High Rise Social Housing: Reducing Fire Risk

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered reducing fire risk in high rise social housing.

It is a pleasure to be here under your chairship, Ms Rees, and to speak about the subject at last, because I have been trying to obtain this debate for some time. It is a shame it clashes with the Building Safety Bill evidence session, but that shows how important these issues are to the House, and they will remain so for a considerable time.

The human tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire was apparent from the morning of 14 June 2017 as the world woke up to the horrifying images of people killed in their own homes in a particularly savage manner. Four years later, the scale and depth of that tragedy are only now being explored. The Grenfell inquiry is still years from resolution, however, interim investigations, such as the Hackitt report, have provided some clue to the comprehensive failures in the building industry. The Government have been slow to legislate, but earlier this year the Fire Safety Act 2021 was passed and Parliament is currently considering the Building Safety Bill.

Much focus has rightly been on the priorities for action, such as the removal of flammable cladding from the exterior of tall buildings and who will pay for the huge remedial costs, in particular whether the costs should fall on leaseholders given they had no knowledge of the risks they were taking on and do not have the means to meet bills that, in some cases, are higher than the price they paid for their homes. Members may wish to raise these issues and others today, but my purpose in requesting the debate was to highlight two aspects of the crisis exposed by Grenfell that have not received sufficient attention. It is not by coincidence that they both relate to social housing.

Anyone who watched Daniel Hewitt’s distressing documentary, “Surviving Squalor: Britain’s Housing Shame”, on ITV on Sunday night and saw some of the conditions social housing tenants are living in in 2021 would have been sickened by how far the sector has fallen from its post-war pride and ambition. I am sure every Member present has horror stories of neglect, under-investment and poor service to relate, but Grenfell has exposed how the failure of some Governments to invest and of some landlords to show a duty of care has become a threat not only to the quality of life of millions of tenants and leaseholders, but to life itself.

In the second part of my speech, I want to deal with the causes of fire in social housing, especially electrical fires, and why more is not being done to prevent them. First, I want to comment on the consequences for social housing landlords and tenants of the costs of undertaking fire safety works. This morning, Inside Housing—all of us, particularly the Government, should be grateful for its investigative work throughout this crisis—published a story that One Housing, one of the G15’s supersized housing associations, recorded a deficit of £25 million for the last financial year. In the same year, it spent £27.3 million on fire safety work to its stock.

Over the next five years, One Housing expects to spend £200 million on such works. Clarion, another of the G15, estimates it will spend £150 million in the next four years, and in total the 12 biggest housing associations will spend an estimated £3 billion over the next decade. Yes, that is right: 12 housing associations will spend £3 billion when the Government’s total building safety fund stands at £5 billion, and the National Housing Federation says the total bill for the sector will be £10 billion. Clarion told me that it expects to receive £5.4 million from the BSF of the £150 million it will spend. That shortfall is significant, not only for the association as a housebuilder and landlord, as we shall see, but for its leaseholders. Like most associations, it will try every other source of revenue, including builders, developers and the BSF. If all else fails, it will bill the leaseholders. Tenants lack even that mitigation; there is no BSF for them. The majority of the costs social landlords must bear will come from their existing income streams—mainly rents—or from diverting funds from other services, from repairs to new developments. Expect more Daniel Hewitt documentaries in the years ahead.

I contacted the main social landlords operating in my constituency that are tackling significant remedial works with a series of questions, including how much they were spending on remediation. The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham said it will apply to the BSF but

“the remainder is from the Housing Revenue Account.”

To its credit, it added that

“leaseholders are not being charged”.

Catalyst says that

“overall, we expect to invest over £109m remediating our high-rise portfolio”.

It has secured £22 million from the BSF, but will charge leaseholders where grants are not available. Shepherds Bush Housing says that

“the total cost of our building safety programme is estimated to be over £40m”.

For buildings under 18 metres, or where grant is not forthcoming, it is concerned that it may have to pass on costs to leaseholders. Notting Hill Genesis estimates a bill of £41 million for the last financial year, and will pass on costs where third-party funding is not forthcoming.

Almost every landlord said the unrecovered costs of fire safety works will impact significantly on core functions and other duties. That means fewer, slower repairs and fewer staff to manage properties and to liaise with residents. Members who already have a full inbox of housing casework will groan, as will tenants and leaseholders, at the prospect of a continued rapid decline in the resources and services available.

