(7 months, 1 week ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Liam Spender: Yes, happily. The main items in dispute are our intercom, car park gates and barriers. Our satellite TV dishes are rented in perpetuity; they were costing £240,000 a year, which is somewhere between 10 and 20 times what they should cost. The reason for that is that the developer chose to enter into a long-term rental and maintenance contract. That contract has never actually been—the technical term is “novated”—transferred to the current landlord, so there is no legal obligation on the current landlord to pay those costs at all. However, the landlord has dug in, so we are more than two and a half years into a service charge dispute. We prevailed in the first instance—that was the largest single item we won—and we must fight an appeal in April, and potentially another one after that, depending on what the landlord chooses to do.
Q
Liam Spender: I knew the general amount of service charges. I was not aware that there was a perpetual maintenance contract, because it was not disclosed in the searches.
Q
Katie Kendrick: Absolutely. If they are saying that commonhold is not ready to rock and roll, to have a share of freehold to mandate, a share of freehold for new flats moving forward would be a good step closer.
Q
Katie Kendrick: All three of us have now successfully bought our freehold. Yes, we are still here.
Jo Derbyshire: There are a number of things. The first is that most leaseholders do not understand the difference between the informal way and the statutory way to do that. The more unscrupulous freeholders will write to leaseholders with a “Get it while it’s hot” type of offer, which can be quite poor value for money. So, there is understanding the process in the first place. Then, regardless of which way you go—if you go the statutory way, currently you pay your own fees and the freeholder’s fees. There is an element of gamesmanship that goes on at the moment, which is why the online calculator is so important. Your valuer and the freeholder’s valuer will argue about the rate used to calculate the amount and then you will try and have some kind of an agreement. It is not a straightforward process at all. Cath will tell you what happened with her transfer, because they leave things in the transfer documents.
Cath Williams: Yes, they did. In my case, it took 15 months and £15,000 to get my freehold.
Q
Cath Williams: Yes, £15,000 on a house. It took that long because I found—this is one of the problems that leaseholders have—that I knew more than the alleged leasehold-specialist solicitor who was dealing with my case at the time. That was very early in the campaign, so a lot of education needs to go on for everybody: leaseholders, conveyancers and solicitors. Because I had done some research and tried to get my head round leasehold clauses and what were fee-paying clauses, shall we say, in the TP1, which is a transfer document, they tried to carry across all the fee-paying clauses. Essentially, it would be freehold but fleecehold, because I would still have to pay to the freehold investors.
It took that long because I kept redacting my own TP1, putting a red line through it and sending it back, saying, “I am not doing that, that or that.” Eventually, we got rid of them. The problem now is that we still have a lot of conveyancers who do not do that for the leaseholders. If the leaseholder does not understand the system or the lease terminology, that is always a big barrier. The way that leases are written—all their legalese—means the general public generally cannot understand; so, it is difficult.
Q
Cath Williams: No, there was nothing on the site or in the paperwork to say that it was leasehold.
Q
Cath Williams: I found out on the day that I paid my deposit and went in to look at the extras list, which you tick to say, “I’m going to have carpets, curtains” and so on. The sales person said, “There’s something I need to add”, took a pencil and wrote “leasehold” along the bottom. [Interruption.] It is a true story. I said, “What’s this?”, because I had bought so many houses that were newbuild. I said, “I don’t understand why you are writing ‘leasehold’.” They said, “Did we not tell you?” I got a story about how it was local council land and had to be leasehold, which turned out to be completely untrue.
Q
Cath Williams: Yes, I paid the deposit, and I had sold my other property. We were very late on in the process, so I believe that I was mis-sold and misled, as were many members of the National Leasehold Campaign. We hear very similar stories.
Q
Cath Williams: That is right. You are committed, and you are at a point where if you do not continue, you will lose even more money. You have an emotional connection to the property that you want to buy and lots of other pressures as well—people might be moving jobs or trying to increase the size of their home.
Jo Derbyshire: I knew, but the salesperson told me that we could buy the freehold at any point for about £5,000. What they did not tell me was that the business model was to sell it on and what the implications of that would be. They sold it on less than two years after I bought the house, and the price went from the £5,000 they asked for to £50,000.
Q
Jo Derbyshire: No.
Katie Kendrick: No, because legally it is unlike in flats, where when they sell the freehold on they should offer the people in the flat the right of first refusal. That does not apply to houses, so the land was literally sold from beneath us and they told us afterwards. Because we were not entitled to buy the freehold for two years—you must live there to qualify to enfranchise—they sold the freeholds on before the two-year point, so the freeholder was no longer the developer that we originally bought from; it was an offshore investment company that then increased the price significantly. We were never told that that would happen.
Q
Jo Derbyshire: That was the market value for a 10-year doubling lease.
