Covid-19: Funding for Local Authorities

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for securing this important debate. I also thank and pay tribute to everyone at Coventry City Council who has worked tirelessly through the pandemic, as they did before it hit, to care for the city’s residents and keep services going, even as workloads have been stretched and budgets have been pushed harder.

The truth is that local authority budgets were in crisis way before the pandemic. They have faced a decade of brutal Tory cuts. In Coventry, that has meant a cut of £120 million to the central Government grant every single year since 2010, meaning a total reduction of funding of £1.2 billion to date. That amounts to nearly £350,000 in lost funding every single day.

It is a similar story across the country. The National Audit Office estimated that between 2010 and 2018 central Government funding for councils was slashed by nearly 50% in real terms. Those cuts have meant a decade of youth club closures and children’s centres having to shut down, and domestic violence refuges and homeless shelters being forced to close their doors. My inbox is inundated with people struggling on the housing waiting list, which now stands at 14,000 people in Coventry. That is what a decade of Tory cuts looks like.

Local authorities have now been rocked by the impact of the pandemic. Councils have been forced to spend more to meet rising needs, and their budgets have been hit by a loss of income in tax receipts and business activity. When we take into account the effects of austerity and covid on local authorities, we see how utterly inadequate the Government’s funding announcements truly are. Councils do not just need eight months of funding to be plugged; they need 10 years of cuts to be reversed.

The crisis has highlighted how fundamental our local authorities are and it has shown who our key workers really are, too. They are not the hedge fund managers or the City bankers, who have had it so good for so long. They are the carers looking after our older residents in Coventry, the refuse collectors and the street cleaners, and the working people who have kept our country going. I will finish by placing on the record my thanks to them.

I call on the Government not only to compensate local authorities for temporary funding shortfalls, but to give them the funding and the powers they need to tackle everything from the housing crisis to the social care crisis, to give low-paid staff the pay rise they deserve, and to truly meet the needs of our communities.

Covid-19 Lockdown: Homelessness and Rough Sleepers

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kelly Tolhurst]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I happily pass on my thanks to the charities and the organisation in her constituency, Leslie’s Care Packages, for the work they have been doing throughout the pandemic. Again, I extend my thanks to all in the charitable sector and the voluntary sector, who have done such a lot of work in this area, working constructively with the Government and local authorities to ensure that we are targeting support to those individuals who need the help the most.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab) [V]]

In the spring, the Everyone In programme showed that where there is the political will, it is possible to take action to provide shelter for people who need it, but that should not be done only in emergencies; it should be done all year round, guaranteeing safe and warm shelter to everyone who needs it, including those with no recourse to public funds. Rather than wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on covid contracts for friends and family of the Conservative party, will the Government instead provide permanent funding to end homelessness for good?

Planning and House Building

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

There is an elite dining club called the Leader’s Group. It is a club exclusively for the super-rich, and to join, a member must donate £50,000 to the Conservative party. The Conservative party’s website described the group as follows:

“Members are invited to join the Leader and other senior figures from the Conservative Party at dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions”.

I say “described” because, as The Daily Telegraph reported this summer, that page has been quietly removed from the website, along with the public register of the Prime Minister’s dinners with the party’s biggest donors. I draw attention to that because some of the Conservative party’s biggest donors are property developers who qualify for membership and will have attended those dinners.

In the Prime Minister’s first year in office, the Conservative party has received more than £11 million from these super-rich developers and construction businesses. These people have paid small fortunes to sit down with Cabinet members and talk about whatever it is property developers like to talk about with the people who decide planning policy.

Eleven million pounds is a lot of money, but with this planning White Paper, property developers have really got value for money, because this White Paper is a developers’ charter. It strips away local oversight of planning applications, with pre-approved applications in designated zones getting an automatic green light. It significantly raises the threshold needed for section 106 requirements, meaning that for many more projects, developers will not need to provide any contribution to affordable housing. It cuts away what the Government call red tape, rather than learning the lessons from the Grenfell Tower tragedy on the need to raise standards and safety.

As the Campaign to Protect Rural England highlights, these plans contain no new protections for green-belt land. Instead, they “weaken protection” of undesignated green spaces in what the CPRE describes as a “free-for-all for development”. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects has described these plans as “shameful” and said that it could lead

“to the creation of the next generation of slum housing.”

Housing charity Shelter says that social housing could face “extinction” under the plans, and dozens of my constituents have told me of their concerns. They fear for our green spaces under these plans, which too often are already under threat. They know that the priority for Coventry is council and genuinely affordable housing, but these plans do nothing to meet that need.