The most shocking effect will be on development programmes and new home building. Shelter estimates the need for 90,000 new social homes a year. Last year, 6,000 were built. Earlier this year, the Financial Times carried a report based on evidence from Clarion, Peabody, Network Homes and the L&Q group—four of the biggest landlords—that the number of affordable homes built over the next five years would fall by 40% as a direct consequence of fire safety works. Small and medium-sized associations have even less room for manoeuvre. Shepherds Bush Housing estimates a 50% cut in the development budget and less planned maintenance spend.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is quite right to focus on the implications of these costs and how they will affect the repairs and development programmes. Does he also recognise an additional issue that the Government have not addressed over a number of years? Local authority housing contains a high proportion of leaseholders within that stock. Even where a local authority wishes to carry out fire safety works, as was the case in mine, the fact that there is no clarity about the right to go into leasehold properties and to require leaseholders to have the works done means that it does not even get the fire safety works carried out, and many tenants are left at risk as a consequence.

[Andy Slaughter]

As always, my hon. Friend is on top of her brief. That is a very important point that the Minister and shadow Minister may wish to address. Many people who looked at the Building Safety Bill think that the provisions for access are inadequate or overly bureaucratic, and simply will not work. We have already seen that happen with the problems that Wandsworth Council has had with retrofitting of sprinklers, where there is resistance from leaseholders. There has to be a way, as with gas safety and so on, of ensuring that where the safety of the occupants of a block as a whole is at risk, it is possible to carry out works in a comprehensive way.

Impact of Floods in North Westminster

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of floods in Westminster North.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David, in this short debate.

I am grateful to the Minister for being here today and for this opportunity to raise an issue that has been hugely important to my constituents this summer. I will ask for her help in holding Thames Water to account for its very poor performance in the aftermath of the floods in my constituency and in getting responses from it to a number of unanswered questions about how the floods occurred. In doing so, this debate will also have implications for water companies and flood preparation in other parts of the country.

Before I turn to the specific events that happened in Westminster North, I will briefly refer to the context in which they happened, because they clearly took place in the context of rising flood risks, arising in particular from climate change. We know that climate change is impacting harder and faster than even our worst fears a few years ago, and that devastating floods have wreaked havoc across the world, from New York to Germany and elsewhere. We have to accept the reality that extreme weather events are the new normal. Also, while poorer communities are always at greater risk of damage from such extreme events, floods or other kinds of extreme weather—such as the extremely dry weather that causes forest fires—are no respecters of postcodes.

So when Thames Water points to an exceptionally slow-moving weather system concentrating unusually high rainfall in a particular area, as was the case in my constituency in July, it may indeed be right. The question is whether such a powerful monopoly provider as Thames Water should have done more to anticipate and prepare for such events. Also, given the history, which I will refer to in a moment, why did the preparations that had been made fail and why was Thames Water’s immediate response to the flooding so inadequate?

Westminster City Council also has duties in this area. After the introduction of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, responsibility for local flood risk management, including surface water run-off, groundwater and flooding from ordinary water courses, was passed to lead local authorities, of which Westminster City Council is one.

Westminster City Council had already identified, via its floods policy, that:

“Due to the heavily urbanised nature of Westminster, and the predominantly Victorian drainage infrastructure, there is a widespread risk of surface water flooding…It is expected that sewer flooding may occur within Westminster and a consistent risk profile is therefore applicable. There is a risk of groundwater flooding within Westminster, and this risk is likely to be exacerbated by increased below ground development (basement extensions etc.).”

The issue of basement extensions has been a hugely controversial one for me in recent years.

The council’s floods policy continues:

“There is a residual risk of flooding due to the failure of either water mains or canals”.

The council recognised in the policy that:

“Further enhanced surface water flood risk modelling was undertaken…in 2015…The study considered the impact of climate change on surface water flood risk assuming a 20% and 40% increase in peak rainfall intensity.”

The council is currently undertaking its own review of the July floods and we expect a report imminently. However, it is already clear that the increased risk of flooding, due to climate change in particular, was understood.

So what happened on 12 July, the day of these particular floods? In the afternoon, intense rain impacted on an estimated 500 properties, mostly, although not entirely, in the Maida Vale area. The water rose incredibly quickly and in addition to the rain and the overflow, sewage pipes backed up, covering many homes—particularly basements—with raw sewage. Thousands of calls were made to Thames Water, with little or no response from it in the immediate aftermath of the flooding.

The London Fire Brigade was in attendance and many local residents spoke of there then being a specific intervention by the fire brigade, which led water to drain away “like a plug being pulled out of a bath”. Over that night and the next day or two, hundreds of residents and businesses were left in crisis, due not only to the damage but to the obvious health risk associated with the sewage overflows.