Q
Katie Kendrick: It is a big concern, because leaseholders are trapped. They are in limbo, so they do not know whether to enfranchise now or to wait for the Bill to go through. The Bill says that it will make it easier, cheaper and quicker, but the devil is in the detail, and we do not know what the prescribed rates will be. We are being promised that it will be cheaper, but will it? It all depends on who programmes the calculator. Ultimately, will it actually be cheaper? The Bill says that it will abolish marriage value, which is hugely welcomed by leaseholders, so those people with a short lease approaching the golden 80-year mark are waiting. Do they go now?
Q
Cath Williams: Yes.
Jo Derbyshire: The Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 has essentially created a two-tier system where you have new builds without ground rent. As Cath mentioned, we are concerned that clause 21 and schedule 7 of the Bill seem to say a qualifying lease for buying out to a peppercorn rent must have a term of 150 years. We have seen lots of examples in the National Leasehold Campaign of new build properties—flats in particular—where the lease is 99, 125 or 150 years from the start, so a whole swathe of properties would be automatically excluded.
However, for us, because ground rent is a charge for no service, peppercorn is the answer. We also fear that, in terms of the timetable for legislation and getting this through, the sector will fight intensively and try to tie this up in the courts for years. It has nothing to lose; why wouldn’t it?
Q
Katie Kendrick: Because an escalating ground rent worries mortgage lenders and buyers are unable to get mortgages because of an escalating ground rent. Where that is because of the £250 assured shorthold tenancy issue, my understanding is that that will be sorted through the Renters (Reform) Bill, so that will close that loophole, but lenders do not like—for most leases now, the doubling has half-heartedly been addressed and a lot of leases are now on RPI—the retail price index.
However, with RPI being the way that it is—it has been really high in the last couple of years—some of those ground rents are coming up to their review periods and are actually doubling. Therefore, RPI, as Jo said many years ago, is not the answer. Converting to RPI is not the answer because an escalating ground rent is still unmortgageable, and it takes it over the 0.1% of property value, which, again, mortgage lenders will not lend on.
Therefore, a lot of mortgage lenders are asking leaseholders to go to the freeholder and ask them to do a cap on ground rent, which is then costing the leaseholder more money to get a deed of variation from their freeholder. That is if the freeholder agrees at all, because the freeholder does not have to agree to do a deed of variation to cap the ground rent. That is coming at a massive cost if someone wants to sell, but without that people are losing three, four or five sales, and people have given up because their properties are literally unsellable.
Cath Williams: There is a house on my estate where sales have fallen through twice already. It is a townhouse; it is worth about £220,000. The ground rent currently—it is on an RPI lease—is £400, which takes it over the 0.1% of property value. Two sets of buyers have had problems getting a lender to lend in that situation.
Q
Katie Kendrick: Absolutely. When I watched the programme, I was shouting out loud. The parallels—the similarities—are astounding. The system there was a computer system; the system here is leasehold. People have been ripped off for so many years and paid unnecessary fees, and lots of leaseholders are thousands of pounds out of pocket. And that is because the system—the leasehold system—has allowed that to happen, and it is a scandal of the same magnitude, as far as I am concerned. People have, unfortunately, lost their lives. I have become a bit of an agony aunt for people; my phone never stops because people contact me in tears, and I have stopped people from taking their own lives because of leasehold. It is horrendous—absolutely horrendous—when you are living it and you feel completely trapped. It is when they feel that there is no way out that people look at taking another way out, and it is horrendous.
Cath Williams: And we were both told, weren’t we, by the CEOs of the developers that we bought our houses from, that there was no leasehold scandal?
Katie Kendrick: Yes.
Q
Katie Kendrick: Our campaign coined the term fleecehold, and it has been used as a bit of an umbrella to describe all of the different ways that we can be ripped off through our homes. It first began because, when we were enfranchising and buying our freeholds, the freeholder was trying to retain all the same permission fees—such as permission to put on a conservatory or to paint the front door—in the transfer document. Ultimately, you could be a freeholder but still have to pay permission fees to the original freeholder.
That is where fleecehold came from, but fleecehold is now used as a much broader phrase because we have estate management charges. The new build estates all have estate management charges attached to them. They have replaced one income stream—leasehold—by creating another asset in the open green spaces. We all have lovely big open spaces and lovely parks, but it is the residents who pay for that. Again, it is a private management company that manages them. You have no transparency over what they are spending.
I can remember somebody ringing me up and saying, “Katie, I have a breakdown of my estate management charges and they are charging me such-and-such for a park, so I rang up and said, ‘You’re charging me.’ ‘Yes, Mr Such-and-Such. You have to pay for the upkeep of your park.’” And he went, “I understand that, but I haven’t got a park.” It is outrageous. It is great that they are going to give people more right to challenge the costs, which they do not currently have with their freeholders. They have fewer rights than leaseholders to challenge at tribunal. But ultimately why have we gone to a private estate model? Why are people paying double council tax? They are paying full council tax the same as anybody else is, yet they now have to pay thousands of pounds in estate management charges. It is a ticking timebomb.
