does she agree that it is now absolutely right that a new Labour Government will change course?
Debbie Abrahams
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I am absolutely convinced that under a Labour Government we will see these changes.
I think it is important that we put on the record where we are at the moment. We need to ensure that the right to adequate social protection and social security is in place, and we know that is not the case at the moment. We must do better not just in changing the culture of the Department for Work and Pensions, but in recognising the extra costs, the fear and the poverty disabled people face and feel, because otherwise I fear that we will be seeing more deaths of disabled claimants.
Similarly, while I support the measures in the King’s Speech to improve our lives, that cannot happen soon enough for the nearly one in two children living in poverty across Oldham. Children living in poverty now will be affected by the experience for the rest of their lives. There is evidence that living in poverty changes the wiring of their brains. Many will not reach their first birthday. Shamefully, we have the worst infant mortality rate in northern Europe. There is no law of nature that decrees that children from poor families have to die at more than twice the rate of children in rich families. I welcome that the Secretaries of State for Education and for Work and Pensions have established the child poverty taskforce to deliver the cross-Government child poverty strategy, and I look forward to it reporting in the early autumn. We cannot forget the 1.6 million children across the UK with special educational needs. SEND education is in crisis and that cannot continue.
This Labour Government are a Government for everyone, and the King’s Speech is a starting point on that. I look forward to working with the Government to deliver the change that all our country needs.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson), and I congratulate all hon. Members who have made their maiden speeches today. I also acknowledge my colleagues in Government, who I have to say have literally been hitting the ground running and getting on with rebuilding our country. I would like to begin by placing on record my thanks to the constituents in Battersea for electing me a third time. It remains an honour and a privilege to serve as their MP.
The King’s Speech will deliver a truly transformative programme of change and national renewal, and turn a page on 14 years of Conservative chaos, decline and division. The Conservatives crashed our economy, imposed Brexit, presided over austerity, presided over the biggest fall in living standards on record, broke our public services, including the NHS and the criminal justice system, and failed to prepare adequately for the covid pandemic. I could say that the list goes on.
In contrast, Labour in government has already set out the first steps of how it will create sustainable growth that works for everybody, restore economic credibility and deliver more safe, secure and affordable homes, as well as deliver a new deal for workers, rebuild the NHS and make Britain a clean energy superpower, while also tackling crime and antisocial behaviour. More importantly, Labour will break down the barriers to opportunity for children and young people, so that we can finally give them a future and hope.
On the Conservatives’ watch, the Government did nothing to tackle the housing crisis, mortgage bills and rents soared, leaseholders were trapped in unsafe homes, and renters faced insecurity and injustice. Thousands of my constituents who are leaseholders will welcome plans to make commonhold the default type of tenure, ending the outdated leasehold system, and tackling unregulated and unaffordable ground rents.
Battersea has a higher number of private and social renters than the national average, so it will be a relief to many that the renters rights Bill will abolish section 21 no-fault evictions and provide greater stability and security. Our plans will strengthen tenants’ rights and protections, apply the decent homes standard to the private rented sector, and ensure that tenants can request a pet, an issue I have worked on alongside Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
Reforms to the planning system will deliver the housing that both Battersea and the country so desperately need, and the introduction of mandatory house building targets will finally get our country building again. However, it is vital that decisive action is taken on the shortage of accessible homes. Inaccessible homes not only impact on one’s physical and mental health, but limit disabled people’s ability to live, study and work, so we must make it our priority to ensure that homes are accessible for all.
Our new deal will transform the lives of workers not only in Battersea but across the country. The employment rights Bill will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts, end fire and rehire, provide rights from day one and update trade union legislation. Alongside it, the draft equality Bill will not only root out structural inequalities by setting out equal pay rights for black, Asian and ethnic minority and disabled people, but introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for larger employers. We can and must go further in this space and ensure that we change course by ending the shameful Tory record on disability employment, where the gap is wider than it has been and the pay gap is at 14.6%. But I have every faith in my colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions, who I will work alongside to deliver this.
This King’s Speech sets out an ambitious and progressive path to deliver the programme of change that the people of Battersea and across our country so desperately need.
Several hon. Members rose—