Housing Market (London)

Debate between Meg Hillier and Diane Abbott

Tuesday 18th November 2014 Westminster Hall

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

I am glad to have the opportunity to address this Chamber on London’s housing crisis. There is no doubt that if there is one issue that Londoners are agreed on, it is that the housing market in London is in a state of crisis. Before I close my remarks, I would like to touch on the New Era estate in Hackney, which illustrates some wider issues and whose tenants are faced with predator American developers and may be evicted by Christmas.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Ms Abbott]

I will happily give way to my hon. Friend before I sit down.

The current London housing market is broken. The average house price in London is £600,000, nearly twice that in the rest of the country. The average monthly rent of a flat in London is over £1,500 a month and to put that into perspective, across the rest of the UK, landlords ask an average of just over £650. To illustrate how far the crisis has spread, a garage in Hackney was recently put on the market for £375,000 and an eight-car parking space in Mayfair was on offer for £2.25 million.

The effect of the inflated housing prices is manifold. For many young Londoners, owning their own home is just a dream. Does the Minister agree that an entire generation of young Londoners have been failed by the Government and the Mayor? A generation of young Londoners are trapped in an eternal cycle of unstable tenancies and extortionate letting fees, and faced with the inexorable truth that a vast chunk of their monthly earnings is immediately sunk into a black hole from which they can expect no real return. They cannot afford to buy in London, so they are forced to rent well into their 30s or to move outside the M25.

The issue is difficult not just for young Londoners hoping to buy; it is a real issue for employers because the cost of housing in London has dire consequences for recruitment in London. The NHS in London has one of the lowest retention rates and highest vacancy rates in the country. The vastly superheated housing market is a crucial issue behind that. I point the Minister to a report that the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry published in May highlighting the fact that over 40% of London businesses said that their ability to recruit and retain skilled workers was negatively affected by housing costs. I question whether the Government truly understand the impact of such issues in London. Does the Minister understand the seriousness of the implications of the inflated property prices and the difficulties of recruitment for London’s sustainable future?

I have seen first hand in Hackney how high property prices indirectly affect rents, including those in the social housing sector, placing extremely high pressure on our most vulnerable communities. Combined with housing benefit cuts, there is a danger that in the immediate future, we will see a social cleansing of zones 1 and 2.

Another crucial element in London’s housing crisis is super-wealthy, non-domiciled international buyers who want to purchase property in central London. They are using London property as a status symbol and a safe deposit box, often keeping the properties empty for much of the year. Even in Hackney, large developments in Dalston had many units bought off-plan in the far east. The almost limitless supply of super-wealthy, non-domiciled buyers in the centre of London is causing a price ripple throughout zones 2 and 3, making it increasingly harder for ordinary families on average wages in previously affordable boroughs to meet their housing costs. Does the Minister agree that when it comes to international, non-domiciled buyers of central London property, we need to look seriously at financial measures designed to disincentivise that practice?

The other structural deficiency in the London housing market is the fact that local authorities are now allowing—or feeling that they have to allow—planning policies to be persistently flouted and affordable housing quotas to be ignored in the interests of huge overseas development consortia, such as the Malaysian consortium that is currently developing Battersea power station. The bottom line is that the London market is not a functioning market, and simply increasing the supply will not bring the cost of houses down for ordinary Londoners.

It seems to me that there are a number of things we can do. We need to tighten up on exploitative letting agencies that hit new tenants with exorbitant fees, and I am glad to say that Labour is moving in that direction. We need to allow councils to borrow to build; that is probably the single most important thing. The Labour Government had a wonderful record in renovating and doing up estates, but we simply did not build enough genuinely affordable housing. The only way that can be made good now is by allowing local authorities to borrow to build in order to produce housing that ordinary families can actually afford.

Some measure of rent stabilisation or rent control also needs to be considered. They have it in New York, San Francisco and Berlin—those are not Marxist municipalities, so if there is some measure of rent stabilisation in other big international cities, we can have it in London. Only if we can offer renters some prospect of stable rents will we be able to offer them the quality of life and the certainty in their communities that they now crave. Rent controls, in spite of what some Government Members have tried to imply, do not signify the first footfalls of a mass, state-led, nationwide socialist project. In a big international city, unless something is done to stabilise rents, the centre of that city will, over time, become out of reach to ordinary people.

We are leagues behind global leaders in addressing the problem of spiralling rents. Labour has raised the issue of a mansion tax, which I support in principle, but I am arguing that the proceeds from a mansion tax should be kept in the cities where it is raised. That would be in line with the recommendations of the London Finance Commission and other recent reports on finance in our big cities. If the money from the mansion tax in London was hypothecated to a London housing corporation, it could be used to build genuinely affordable housing—not the Boris Johnson version of affordable housing, which is 80% of market rates—and to offer mortgages to key workers in the public sector.

My first mortgage was given to me by Westminster council, which gave out mortgages in the ’80s in the belief that people who got a mortgage and owned their own home would be more likely to be Tories. They got it wrong with me, but none the less, I am grateful for my very first mortgage. The mansion tax is a good idea in principle, but to sell it to Londoners, I believe that they ought to be able to see a direct benefit through investment in affordable housing in London.

That brings me to the New Era estate, which contains over 90 families, many of whom have lived there all their lives. It has always been deemed to be affordable housing, but sadly for those residents, all around Hoxton and in the City fringes of Hackney, a housing bubble has erupted that has made almost irresistible the profits to be made from clearing out those tenants and letting out the accommodation at market rents.

Who has stepped into the breach? A US developer called Westbrook Partners. It could not have less interest in housing ordinary people and in affordable housing. On its website, it describes itself as,

“a privately-owned, fully integrated real estate investment management company with offices in New York, Boston, Washington DC, Palm Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Munich, Paris and Tokyo.”

It goes on to boast that it has

“raised…$10 billion of equity in $40 billion of real estate transactions”.