The estates look very nice now, but in the future when the pavements are falling to pieces—I spoke to a police officer and things are not enforceable because they are classed as private. Speeding restrictions? You could have a boy racer running through the estate, but the police cannot enforce anything. The same with double yellow lines and things like that. It is a ticking timebomb, because new build estates are popping up all over the place with private management companies.
Jo Derbyshire: There are some things in the Bill that try to stop things. Typically on fleecehold estates there might be freehold houses, but the estate management charge is secured legally by something called a rent charge. What most people do not understand is that if they withhold their estate management fees, the property can be converted from freehold to leasehold. Again, that cannot be right.
Q
Amanda Gourlay: In the first few years, it would make it more complex, because I would have to learn about it. I have read the Law Commission’s report, and any new scheme is going to involve some bedding down. From what I read and hear about commonhold, it should make matters less litigious. That is what I hear. I have no experience of commonhold directly, however.
Q
Amanda Gourlay: The difficulty always comes back to what information people are given when they purchase a property, or when they take on the lease of a flat or a house. On the whole, those in the conveyancing industry who behave ethically do their best to inform people. I have very little conveyancing experience, so I am going to hold my fire on that a little. Clearly, if something is important, it should be drawn to a purchaser’s attention. Recurring charges are something I would have anticipated. Anecdotally, I have heard that people will say, “I don’t understand why I am paying a service charge—I own my flat.” “Education” always sounds slightly high-handed, but more information being made available or accessible would be useful.
Q
We have just three minutes left, as we are bound by the programme motion. We will hear questions from Rachel Maclean and then Barry Gardiner, and we will finish by 11.25, as per the programme motion.
(7 months, 1 week ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
“Insurance firms must now act in leaseholders’ best interests and ensure that their policies provide fair value.”
Now I will give you a live case, which happens to be in a neighbouring constituency to mine. It is called The Decks. They have a remediation day and Taylor Wimpey has accepted responsibility, yet insurance premiums are going up again—poor value and high cost, as I think was cited in the review. New year was going to be a new broom to intervene and shape the market, yet you have got insurance companies like this, and many more up and down the country, laughing at people in this room—key stakeholders such as yourselves. What are you going to do? What powers have you got to intervene? Also, we have discussed insurance. Are clauses 31 to 33 in part 3 sufficient to deal with the issue?
Matt Brewis: Our new rules around ensuring that these products are fair value came into force on 31 December last year. The cost of insurance of multiple-occupancy buildings has increased, and our report of 2022 found that this was not an area where insurers were making significant profits, or super-profits, of any form because of a number of different parts—around fire safety risks, but more to do with some of the structural issues around the quality of the buildings and how they had been constructed. Escape of water was something that was causing significant losses in these buildings.
We found some of the biggest issues around the brokerage charges, which were increasing, and the payaways—payments that insurance brokers were making to property managing agents for services that they were apparently providing for them. So our new rules require them to be very clear what value they are providing and how they are doing that as brokers, as managing agents, and for that to be made clear to the leaseholders. We are undertaking reviews of those with a number of firms. This will provide leaseholders with more information so that they can challenge their freeholders, so that they can challenge the insurers and the brokers at a tribunal if necessary.
Where this Bill goes one step further is that although, as I have explained, we are not responsible for the managing agents or the freeholders, by effectively banning those payments of any commissions, as the Bill does in the clauses that you mention, it will go significantly further than I can with the powers that the FCA has to restrict the payments to other parties and therefore to reduce the cost to leaseholders. In my view, this is in line with the recommendations that we made in that report and results in a better product—a cheaper product—for leaseholders.
Q
Matt Brewis: In terms of the provision of information, yes. And it goes alongside the rules that we have introduced that require brokers and insurers to pass information to the freeholder to pass on to the leaseholder. This further tightens up that. It allows for leaseholders to take their freeholders to tribunal to reclaim costs, as necessary, that have been incurred. So this does go further, and I welcome that.
Q
Matt Brewis: Yes.
Is that suitably addressed in this legislation?
Matt Brewis: We have talked with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities about how to do that. The tribunal is a mechanism, but from talking to leaseholders, we recognise that taking a firm to court is a big step for anyone. There are a number of routes that strengthen that in this Bill, and we welcome that, albeit—
Q
Matt Brewis: There are other mechanisms—an alternative dispute resolution mechanism—that we have seen used in some parts of financial services. The Financial Ombudsman scheme is one, where it is not a legal test; it is more of a fairness test about how you are treated as a consumer. But the tribunal is another mechanism—the insurance part is a very narrow part of a much wider piece, and I am not equipped to talk more broadly about the leasehold ownership structure.
Q
Matt Brewis: I cannot talk about individual cases. However—
I am mindful of the fact that we will have to bring this session to a conclusion at 3.40 pm and five more Members have indicated that they would like to speak, so you can time yourselves accordingly. I will start with Andy Carter.
