Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

The £5.5 billion housing infrastructure fund is a cross-Government effort to unlock housing by supporting infrastructure development. With the Department for Transport and the Treasury, we are looking at ways to build capability across Government to make that as effective as possible. My hon. Friend is right. It is about that sense of delivery and consent, and seeing that homes are supported by the infrastructure they need.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

On Thursday, it was confirmed that high pressure laminate cladding, exactly like Grenfell-style ACM cladding, is lethal in certain combinations and must be removed from buildings. This could affect up to 1,700 additional blocks. The Secretary of State has known since last October that this cladding failed a fire test. No building should be covered with lethal materials and there are lives at stake, so I ask the Secretary of State: how many buildings are covered in this lethal cladding? What is the deadline for the removal of that cladding? Will the Government fund its removal?

[James Brokenshire]

The hon. Lady needs to be careful about the detail of what she has said, because she will equally know that there has been a BS 8414 test in relation to high pressure laminate, with different types of insulation, where the finding was not the description that she has set out. We provided advice in December 2017 and December 2018. We have now reaffirmed further advice to building owners to see that they take appropriate action to make buildings safe. That is what we have taken action to see and secure, and further steps are being taken with local government to test the type of materials that are in buildings. There is certainly no sense on this side of not taking the action that is required to make people safe.

Leasehold Reform

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and all the other members of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on such a powerful report, and I thank the 700 or 800 people who got in touch with the Committee to give their views. We have heard this afternoon how powerful the feelings are across the country. I thank the APPG, of course, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, of course, and the National Leasehold Campaign, of course, all of which have done extraordinary work in this area. I also pay tribute to all the Members who have spoken today, but I give particular thanks to the Conservative Members on the opposite side of the House. It is not necessarily comfortable for an MP to stand up and call for action from their own Government, but they have done that well and with dignity and great conviction.

We have all heard some of the stories many times, and the time has come to act. One in four homes in this country are leasehold homes, which means that up to 6 million people have basically bought homes that they think they own when they do not. We have heard horrific cases of people trapped in homes they cannot sell, people being ripped off with extortionate service charges, and people being threatened with eviction for absolutely no good reason.

No other major economy has this feudal-style system. Every other major economy has moved away from leasehold and towards fairer, more transparent systems of ownership. Scotland has abolished leasehold, transferring all properties held on long leases to outright ownership, and action has been taken in Northern Ireland. Other countries have demonstrated that alternative models of ownership can work. There are co-op models, and the Australian system has spread to other countries—Canada, New Zealand and Singapore. This is being done everywhere else, but not in the UK.

This week, the Labour party announced a policy that will bring leasehold into line with every other major economy, and I brought a copy of the document with me today. We do not have many printed copies, but I have one here for the Minister, because she will hopefully appreciate reading it. We talked to the Law Commission. We spent a lot of time listening to the debates, reading the Select Committee’s report, and listening to the APPG and the campaigners, and we talked to property lawyers. Our policies are comprehensive and sensible, and worth being looked at by the Government. There are two parts, and the first is what we do with new leasehold properties going forward.

Of course, there is no argument at all for new leasehold houses. We should be looking to abolish new leasehold flats, too. The second part of the package, of course, is to help the up to 6 million people living in leasehold homes by giving them new rights and saving them thousands of pounds.

The Government have paid lip service to this. They know the system is broken and they have acknowledged the problem, but they have failed to act. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Jo Platt) said, they have made over 60 announcements on leasehold since 2010, but none of their proposals is aimed at helping the 6 million people trapped in leasehold homes right now and none of their proposals has led to any legislation.

Going beyond that, as has already been mentioned, the Government are actually propping up the system. The number of leasehold homes is increasing and £1 billion of Help to Buy money has gone directly to new leasehold homes, which is nothing less than a scandal.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) said, Labour proposes to end the sale of new leasehold houses, with direct effect, and to legislate to end the sale of new leasehold flats. We want existing leaseholders to be able to buy the full freehold ownership of their home for no more than 1% of the property’s value. Where does the 1% figure come from? It was suggested by the Law Commission; it is well evidenced; and we think it could work.

Labour would end ground rents for new leasehold homes, and as has been said, we would cap them for existing leaseholders at 0.1% of the property’s value, up to a maximum of £250 a year. Again, where does that come from? It comes from the Select Committee, and the hon. Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) has tabled the Ground Rents (Leasehold Properties) Bill, too. Again, the proposal is well evidenced and sensible.

Labour would give new rights to empower leaseholders to hire and fire their managing agent, or to take over the management of their home themselves. Importantly, we would crack down on unfair fees and contract terms by publishing a reference list of reasonable charges, not dissimilar to that which the Government introduced in the Tenant Fees Act 2019. We could have a similar system. We want to see transparency, which we would introduce on service charges, and we want to give leaseholders a right to challenge rip-off fees. As we have heard, such fees are complex, difficult and expensive.

We think the formulation of acting “whenever parliamentary time allows,” after nearly 10 years of Conservative government, is unacceptable. As the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) said at the start of the debate, this feudal system has been in place for around a thousand years. After a problem has existed for a thousand years, parliamentary time should allow for us to act. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) said, Labour Members and Conservative Back Benchers would support such legislation if it were introduced by the Government.

I end with a series of questions, which I would be grateful if the Minister answered. Does she recognise that we are the only developed country in the world that has failed to move away from the feudal leasehold model? Does she accept that the number of leasehold homes has gone up, and is still going up? Does she accept that 100,000 people are trapped in unsellable homes because of the leasehold scandal?