This White Paper is a good deal for developers, but for the thousands of people in Coventry struggling to pay rent, for those on the housing waiting list desperate for a decent home and for people praying to get on the housing ladder, it is a rotten plan set to make a bad situation worse. Instead of a planning system rigged for developers, it is about time we put human needs first. That means the biggest council house building programme in generations, with local councils given power and funding to build the homes that people need. It means rent controls, and ultimately, it means a Government who are no longer in the pockets of developers.

Planning System: Gypsies and Travellers

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I am a new Member and this is my first Westminster Hall debate, so I came this morning with a little trepidation.

I have listened with alarm at what the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) and other Conservative Members have said. Gypsies and Traveller communities are not a problem that needs to be tackled, nor should legislation crack down on them. They are citizens entitled to equal treatment and the protection of their way of life. The dehumanising language we have heard should have no place in society or in the halls of power.

I appreciate that this debate is about planning law and relates to the Gypsy and Traveller communities, but that topic cannot be understood outside the context of the prejudice that they face. All too often, they are othered as outsiders unworthy of equal rights. As with all types of bigotry, it comes from the top down—including, I am sad to say, from Members of this House, who have in the past compared Gypsies and Travellers to a “disease” and a “plague”. Such scapegoating catches on.

A report by the Traveller Movement found that 91% of people in the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities had experienced racism because of their ethnicity. Some 70% had experienced discrimination in education; 49% had faced discrimination in employment; and 30% in access to health. More than three-quarters said that because of this prejudice, they have hidden their ethnicity to avoid discrimination.

Such bigotry—like all bigotries—has consequences: 77% of Gypsy, Roma and Travellers report having experienced hate speech or hate crime. Racist attacks are common, such as the burning of three caravans in Somerset at the end of last year and the killing of Johnny Delaney, a teenager kicked to death in 2003— his assailants reportedly shouting that he was only an “effing Gypsy”.

This prejudice has a long history: from 16th-century laws that threatened nomadic peoples with exile or death, to the Thatcherite Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which repealed the duty of local authorities to provide sites for Roma and Travellers. Since then, there have only been further reductions in stopping places and authorised sites, which has left many with the choice either to use unauthorised sites or to abandon their identity. The inadequate provision for Gypsy and Traveller communities is the principal cause of the problems that hon. Members have mentioned. It is hardly surprising that a mess is made when adequate sites are not provided for them. The advocacy group Friends, Families and Travellers argued that the main cause of unauthorised camps was

“the abject failure of the government to identify land for sites and stopping places.”

It is a mistake to blame the effect, when the underlying cause of inadequate provision is at fault. That is why the Government’s consultation document, released early last year, as well as Tory manifesto commitments, are of great concern to me. The sweeping new police powers would be unnecessary and authoritarian. Existing powers are already more than enough, as shown by the fact that the majority of police who responded to the Government’s initial consultation opposed increased eviction powers. The powers are also authoritarian. One traveller said:

“The police will have the power to kick my door in, take my home, arrest me and take the children into care. We won’t get them back because we won’t have a home.”

That is the fear that those proposals cause in the Gypsy and Traveller community.

[Sir Paul Beresford]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Zarah Sultana]

Sorry, I will not.

The proposals do not solve a problem; they further oppress a marginalised group.

What, then, are they really about? Why was this bigotry so prevalent throughout the Conservatives’ election campaign? Was it because this is a major issue faced by working people of this country? Of course not. It is because, in the words of the chair of the Gypsy Council, the Tories are trying to

“criminalise Gypsies to hide their own failures”.

I know what it is like to be part of a scapegoated community. According to research from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, 22% of people openly express negative feelings towards Muslims, while 44% openly express negative feelings towards Gypsies. We are both scapegoated communities blamed for problems not of our making. I note that the hon. Member for Kettering, who calls for oppressive measures on the Gypsy and Traveller communities, has also demanded that the burqa be banned.

Some people—often children born to wealthy families, sent to expensive private schools and educated at prestigious universities—are intent on blaming people they deem to be outsiders. I know where the real blame lies: not with Gypsies or Travellers, migrants or refugees, Jewish people or Muslims, but with a class of people born into privilege who dominate society and use their power and privilege to deflect the blame for a failing economy away from themselves. Instead, they scapegoat others.

At a time when there is rising racism against Muslims, Jewish people and the Gypsy and Traveller community, we must all stand up to bigotry wherever we see it and recognise that our struggles are one and the same. There is safety in solidarity, which is more powerful and more beautiful than anyone’s hate.