After a varyingly slow start, which was particularly slow by Thames Water, staff from the council, from housing providers and then from Thames Water got to the scene to support people and begin the clear-up. People helped their neighbours magnificently and many staff worked very hard in the aftermath to ease the distress. Even so, people fell through the net. One constituent, who is HIV positive and currently receiving cancer treatment, was put into a hotel and no payment was made. My office was dealing with him on the night after the floods when he was crying in the lobby because of the lack of support.

Many people had to be urgently rehoused after their home was flooded with sewage. That was not organised for a couple of days and, even now—as recently as last week—I heard from a woman who is still confined to a single room in her home as she is immune suppressed and the rest of her home is badly affected by the damp and mould, to which she cannot risk prolonged exposure.

Those affected and many others in the at-risk areas want to know why the water rose so fast and why the sewers backed up and then why the water disappeared so fast once the London Fire Brigade attended. They deserve to know whether anything could have been done sooner to avert disaster as the rain fell. A typical comment went, “As you might know, the water levels dropped very suddenly after the fire brigade attended on our street and seemingly opened a flood valve or removed some kind of obstruction. The rain was still falling as heavily as it had been, but the water went, in my case, from 70 cm deep to ground level within minutes. Thames Water are blaming heavy rainfall but that does not explain how the water just dissipated.”

Many, although not all those affected in Westminster—the problem was particularly concentrated in the Maida Vale area—have a wider question. After localised flooding some 10 years ago, ward councillors, residents and I pressed Thames Water to increase drainage capacity in the W9 and NW6 areas. This was strongly resisted for some time. Thames Water took the line that these were 100-year events. We counter-argued that there had now been two 100-year events in the course of just three years. It gave in, and in the middle of the last decade, new tanks were installed under Tamplin Gardens in W9 and additional capacity was increased, with major works around Warwick Avenue and Westbourne Green lasting two years.

In 2012, Thames Water told us it would complete the Maida Vale sewer flooding alleviation scheme over the next two years, saying that the alleviation project would cover four wards in the Maida Vale area and be good news for the 400 or so residents who have experienced sewer flooding over the past few years, some of whom have been flooded with sewage up to nine times.

The heart of the matter is this question, which Thames Water and, to some extent, Westminster, must answer. Why did a major alleviation scheme designed to cope with 100-year events fail so spectacularly within just half a decade? Was the additional capacity insufficient and should that have been foreseen six or seven years ago? Was the system properly operational? Were there any blockages in the system? Were the drains clear and properly maintained? If the rain that fell on 12 July was a 300-year event, as we have now been told, how long before it fails again?

If Thames Water now suggests that we cannot build our way out of the severe weather-related flood risk, how and when will a package of alternative measures be put in place across agencies to achieve a reasonable level of protection?

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate because several hundred of my constituents were equally affected by the floods she is describing. Thames Water candidly described its response to me as “bloody awful”. It said it was under new management with new shareholders, but it is always under new management and new shareholders. That is the problem. It was exactly the same 10 or 15 years ago, when the same properties were flooded for the same reasons and the schemes have either been cancelled or have not worked. Does she agree that, like the Thames tunnel and the Bazalgette sewers we rely on now, whoever ends up paying for and delivering this, it needs Government direction, because this is a serious matter that repeatedly affects our constituents?

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is right. We are constantly told that Thames Water is under new management. That management always seems to enjoy a level of remuneration that would make my constituents blanch. It continues to charge costs to consumers and is seemingly impervious to the kind of challenges and questions that he and I are raising.

We were told by Thames Water at a public meeting at the end of July that this event was simultaneously unforeseeable and yet also likely to happen again. Legally, its position remains that it is not liable for the damage arising as a result of the flooding. It claims that London’s sewers were never designed to deal with rain on that scale, and yet relies on the fact that its systems meet the targets as evidence that it was not negligent. If that position holds and is reaffirmed by the inquiry set up by Thames Water, this question arises: how can targets be adjusted significantly to reflect the changing weather expected over the coming years before more homes are affected by similar events?

Almost everyone who was in touch with me and ward councillors over the days and weeks after the July floods has good grounds for feeling that Thames Water failed them with its response that night and in the aftermath. A significant minority of people whose homes were flooded are still suffering and feel that their housing providers, council and Thames Water have not acted as swiftly and caringly as they might have done, despite many of the employees stretching every sinew to help.

What assessment has been made of the capacity in local authorities and housing providers to resource their emergency responses? They have been cut back drastically in the past decade and, as we saw with Grenfell, an effective emergency response cannot be guaranteed without the staff available to deliver it. Increasingly, they also have to be able to manage more than one crisis at a time, or in close succession.