Q
Halima Ali: I am the perfect example. I have living on a fleecehold estate for 13 years.
Q
Halima Ali: There is no management happening at all.
Q
Halima Ali: The management company should respond in a timely manner, do the work and communicate with the residents. The situation is horrendous. On our estate alone, we are paying £30,000 to maintain a field that is half the size of a football pitch. That makes no logical sense.
Q
Halima Ali: They are cutting it, but at a substandard level. On top of that, the grounds that they are maintaining have not even been built to a standard for local councils to adopt.
Q
Halima Ali: I have had meetings with the head of planning. I have raised so many complaints.
Q
Halima Ali: They just do not want to know, literally, because they are not regulated and it is not their concern. They just will not do anything.
Q
Halima Ali: It has to be central Government. They need to regulate that councils need to start adopting all new build estates going forward and in the situation that we are stuck in.
Q
I have one estate in my constituency where they were charging residents for the management of land that they did not even own. It took us months to get the documentation to prove that they did not own that land. The fence that they had mended had actually been mended by the council. Other things like that are going on, but if that restriction were put in place in the first place, they would not be able to do it, would they?
Cathy Priestley: Our understanding is that the land belongs to the developer. It is not public until it is made public through section 106 agreements with the council.
Otherwise, my name is Chloe Smith. I am temporarily chairing the session to allow for a very short break.
Q
Beth Rudolf: What you have in there is the energy performance certificate; the title to the property, including a plan and any documents referred to in the title, such as a lease or a conveyance containing covenants; the searches—the local authority search, the drainage and water search and environmental data, which will tell you whether the property is impacted by coastal erosion or flooding; and the BASPI, or the buying and selling property information, which is completed by the seller and provides information about their understanding and ownership of the property.
You verify the identity of the seller digitally to ensure that they are the person registered as the proprietor to avoid seller impersonation fraud, through which people have lost £1.3 million. Those are the things that you need available. For a shared amenity property with a leasehold or managed freehold estate rent charge, you also need that shared amenity information—the LPE1, or the leasehold property enquiries form, and the FME1, or the freehold management enquiries form.
[Dame Caroline Dinenage in the Chair]
Q
Beth Rudolf: It is about building safety. Is remediation required? What will be the impact on you? How much will you have to contribute? Are you a qualifying leaseholder? How the hell do we know?
Q
Beth Rudolf: For any house, yes, absolutely. It needs to whack up the material information under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, which impact estate agents by saying, “These are the prescribed documents.” The home report in Scotland shows that that is pretty much what they have done. They have 60% fewer fall-throughs than we have and their transaction time is much faster. If we can go that way, it will absolutely deliver. When estate agents and conveyancers have worked together to deliver this already, it has knocked transaction times from 22 weeks to 10 weeks and fall-through rates have plummeted.
Kate Faulkner: Obviously, I work right across the property industry, from self-build to the leasehold side, and a lot of the work that has been done, including the rent reform and the work that has been done here, focuses on what happens after. For me, there is a problem with property from a consumer perspective, because there is a shortage of properties and owning a property is such a complex thing. You cannot compare it to buying a toaster—it often is, but please let us get rid of that.
For property to work for consumers who are moving, buying property or selling after deaths, divorce and so on, you have to make sure we have no bad freeholders, no bad landlords and no bad or poorly qualified agents. The good thing about the leasehold Bill is that you are doing some of those things. The Renters (Reform) Bill is not doing those things; most of it is after the event, but that is too late because consumers have to put a roof over their head and get their kids into school, so they will compromise on their rights. They will compromise when they are told, “You need to understand this information from your conveyancer, which means you should pull out of this deal.” We therefore have to put the protection in first. We must regulate agents and make sure the bad elements cannot be there. There is such a massive scale, ranging from the brilliant people I work with right through to the criminal, and we have to move everybody up.
Beth Rudolf: Just to catch you there, because we are short on time, the regulation of qualifications is a key point.
Q
Beth Rudolf: No. It is wonderful that you are opening up the jurisdiction of the tribunal, but it still does not cover administration charges—I have talked about how ridiculously expensive they are—and their duplication. The point is that, as Kate says, the consumer is not educated, and nor is the estate agent. The material information guidance has come out, but none of the estate agents knows about it. When conveyancers ask them whether they can help them prepare the summary of the material information, the estate agents say, “Well, why? What are you talking about?” They have no idea.
The point is, as Andrew says, that we want to put a fence at the top of the cliff, not an ambulance at the bottom. The tribunal is the ambulance at the bottom; regulation of property agents is the fence at the top. That will ensure all people are educated, including the consumer, the estate agent and the property manager, and we also need to include the landlords and the developers in that. They need to be regulated too, because otherwise it is all going to slip through the net. The enterprise reform regulations do not incorporate anything where you are not instructed to work on behalf of somebody else, so your landlord is not going to be regulated, and they already do not have to be part of a redress scheme. Bringing these things in will help with education, so that they know what they are supposed to do and they will not make these mistakes that cause people to have a nightmare in their own homes.