[Chi Onwurah]

Some of them are my constituents.

[Sarah Jones]

Exactly. If the Minister does not accept that 100,000 figure, what work is her Department doing to understand what the number is? What possible reason can she give, after the 60 announcements and the body of evidence we have heard of today, for legislation not having been introduced? When will the legislation be introduced? Can she confirm that none of the Government’s proposals will help the up to 6 million people who are currently leaseholders, and what will she do about it? England is the only place in the world that has failed to move away from this system, and it is time we caught up.

Social Housing

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing this debate on the housing crisis. I also congratulate him and my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) on the council housing campaign they have led together. We have had some glorious contributions from the usual suspects today—we need a better term for the usual suspects, don’t we? We need to brand them better, but the expertise and knowledge in the House has been well worth hearing.

As has been said across the House, the focus is not in this Chamber. The focus of the media is outside, where the latest Conservative party vanity project is playing out and sucking the life out of this place. We are all on hold. We have no meaningful legislation to debate, no progress on Brexit and no substantial action on all the big issues facing people across the country. Even the Minister reportedly admitted that the Government were not focused on housing—after Brexit, he said, the Government would turn to housing. How long will that take? And in the meantime, what do we have? A lot of consultations and a lack of action.

It is two years tomorrow since 72 people—the vast majority were social housing tenants—died in the Grenfell Tower fire. We know that the fire was avoidable, but Inside Housing has today exposed, to my horror, the multiple times that members of the all-party group on fire safety and rescue, some of whom are present, pressed, pressed and pressed again for Ministers to strengthen fire safety regulations in the wake of the multiple fatalities at the Lakanal House fire.

In 2014, the APPG wrote to previous Minister, Stephen Williams. Following more letters, the Minister said that he was

“not willing to disrupt the work of this department by asking that these matters be brought forward”.

In November 2015, the next Housing Minister, James Wharton, promised that he would make an announcement shortly. By September 2016, a year later, there was still no announcement, so the APPG wrote again to the next Housing Minister, Gavin Barwell. It wrote again to chase that letter in October and November 2016, following a parliamentary question in which the Minister had said that

“we have publicly committed ourselves to reviewing part B following the Lakanal House fire.”—[Official Report, 24 October 2016; Vol. 616, c. 16.]

That Minister refused a meeting with the APPG and claimed that other letters had gone awry.

In November 2016 the APPG wrote again, raising a tower block fire earlier that year in which a pregnant woman had died. In February 2017, it wrote again, having not received a reply, pressing for a date for the promised review. In April 2017, the Minister replied, suggesting again that correspondence had been lost. The APPG wrote again, pointing out that it was 11 years since part B of the building regulations was last reviewed and that it had been promised action by three successive Ministers since 2010. In May 2017, the Government replied, brushing off concerns about the fire in which the pregnant woman had died. Finally, on 19 May 2017, the APPG sent another letter pressing for action. That letter was sent only a month before the Grenfell Tower fire.

In all, the APPG wrote to Ministers 21 times. It is hard to know what to say. The changes that the APPG was calling for have still not been implemented. The Secretary of State said last week that the legislation to implement wholesale reform of our system of fire safety and building control would not be brought forward until the next parliamentary Session. The culture of indifference stopped action before Grenfell, and two years on, we see the same pattern.

My direct plea to the Minister today is to speed up the action. I know that he has consulted on approved document B and launched a consultation on Hackitt, and that the Government have said that they will pay for the removal of flammable cladding, but two years on from the fire, the fundamentals of the system remain unchanged. Flammable cladding remains on blocks, approved document B remains unchanged and the accountabilities in the system have also not changed. That is simply not good enough.

Turning to the wider crisis in our affordable housing supply, we have heard so eloquently today about the scale of the housing crisis, which spans beyond the issue of social housing, although that is without doubt the vital building block in creating a housing market that works for everyone, not just the few. My hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington set out the context of the housing crisis and the history of council house building, with the big boost to building that we saw after the second world war. My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) told us very powerful stories about what that means for people in today’s situation, where we do not have the house building that we once saw.

Over the last nine years, not only have the Government failed to tackle the gap between social housing supply and demand, but their policies are turning the gap into a gulf. Research from the National Housing Federation and the homelessness charity Crisis shows that England needs to build 145,000 affordable homes a year for the next 12 years. As we have heard, Shelter has put the figure at 3.1 million social rent homes over 20 years, but the last two years have seen the lowest level of social rent homes built since world war two. Only 6,500 were built last year, which is a fall of over 80% since the last year of the last Labour Government. The number of new homes built for affordable home ownership has almost halved since the time of the last Labour Government to less than 13,000 homes last year.

It is not hard to see why house building numbers have plummeted under this Government. Real-terms Government funding for new affordable homes has been cut by around 90%—it was less than £500 million last year compared with over £4 billion in the last year of the last Labour Government. The funding is nowhere near enough to deliver the scale of homes that we need, particularly because while the Government have failed at building, they have proved successful at selling off our existing social housing stock.

As we have heard, the Government promised a one-for-one replacement of homes sold under right to buy, but in reality, we are seeing one home built for every four sold. Over the past five years, under the scheme, councils have lost enough homes to house the population of Oxford. Councils do not even get to keep the profits from the sales; two-thirds of the receipts are sent to central Government. Meanwhile, as hon. Members have so eloquently said, the term “affordable” has been tested to the limit and beyond, including homes that are at 80% of market rents. Since 2012, over 111,000 genuinely affordable homes for social rent have been converted to those not so affordable “affordable” homes.