This entity is not interested in providing housing in principle; it is entirely profit driven and does not care about the consequences of its activities for the tenants who fall into its hands.

The company owns properties all over the United States. In 2007, it took over a large development—a rent-controlled building—in the Bronx. From then, the tenants saw heat and hot water being turned off and becoming sporadic. They found that repairs went undone and they started to be harassed. Fortunately, in New York rent-controlled apartments they have some rights, and finally, in April this year, the New York Attorney-General, Eric T. Schneiderman, reached a settlement with Westbrook. It had to make years of repairs and resolve thousands of building violations, and it had to pay more than $1 million in rebates for illegal fees and overcharges. When it comes to Westbrook, we do not have to look in a crystal ball; we can read the book and see how it has exploited tenants in other parts of the world—and yet, these are the predator property developers who have come into Hackney and purchased New Era.

What are Westbrook’s plans? I understand that it intends to issue a notice seeking possession to all the tenants, to clear and refurbish the estate for full market value prices—way out of the reach of most of the existing tenants—and that it has no plans to provide any houses for below market price. I also understand that it intends to sell in four or five years, flipping the properties at a profit.

The mayor of Hackney has written to Westbrook in the past 24 hours, asking it to reconsider its plans and to honour a commitment to no further rent increases until 2016. He is also asking that the new managing agents for New Era, Knight Frank, meet the council and engage with the residents. Even the Mayor of London—the Minister’s colleague, Boris Johnson—is calling for Westbrook to engage with the council and with the tenants.

The tenants, many of whom have, as I said, lived all their lives on the estate, have asked me to say to the Minister that they simply do not understand why a foreign company is allowed to buy the estate and evict 92 residents, with no sense of whether the company is a fit and proper owner and no sense that the tenants have any protection. They have also asked me to ask what the Government will do to offer the tenants protection and support. I hope that the Minister will find it in his heart to say something supportive to those tenants, who are fearing eviction by Christmas.

[Meg Hillier]

As the constituency Member for the New Era estate, I, likewise, have had many conversations with tenants, who are very worried about their future. I also managed to speak to Knight Frank earlier today to urge if not only to honour the two-year rent and tenancy guarantee, as a minimum, but to look at having affordable rents to make sure that people who have lived there for 20 years or thereabouts—for a long time—do not find that their homes are removed from them. Does my hon. Friend agree that the real issue is people coming in who are looking at this as being about profit rather than about people and their homes, and that in London, we need a long-term private rented sector in which people can bring up families over a generation?

[Ms Abbott]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, although I would say that it is a question not just of long-term tenancies, but of rent stabilisation. It has become completely impossible for people to manage in a rental market in which there is no stabilisation and rents continue to spiral. I have spoken at some length about the New Era situation, because it reflects the way in which Londoners’ homes are becoming pieces on a chessboard for multi-billion-dollar international property developers.

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. There is no question but that we are seeing a process that is partly about how private developers are being facilitated and partly about what is happening with the Government’s so-called welfare reforms, which, as I said, is resulting in a form of social cleansing of zones 1 and 2 in London. That does not make for a sustainable community. How are hospitals, the fire service, local authorities and the public sector generally to recruit if ordinary people coming into the housing market for the first time increasingly can afford neither to buy nor to rent in zones 1, 2 and even 3? As my hon. Friend said, that is not by chance—by accident. When we have a Mayor who says that affordable means 80% of private sector rents, which is way out of the reach of anyone on an average salary in London, and who seems loth to intervene in what is happening, Londoners have to face the grim reality that a city that has always prided itself on its diversity and cohesiveness will see that diversity and cohesiveness torn asunder as we move towards social cleansing at the centre. If nothing is done about the current situation, London will become a place where people living in zones 1, 2 and 3 either are extremely wealthy or are serving the extremely wealthy. That is the only way people will be able to afford to live there.

As I said, there are a number of remedies that we need to look at. First and foremost, councils need to be able to borrow to build. We need some form of rent stabilisation. We also need to do something about rental agencies and the charges that private sector renters find themselves paying.

However, there are also a few things that we should not do. It has been suggested that one solution to London’s housing crisis lies in building on the green belt. As someone who spent most of her childhood on the edge of the green belt in Harrow and who now lives in the inner city, I do not believe that building on the green belt is the remedy. It is what developers always want, because building on the green belt is easier for them. They build executive houses that they can sell easily. But houses on the green belt are of no use to young professionals in the centre of the city, who want to be within reasonable commuting distance of their work. They are of no use to families in the centre of the city, who want family-sized housing that, again, is within commuting distance of their work. I therefore say very firmly that anyone proposing to build on the green belt is simply falling into a trap set for them by developers. We should look at the more than 50,000 brownfield sites in London and incentivise development on those sites. The truth is that London’s housing issues must be addressed primarily within the M25, because it would defeat the primary objectives of the green belt—to check urban sprawl and to support biodiversity—if we fell for what the developers are telling us and started to build on it in any great numbers.

London is the greatest city in the world. It has never been more energetic, more exciting or more prosperous, but I put it to the Minister that without urgent action to address the housing crisis, London’s future is at risk. The housing crisis is not just a question for young renters, people who cannot afford to buy and people in social housing and council housing, who are being forced out of London in some cases because of the cuts in housing benefit. It is also a question for older people who are themselves well housed but who look at their children, who may have professional jobs, and realise that they will never be able to afford to buy inside the M25. It is also a question for employers. As I said, it has become increasingly difficult for London employers to recruit because of excessive housing costs.

How does the Minister propose that a city such as London can function if teachers cannot live within commuting distance of the schools that they teach in, if nurses cannot live within commuting distance of the hospitals that they work in and if even policemen find themselves living way outside the communities that they police? The state of the housing market in London is our most pressing issue. What is happening on the New Era estate in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) illustrates predatory property developers at their worst.