Has the Minister undertaken an assessment of the capacity of local councils and others to support residents who lose everything in disasters such as this? Local support payments are designed to patch the increasingly large holes in social security, not to help what might be hundreds of people on lower incomes who are uninsured and left without furniture, clothing and toys. Also, local support payments offer assistance only to those on qualifying benefits—excluding people on working tax credits, for example.

Locally, we have organised crowd funding and worked with the local voluntary sector to relieve hardship. I congratulate such volunteers and One Westminster for their assistance; they have been significantly more supportive of the community than has Thames Water, which I asked to contribute to the hardship funding quite separately from the issue of liability—a request that has been ignored. Why is it that volunteers and community organisations can raise more money for people who have been devastated by floods than the powerful monopoly water provider can?

I turn back to the flood itself. The threat of recurrence now haunts us locally. How are the Government working with local authorities in areas such as mine, where large numbers of basement properties are understood to be at particular risk? Westminster’s 2019 flood policy states:

“Self-contained basements or basement flats wholly or partially below ground without freely available access at all times to a habitable space above ground level within the same dwelling are ‘highly vulnerable’”,

and that

“applicants are encouraged to incorporate flood resistance and resilience measures as part of the design…to prevent water ingress and to reduce flood damage should flooding occur.”

Is encouragement enough, however? How will that be monitored? Where will the responsibility lie in privately owned properties, whether freehold or leasehold? What rights do private tenants have? Who would pay for such alterations to social housing? The time for warm words and vagueness is definitely now over; in terms of damage and indeed safety, we need firmer action. Do the Government have plans to scale up the expectations of local councils—backed by the necessary resources—to review, report on and deal with factors that expose residents to flood risk?

Then there is Thames Water. Ultimately, as I said, residents feel that Thames Water let them down catastrophically. One typical comment was:

“Thames Water were extremely slow in dealing with this emergency and when they made an appointment either didn't turn up or if they did were several hours late. They then arrived with a dust pan and brush and a bottle of bleach and were quite unhelpful commenting always how it was not the fault of Thames Water and what a wonderful company they are.”

My constituents believe they deserve compensation for the damage caused, although Thames Water has already been quick to deny liability. Will the Minister assist my constituents and me in pressing Thames Water to ensure that the already somewhat foot-dragging independent inquiry is now completed as a matter of urgency, so that we have absolute clarity on the sequence of events on 12 July? How can my constituents hold Thames Water to account more effectively given the obvious imbalance in power and resources between them—me—and a private company of such size enjoying a monopoly position as a provider? I and hundreds of local residents need the support of the Government if capacity is to be increased, people protected and Thames Water held to account. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Grenfell Tower Fire

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Thursday 6th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) on securing the debate and on the work she has championed since she was elected. She was plunged into this catastrophe just days after being elected—probably one of the biggest challenges any Member of Parliament has had to face. She knows how much it matters to me, too. My previous constituency boundary included Grenfell Tower. As the neighbouring constituency, many residents in my constituency watched in horror from tower blocks around Harrow Road as the fire claimed those lives. The trauma affects my constituents, too.

The night that Grenfell burned and 72 people died in a modern, refurbished tower block, at the heart of one of the wealthiest communities in one of the most prosperous cities the world has ever known, is seared into our national consciousness. It is a defining moment of modern British politics. It should have been the event that changed everything. It should have brought about a wholly new attitude to housing, social housing and meeting housing need, the duty of care we have to people in high-rise accommodation, risk and deregulation in housing. I let myself believe that that would be true. It should have been a defining moment and it has not been.

Of course, some action has been taken, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Select Committee, said: the inquiry is under way; we have had the interim report from the Hackitt review; and the Government have today launched a consultation. I am grateful for the fact that the Government backed my private Member’s Bill, the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, which allows tenants legal recourse when their homes, including the common parts of flats, are unfit and threaten their health and safety. That includes fire risk. We have also had the £200 million fund for cladding removal in private blocks.

What has not happened, however, is a seismic shift in attitude and action from the Government. That falls into two parts and I will briefly refer to both of them.

The first is the meeting of housing need relating specifically to Grenfell. On the day after the fire, we convened in Westminster Hall—Parliament was still prorogued; it was just after the election—and a number of us spoke to Ministers about the aftermath. I recall saying to Ministers that one of the things that needed to be understood was how many of the residents in Grenfell Tower and around Grenfell had direct or close experience of homelessness, and how critically important it was that immediate action was taken to provide permanent accommodation for them. In addition to the trauma of the fire, the dislocation of moving from one home to another and the experience of being in emergency or temporary accommodation would only compound what they had experienced. I remember placing that in the context of rising homelessness across London and the importance of not making other vulnerable families in housing need wait longer for a home because of the demands posed by Grenfell. Heads nodded.