As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, we simply do not have enough social housing. As a result, over 1 million households are on the council waiting list, and if house building carried on at the current rate, it would take 172 years to get those people the homes that they need. Last year, 18,000 fewer social lets were made to homeless households than a decade before. Rough sleeping has doubled. There are 120,000 children in temporary accommodation—my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) told us about the quality of that accommodation. There are more families pushed into more expensive, less secure, worse-quality private rented homes; a million more households paying private rents, which have skyrocketed by an average of getting on for £2,000 a year since 2010; and thousands still paying the bedroom tax, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) pointed out.

The impact of all this is not just felt by individuals, because Government finances are being hit, too. The housing benefit bill, going straight into landlords’ pockets, has more than doubled since the early 2000s. Spending on temporary accommodation increased by 39% between 2011 and 2016—my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) pointed that out so well. It is an utterly false economy of spending—£22 billion a year on housing benefit rather than investment in the bricks and mortar that would keep an asset in the ownership of the state, to be enjoyed by everybody at a lower cost. Of the children living in poverty, 1.3 million live in private rented accommodation. We could lift a lot of those children out of poverty if they were in council housing. We have our priorities completely the wrong way round and it is a waste of Government funding.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden said, Labour’s record, although not always perfect, was clear: 2 million more homes, a million more home owners, and the biggest investment in social housing in a generation.

The next Labour Government’s plans for social housing are more ambitious. We want to build a million genuinely affordable homes over 10 years, including the biggest council house building programme of nearly 40 years. Crucially, we will stop the haemorrhaging of our stock by suspending the right to buy. Labour long called for the lifting of the cap, and we are glad that the Government have finally listened, but that alone will not work, especially for the 205 councils that no longer own any housing stock—they will be unable to use their new borrowing powers.

Labour will back councils to set up new housing revenue accounts. We will make long-term funding available so that councils have the certainty to properly invest in social housing. Along with the money, councils and housing associations will have new powers and flexibilities to build again at scale. We would end the Conservatives’ so-called “affordable rent”, redefining “affordable” to be linked to local incomes. We will transform how land is available and how much it costs. We would scrap permitted development, which Members have talked eloquently of already, and we would invest in making sure that all council and housing association homes are warm, safe and dry. The money we save in housing benefits will be recycled into helping tackle the causes of the housing crisis, and our new homes would meet green standards.

Tomorrow’s anniversary, marking two years since the Grenfell Tower fire, is a terrible reminder of the tragic consequences of not giving social housing tenants a voice. The tower block fire in Barking on Sunday, where more than a third of the properties were social housing, was a stark reminder that too little has changed. Highly flammable material on the side of a tall building, and residents’ complaints ignored—these lessons were not learned after the Lakanal fire a decade ago, and they have not been learned following the Grenfell Tower fire. We must do better.

House Building Targets

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone.

I welcome the debate and congratulate the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) on securing it and on saying a lot of sensible things on which a lot of us can agree. I would like to say a big thank you to the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) for managing to reduce the quantity of reading on the NPPF that the rest of us have to do. Even though the Opposition think that we can beef it up, we certainly want fewer pages and less red tape. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) on her barnstorming 10-point plan for housing, which would provide the homes we need and was powerful to hear.

There is much agreement in the Chamber. We are not building enough homes, those that we do build are not often affordable, the right infrastructure is not necessarily in place and no single policy can solve that. We have big structural problems with our housing system, caused by years of Government neglect and market failure.

As my hon. Friend said, we have to remember what we are doing this for. Rough sleeping has more than doubled since 2010, 120,000 children are in temporary accommodation, home ownership is down, with 1 million fewer young home-owning households than in 2010, and we have an insecure private rented sector. In the private rented sector, homes are often in poor condition and 1.3 million children live in poverty. About a quarter of those children would not be in poverty if they had access to social housing. The cost of private rents is driving families into poverty.

The record on house building since 2010 has contributed to the crisis. House building is still well below the levels needed, and it has not recovered to where it was before the global financial crisis. Half of local authorities are set to miss their targets for new homes, while developers get away with paying less for infrastructure. House prices and developer profits have been inflated artificially by Help to Buy, while the supply of genuinely affordable homes has plummeted. The past two years have seen the lowest levels of homes for social rent built since the second world war—as my hon. Friend said, about 6,500 socially rented homes.

There have been flaws in how the Government have managed house building targets and in their approach to planning more broadly. As the hon. Member for Newton Abbot said, the methodology for calculating local house building targets is flawed, and the National Audit Office confirmed that the system is not working well. The NAO also noted that reducing the target for certain regions could hamper local authority plans to regenerate and to stimulate economic growth.

Too often, councils are losing their grip over planning policy. Too many are still without the up-to-date local plan and five-year land supply that they need to avoid developers overruling them and building the wrong types of homes. The gap between homes granted planning permission and homes built is at its widest on record and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) said, land banking is a huge problem that we need to tackle. After years of cuts to local authority funding, many councils simply do not have the capacity and the expertise to negotiate effectively with developers to deliver the homes we need. Local authority spending on planning and development has halved since 2010, and the NAO has questioned whether councils have the necessary commercial skills.