I am grateful to the House for the time allotted this afternoon to raise these important issues and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and his comments on what he and the Government are doing to address this state of affairs.

[Meg Hillier]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Abbott]

May I remind the Minister that the Mayor has much broader housing powers than the former Mayor had? That is a consequence of the former Mayor’s campaigning. I also remind the Minister that affordable housing, as the current Mayor defines it, means 80% of private sector rents. That is way out of the reach of ordinary people in Hackney.

[Meg Hillier]

rose

Olympic Legacy (East London)

Debate between Meg Hillier and Diane Abbott

Friday 8th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you for the first time, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is also a pleasure to stand here united with my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), my fellow Hackney MP, to endorse what she said.

I wanted to add a couple of perspectives from my constituency to the point that my hon. Friend made very effectively about jobs. As she said, there are good news stories from the Olympics. Regardless of anything else, 800 new homes are a good thing, but she is right that the Government’s policy is putting that at risk. The homes need to be affordable for local people, and we also need to watch that they are not sold to overseas landlords. We need to ensure that they are owned within the community, or certainly in the UK, even if they are let.

My constituency has a really great legacy in the Copper Box, a multi-sport facility that will host the London basketball team. Events are already happening, so that is a direct legacy. It is run by Better, the organisation that runs the borough sports facilities, so it is accessible to local people. iCITY has brought in BT Sport as the first anchor tenant in the media centre, and it is giving Sky Sports a run for its money. I met BT Sport only this week to push it on the jobs front, and I am watching that closely.

There are some excellent small businesses. Hackney Pearl, a fantastic restaurant and café in my constituency, was an early believer in the Olympics. It has struggled because infrastructure changes have not happened as quickly as they should after the Olympics to give it the boost it needs, but it is an example of the interest of local businesses in the potential legacy that my hon. Friend highlighted.

In the seconds I have remaining, I want to make a point about jobs. The borough is working closely with local companies to ring-fence jobs locally for Hackney residents, including in the construction of any new facilities. The Ways into Work programme is an important step that provides one-to-one support for local people. The support is holistic, involving everything from interview skills upwards.

However, the key thing that my hon. Friend highlighted, which I reiterate to the Minister, is that we and others are watching what is happening. We need an audit of employers who have promised to recruit and employ local people, because without that, they will not do so. There were scams in Olympic employment. It took me a while to uncover them, and by that time it was too late to do anything about them. For example, people pretended to be local.

[Ms Abbott]

One scam was that people who had moved very recently to Hackney were counted as Hackney residents.

[Meg Hillier]

If I had time, I could detail more scams, but there certainly were scams. I know that this is not the Minister’s remit, but it is vital that he takes the point back to his colleagues. There needs to be an audit of where people came from. I will happily give him more details, but I am anxious, as my hon. Friend is, to hear the Government’s official response.

My hon. Friend and I agree that there have been some great benefits from the Olympics, but jobs and skills are the real prize. It is the legacy that we are both watching like hawks.

BME Communities (Educational Attainment)

Debate between Meg Hillier and Diane Abbott

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) on securing this vital debate. There has been much talk about this subject in the media and in the report by Alan Milburn, and I know that the Government are taking seriously the work on social mobility. None the less, unless we deal with the issue of differential attainment, we will be letting down a generation of young people.

We have a mixed story to tell. I applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) for her pioneering work on this matter. Had she not been making noises about the underachievement of black boys in particular, some of the progress and bureaucratic changes that have been made would not have taken place. I will touch on that matter in my suggestions to the Minister at the end.

Over the past week, the Secretary of State has talked about changing and splitting the GCSE, which is relevant to many of my constituents in Hackney. I do not disagree that we need to see rigour in standards—in Hackney, we have seen huge improvements in schools, which were achieving well below the national average 10 or even seven years ago, but most are now achieving well above that, with Mossbourne academy, which my hon. Friend cited, achieving 84% A to C grades including maths and English. A number of children are going on to not just good universities but Oxbridge as well as other Russell group universities.

We have done a lot in Hackney to improve standards, which we attribute to good heads, rigorous standards and a clear framework of expectations for young people of all backgrounds. We accept no excuses because of poverty or ethnicity and no low expectations. In one school, City academy—its principal, Mark Emmerson, is now also acting executive principal of City academy Islington because of his success so far—the pupils have not sat GCSEs. He has told his staff that they should see all the pupils in his highly ethnically mixed school, which is populated mostly from the dense local council housing estates in the area, as future A* pupils, and that that must be the teachers’ expectation. The school has been growing year by year, and is now in its third year. Most of the pupils are a couple of terms ahead of the expected achievement at the end of year 8, their second year in secondary school. A couple of them are more than a year ahead of where they would normally be, but they did not necessarily come in with the highest level of achievement at key stage 2—level 5. Some were achieving below that. Mark Emmerson has got them back not just to where they should be, but to above that.

I spoke about one school, but I could spend a lot of time talking about good practice in Hackney schools. Everything is not perfect, but there are good heads and good rigour, and we have seen huge investment, thanks to the previous Government, in new schools and good buildings. Young people have been amazed when they have gone into their new schools, and feel that they deserve them. They have a feeling that they have the right to be in a good-quality environment. The schools operate long days, with breakfast and after-school provision.

Another school in my constituency, Petchey academy, gives same-day detentions, but that is seen as positive. If a child is falling behind, for whatever reason—they may have been messing around in class, they may just not understand something, or they may have difficulties at home and bring other issues into the classroom—at the end of the day they spend an hour focusing on that area of under-achievement so that by the next day at school they are back with the rest of the class. I am sure that that does not always work, but that aspiration is surely needed. Many pupils in Hackney come from challenging homes, and often live in overcrowded conditions in families with long periods of worklessness. I will touch on some of the issues of ethnicity and language in a moment.