We know now, two years later, that not all those housing needs have been met. Of the 202 households from Grenfell, 14 remain in temporary accommodation. Of the 129 evacuated from the wider area, 41 are still in temporary accommodation. That is unacceptable. It sits in the wider context of homelessness across London, which is detailed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington said, by the Shelter commission. That should also have been a wake-up call and a demand for immediate action to tackle housing need.

We have seen very little action. There has been a collapse in social housebuilding under this Government. It was inadequate beforehand—I am happy to say that—but there has been a collapse since then, with record lows in housing delivery and an acute homelessness crisis. The needs of the Kensington and Grenfell families should be seen in that context. In a new era for social housing that Grenfell should have generated, we have not seen action from the Government.

The second legacy, as we have heard, is the Government’s commitment that such a catastrophe should never happen again and that people should not fear that it will happen again. They should not live under the shadow of safety concerns in their own blocks, yet two years on that is exactly where we are. We know that 60,000 people live today in blocks with potentially dangerous cladding. We know that eight out of 10 of the blocks that had cladding have yet to have it removed. We know that 16,400 private apartments are wrapped in potentially dangerous cladding. In a question to the Mayor of London two weeks ago, Assembly Member Andrew Dismore found that London Fire Brigade paid 1,200 visits to high-rise premises with suspected flammable cladding, of which 316 confirmed flammable cladding. That is at its most acute in three boroughs: Tower Hamlets, where there are 65; Greenwich, where there are 45; and my own borough of Westminster, where there are 26.

The £200 million the Government recently announced is welcome—it came just under the wire for the second anniversary—but it is clearly not enough to ensure that either the ACM cladding blocks or those in potentially non-ACM flammable cladding can be dealt with.

We have heard from the Select Committee about the generally deregulatory attitude of the building industry. It was very, very concerning to see a survey in Building, which showed how little the business industry had risen to the challenge of safety concerns and how little change there has been in the way it works.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the industry has not taken responsibility. It is a shame that past Ministers are on record as putting the onus on industry, saying it is not for the Government to regulate but for the industry to self-regulate. Does she agree that we have to end that, and that if industry will not take responsibility the Government will have to act?

[Ms Buck]

I totally agree. People living in high-rise blocks wrapped in cladding find it inexplicable that the Government still have such a deregulatory approach and expect the industry to take responsibility.

Section 21 Evictions

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Thursday 6th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ms Buck]

It is very much a concern. I will come on to retaliatory evictions in a minute when I talk about why we are concerned about the use of section 21 and the balancing alternatives.

Abolishing section 21, which my remarks are aimed at, would, in practice, make fixed-term tenancies irrelevant. I know that the Government are also interested in, and have consulted on, longer tenancies, in order to provide greater security in the private rented sector. Although I am sympathetic to that idea, I am increasingly of the view that, rather than adopt an arbitrary target for the length of tenancies, we should change the framework completely and ensure that the default is a longer tenancy, unless and until the landlord has a legitimate need to recover the property or if there is a fault on the part of the tenant. However, as I will remark later, that must be balanced with other changes that meet the legitimate concerns of landlords.

Why do we need to change this framework? A Conservative Government introduced section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 as part of a deregulatory approach to the housing sector, at a time when the private rented sector was in a very different place from now. It had been in long-term decline over a great many decades, and the Government felt that deregulation would be one way to boost it. Indeed, the sector has been utterly transformed from the landscape we saw 30 years ago, doubling to 4.7 million households. That is by no means solely the result of deregulation; the obvious decline in the social housing sector and the crisis in the affordability of home ownership are also important factors.

The sector also now has a very different profile, compared with a few decades ago. For many of us, renting was a transitional housing tenure. When starting out in life, many of us rented privately—I certainly did for several years—but often on the way to home ownership. Very few of us, particularly those who were bringing up families, expected or wanted to be in the private rented sector for life. However, we are now seeing a change in that profile, with four in 10 private renters now families with children. The recent Rugg review demonstrated that the private rented sector is also home to a growing proportion of highly vulnerable tenants who have been discharged into the private rented sector who would previously have been accommodated through the homelessness route. We are also seeing, inevitably, an increase in the number of older tenants who expect to live out their retirement in the private rented sector, which was extremely unusual at the time of the 1988 Act.