Labour’s approach to house building is fundamentally different. We believe we should be more ambitious, not less. We need more homes, which need to be genuinely affordable. As the hon. Member for Newton Abbot said, we need to define in some way what we mean by “affordable”. Labour would redefine in legislation what “affordable” is, linking it to earnings as well as house prices. Our green paper on affordable housing, “Housing for the Many”, sets out our plans to build 1 million genuinely affordable homes over 10 years, including the biggest council house building programme in nearly 40 years. We must return councils to their rightful place as major builders of homes, and we have been clear that we would restore the national grant investment to the £4 billion a year it was at the end of the last Labour Government.

Our campaigning has had some wins. We are glad that the Government agreed to lift the housing revenue account cap and to close the viability loophole, which gave developers a get-out clause on affordable housing. However, the decision to back Labour and lift the cap on council borrowing to build council homes means little if Ministers will not suspend the right to buy, support the half of councils without a housing revenue account to set one up, or provide much more central Government funding to councils.

I look forward to the Minister’s response to the debate. Will he push for a major building programme of affordable housing as part of the next spending review, set new affordable housing targets and respond to Labour’s call for new powers to end land banking through housing delivery contracts?

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

It is a great pleasure, as always, to appear under your accurate and well controlled chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. A number of Members have raised myriad issues, literally two or three dozen different, particular and technical ones, which my team will attempt to respond to in writing. I will cover some of the major ones.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) on securing this important debate. House building is at the heart of so much of Government priority at the moment and has been a big part of my life over the past 12 months or so. We will see how much longer that lasts. A number of specific situations have been raised by Members, but I hope that they appreciate my position in the planning system and the quasi-judicial position of the Secretary of State. It would be inappropriate for me to comment on particular issues and local plans, such as Teignbridge, but I can talk more broadly about some of the issues.

Before I do that, I will say that I have found over the past 12 months a slightly debilitating attitude in some of our debates, which speaks of the problems we have in the housing market—there are certainly ones that need to be addressed—as if they suddenly arrived in 2010 and there had not been a general failure of Governments over a number of decades to build the houses that we need. Under the last Labour Government, the peak in house building was 223,000 a year. We hit broadly the same figure last year, after 10 years of recovery in a housing market that had been decimated in the financial crash. An inability and unwillingness to acknowledge that does a disservice to the general public. Presenting a series of silver bullet solutions to a very complicated and difficult problem does not illustrate to the public that all parties across the House are joined shoulder to shoulder to build the homes that the next generation needs.

I am pleased that there is general cross-party agreement that a target of 300,000 homes or thereabouts—1 million homes over 10 years, which is about 100,000—

[Sarah Jones]

Affordable homes.

[Kit Malthouse]

Affordable homes as well. That is critical. It would be helpful if, from time to time, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) acknowledged, as she did in the latter part of her speech, some of the things that the Government have done to get us towards 222,000 homes and to move beyond that in the months to come.

On the major subject of the debate, local housing need, we introduced a standardised approach to assessing housing need locally, as my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) mentioned. We published that in July last year in the national planning policy framework, after extensive consultation to speed up and reduce the cost of plan making, to make that process more transparent and accessible.

In practice, all councils should make a realistic assessment of the number of homes that their communities need and they should use the standard method as the starting point, not the end point in the process. That starting point is used to identify the minimum number of homes needed every year. What the standard method does not do, however, is provide a maximum number of homes needed, nor does it provide a target that must be planned for. Development should not progress at any cost, and local circumstances should be taken into account. We need to make sure that constraints are considered and that we find the right places for homes, having regard to those constraints.

We need to ensure that the right infrastructure is in place, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot said, and that we underpin all development with good design principles. Local authorities are best placed to do that; through the production of development plans they should set out how to meet the needs of their communities. It is vital that local authorities plan sustainable communities, as my hon. Friend also mentioned, delivering homes that people want to live in. As part of that, we need the right types of infrastructure ready to support the delivery of new homes. Identifying the infrastructure needed to support growth will be an important aspect of local plan making. It is only by identifying what is required that it can be planned for and delivered.

To support that delivery, we are providing grants to local areas. Through the £5.5 billion housing infrastructure fund, we will help to deliver the infrastructure that is needed. I am pleased that Teignbridge District Council will benefit from the fund, having successfully bid for £4.9 million of marginal viability funding, to unlock 315 homes by investing in the Dawlish link bridge. I am also delighted that in the wider Devon area, the successful south-west Exeter bid for forward funding will provide over £55 million to unlock 2,500 new homes, delivering road improvements, suitable alternative natural green space, GP surgery facilities and strengthened utilities provision. That money is going towards ensuring that planned new development is supported by the infrastructure that the community needs.

The planning system should be genuinely plan-led, with up-to-date plans providing a framework for addressing environmental, social and economic priorities for an area. Local plans are prepared in consultation with communities and play a key role in delivering necessary development and infrastructure in the right places. Community participation is vital in that. The best plans are those in which communities have been effectively engaged throughout the process. Having an up-to-date plan in place is essential to plan for housing, providing clarity to communities and developers about where homes and supporting development should be built and where not, so that development is planned for rather than being the result of speculative planning applications.

Through the revised national planning policy framework, we have made significant reforms to make it easier and quicker to get a plan in place. We have introduced flexibility in plan making, with a new, more flexible plan-making framework and an expectation that plans are kept up to date through review at least every five years. That ensures that local people have the opportunity to engage with the local plan process regularly, and that a plan stays relevant to the community it is prepared for. In addition, neighbourhood planning gives communities direct power to develop a shared vision for the future of their area, and to shape development and growth. I am very pleased to have a neighbourhood planning champion in the debate—my hon. Friend the Member for Henley.