Returning to the Secretary of State’s comments, I do not agree that reintroducing a two-tier system for education is the answer. The idea that 25% of Hackney pupils at 11, and certainly at 13 or 14, will be pigeon-holed and earmarked for a lower qualification is a retrograde step. The example I have just given of Hackney’s City academy shows that much can be done at secondary school for pupils who may not have achieved their full potential at primary school. It would be a retrograde step for a cohort of teachers to expect a percentage of pupils to take a lower-grade exam. The benefit of the GCSE is that whatever someone’s ability, they can progress on the same programme of attainment, and if they work hard they can achieve higher than C grade.

Changing the landscape massively confuses matters for employers, who tell me that they have several issues about the qualifications that young people leave school with, and I certainly do not believe that changing them will make a difference. I am not alone in thinking that. Lord Baker, former Secretary of State for Education, gave the Minister and the Secretary of State good advice when he said:

“The CSE certificate which we did away with in the eighties”—

I was one of the last pupils to sit the old GCE, which shows my age, but we are talking more than 20 years ago—

“became a valueless bit of paper. It wasn’t worth anything to the students or to the employers. That means that there has got to be rigour for the other subjects at 16 as well.”

Lord Baker is promoting university technical colleges, as I am. I have one in my constituency, Hackney university technical college, where young people will be studying from the age of 14 and taking more technical qualifications alongside academic qualifications, but that will not be seen as second best or something different, and will be not instead of but as well as GCSEs.

I am one of the vice-chairs of the all-party group on social mobility, and in the discussions I have touched on there is much talk about universities and getting young people into university, but the issue starts much earlier. That is one reason why I was a great champion of Sure Start. The investment in children under 5, and helping their parents to parent better and to understand the benefits of wider education through play, is very important. Professionals say that they can see the difference between children of parents who have been supported by Sure Start and those who have not, because the former have been positively engaged with the child. We must start there.

We need a raising of attainment in primary schools and a raising of ambition. That is why many Hackney primary schools take pupils to universities and into the workplace, through work programmes, to see those places for themselves. That is particularly important for a range of young people, including some from ethnic minority backgrounds, who do not have a pattern of work in their family.

I shall touch on some of the data, which show why this issue is so important and why the Minister, who I am sure is listening hard, needs to ensure that the Department does not take its eye off the ball. The inequality is still quite stark: we have seen some improvements in Hackney, but provisional data from 2011—last year’s results—show a 6% gap in achievement at GCSE level between Caribbean-heritage boys and all other boys and a 5% gap between the same cohort, Caribbean girls, and all other girls. We can look at the pattern from 2005. Due to interventions by various schools and the Learning Trust in Hackney, we have seen the number achieving five A* to C grade GCSEs, including maths and English, steadily improving for both boys and girls. It is a good story so far, but we should not sit back and say that that gap is acceptable.

[Ms Abbott]

As a Hackney resident and a Hackney mother, I am glad to see the very many improvements, but we need to be careful about what we say about improvements, because some of the stats go back to a period when there was the use of NVQ equivalents to GCSE. My concern is that although on paper the gap may have narrowed, it is because some black children have been palmed off with NVQ equivalents, which do not in fact equip those children to compete in the marketplace.

[Meg Hillier]

I completely agree. Statistics can bury many issues, which is why the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth about ensuring proper teacher training and support so that assumptions are not built in at the beginning is a key one. I shall give a couple of examples of where I have seen that in the past.

Some issues that probably do not figure on most hon. Members’ horizons, although my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and I will come across them regularly, are those to do with Turkish, Kurdish and Cypriot children, who are still massively underachieving compared with their cohort group. Although there has been an improvement since 2011, we still see a gap in attainment between Turkish, Kurdish and Cypriot boys and girls and all other pupils of 14%. That brings in one of the other issues—language. At home, many of these young people will speak only their mother tongue. That is fine. The mother tongue is very important, and of course parents and mothers in particular are the first educators of a child. However, if the parent is not very literate in the mother tongue, the child may not be getting the range of educational input required from the parent in the mother tongue. Often, the only adult whom many of these young people speak to in English is their teacher. Their exposure to the wider world is sometimes a bit limited. Often, the young people will be helping in the family business, which will involve working with other Turkish families, for instance; and in the mosque and other community groups, it will be only the mother tongue that is spoken.

I do not want anyone to go away with the impression that I do not think that the mother tongue is important, because it is very important. Actually, it is very important for our young people as they go out into the world and develop their careers. Given that the Turkish economy, for example, is growing by about 7% a year, speaking their mother tongue is a real skill and strength for young people in Hackney. However, there is an issue and it may not hit the Minister’s radar screen because, in terms of the national population, this group is relatively small and focused in parts of north-east London.

I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington about statistics, but let us look at the differences between young people when they leave primary school at 11 and when they get to GCSE level. In Hackney in 2011, 77% of white boys left school at key stage 2 at the end of year 6 with a level 4 in English and maths. At GCSE level in the same year—so it is not the same cohort, but this shows the gap that we have to bridge—51.7 % got five or more A* to C grade GCSEs, including English and maths. That is a differential of 26 percentage points. If we look at the same figures for black boys, we see that 69% achieved level 4 in 2011 and, in the same year—so it is not the same cohort—42% achieved five A* to C grade GCSEs. That is a differential of 27 percentage points. The differential is similar, but there are endemic issues, on which I and others have touched, about why certain groups achieve less well.

I want to illustrate the importance of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth about teacher training. For about nine years, I was a governor, and latterly chair of governors, at a primary school in north Islington. During that time there was a big shortage of teachers. We had a lot of very bright, talented, young teachers, who were keen to teach, but many of them, to put it bluntly, had never seen a black face in their lives.

