Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I, too, have many constituents who are leaseholders and who are stuck in limbo and facing astronomical bills through no fault of their own. Meanwhile, developers such as Galliard have refused to sign the Government’s latest pledge. What is the Secretary of State doing to fix that aspect of the building safety crisis?

[Michael Gove]

Applying a vice-like grip to their nether regions.

Building Safety

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Monday 30th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Flammable cladding and fire safety issues are not the only building safety concerns that affect the residents of blocks, particularly those built since the post-2010 bonfire of red tape. What is the Secretary of State doing to protect leaseholders and residents in blocks that have non-fire-related safety issues?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. One of the things I announced last week was new support, initially for Greater Manchester and the west midlands, to make safe a variety of safety issues in social housing in particular. We all have the horrific death of Awaab Ishak in our mind and on our conscience. More work is required on building safety, and I gently say that I do not believe there is a material difference in our post-2010 approach to this important issue, but I do believe this Government should have acted earlier to learn the lessons of the past.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

That is an important issue that relates to permitted development rights. My right hon. Friend is on to something, so I look forward to working with her.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

As private sector rents continue to rise in west London, more and more of my constituents on low incomes and dependent on benefits are having to pay rent well above the levels of the local housing allowance. They cannot afford it and are having either not to eat or not to heat their homes. Will the Secretary of State make a statement about the urgent need for the Government to uprate local housing allowance?

Social Housing and Building Safety

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Thursday 9th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I know he is passionate about helping young people, particularly those at risk of homelessness and those who need decent homes. It is thanks to him that I have had the opportunity to meet people from Centrepoint, an amazing charity that has done such good work for so long. I look forward to the opportunity to see more of the work it is doing, which he has championed, to help those who are most in need of support to have a safe and decent roof over their heads.

I mentioned the legislation we are bringing in, which of course follows on from the publication of a new vision for social housing by my late colleague James Brokenshire. I think we would all want, as we reflect on James’s life and legacy, to recognise that one of the issues about which he was most passionate was making sure that the vulnerable and the voiceless had a champion in Government. It was his determination to set us on a path to stronger rights and better protections for tenants in social housing that has resulted in the legislation that my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North is bringing forward.

Under that legislation, we will ensure that tenants know that they will be safe in their home, that they will be able to hold their landlord to account and that complaints will have to be dealt with promptly. They will know that they need to be treated with respect and that those who work in housing, to whom I am enormously grateful, will have the support and the extra professional training that they need to ensure that they work effectively with tenants. We also want to ensure that, in those circumstances—I hope they become progressively rarer—where there are real and genuine problems and an urgent need for action, there are new powers for rapid inspection and for unlimited fines, to ensure that appropriate steps are taken.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for the Bills he is bringing forward. He talks about bringing in legislation to improve safety for social rent tenants, which is good—but is that in parallel with the safety that leaseholders and private sector tenants in similar kinds of blocks also expect? Will everybody who lives in or owns a flat that is safety compromised be as safe as his legislation seeks to make social rent tenants?

[Michael Gove]

Yes, that is our intention. The hon. Lady’s question gives me an opportunity to restate and underline one or two things, to make them perhaps a little more clear than I had hitherto. To my mind, and this is very much the theme of this debate, there are two big issues that the Grenfell tragedy threw into the starkest relief, which we should have addressed beforehand and which the tragedy makes it imperative that we do not forget.

The first issue is building safety. We have a compromised and weak regime that needs to change. We need to improve regulation, ensure that those buildings that are unsafe are made safe, and ensure that the people in those buildings do not pay for it, but that it is those who were contributors either to the system overall or to the state of those buildings who pay. That is one important set of issues.

There is another parallel and related set of issues. We know, because we can hear on tape the voices of those who were in that tower saying beforehand that they were not being listened to, at a time when changes were being made to their own home, that they were not paid attention to. That symbolises a wider problem of too many people in social housing not having their voices heard or their interests and lives protected. Of course, the two come together.

The tragedy raises other issues, on which I, my Department and others have reflected, and which I hope this House will return to as well. As the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) rightly says, people in the private rented sector need their rights protected. We have some legislation that we will be debating in this House in due course that is intended to better protect the rights of those in the private rented sector by, for example, getting rid of section 21 evictions. I know the very close interest she takes in housing, so I hope we will have an opportunity to look at that Bill; if she has thoughts about how we can ensure that we do an even better job for those in the private rented sector, I look forward to working with her.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The communities of Tunstall, Burslem and Kidsgrove could not have a better advocate than my hon. Friend, and I could not have a better ally in shaping measures on urban regeneration. To drive urban regeneration, we will be increasing the council tax surcharge on empty homes. That is a means of making sure that we deal with that scourge and bring life back to all our communities.

Critically, we will also reform the compulsory purchase rules, because the way those powers operate often thwarts the desire of Homes England and others involved in the regeneration business to assemble the brownfield land necessary to build the houses and to get the commercial activity that we want in those communities. The reform in the Bill will ensure that the assembly of land required for urban regeneration becomes easier, so more of the homes that we need are built in the communities that need them in our towns and cities, rather than on precious green fields. The legislation also introduces new measures to facilitate the creation of the urban development corporations that have been integral in the past in driving some of the changes that we wish to see.

A significant part of the Bill seeks to reform the planning system, which I know is an issue of concern across the House of Commons. We all recognise that we have a dysfunctional planning system and a broken housing market. There is a desperate need for more new homes to ensure that home ownership is once more within the reach of many. It is more than just the planning system that needs to change: as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will outline later this week, changes need to be made to everything from the mortgage market to other aspects of how Government operate to help more people on to the housing ladder. Planning is part of that.