If the sector has changed beyond recognition, policy towards it must also change, to address some of the unforeseen consequences of those developments and to make sure that the sector works well and fairly for both tenants and landlords. A healthy rental sector is important for the housing mix, and it is important to acknowledge its flexibility, often as a starter accommodation. It is also absolutely essential to recognise that most landlords are good and responsible and provide a decent quality of accommodation.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is right that most landlords are responsible, but that is not really the point. The point is that the 1988 Act, and section 21 in particular, allowed housing to become a commodity. Landlords can simply treat it as an asset to be traded and sold to increase their profits or income. Housing has no structure as a home under that Act. That is the basic flaw.

[Ms Buck]

That is absolutely right. It is important to address the points from landlords. Having seen some of the concerns expressed by landlords in the social media commentary in the build-up to the debate, and having spoken at the Residential Landlords Association conference and at other conferences, one hears from landlords that they feel unfairly treated and tarred with the same brush as the rogue minority, which I think is probably fair. Unfortunately, the rogue minority bring down the sector as a whole. However, addressing section 21 is not about the behaviour of the small minority; it is about recognising that there is now a structural imbalance in tenancies that unexpectedly provide long-term homes for a much wider spectrum of society than was previously the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Buck]

That point is absolutely central to the argument, and I will come to it in a minute.

On the point about the behaviour of a minority of landlords not doing a great deal for the cause of the majority, there was also on social media the letting agent who said in respect of the payment of a tenant’s renewal fees:

“As far as I can see if the tenant doesn’t pay the renewal fee, DON’T renew the tenancy. Simples… You could always serve S21 and replace them.”

That cavalier attitude to security of tenure is completely unacceptable, but we have a legislative framework that allows a number of landlords to behave in that way. I say to people who are doing that, “Guys, you are really not helping your own cause or the cause of the business sector for private rented tenure, and I would advise you to think very carefully about the way you express yourselves.”

What has happened to the use of section 21 over time, and why do we need to consider our longer term approach? It is extremely hard to obtain accurate information from landlords about their use of section 21 notices, and the large majority of tenants who leave assured shorthold tenancies do so after the service of a notice without court proceedings. I think that in the private rented sector debate last week the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said—I believe this to be true, and have seen anecdotal evidence that it is true—that there are landlords who issue section 21s routinely at the end of a six-month period in order to be prepared for exercising those rights at the end of 12 months. That builds in to tenants’ experience instability of exactly the kind that hon. Members have mentioned today.

The actual number of section 21 notices served is unknowable. However, we know that in 2017 there were 21,439 possession claims under both section 8 and section 21 and 6,260 actual possessions, and a further 29,601 claims and 12,953 possessions under the accelerated procedure. That is a lot of uses of section 21.

We also know from Government homelessness statistics that the ending of a private tenancy on a no-fault basis has become the single largest cause of homelessness, currently representing more than half of all homelessness applications. That is critical. An analysis by Generation Rent claims that 92% of the rise in homelessness cases caused by the end of a private tenancy in London, which of course has the largest share, regionally, of national homelessness cases, can be explained by no-fault evictions. The figure is only slightly lower—88%—outside the capital.

[Andy Slaughter]

The major trauma, of course, is for the tenants being evicted, but there is also an impact on local authorities, because if a landlord is using the section 21 process—often the notices are served at the beginning of the tenancy as protective notices—they are simply using it as a way of regulating their business, knowing that if the tenant is in priority need, they will be picked up in some way by the local authority, which obviously puts additional costs on the taxpayer.

[Ms Buck]

Of course it does. As we have been discussing in the context of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, local authorities, because of the sheer pressure of homelessness applications, are also expecting tenants to wait until the court order has been issued and to wait until the bailiffs have been instructed and a date for the bailiffs to arrive has been received before they will consider the homelessness application. Landlords hate that, and one can understand exactly why—because of the insecurity about what happens to their rental payments. But the tenants absolutely loathe it and find it wholly traumatic to have to wait, often with their children, for the bailiffs to turn up before they can be rehoused by the local authority.

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year found that the number of private tenants being evicted had risen by one fifth, that the overwhelming majority of the increase in possessions was driven by section 21, and that that was highly concentrated, with four out of five such repossessions being in London and the south-east, where rents are highest. It is precisely that concentration of section 21 use in certain areas correlating with the areas where market rents have risen most rapidly that I think is a real cause for concern.

The London boroughs identified by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation were all in the top 10 for the largest and fastest market rent increases from an initially low level. Although correlation must be treated cautiously, it is hard not to conclude that there is causation between increases in market rent levels and the use of section 21, whether that involves evicting tenants in rent arrears because of high rent levels, or evicting tenants in order to raise rents.