Q
Beth Rudolf: No, I have so much to tell you about this. In Worcester, the county authority has a £35 million overspend on adult social care. Because of that, it is not putting any money into the adoption of public open spaces. It is not putting any money into supporting those. It will absolutely look for developers that will take on those open spaces, create these estate rent charges and make a bit of wonga by collecting all that money.
Q
Beth Rudolf: It is council resources, as much as anything. Then, on top of that, developers see it as being a financial asset, because they continue to have an economic interest in that land by gathering the referral fees, the commissions on the insurance and things like that.
Q
Beth Rudolf: All I can tell you is that currently the council that I am aware of will not adopt anything. The dowry that it used to receive for adopting is no longer enough to cover the cost of bringing it up to an adoptable standard and, as was mentioned before, if the developers leave before bringing it up to an adoptable standard, you are completely stuffed: there is no resourcing and no money available to fund this.
Q
Beth Rudolf: Bring in commonhold. Enable commonhold on managed estates, because then people will at least have their control. With commonhold, you immediately get people saying, “You don’t have professional property managers running it.” Well, require that, when the commonhold association takes over, it has in place a professional, regulated property manager with a limited contract, so that the association can tender for a replacement if it turns out that that estate manager is not good. That means that you are starting to drive it on the basis of customer satisfaction: if you do not do it fairly, well and reasonably, the commonhold association is going to replace it. We did a survey of the commonholders—
I am conscious of the time. Others may want to—
Beth Rudolf: I know, but I was going to say that the commonholders did not complain about being commonholders. Some of them had been leaseholders, and they said that they would prefer to be commonholders.
Kate Faulkner: One of the things from the developers’ side—and I was not clear about this—has to do with where this leaves people with shared ownership, because you cannot have two-tiered systems. The housing associations and shared ownership should be as protected with these rules and regulations, because, unfortunately, not all housing associations do a good job.
Beth Rudolf: One more thing: the ground rent capping referenced in the Bill requires the lease to be a qualifying lease, so it will not impact leases under 150 years. But the majority of the mis-sold leases with onerous terms and escalating ground rents were well under 150 years. They will not be touched by this, so that needs to change.
Thank you very much. I do not think there are any further questions, so I thank you both very much for attending today.
Examination of Witness
Professor Tim Leunig gave evidence.
Q
Professor Leunig: The only prioritisation meeting I had was with the current Secretary of State for Levelling Up on the LURB—the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill —because the first draft of the Bill had twice as many clauses as could get through Parliament. We had a meeting for about two hours with the Secretary of State and each part was read out, including what its intention was and how many clauses it required. That is the cost-benefit analysis.
If I say to you, for example, “The lady before said 150 is too big”, I would agree with her; I imagine that is a very sensible change to make. By contrast, I am sure that other people have said, “Go for commonhold for everything in future”. That strikes me as requiring a lot more clauses than the number that would be required to change the 150 figure to 99, or 75, or something.
What I urge you to do is to ask the lawyers—the people drafting the legislation—how many clauses would each change that has been proposed cost. Then you think, “Okay, we can probably manage another 24 clauses”, or whatever it is, “or we can change 24 clauses. Which ones do best in that cost-benefit analysis?” I do not think that it would be sensible for me to give you an answer without knowing that legislative cost.
Q
Professor Leunig: Yes.
He should?
Professor Leunig: Yes, and it is increasingly important as more and more of us live in flats. Unless we are going to make London look like Houston and stretch all the way from the white cliffs of Dover to Oxford, more people are going to have to live in flats in London. They are going to have to live in terraced houses and flats; that is just a simple, basic sense of physics and geography.
So yes, flats are going to be more important over time. I can see no reason why new flats should not be built on commonhold for anything where planning permission has not already been granted. That gives builders amply long enough. At that point, they cannot turn around and say, “Oh, but our economics were predicated on this.” You have not put in for planning permission. Do it on commonhold. Get on with it. Adjust to the new world order.
I think we had a couple of follow-up questions, first from Rachel and then Richard.
Q
Dr Maxwell: I am not a solicitor; I am a barrister. I am not able to really comment on the main implications of the Bill for solicitors, unfortunately. That is a nice, succinct response.
Thank you—I do apologise for that. Thank you very much on behalf of the Committee. That brings us to the end of this afternoon’s sitting. The Committee will meet again on Thursday to hear further oral evidence on the Bill.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Mr Mohindra.)
(7 months, 1 week ago)
Commons ChamberLast year we cleared the equivalent of 90,000 legacy claims and processed a total of more than 112,000 claims—the largest volume in two decades. The total asylum backlog is now at its lowest point since December 2022. The improvement of processes continues, and we will continue to review and improve them to accelerate the decision making from hereon in.