Communities can decide the location of new homes, employment, shops and services, protect local green spaces and heritage and set policies on the design of new buildings. Producing a neighbourhood plan can bring the wider community together in the creation of that shared vision, through the consultation and engagement process. Over 2,600 groups have started the neighbourhood planning process since 2012, in areas that cover 14 million people. I welcome the fact that four neighbourhood plans have been made in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot, and I acknowledge the contribution that those plans make to community involvement in the process.

My hon. Friend went through a list—I think I wrote down 11 specific points—of issues that she wanted to raise. I want to address one or two of them, but I will respond to the rest in writing. There were a number of misapprehensions, if I may say so—that may be my fault because I have not communicated to her some of the things we are doing. She talked about the requirement for new villages. Could we plan for new garden villages? We do have a garden villages programmes and are supporting 23 garden villages. We put a prospectus out for more in December last year, expecting to get back a few dozen applications, but we got 100 back. There is a lot of hunger and ambition in local authorities to do exactly that.

On broadband, I agree with my hon. Friend that we want it to spread across the community. It is certainly part of planning guidance that those kinds of facilities should be provided. While not mandatory, local authorities can, through their local plan, encourage developers to put that kind of facility in place. A number of hon. Members mentioned viability, section 106 and transparency; we are moving to make sure that section 106 agreements are published, not only so we can see what our local authority is producing for a local community but to compare the performance of our local authority to that of its neighbours. Some local authorities do well on section 106 negotiation and others not so well, so to be able to see across the piece is key. Viabilities should be open, transparent and publically available, so that local people can see what is being done in their name.

My hon. Friend mentioned support for small developers; she is right that in the crash of 2007-08, about 50% of small developers were wiped out. They used to produce over half of new homes in this country; obviously, that number has fallen significantly. Part of the challenge of getting up to that 300,000 number will be stimulating a whole new generation of developers—both new ones and expanded existing ones. We are putting significant funding and assistance behind helping them to do so. We have a large fund of £1 billion with Barclays, seed funded by Government and with Barclays putting in the rest, specifically to support small developers.

There was a lot of emphasis on our increasing capacity by using modern technology and construction methods. Modular homes are the way to go. Again, we are putting significant amounts of money behind stimulating that market and the adoption of new building techniques. I have challenged large and small developers not to be the Kodak of house building and to ignore technology at their peril, such that they might be rendered obsolete. It is coming: we reckon there are something like 30 factories across the UK that produce modular homes. There is much more that we can do and we are keen to stimulate that.

The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) raised a number of points, many of which we are actually taking up. We have made second home owning more expensive, we are attracting institutional funding into housing and, as she knows, we have given local authorities the ability to change green belt boundaries if they wish, subject to a high bar.

I want to finish by thanking everybody for participating in what has been a detailed debate for just an hour. While we will respond to the points raised, I urge hon. Members please to refrain from imagining that there is some simple solution to the housing crisis in this country. It is a complicated landscape, but we are applying as much energy and industry as we can to building the hundreds of thousands, nay millions of houses that the next generation needs.

Domestic Abuse

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. Today’s announcement is, of course, welcome. It is a victory for the campaigners who have fought for 10 years for a legal duty to support survivors of domestic violence. It is a victory for charities such as Women’s Aid; for campaigners such as the new Victims’ Commissioner, Vera Baird; and for Members of this House such as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). They deserve huge credit, as do many other Members in this House, on both sides, who have fought for this change. This is a victory for the hard work of current and former Front-Bench colleagues, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) and for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn). Most importantly, it is a victory for survivors of domestic abuse, who show such unimaginable strength.

There are, however, questions still to answer, which will determine whether this policy is going to work. First and most importantly, unless we provide the funding to make it work, we are setting local authorities up to fail. The Secretary of State has estimated today that the new legal duty could cost £90 million. Given that councils in England are facing an overall funding gap of £8 billion by 2025 and that Home Office figures estimate that domestic abuse costs the economy £66 billion in just one year, does the Secretary of State really think that that funding will be enough?

The Local Government Association has today raised concerns that the policy is focused exclusively on the crisis-point intervention, rather than early intervention; we need to ensure that the funding does not drain from these equally important areas to pay for this policy. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the funding will be ring-fenced? We do not know when the spending review will be; we may not know the outcome of the spending review until this time next year. Why is the Secretary of State risking this policy being kicked into the long grass by hooking it to the spending review? When will we know how much money there will be to spend?

We know that there are issues with support provided to victims only in their local area, despite two thirds of women fleeing to a refuge further afield. Can the Secretary of State confirm that women will be supported wherever they are from? The same must apply in respect of women with no recourse to public funds and those with complex needs, as such women struggle to access beds and are overrepresented among women murdered. Specialised support services such as those for black, Asian and minority ethnic women and for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are hugely important but have suffered significant cuts, with one expert recently saying that we have lost 50% of all specialist BAME refuge services. It is unclear how these proposals will impact specialist services, so can the Secretary of State provide some reassurance?

The background to this announcement is a crisis in support for victims of domestic abuse and deep cuts to investment in genuinely affordable homes. The Government are responding to a crisis that their own policies have partly created. A 60% cut in Government funding for local authorities between 2010 and 2020 has stretched our councils to the limit. Services have been cut back to the legal minimum and core services have deteriorated in quality. Women’s Aid has found that many organisations are running an area of their services without dedicated funding from local authorities, and some receive no support from local authorities at all. That has led to a fifth of refuges closing since 2010, and more than 150 women a day are now being turned away from refuges.