The head teacher, who was a black woman, which was still quite unusual, and I were very concerned on a couple of occasions. On one occasion, a child was very scared about going into assembly to see African dancing. My immediate reaction was that it was terrible that a child was worried about seeing something that reflected, to a degree, their own heritage. There were a number of issues to unpack about witchcraft and pride in their background, but the other teachers saw it as naughty behaviour, because they had not come across the cultural issues involved.

On another occasion, they were casting for “The Wizard of Oz”. In the film, Dorothy is played by Judy Garland—a young, white girl—so presumably, that was the image in the minds of many teachers. Each class was asked to do a bit of “The Wizard of Oz”, so they each had a witch, a Dorothy and so on. The Dorothys, when they came out of the classes, were all little white girls. The head, being from a different background, challenged it, but at the time I was worried; this was a cohort of good teachers, but teachers who did not have that perspective, which was a real worry. We need young people in schools now not only to achieve well, but to go on to become teachers themselves.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and I were at Sebright school in my constituency, which is one that works with City Year kids. Through City Year, young people on a gap year work with pupils, providing mentoring, physical training and an extra adult to support the students. They have found different ways to engage and are very popular with the Hackney schools they go into. They are now moving into secondary schools. What is good about that cohort is that the groups of young people, aged between about 18 and 22, coming into Hackney schools better reflect the wider Hackney community. They are not all from Hackney, but they better reflect what you might see, to put it simply, on a Hackney bus.

To a degree, there is a time lag with teacher training, but the teachers in our schools do not necessarily reflect the ethnic background of the pupils they teach. What is the Department doing to encourage change? Are the Government being proactive? Let us be honest, we do not have enough teachers from ethnic minority backgrounds. Just as we have concerns that there are not enough male teachers in primary schools to be role models, the Government need not to be shy at addressing this issue. That brings me to my final point and recommendation to the Minister.

We used to see a quite detailed breakdown of achievement by ethnic background. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. If she had not talked about, and made it acceptable to talk about, the difference between black and white children, the Department at the time would not have had the courage to produce a much more granular breakdown by different ethnic groups. We have gone back and shrunk to broad-brush breakdowns—black, white, Asian and so on. That breakdown does not work for me, because it would not pick up Kurdish, Turkish and Cypriot achievement, which is a big issue. We collect some of those data locally, but no wider dataset is collected.

I know that there has been nervousness about labelling and pigeonholing pupils by ethnic background, but used properly, such information can be very helpful. It can be used by MPs, parents and others to challenge what a school does and by good teachers and head teachers to ensure that they focus on areas of proven underachievement and do not contribute to it. I understand that that is a detailed point, but if the Minister cannot comment now, will he write to me with exact reasons why the Department no longer breaks down the data to that level of granularity? Will the Department consider doing so again? Will he also pick up the point about teacher training and attracting more young people from ethnic minorities into teacher training?

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) on securing this important debate.

The first thing to say is that the underachievement of black children is not a new issue. It goes back all the way to the 1950s, when children would come here from the Caribbean—bright and able children, who had excelled in the classroom in the Caribbean—but they suddenly found themselves in units for children who were educationally underachieving.

There is a clear pattern to that underachievement. When children of African and Caribbean descent enter the school system at the age of five, they are doing as well as white and Asian children. In some cases they are doing marginally better, because there is some medical evidence to show that black children are a little more developmentally advanced at the age of five. By the age of 11, their achievement levels, particularly for boys, start to drop off and by the age of 16 there is a huge gap. Although we—my Government—masked that gap, partly by the use of national vocational qualification equivalents for GCSE, it still remains startling.

Ministers might say, “Why does this matter to us? We don’t have many of these people in our constituencies. Maybe it’s their families. Maybe it’s them. Why should we bother?” First of all, as hon. Friends have said, it is an issue of equity and justice. If it means anything to be a British citizen—even in austerity and even in the times that we face—it ought to mean that there is the chance to make something of yourself through an educational system that treats people fairly.

As the child of immigrants who came to Britain in the 1950s, I know that that generation of West Indian immigrants knew that it would be tough, that they would have to work two jobs, that often they would live in overcrowded conditions and that they would encounter racism, but they thought—as immigrants always think—that for their children it would be better, and that education was the means by which it would become better. All the challenges faced by minorities today—whether about employment, policing or immigration—pale to nothing, in my view, in comparison with the betrayal of an earlier generation of immigrants who came to Britain to better themselves and their families, and thought that education would be the ladder for them, as it has been historically for immigrants all over the world.

Education matters because equity matters; it matters because fairness matters; and it matters because justice matters. I throw into the debate a quote from Martin Narey, who is the former director of the Prison Service and the former head of Barnardo’s. He said years ago that on the date and time a child is permanently excluded from school, they might as well be given a date and time to turn up in prison. The link between educational underachievement, social disorder and eventually a life of crime is a very clear pathway. Rather than spending money on rehabilitating young people and on dealing with the consequences of crime, let us focus on and pay attention to what I believe is the root of a lot of these issues—the educational underachievement of too many of our children, particularly black children, in our schools.

Post the riots last summer, people talked about the rioters being in gangs, about their parents, about lack of religious leadership and about all sorts of things. People did not talk about the fact that the biggest signifier when we looked at the young people who were arrested and charged with incidents in the course of the riots was that two thirds of them—I think that was the figure—had special educational needs, and the majority of them had been excluded from school. Those were the two biggest indicators. I am not saying that educational underachievement is an excuse for criminality or rioting, but the link is there. If we are talking about a business case, the business case for making sure that all our children achieve their very best in school is unanswerable.

As colleagues will know, this is an issue that I have harassed Ministers about, both in my Government and in this Government. On the question of the figures, I remember going to see a brand-new Labour Schools Minister in 1997 and asking him about the figures about ethnic achievement. I will not give his name—he was a very nice man—but he looked at me and said, “Well, Diane, we have got these figures and, you know, they seem to show that ethnic minorities are doing better.” I said, “How can that be?” I think he had a youth cohort study and the figures were broken down into white and ethnic minority, so I said, “I tell you what, you tell your officials to go away and break down those figures between white, Asian, African and Afro-Caribbean.”