If anything, the flattening off of possession claims over the period 2015 to 2017—that has flattened from a period when it rose very steeply—has happened at a time when the private rental market has been under pressure from several other directions. It tends to reinforce the point that section 21 use reflects wider trends in relation to rents and that, crucially, we cannot stop worrying about it because there has been something of a flattening off in the last couple of years. If anything, now is the moment when we need to review the law, because if rents start picking up again, as over the longer term they almost certainly will, we will find that there will be a further acceleration in its use.

The Residential Landlords Association makes the case that its research shows that in half of all places where section 21 notices are served, that is because there is an alleged fault, such as rent arrears, but that argument is somewhat undermined by the local authority homelessness experience, because local authority acceptances of people who have been evicted from the private rented sector will happen only after there has been an inquiry into the cause of homelessness and it has been found that the homelessness is not a result of fault on the part of the tenant.

Homelessness is therefore a major factor in our wanting to reconsider the use of section 21, but it is of course only the sharp end of a much wider experience of insecurity. Unchosen ends of tenancies are disruptive, expensive and often traumatic for those involved. Having to make frequent moves, especially for families with children and for vulnerable and older tenants, is a deeply negative experience, even when it has not been imposed by a court order.

Shelter estimates that 27% of renters with children have moved three or more times in the past five years. That takes a toll on physical and mental wellbeing and on educational achievement. It also undermines communities and civic engagement. A very powerful case was made a few years ago by the Electoral Commission on the impact of high turnover and churn in the private rented sector. I know from my own casework, as I am sure all hon. Members do, just how distressing parents—it is not only parents, but it is parents in particular—find it to have to move around, changing schools and disrupting support networks. I could have chosen dozens of cases from my own case load to illustrate that point, but I have chosen the details of just one to read out— it is only a few paragraphs—with your permission, Mr Hollobone.

My constituent says:

“I have lived in this area for over 30 years. Due to overcrowding in our family home I was asked to leave in 2010, at which point I made a housing application to”

the local authority. They continue:

“The Council accepted a…duty and provided us with temporary accommodation in East London. We stayed in Dagenham for a short while before being lured back to Westminster by the Private Sector Team, reassuring us that this was a better option…When we signed a private tenancy we were promptly notified that the council has discharged its duty towards us because we have accepted private rent. We only rented for a year before the Housing Benefit was reduced under the new welfare reforms. As we could no longer afford the rent, we were obliged to find alternative accommodation”.

Despite their need for three-bedroom accommodation, they moved into two-bedroom accommodation. The council said that it

“could not and would not help us. I have a local connection as I have my family here. I look after my elderly father”,

who has cancer.

“I have 3 dependent children…attending local schools. I sit on the board of governors and play an active role in the…running of the school. I am…a member of the Parent Council.”

My constituent says that they are

“employed…and have served 18 years”

in their job in the local area. They say they have been served another

“Section 21 Notice by the landlords Agents requiring possession of the flat on 02^nd October.”

That will be the family’s fifth move in eight years. It is a simple example. It involves no fault, no arrears, no bad behaviour on the part of the tenants, but an imposed move of a vulnerable local family, and it is only too typical.

Renting privately is overall less secure than other tenures. Some 860,000 tenants moved between private rentals in 2016, up from 465,000 20 years ago, and one in 10 movers said that their move was down to being given notice by their landlord.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) talked about retaliatory eviction. A significant minority of tenants fear retaliatory eviction if they make a complaint and so may be deterred from pursuing their rights for fear of the consequences. That unfortunately undermines efforts to improve standards in the private rented sector, despite its having, of all tenures, the highest level of substandard accommodation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Buck]

That is absolutely right.

[Andy Slaughter]

To add to that interesting argument, section 21 has been abolished in Scotland, which is a different jurisdiction and a different housing market, and has been replaced by a regime in which there are mandatory and discretionary grounds for possession. As I understand it, the objections from many landlords are about the complexity and the expense of the court process as much as anything. It is quite a difficult argument to put forward—although I am sure that the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) would do it well—that it is simply too difficult for landlords and it should be unrestricted for that reason.

[Ms Buck]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. Certainly the landlord associations and landlords make the argument that the court process takes too long and is too complicated and, in many cases, too expensive for them to operate. I am unconvinced by that argument, because the figures that the landlord associations have put forward for the period of waiting for a court date or until a warrant can be issued are significantly different from the figures that the Library has provided for the debate. I am not sure that the associations are not using a different definition of average to make their case.