I am grateful to the Home Secretary for that update, but there are still four hotels in and around Warrington housing asylum seekers. Will he give us an update on the closing of hotels, and will he also tell us what steps he is taking to speed up the processing of refugees when they are in hotels awaiting the outcome of their claims?
My hon. Friend made an important link between the speed of asylum processing and the need for asylum accommodation in various forms, including hotels. We are moving away from using hotels as that type of accommodation, thus reducing the cost to the public purse, and we will maintain recruitment levels and improve processes so that the speed of processing that we are seeing now can be continued. Although I cannot make commitments about the specific hotels in my hon. Friend’s constituency, he should rest assured that we are seeking to drive down the number of hotels on which we rely.
(11 months, 1 week ago)
Commons ChamberOur communities are safer than in 2010, with overall crime on a like-for-like basis down by 54%. We have put 20,000 more police officers on our streets—a record number—which is enabling us to take action across the board to bring more offenders to justice, to better protect victims and to equip our police with the powers they need to prevent crimes.
I thank the Home Secretary, who recently came to Warrington to meet the chief constable, Mark Roberts, and our police and crime commissioner, John Dwyer. We are now at record numbers of police officers, and alongside that we are at record numbers of arrests. Cheshire had the second-highest charge and summons rates in England and Wales for all crime in the last 12 months. One of the concerns raised by constituents at a recent surgery was the increase in cyber-crime. What steps is the Home Secretary taking to bolster action against fraud and online scams?
My hon. Friend has been an indefatigable champion for his community, and I very much enjoyed joining him at his local police station to meet his excellent chief constable, Mark Roberts, with the PCC. Cheshire is an example of common-sense policing and protecting the public. With those arrest rates and a focus on domestic abuse, on which Cheshire constabulary has achieved some excellence, it deserves all the praise that it gets.
When it comes to tackling online scams and online fraud, which are a feature of modern-day crime fighting, earlier this year, with the Prime Minister, I announced our fraud strategy. One hundred million pounds from the 2021 spending review has gone towards tackling fraud. A portion of that will fund a new national fraud squad of 400 specialist fraud officers across policing and the National Crime Agency, who will investigate the most harmful fraudsters targeting the UK public.
I have no idea what the hon. Lady is referring to, but I would be very happy to look into that individual case.
Yes, I do agree; local councils should be robust in using the powers this House granted them, as should the police in terms of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. The police do have strong powers under the amended Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and I urge police forces up and down the country to use those powers.
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberI would be happy to look into the example the hon. Lady has given. However, she may also have seen the advice I issued last week to Members of Parliament and local authorities, saying that no individual should be moved from Manston, or indeed now from one of the secure infectious disease centres, to a hotel or other form of accommodation in any part of the country unless the local authority has been informed of who is arriving and whether they have any pre-existing medical conditions. That information is now flowing. If the hon. Lady has examples to suggest that that is not the case and brings those to me, I will be more than happy to look into them.
I am grateful to the Minister for setting out a clear plan for screening and vaccinations at Manston. However, as he just said, most asylum seekers spend only a very short period of time at that initial processing centre, so what additional support and resource is being provided to local GP services that take care of the health needs of asylum seekers when they are dispersed to hotels around the UK?
That is an important point, because we aspire to be in a position—indeed, we are now—where individuals spend a very short period of time at Manston, then rapidly move into other accommodation, which places a greater burden on the local NHS and the local authority in that area. We are providing further guidance, in addition to that published by the UKHSA two weeks ago, which will set out what we are asking of those communities. I hope there will be a two-way conversation, so if further support, information or resources are required from central Government to meet those requirements, then of course I will endeavour to provide them.
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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According to Home Office figures, the 116 asylum seekers who arrived in Warrington last week can expect to spend about 400 days waiting for their cases to be dealt with. What steps is my right hon. Friend taking to speed up the process so that those who do not meet the test for asylum can be returned to the safe countries from which they came?
My hon. Friend raises an important point. Productivity in the Home Office fell very sharply during the covid period and has yet to recover in its entirety. That is wrong and we need to change it. We need to ensure that caseworkers review and decide on cases at least at the same speed as they did a couple of years ago. A pilot in Leeds on how to do that has more than doubled the productivity of caseworkers. We want to get that still higher and roll it out across the country. The Home Secretary and I will say more shortly.
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberThe UK is not involved in pushbacks at sea; we uphold our international obligations in that respect. It is a right for an individual to claim asylum. We want a system whereby those who are fleeing genuine persecution, war or human rights abuses can find refuge in the United Kingdom. The issue that we are grappling with is the sheer quantity of individuals who are choosing to come here, leaving other safe countries such as France. That places an intolerable strain on our system and means that those individuals to whom we want to offer support find themselves in difficult circumstances.
A fair and robust system would not encourage people to come across the channel illegally in small boats. It would be predominantly based on resettlement schemes such as the ones that we have engineered in recent years for people from Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan. That is the system that I want to build in the years ahead.