The Minister looked at me, but he was a nice guy, so he went away and came back a few months later and said, “We have broken them down, and we find that you have the whites doing how they’re doing, and the Asian students doing better than the black students, but even the black students are creeping up a little bit.” I replied, “I tell you what, you go away and break down the black student figures between boys and girls.” He came back with what I and the black community knew, that black boys’ results were flatlining. What was happening to black boys at the end of the ’90s, and had been happening for decades, was masked by a failure to keep statistics. Although it seems arid and technical to ask for stats, we cannot have programmes that reach those children effectively without a statistical basis.

[Meg Hillier]

There is an emerging concern that although girls from certain ethnic minority backgrounds now achieve well in Hackney schools at 16, and in particular at 18, and some of them even go on to university, a number of them drop out of education after 18. Studies show that, and it exactly illustrates my hon. Friend’s point about the need to track the figures and keep the statistics at a detailed enough level for them to be meaningful.

[Ms Abbott]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.

I also remember, a few years into that same Government, going to see the then Secretary of State for Education and asking for a breakdown by ethnicity of GCSE results. She said, “Sure Diane, of course you can have them,” but her officials looked shifty. At that time, schools were supposed to keep the figures; they just were not published. Months later, I got a letter from my colleague, who is now in another place, saying that unfortunately the data could not be released because they were “not in a usable form”. Even if schools are made to keep data, unless they know that the figures will be made public and used, it is in their interests, particularly those of schools that are failing our children, to keep them in all sorts of higgledy-piggledy ways so that no one can drill down and see what is happening to the children. I cannot stress enough the importance of examination data broken down by ethnicity, because if we do not have that we cannot reach those children because we do not know what is happening to them.

I suppose this is the appropriate point at which to raise the question of why. Why do black children fail? That is something I have struggled with, as have academics, parents and community workers. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth said, it is a mix of things. It is partly to do with poverty in an absolute sense, although all the research shows, particularly that done by the Institute of Education, that even when we allow for poverty—usually by using free school meals as an indicator—black children systematically do less well than children of other ethnicities. There is no question but that poverty is an issue. Nowadays there is also increasing peer group pressure. Parents can be devoted to their children’s academic futures but if, as the children reach adolescence, their cohort thinks that studying is not cool, that can be problematic. I have mentored the children of friends in that situation, and I do not discount its significance.

There is also a culture of low expectation in some schools. I am not talking about bad teachers, but about teachers who say, and have said to me, in effect, year on year, “What do you expect?” Well, let me tell Members what communities in areas such as Hackney expect: they expect each and every child to reach their potential. There is a culture of low expectation, of saying, “Well, if we can make school a nice, safe place, and the children come in and make samosas and bang steel drums, isn’t that nice?” That sort of culture masks the failure to give young people the academic equipment they need to fulfil themselves as people and to compete in the world of work.

Some educationalists, some teachers and perhaps some Ministers might say, “Well, you know, Diane, you can’t expect schools to make good the failings of society.” That is a strange thing to say because if we read the history of education in this country, the Victorians believed exactly that: school could make good the failures of society. Had we said to Arnold, the first inspector of schools, “Oh, you can’t expect schools to make good the failings of society”, he would have said, “That’s ridiculous! This is what we’re here for.” Hiding behind—I emphasise “hiding”—real social and youth culture issues to say that schools cannot make a difference is to take a position that the Victorians would not have recognised.

One reason why it is important to keep detailed stats is that it is not sufficient to talk generally about black and minority children. I have worked on the subject for years, and in London, which is the part of the country I know best, the figures and outcomes are complicated. Chinese children, I think, do best in London, white girls do second best, then children of east African, Asian or Indian origin and, going down the list, Bengali boys, who are bumping along at the bottom with white boys and black boys. Black girls always do better than black boys. The London stats show us differences in out-turn between Asian children from the subcontinent, Asian children from Bengal, Asian children from east Africa, African children or Caribbean children, and not keeping detailed statistics about out-turns year on year is failing such children. Only when we see the differences can we start to identify what the issues are.

For instance, one of the reasons why Bengali boys do so badly compared with Asian boys from other backgrounds is to do with rural Bengal and the conditions that they come from. Unless we have the detailed statistics, however, we cannot identify that. One of the things I have seen as the years have gone by is that first-generation African children tend to do better than Caribbean children. That is an interesting fact, which is worth contemplating. In my opinion—having studied this, held events and looked at the figures—the results of first-generation African children may speak to more stable families in the African community at this point and a stronger sense of personal identity. Until we have the figures and can analyse why there are differences, we cannot help those children.

We have not spoken much about higher education, which the debate is not primarily about, but we cannot talk about educational underachievement without mentioning what is happening to BME children in higher education. A case in point is London, where it is striking that universities within a few miles of each other and in theory serving the same population are very different in their demographic make-up. In fact, some of the former polytechnics in London educate more BME young people than some of our Russell group universities put together. I do not accept the argument, “Well, that’s because it’s all they are capable of.” A lot of things are going on, such as poor advice at school level or poor A-level choices. There is a lot to say about what is happening in higher education to BME young people.

[Meg Hillier]

As my hon. Friend knows, a lot of interesting work has been done on that, but for me it is summed up by the bright young woman from Hackney who was offered places to read medicine at Nottingham and Cambridge universities. She turned down the place at Cambridge because she said that she did not think she would fit in there. That demonstrates that it is about more than the academic side; it is about the attitudes of universities and their welcoming of the wide population of this country.

[Ms Abbott]

It is an interesting issue, and I hope that on another occasion in the House we shall have the opportunity to debate BME communities in higher education specifically.