As well as making sure that we have the right homes in the right places, we must recognise, as the Bill and my Department do, why there has been resistance to new development in the past. Five basic and essential factors have led to resistance to development and our Bill attempts to deal with all of them. First, far too many of the homes that have been built have been poor quality, identikit homes from a pattern book that the volume of housebuilders have relied on, but that have not been in keeping with local communities’ wishes and have not had the aesthetic quality that people want.

One of my predecessors in this role, Nye Bevan, when he was the Minister responsible for housing in the great 1945-51 Government, made it clear that when new council homes are built, the single most important thing should be beauty. He argued that working people have a right to live in homes built with the stone and slate that reflect their local communities and were hewn by their forefathers, so that when someone looks at a council home and a home that an individual owns, they should not be able to tell the difference, because beauty is everyone’s right. I passionately believe that that is right and there are measures in the Bill to bring that forward.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State rightly references the important role of local people in new developments, but the Osterley and Wyke Green Residents’ Association and Brentford Voice have expressed their concerns that the national development management policies in the Bill give the Secretary of State powers to overrule local people and the local plan, and that unlike for national policy statements, there is no requirement for parliamentary approval. In reality, is the Bill not the latest in a long line of power grabs by this Government?

[Michael Gove]

I am allergic to power grabs. I am entirely in favour of relaxing the grip of central Government and strengthening the hand of local government, which is what the planning reforms here do. The reference to the national development management policies is simply a way to make sure that the provisions that exist within the national planning policy framework—a document that is honoured by Members on both sides of the House, of course—do not need to be replicated by local authorities when they are putting together their local plans. It is simply a measure to ensure that local planners, whose contribution to enhancing our communities I salute and whose role and professionalism is important, can spend more time engaging with local communities, helping them to develop neighbourhood plans, and making sure that our plans work.

Levelling Up

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

That is absolutely, totally, 100% correct, and it is my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary who deserves all the credit.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Hounslow is in the second most prosperous UK sub-region by gross value added, but thanks to 11 years of Government policies, 40% of Hounslow’s children live in poverty, so when will levelling up address inequality within communities as well as between them?

[Michael Gove]

That is a very important point. What we need to do is to make sure that we work with the Mayor of London, but also with Hounslow Borough Council and those who are involved in providing opportunity for young people in the communities the hon. Member represents, to give them a better chance in the future.

Building Safety

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend raises a very important case. I will look at what we can do to help his constituents. I will not make an absolute promise from the Dispatch Box at this point, but the situation he describes is clearly unacceptable.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

The shadow Secretary of State said that we cannot make a building half safe, but some residential buildings are possibly more dangerous than others. In October 2020, over 800 leaseholders and students were evicted from the Paragon blocks in Brentford, with one week’s notice—that is how dangerous they were deemed to be. They were built using a modular form of construction, and the eviction came two years after the flammable cladding had already been removed. I have reason to believe that the Paragon situation—there are other examples across the country—was a result of the modular form of construction, to which the out-of-date building regulations do not apply, as well as poor, shoddy and badly supervised construction works. When will the Secretary of State bring up-to-date building regulations through the system, and when will he address the lamentable culture in the construction industry, which the counsel for the Fire Brigades Union at the Grenfell inquiry described as being driven by an

“agenda of deregulation, privatisation and marketisation”?

When will he do something about that?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady makes an important point about modular construction. Through the Buildoffsite Property Assurance Scheme guidance, we require appropriate adherence to principles with modular construction, which should keep buildings safe. She is right that the Grenfell inquiry has also had a number of accounts from a number of witnesses that raise issues of concern. Although it is important that we continue to take action even before the inquiry concludes, I would not want to pre-empt the inquiry’s conclusion on all the issues she mentions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely, and we will be saying more about how we can ensure that the remaining tranches of the levelling-up fund are allocated fairly. Accrington and Oswaldtwistle speak to me even now as communities that I would love to visit, with my hon. Friend as my guide.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Not only have reforms of permitted development rights led to a new generation of slum housing, but the latest developments pose a huge risk to the beating heart of our high streets. Communities in this position have no voice and no say in these conversions, and councils are powerless to stop them. Will the Government at least give councils and communities some transparency, and release in full the promised regulatory impact assessment of the Department’s changes to permitted development rights?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Ruth Cadbury and Michael Gove

Monday 25th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady. It is important to recognise that we want to work with York to ensure that there is a local plan in place, but it is also the case, as she knows, that this Government are investing in York, deploying more resource and bringing more civil servants to the beautiful city that she represents. I hope that we can continue, in that consensual manner, to deliver for the people of York.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I welcome the new Secretary of State to his role. I also welcome his replies to hon. Members, as he said that, effectively, the Government’s developers charter is being reviewed. I have not seen the right hon. Gentleman torpedo something so effectively since he sunk the Prime Minister’s leadership bid in 2016. But we know that, like Lazarus, the Prime Minister came back. Will the Secretary of State therefore take this opportunity to confirm that the Government’s wholly unpopular and disastrous planning reforms will never return?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for taking me back to the halcyon days of 2016; it was not so much a torpedo being launched as an unexploded bomb going off in my own hands. As the former Member for Kensington and Chelsea, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, pointed out, one of the things about committing political suicide is that you always live to regret it.

On the hon. Lady’s broader point, it is only fair to say that the planning White Paper was mischaracterised by many. There is so much that is good in it, but it is important that we listen to concerns that were expressed in order to ensure that an already powerful and compelling suite of proposals is even more effective.