The lack of genuinely affordable housing has left domestic violence victims facing homelessness and squalid housing. This is because last year the number of homes built for social rent fell to fewer than 6,500, compared with almost 40,000 in 2010. The Government’s record on this issue is not good. Attempts to dismantle the funding stream for refuges through housing benefit were shelved last year only after tireless campaigning from women’s organisations.

Although many men are victims of domestic abuse, the majority are women, and women are disproportionately affected by austerity, bearing the brunt of cuts in support services. Ten years of austerity have had a savage impact on BAME women and single mothers in particular. By 2020, the income of single mothers will have fallen by 18%, and black and Asian households will see average drops in living standards of 19.2% and 20% respectively, according to analysis by Amnesty International.

The Prime Minister said today:

“Whoever you are, wherever you live and whatever the abuse you face, you will have access to the services you need to be safe.”

That is a commitment that cannot be made lightly. There is a now a clear moral duty on the Government to see this through—not just for the sake of keeping the promises that have been made, and not just for the sake of the campaigners and survivors who have pushed for this change for years, but for the sake of those people who are trapped right now in abusive relationships. If we promise them safety and do not deliver it, we will not deserve forgiveness. We welcome today’s announcement, but we will hold the Government’s feet to the fire until this commitment becomes a reality.

[James Brokenshire]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments and her support for today’s announcement. I agree with her on that sense of moral duty—that sense of moral purpose—to those who are in abusive relationships that underlines all this work. She will know the figure that is used: some 2 million people each year suffer some form of domestic abuse. That is unacceptable and intolerable, and it is right that we do much more, which is why the Prime Minister made her comments today. Indeed, she has an enduring commitment to making a difference in this important policy area.

I join the hon. Lady in paying tribute to all those who have campaigned on this issue, not only across the House but throughout the country. So many voluntary organisations—those very much at the frontline—have really made the difference and I pay tribute to their work, as well as to the quiet, dignified determination of so many survivors of domestic abuse, who have really underlined that sense of why we need to do more.

The hon. Lady highlighted the issue of funding for local government and the interrelationship with the spending review. We have indicated that there will be a spending review later this year because the current spending review period ends at the end of this financial year. It is therefore right that we look at the funding position in that context but, as I have underlined, it is a question of ensuring that local government receives the appropriate financial support, given that a new and additional requirement is being placed on local government as a consequence of this proposal. That is why I said what I did about the need to ensure that this issue is properly addressed through the spending review and that it is informed by the consultation itself.

In the media this morning, I gave some estimates of what we anticipate the broad annual cost may be—a round figure of around £90 million is our current estimate—but I want that to be informed by the consultation and, indeed, to be taken into the spending review, so that we can get the right level of support. That sense of co-operation between areas is also within the duty that we anticipate, by which I mean not looking at this in isolation. The hon. Lady makes a very good and important point about being able to support people from wherever they come. Indeed, that is, in part, what this variability of service, which we want to address, is all about, and what the statutory duty is very firmly intended to underpin.

As I said in my statement, we announced £22 million of additional support for the sector last November. I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs Wheeler), who has had to leave her place on the Front Bench to attend a debate in Westminster Hall, for her incredible support and leadership in this regard. Obviously, local authorities are seeing a real-terms increase in spending power over this coming year.

I know that we need to do more. We need to ensure that specialist support reflects the protected characteristics —the needs of BAME, LGBT and other communities. There is a need to recognise some of the different types of outreach services that will be needed to give effect to that. The hon. Lady sets that challenge, and I respect and acknowledge her intent to ensure that this Government are properly scrutinised and challenged to see that we follow through. I know that that view is shared across Government. Colleagues with different responsibilities are determined to work together to make that difference.

Housing

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

This has been a short but good debate—quality not quantity. We have heard from Members across the country from the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) to the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss). To pick out a few, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) spoke with great authority, as always, about the need for real revenue funding and for a substantial change in the private rented sector. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) was absolutely right that we should look at locked-in discounts for first-time buyers. He will be pleased to hear that this is indeed a Labour policy, and if he votes Labour at the next election, his idea may well come to fruition. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) talked about the need to tackle climate change through housing and how important the role of modular housing is.

The Government are not just failing to address the housing crisis; they are actively making it worse. I do not know whether it is incompetence, mismanagement, complacency or deliberate policy, but this Government are wilfully exacerbating the housing crisis. Whether it is homelessness, private renting, leasehold, home ownership or fire safety, the story is always the same: things are getting worse, not better. The problems can be traced to bad Government policies. In government, Labour managed to successfully tackle these issues. As a Government in waiting, Labour is the party with the solutions to these problems.

Things are getting worse, not better. Rough sleeping has doubled. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) that rough sleeping has gone up by 333% and that someone is dying every fortnight. Only 6,500 homes for social rent were built last year. Home ownership is supposed to be the thing the Conservative party cares about, but nearly 1 million young people are unable to access it. My hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) was absolutely right to talk about the overwhelming sense of injustice felt by leaseholders.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) talked eloquently about the plight of permitted development—something the Government want to increase. The problems can be traced right back to the Government. Ministers have stretched the term “affordable housing” to breaking point, to include homes that are let at up to 80% of market rents. We are building the wrong homes, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) said.

The Government have repeatedly ignored fire safety advice that sprinklers are essential. They have also ignored advice following the Lakanal House and Grenfell Tower fires and refused to intervene in other blocks with aluminium composite material cladding. We have 40,000 people still trapped in deadly buildings. We have also lost more than 170,000 affordable council homes through poorly designed policies.