The issue we are debating has engaged me for many years, almost since I first entered the House, and there are two specific things that I have done about it. I set up an initiative called London Schools and the Black Child. Over a decade we have had annual conferences at which we brought together parents, community leaders and teachers, not to say, “Oh, the system is terrible and these teachers are terrible,” but to ask what we could do to help our children. The heart of those conferences—officials can tell Ministers about them, if they look through the files—were workshops, where parents dealt with issues such as how to cope with exclusions, how to help black boys to achieve, and how to help children to achieve higher standards.

The extraordinary thing about the conferences was that every year more than 1,000 parents would turn up. We held them at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre just across the way. The first one was due to start at 10 o’clock, and at 9 o’clock we had people queuing outside the door. Parents really want to help their children. There is an assumption that perhaps black children do badly because the black community does not value education. No. If I only ever say one thing in this House let it be that the black community does value education. That is why it is so important to me to keep making the case for focusing and having practical strategies.

The other thing that I have done, with the support of UBS, the international financial services company and bank, is to run an awards ceremony for London’s top achieving black children. One is always trying to counter stereotypes. The Minister might be surprised to know that there are black children at inner-city schools turning out 10 or 11 A* grades and four As at A-level, and going on to study medicine or law at Russell group universities. One year, we got Lenny Henry and the newscaster Trevor McDonald to hand out the awards, and we rang the Evening Standard and said, “We are having this awards ceremony—London’s top achieving black children; would you be prepared to cover it?” They asked, “Are any of the children gang members?” In other words, unless those children fit a stereotype they do not get coverage. We can open a London newspaper any day and see gang atrocities, stabbings and shootings. We do not hear enough about the children, of all ethnicities, who are achieving, and trying their very best. I thank UBS for its support. After the debate, I have a meeting with UBS to plan this year’s awards ceremony in the autumn, which will be held in the House of Commons.

I want to talk about what I think the solutions are. I have never doubted that part of the solution is to get parents to engage. The children who come to the awards ceremony are often from underachieving schools in socially deprived areas. One of the problems is that the room is always packed, because they bring their mum, dad, aunt and gran; the children who do best are those whose parents are most engaged in their education. It is important to get parents to engage, and that is why I have held conferences every year. Often parents do not quite know what to do for the best. The education system is very different even from when I was at school in this country. It is important to get parents to engage, but it is also important that the education system should recognise that. It is important to recruit more black teachers, not because only black teachers can teach black children, which is clearly absurd—I have mentioned Sir Michael Wilshaw—but because, particularly in metropolitan areas, unless the demographic in the staff room bears some relationship to that of the children who are being taught, there is unlikely to be the overall cultural literacy that will help teachers to engage with the children. It is also important, for all working-class boys, to recruit more male teachers. I deal with boys in Hackney—black, white, Asian, Turkish—who throughout their education have engaged only with women and have never seen a man as an educational role model. More male teachers are important. Teacher training is also important so that teachers have cultural literacy.

In closing, I will mention a subject on which I could talk for an entire hour and a half, because I have spent a lot of time on it in my life as a Member of Parliament. I had to have this debate with Labour Ministers: it is not good enough to adopt a colour-blind approach. With a colour-blind approach, ethnic minority children continue to slip under the radar and are palmed off with substandard qualifications, education and life chances. A colour-blind approach will not work. Comprehensive statistics are vital, as is recognising the importance of parents.

I must mention the institution of Saturday schools. For 20-odd years, Saturday schools have been run on a voluntary basis by the black community in London and other big cities. The same children of whom teachers in their mainstream school say, “Oh, what do you expect? We can’t get them to sit down,” go to a Saturday school, get their heads down and do their work. That is partly due to parental involvement.

We need statistics, recruitment of black and male teachers and teacher training, but above all we need to recognise that the issue is easy to ignore or to utter pieties about. If we abandon a cross-section of the community in our inner cities, they have a way of bringing themselves back into the political narrative—a way that is not good for them or for society. Better people than me have worked on the issue over their lifetime. I implore the Minister: let us not lose the advances made under the Labour Government. Let us continue to move forward.

Jobs and Growth

Debate between Meg Hillier and Diane Abbott

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier]

That question demonstrates the detachment of this Government and their Back Benchers from the reality of human lives. If the hon. Gentleman will let me develop my argument, I will point out that there are real challenges for people. There is an alternative plan, which my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor and his colleagues have laid out, and I back it.

I have met young people who have already been made redundant in their early 20s and others who have done everything that the Government have asked of them, such as working hard at school. Our borough has seen huge improvements in schools and education, and its results are improving. Our young people are increasingly going to university, which was pie in the sky for many young people when I was first selected for my seat. And still, there are no jobs. We risk having a lost generation, although not like the lost generation that the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon) spoke about, because we made great strides in government, although there is still more to do on skills. We risk a lost generation of young people who have achieved a lot and still cannot get a job.

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most alarming consequences of the Government’s economic policies for those of us in inner-city communities is how hard the cuts hit the public sector and women workers in the public sector? Particularly in inner-city London, disproportionate numbers of public sector workers are black and minority ethnic, and there are no private sector jobs for them to go into. Those people are often the head of their household and the only earner in their household. They are the sacrifices of this misconceived economic policy.

[Meg Hillier]

I could not put it better than my hon. Friend and I will not try. She is absolutely right.

Young people who have never worked are now desperately seeking even unpaid work experience. What have this Government done in response? They have cut the future jobs fund so that there is no more chance of employment and no more try-before-you-buy for employers. They have cut education maintenance allowance and increased student tuition fees. Just as young people in Hackney are emerging from school, ready and qualified for university, they are losing the help that they had.

The cuts programme is so deep and so fast that it gives no hope. It does exactly what my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said: it cuts the jobs that were providing for so many households in my constituency and keeping our local economy going.