On Thursday, I was notified by the Home Office that the Fir Grove Hotel in Grappenhall would become an asylum centre the following day. There was no discussion with the borough council and no notification to local residents. It is in the middle of a residential area, fewer than 200 yards from a primary school. I am sure that my right hon. Friend would agree that it is simply not acceptable for the Home Office to steamroll ahead with such a decision without the necessary consultation with local residents. I would be grateful if he would meet me to discuss that situation and how we can review and reverse that decision.
I would be very happy to meet my hon. Friend so we can discuss the issue and he can represent the views of his constituents. I can inform the House that I have agreed with my officials at the Home Office that, as a matter of course, all Members of Parliament should be informed of new facilities being opened in their constituency ahead of time. All local authorities should be informed and proper engagement undertaken with them so that we can better understand the specific issues and provide the support that might be needed. It is not right that MPs and councils find out on social media or third hand and I intend to bring that to an end.
(2 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberI rise both perplexed and pleased to respond. First, I am perplexed because, in seven years in this House, I do not think I have heard quite such a series of distortions of events, or indeed such a naked use of a global pandemic to derive political advantage. I know that when the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) goes to tweet or Facebook the clips of her being outraged in this debate, she will point out—to her, no doubt, small number of viewers in Lewisham West and Penge—that the pandemic had an impact on the whole of the country, not least the criminal justice system.
I am also perplexed at the sudden reversal in the Labour party’s view of community payback. It was only a year ago that the former shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), said that community payback
“has nothing to do with tackling crime”.
She accused us, in promoting community payback, of “stigmatising” certain sections of the community. She called our desire to have more community payback teams out in the community, doing exactly the kind of work that the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge now seems to celebrate, a “distasteful gimmick”, as did, at the same time, the now shadow Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). So while I welcome the hon. Lady’s conversion, it is the cause of some confusion. Perhaps we are in happier, more Blairite times in the Labour party now, under new leadership, although how long that will last I do not know.
Having said that, I am pleased to celebrate the work that has been done on community payback, particularly over the last year as it has roared back into life, and to take the opportunity to pay tribute to the outstanding work of our operational staff across England and Wales, who, in spite of a huge number of challenges, have continued to deliver projects day in and day out.
The community payback requirement is of course delivered in groups, sometimes indoors—painting and decorating schools for example—and covid-19 had a severe impact on our ability to deliver. I am afraid that resulted in a backlog of cases where hours have not been met 12 months after sentencing, which is a stipulation of the requirement. However, we are committed to ensuring that all eligible offenders who did not complete their community payback because of covid-19 will be required to meet their hours.
The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge, on whom I wanted to intervene, seemed to indicate that hours had been written off from community sentences. She may not be aware of this, but we are not able to write off community sentence hours as that is entirely a judicial decision. We have undertaken to present every single case where somebody goes over their 12-month requirement period back in front of a judge for them to take a decision—to extend the time limit, we hope, but at the very least for those people to complete their hours.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I sat as a magistrate in a breach court in Merseyside last week, hearing from the probation service on cases that it had not been possible to complete in a certain period of time, and the periods for delivery of that community payback were being extended. A point was made from the Opposition Benches that in Greater Manchester some payback cases were not being completed; of course where that is happening, the probation service can and does bring breach cases to court for magistrates to resentence or revoke the order.
I salute my hon. Friend for doing his civic duty as a magistrate and he is right that these decisions are effectively for the independent judiciary and we are very limited in what we can do in terms of flexibility. My hon. Friend also rightly highlights that we regularly take those who fail to complete their community service requirement in front of judges for alternative sentencing or for reaffirmation of the sentence. I hope my hon. Friend made the right decision when sitting as a magistrate; I am sure he will have done.
In stark contrast, our brethren in Scotland decided, other than in certain cases, to write off 35% of the hours accumulated because of the covid-19 backlog. We in this part of the United Kingdom took a completely different decision, recognising the importance of sentencing both to victims and for rehabilitation and punitive purposes, so we are persisting. That does however mean that we have a backlog, but also that we had to develop some necessary solutions to make sure sentences were delivered despite social distancing regulations.
The independent working projects, which the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge mentioned, were introduced as a temporary delivery method in response to covid-19 restrictions and have enabled us to maximise delivery during the pandemic and as the probation service recovers from the impact of the pandemic. All the products created by offenders during these projects were for the benefit of the community or for local charities. They have included a range of robust and practical tasks such as producing hats and scarves for Ukrainian refugees and making face masks and personal protective equipment during the pandemic. I am sure the hon. Lady would not see those jobs as any less valuable than cleaning up a churchyard. Those projects are still being deployed in a limited and targeted way to support our recovery and will be phased out by the autumn.
We cannot shy away from the fact that the probation service and community payback were, like the rest of the country, deeply impacted by the pandemic. As a result we have built up a backlog of cases and we need to make sure those and future cases are all delivered within 12 months. We are boosting our delivery capacity and maximising our efficiency, and to do that we are investing an additional £93 million in community payback over the next three years.