In government, Labour managed to successfully tackle these issues. As a Government in waiting, Labour is the party with the answers to solve these problems and the ability to deliver the change we need. It is the Government’s job to solve the housing crisis, and it is the Government’s shame that they have failed. This country has a right to expect better, which it will get under a Labour Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

We have already invested £10 million in the Chelmer Waterside development in my hon. Friend’s constituency, but she is still insatiable for more Government funding for her fast-growing constituency. As she knows, HIF bids are a competitive process, but I will look carefully at the proposals put in by Chelmsford; and, given her support, let us be hopeful of success.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

New figures today show that 40,000 people are still trapped in privately owned blocks wrapped in Grenfell-style aluminium composite material cladding. That is 40,000 lives on hold—weddings cancelled, mental ill-health rife—because people are trapped in properties that cannot be sold. The Prime Minister repeatedly said that she rules nothing out, so when will the Government finally say, “Enough is enough,” set up a loan fund for private blocks and get the job done?

[James Brokenshire]

I firmly recognise the stress, strain and anguish that so many people continue to live with as a consequence of ACM cladding on the outside of a number of these blocks. A growing list of companies, such as Barratt, Mace and Legal & General, are doing the right thing and taking responsibility. In addition, warranty providers have accepted claims on a number of buildings. I urge all owners and developers to follow the lead of those companies and step up to make sure this work is done. This is a priority for me; I know the work needs to be advanced more quickly, and I am considering all other options if it is not.

Fire Safety and Sprinkler Systems

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) on securing this debate. Given that the call for evidence on approved document B of the building regulations ends on Friday, this debate is exceptionally timely, and I hope that the Minister has listened carefully to the wise words of the secretary of the all-party fire safety rescue group. Hon. Members are clearly as one on the need for change, and that case has been made conclusively this morning.

The need for urgency percolated through everybody’s speeches. The hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) said that this “nonsense” must not go on, and the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) asked whether property is more important than people’s lives. My hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) said that Grenfell 2 is “in the post”, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) said that we should consider the cost and that this issue is a “no-brainer”. The hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) said that we have kicked the can down the road for too long. We heard sensible arguments from all those who contributed this morning, including on the important need to protect firefighters as well as residents, and the fact that modern sprinkler systems can be installed at less cost and with less damage if they need to be used.

In 2019, we find ourselves in the sorry position of knowing that our fire safety and sprinkler regulations are woefully inadequate, and almost two years on from the Grenfell Tower fire, we are still waiting for the Government to act. Seventy-two people died in the Grenfell fire, and that fire and its aftermath exposed a litany of fire safety failures across thousands of buildings. Hundreds of blocks are draped in flammable Grenfell-style ACM cladding, and many more are covered in other types of flammable material that is as yet untested. There are tens of thousands of faulty fire doors, and a huge discrepancy in the provision of sprinklers. We also know that warnings came years earlier. The coroner’s investigation into the Lakanal House fire recommended in 2013 that sprinklers be retrofitted in social housing, and similar calls were made by members of the all- party fire safety rescue group in the same year. In 2016, a building regulations review was promised by the Government but never delivered. The London Fire Brigade stated:

“It is deeply concerning that on the two occasions in recent years when the Government has looked at reviewing sprinklers legislation or guidance it has been in the wrong direction—seeking to weaken rather than strengthen it.”

As has been said many times this morning, no one has died in a fire where a sprinkler system was installed, yet in England sprinklers are a legal requirement only in new residential blocks that are more than 30 metres tall.

Labour party research found that more than 96% of tall council tower blocks in London do not have sprinklers—a huge number. Although 3% of those blocks are now looking to install sprinklers, the vast majority have no plans to do so because they do not have funding. Installing sprinklers at Grenfell would have cost a few hundred thousand pounds. Croydon’s fully retrofitted stock post-Grenfell cost £10 million, and Birmingham has projected a cost of approximately £30 million to retrofit more than 200 blocks. Despite repeated calls from local authorities and the Prime Minister’s promise that the Government will do “whatever it takes” to keep our people safe, no funding has been provided by central Government for sprinklers. We do not pretend that these changes come without cost—of course they have a cost, but what is the price of safety? As we have heard, the rules in Scotland and Wales are more comprehensive, and a multitude of experts have called on the Government to reduce the height requirement for sprinklers, and to extend that requirement to other buildings.

The problem goes wider. Over new year, the Shurgard fire exposed our backward laws and regulations on fire safety across the board. Shurgard operates in Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, where sprinklers would have been required by law in a warehouse the size of the one in Croydon. In this country, however, there are no such requirements, and the property of nearly 2,000 people got burned.

I do not need to list the individuals and organisations calling for change. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith listed RIBA’s excellent four pillars for reform, including a requirement for sprinklers and automatic fire suppression systems in all existing residential buildings above 18 metres. In addition to the questions raised today, will the Minister listen to RIBA and implement its sensible set of policies? Will the Government extend their ban on flammable cladding to schools, hospitals and care homes, and introduce a requirement for sprinklers in schools and hospitals? Will they consider a fire safety fund that is available to help council and housing association landlords with the costs of retrofitting sprinklers and other urgent remedial work? Two years on from the Grenfell fire, will the Government understand the need for urgent action, get a grip on the situation and act, so that we can hold our heads up high and say that we have done what we could to stop such a tragedy happening again? There has been much talk in other places of the “Malthouse compromise”. If the Minister were to act today to prevent future deaths, we would call it anything he wanted, and we would thank him for it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

A smörgåsbord, I am sure.