Although the Chancellor is not in his seat, let me tell him about real people. Last week, I met a 16-year-old who said to me, “I really want a Saturday job because I want to grow from a boy into a man and this will help me.” He also told me that he wants and needs to contribute to his household’s increasingly squeezed income. He is losing the education maintenance allowance that he would have been entitled to and he is very worried.

There is the sixth-former who used her education maintenance allowance to top up the family’s electricity key on a Thursday so that she could keep the lights and heating on until the end of the week for the basics of study and existence. There is the teenager who attended school on alternate days because he and his brother had to share a pair of school trousers. Thanks to EMA, he is now at university, where he has escaped from his chaotic family background and is ready to succeed. I hope that there will be a job for him when he leaves.

There is the woman who is working to bring up her children and is using an expensive prepay meter key.

Alternatives to Child Detention

Debate between Meg Hillier and Diane Abbott

Thursday 17th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier]

I worked with two Home Secretaries who were robust in defending the Home Office’s need for resources for several areas, but, as the Minister will find out in his new role, resources are always challenging in a Department such as the Home Office. There are many priorities, and every time resources are put into one area, there is a risk that another area will bubble up, as I believe he with his greater experience dealing with these matters in Parliament will know.

Resources were always an issue, but it was not as simple as that. Often, local authorities did not want cases decided as quickly as they could have been because of the challenge of then housing and providing for families. There had to be some negotiation so that families who were able to stay were properly provided for in local authorities.

[Ms Abbott]

Would my hon. Friend agree that delays, which bear on child detention, are part of a process that feeds on itself? The more delays there are, the more people have shoddy legal advisers who tell them, basically, to play for time. If at some point we could bear down on the delays, it would save us money in the medium term.

[Meg Hillier]

I believe that my hon. Friend would agree that, as constituency MPs, we have seen reductions in the delays. I certainly am seeing that, and the figures that the Government can provide will show that they have reduced. Yes, as she rightly says, there is a self-propelling, negative cycle.

The hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) raised some questions about the Opposition’s position, and I shall make that clear. Actually, the approach of the Government is very much the approach that was under way as the previous Government left office.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) said that she has visited detention centres and seen what goes on there. I, too, have visited them, and that was one reason I was keen, as the Minister then responsible, to have a review and to work with organisations that had an interest in the matter. As I communicated to her and, in particular, to the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who is now the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and who was very interested in the matter, I was frustrated that a great deal of energy was being spent on argument and disagreement, not solutions. Any solution would not have solved the problem overnight. Do Members not think that in the past 13 years the Government would have stopped detention overnight if it were that easy? It is not that easy, and that is the reality of government.

[Ms Abbott]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Meg Hillier]

Could I make some progress, please? Let us be clear that Yarl’s Wood also houses foreign national prisoners, not just families with children. We should get it into the debate that families with children are not the only people housed there.

I worry that my hon. Friend has forgotten our conversations in which I explained my plans to revisit some of the issues surrounding children in detention. Some work was done by previous Ministers responsible for immigration to improve support for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, create expert local authorities that were able to deal better with those children, and create a children’s champion within the UK Border Agency.

At the end of last year, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Mr Woolas), who in the past had focused more widely on the issue of children in the immigration system, spoke to me about his desire to see a particular ministerial focus on the issue of children in detention. He asked me to take on that responsibility. As I have said, I wanted to look at the whole picture, and I began that process by meeting a number of organisations involved, and the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire and the former Member for Bedford, because of their particular interest in this matter. Out of that meeting, held under the Chatham House rule—I will not name those who were there, although hon. Members would not be worried about that—we came up with the view that early legal advice was important, and that the early legal advice project already under way needed to be boosted. I subsequently met the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and ensured that we worked closely with it, because of its desire to see a difference in that area. That was a helpful partnership and I also worked with local groups.

[Ms Abbott]

I remember our conversations with great clarity. My hon. Friend is a good friend and colleague, but we took diametrically opposed views on the issue of children in detention. I thought that it was wrong, and I have always thought that. One argument is that there is a problem because this is not an easy matter, but the real Home Office position was revealed in many statements, which claimed that ultimately, children in detention were not the responsibility of the Government but that it was the fault of their parents. Behind that lies a narrative on immigration that suggests that the more punitive the system is made, the less likely people are to abuse it.

[Meg Hillier]

I disagree with my hon. Friend. Perhaps I could remind her that we both agreed that we should not let the better be the enemy of the good. I was attempting to improve the system, and I am pleased that we are now seeing further steps along those lines. A better take-up of assisted voluntary return was a particular issue, and I pushed hard for third parties to do that. The Government felt that it was not always appropriate if such matters were dealt with by the person who was deciding on the immigration claim, and I hope that that will be a major part of the review. Excess baggage is not a new issue, but it is an equally important one to help people settle back. We need a clearer process in which people know from the beginning what the options are, and work on that with community groups has been important. Removal directions should be provided in the community. Those things are all part of the plan and the intense work that the UK Border Agency was beginning to undertake, prior to the election.

The previous Government were learning from the best models from abroad, and the new Government are continuing with that. However, we must recognise that even those models from abroad—in Australia and Sweden, for example—allow for children to be detained under difficult circumstances. I refer the House to an Adjournment debate from 10 February 2010, in which I flagged up some of those issues, although at that point I had not met a number of the groups.

I wish this approach well, as it is the way in which the previous Government attempted to deal with the situation. However, it was not easy, and I am a little puzzled. Today the Minister reiterates an announcement of the end of children being detained, and he re-announces a welcome review that was already under way. In his opening speech, he clearly highlighted the likelihood of detention immediately prior to a flight. I refer back to my point about what would happen in the case of a late legal challenge; that is an issue that needs to be tackled and supported by the whole legal process. The Minister also mentioned the Afghanistan centre for Afghan teenagers, and I wonder whether that marks a division in the coalition, especially given the remarks made by the hon. Member for Cambridge.