The hon. Lady is making an interesting speech. There are, of course, two elements to unpaid work—the punitive element and rehabilitation—so two levels of sentencing are imposed: rehabilitation activity requirements and unpaid work. It is important not to confuse the two, because unpaid work is usually the punitive element. She talks a lot about needs, which sit in the rehabilitation activity requirement.
I genuinely think it is about seeing it in the whole. If I am doing unpaid work to clean up a graveyard, I can look back and see a graveyard that is in better nick because of my work and somebody could commend me for that work, which begins to build confidence and self-worth. Although there is the punitive element of taking hours away from my life and making me do a job that I do not particularly want to do because it is a bit nasty and a bit scuzzy, there will be appreciation from others and from me for a job well done. The two cannot be separated, so we should acknowledge and accept both bits with open arms and say that this is what we want to do, because it changes lives.
Good, valued probation staff are not just an early warning system; they are agents of hope and healing. I worry that unpaid work can be seen as a box-ticking exercise, and it is no surprise that courts and victims sometimes do not have confidence that it is a genuine form of justice. I am worried that the probation system, with its regional structures, is too remote from our local communities. There is not necessarily the transparency and accountability to create genuine confidence in what is happening.
I worked in local government for years before I came to this House, and I saw time and again how money and power can be sucked away from the local when there is a regional structure. Sometimes our regional structures are a bit too far away from the delivery on the ground. There are fabulous local and public organisations working in Newham that I would trust to do the job of putting people to work in a way that pays back the community and creates opportunities for offenders, but those organisations are too often shut out of these contracts because they are a bit too small, a bit too local and a bit too distant from the decision makers, whether in Westminster or Islington. It sometimes means the best are not employed to do the work that we all know could happen.
To illustrate what I have been trying to say, I will finish by talking about the group that is failed most by the criminal justice system. Women overwhelmingly end up before the courts for non-violent and non-sexual offences. In 2020, 72% of women sentenced to prison had committed a non-violent offence. These offences are usually driven by the legacy of abuse, trauma and exploitation, and we know from the Government’s own research that 60% of women entering prison have suffered domestic abuse, almost half have an alcohol problem and almost a third have a drug problem.
Let me be clear. Women do commit crimes and we have to respond by creating a justice system that supports them to escape the abuses, traumas and addictions that have put them where they are. Community sentences can be an important tool for women offenders. They can help women to face up to and deal with their addictions. They include unpaid work that builds a woman’s skills, confidence and ambition. We have to face reality: if we do not give a community sentence, the alternative is a short prison sentence, which can make the problems that drive women’s offending so much worse.
Let me give an example. Many women who commit crimes are in a desperate situation due to homelessness. They then go into prison and, if they had a tenancy, they lose it. When they are out of prison, as many as two thirds do not have a safe home to go to. Most prison sentences for women are very short—70% are for less than a year. In the system in which we are working, that, frankly, does not give professionals enough time to respond to individual needs and provide the necessary treatments that will enable a woman to make a success of her life once she is released. For instance, it is not possible in that time, in the big structures in which we are working, to get a woman on to drug rehabilitation and alcohol dependency courses and provide the facilities and resources that she needs to turn her life around.
(2 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy right hon. Friend is correct on this. I know that, for many years, he has been a champion of many of the reforms, some of which have been put in place. We have had part 1—the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 and sanctions—but the next Bill will also tackle Companies House and many of the wider issues that have been raised.
The Home Secretary has talked about the extra 13,000 officers recruited across the UK. It perhaps helps to break the figures down. Cheshire has had 189 new officers, and we are seeing results from those additional recruits. There has been a striking improvement in the number of arrests in relation to child abuse cases. Those officers increased from 10 to 46, and last month, we saw 28 extra arrests in Cheshire. Does she agree that that sort of increase makes a significant difference? It is not just about having fluorescent jackets on the streets; it is about the work of investigators tackling terrible crimes such as child abuse.
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberI am more than happy to join my right hon. Friend in congratulating his local police force on their work in this area, and I am pleased to hear that his non-human constituents are as important to him as the human ones. He will be aware that some of these truly appalling crimes need to be addressed much more assertively, and I hope he has noticed that, in the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Bill, we are tabling amendments specifically on hare coursing, which will help to fight that awful crime.
Bearing in mind the security statement coming after this question session, will my right hon. Friend assure me that he is working with both law enforcement and security services to understand what more can be done to increase capacity to counter hostile activity that has the potential to damage democracy but operates below the legal threshold?
I know this is a matter of concern to the whole House, which I know is to be addressed by the Home Secretary shortly. As I hope my hon. Friend knows, police capacity—that relates specifically to the question—has been increased not just in territorial policing but in other arms of policing, recognising as we do that, while it is important to fight crime on the ground in all our constituencies, it is also important to fight it there as well.