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

We need to build new homes but they must be the right homes. In 2017, the then Secretary of State the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) said:

“It’s unacceptable for home buyers to be exploited through unnecessary leaseholds”,

and added that “enough is enough”. He said that real action was needed and announced that the Government were banning the sale of leasehold homes. Last summer the current Secretary of State promised no new Government funding schemes for leasehold homes, yet the Government’s own figures show that Ministers are pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into a state-funded racket by subsidising large house builders for the sale of leasehold homes through Help to Buy—some 17,000 homes over five years, half of which have been sold since the Government promised to ban that. Can the Secretary of State tell us: have the Government forgotten what they said, has he changed his mind, or can he let us know when he will deliver on his promises?

Residents of Leisure Park Homes

Sarah Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Austin, and to speak in this debate. The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) made a convincing case for the need for protection of leisure park homes. She also painted a lovely picture of her constituency. Is it any wonder that people want to go to the rolling hills of the north downs and retire there? What a terrible thing it is when they find that it is not quite what they expected.

We heard tales of pitch fees increasing, and about the culture of fear and mis-selling. The right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) rightly asked who some of the people running these homes are, and what can be done about the problems. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) asked why nothing had been done, when he has been raising these issues for some years. The hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan) talked about people feeling almost “stateless”, which is a strong and apt word.

The hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) talked about his role with regard to previous legislation, and made a really important point about the need to protect the tourism industry. Anything that we do must not damage that. The hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) told us that his area is second only to Skegness in its concentration of caravans, and we must listen to what he has to say.

[Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

I am very sorry that I was not here earlier; there were distractions in the House. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is incredibly important to draw a distinction between sites that are badly run and badly managed, where bad practices are endemic, and really well-run sites that have had zero complaints over many years? For example, there is Pinewoods in my constituency, near Wells-next-the-Sea, Searles park in Hunstanton, and McDonnell caravans park. We have a number of really well-run sites with no history of complaints whatever. We need to find a way of ensuring that we drill down and protect those people who need protection, while not damaging those well-run sites.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

I agree with that completely. The poor form tarnishes the whole industry, and people who are doing things well do not, on the whole, object to changes to regulation or legislation because they are already doing what they should be. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point.

As we have heard, there are lots of problems that we need to try to fix. Residents in leisure park homes are not afforded the limited protections of mobile home owners on sites with residential planning permission. They do not have the special protections under the Mobile Homes Act 2013, as we discussed. In the Opposition’s view, it is right to call for protections to be extended to residents living permanently in leisure park homes. We should also ask why residents are being sold permanent homes in leisure parks that do not have residential planning permission. It is unclear how widespread that practice is. Perhaps the Minister can tell us her sense of the scale of the problem, and what the Government consider the issues to be.

The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent talked about the protections afforded to residents of park homes through the 2013 Act, but it is worth emphasising that abuses are still happening across all park homes despite those changes in law. There is a need for wider reform. Organisations such as the Park Home Owners Justice Campaign and the Park Homes Policy Forum have worked for years to expose the exploitation of park home residents, which is still ongoing. Park homes have been described to me as

“like leasehold bullying, but with criminal thuggery thrown in.”

We know that 62% of leasehold home owners feel as if they were mis-sold them; I would not be surprised if a similar, or higher, number of park homes residents felt the same way. Just as there are leaseholds with onerous ground rents, park home owners can be charged extortionate pitch fees that can increase rapidly each year. As with leaseholds, hidden clauses in park homes contracts can cause significant hardship down the line; residents have limited routes of redress when things go wrong, and any enforcement is often affected by a lack of transparency and opaque structures.

However, unlike the situation with most leaseholds, park home owners also report, as we have heard, experiencing or being threatened with violence and other illegal activity. We saw that most prominently in the disgraceful treatment of Sonia McColl, a leading campaigner for park homes reform. After campaigning for action on rogue park owners, Sonia had to sell her park home and move due to death threats. She then, astonishingly, had her entire home stolen while waiting for it to be delivered to her new site. She was made an OBE for services to society, but I think society has let her down. I asked her what issues she would like to raise with the Minister; she wants to know, first, when the consumer prices index instead of the retail prices index will be used to calculate the increase in pitch fee, and secondly when independent research will be done on the 10% commission payable to site owners on the sale of residence properties. She will be happy to share the Minister’s response with the 30,000 residents on her database.

I want to give the Minister time to respond, so I will say only a little more. The Government have recognised the systemic problems with park homes, and have promised to legislate on areas such as pitch fee reviews, but they have not done so yet. They have been promising for some time to get a grip on the wider leasehold scandal, but there has been no primary legislation on it. Stronger laws are worthless if they are not enforced; I am sure that the Minister will talk about the duties of local authorities, but in their own recent analysis the Government admitted that the 2013 licensing and inspection powers are not being applied because of a lack of dedicated resource in councils. That is not really a surprise, given the billions of pounds of cuts made to local authorities under this Government.

I hope that the Minister will outline when her Department will introduce the legislation that was promised back in October, and will say how she will support councils that are too strapped for funds to enforce it. The Conservative party claims to be the party of home ownership, but here we are again, talking about homeowners being exploited, mis-selling, exploitative contract terms and excessive fees and commissions charged to residents who were told that they were buying a home, with all the rights and freedoms that that affords. This is the third time today that the Government have been challenged by a member of their own party about the treatment of homeowners on their watch. I look forward to hearing when they will act on their promises.