Obviously, once a landlord has decided that they want to recover a property, they will want to do so as quickly as possibly—that is inevitable—but whether the period that landlords have to wait and the quality of evidence that they have to provide if they are seeking a fault-based eviction should be lowered to make it easier for them, to the point where it effectively allows them to act without due regard for the rights of tenants, is a highly moot point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is right. We tend, rightly, to focus on bad landlords. I think we all agree that they are a minority, but there is some shocking practice out there. That is nothing new—some of us can still remember the age of Hoogstraten and Rachman. However, I do not think that that is what the debate is primarily about. As I said in my intervention, it is about changing the climate in the private rented sector for good and bad landlords. It is about changing the way in which the private rented sector operates, which is long overdue.

I am often asked to act both for landlords and for tenants in relation to assured shorthold tenancies. A whole industry grew up, partly fuelled by the excellent housing columns in the magazine Legal Action by their honours Nic Madge, who recently retired, and Jan Luba, who is still a sitting judge. Systematically, over many years, they indicated all the areas of housing law where practice was changing and precedents were being set in the higher and lower courts.

A whole industry developed around section 21 notices, which are actually quite difficult to get right. Landlords who think that they can do it themselves often get them wrong. Although they cannot be challenged on the basis that it is a no-fault eviction—the tenant has been a model tenant, and all the other things that we have heard—they can be challenged if they have got it wrong procedurally. Often they have, but it does not get found out.

That should be spotted, frankly, by the judge, even if they are looking at the case on paper—the accelerated procedure for section 21 notices means that often such matters are not heard in court at all. Without the benefit of legal aid and legal advice, it is difficult to expect the tenant to know the process, but often the landlord does not either and it is, in fact, defective. However, it is an indictment of the way in which the housing market runs if we are reliant on catching landlords out on such procedural matters to give people security.

[Ms Buck]

Is it not also the case that, because tenants do not necessarily know their rights or have access to advice, many people leave their properties, and a much larger number of people feel that they have to, upon the issuing of a section 21 notice, before it goes to court, or at the point of receiving a warrant? They then find themselves judged by the local authority to be intentionally homeless because they did not stay until they were required to leave.

[Andy Slaughter]

I know that my hon. Friend is, like me, a great rooter around inside plastic carrier bags when they are brought into her surgery. Often one can find, among many other papers, half a dozen possession notices. Social landlords are better at this—or worse, depending on how one looks at the matter—because they often rather lazily issue notices seeking possession with no intention of pursuing them, the only purpose perhaps being to terrify the tenant. However, private landlords do it as well. They will issue section 21 notices like confetti, either as protective notices, or to try to scare the tenant off or something of that kind.

Although my hon. Friend is right that the advice should always be to stay put, to try to get what legal advice is available and to talk to the local authority housing adviser, one thing that the landlord will say is, “If you don’t go now, there will be costs when, at the end of the two-month period, I issue proceedings, or after that when I issue the bailiff notice, and you’ll have to pay them. It will be several hundred pounds at least, and if you challenge, or attempt to challenge, the action it could be more than that.”

Homes (Fitness for Habitation) Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 26th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend on that. It is also fair to say that the majority of good landlords are happy to endorse that view, because their reputation is dragged down by the behaviour of the rogue minority.

The Bill is not intended as a replacement for the work of local authorities but is complementary to it, enabling tenants to take action where the council has not done so or cannot do so. For all new tenancies after the Bill comes into force, it would make it a right to have a home that did not create a risk to the health and safety of its occupants. As the excellent House of Commons Library briefing on the Bill says:

“The Grenfell Tower fire has focused attention on housing standards in the social rented stock and also in privately owned blocks of flats.”

So I am also pleased to say that the Bill was amended in Committee, with the support of the Government, to extend the fitness obligation to the building within which the dwelling forms part. So the tenant of a flat, a room or part of a shared house will be able to enforce against defects, including fire risks, that threaten their health or wellbeing in their home, even if the defect is in another part of the building.

It has been marvellous to have secured Government backing for this Bill, even to the point of strengthening it. We have had support from across the spectrum. It has come from bodies ranging from the National Landlords Association and the Residential Landlords Association, to the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health—CIEH—the Association of Residential Letting Agents, Shelter, Generation Rent, the Law Society, Mind, the National Housing Federation, the Local Government Association, Citizens Advice and others.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am delighted to say that the Government have now got behind the Bill, as that is very welcome. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would also be useful if they gave more security to private tenants, because that is necessary to ensure that they are not evicted as a result of reporting faults, and if they restored early legal advice for housing matters, because without that it is going to be difficult to enforce this?

[Ms Buck]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend on that. This Bill is one tool and there are many others we need to adopt to ensure that tenants have a full range of rights and, indeed, are protected against retaliatory eviction. That is outwith the scope of this Bill, but there is much more we will seek to do and will no doubt be pressing the Government to do, on matters ranging from security of tenure protection to the provision of legal aid and advice services

I have always believed that politics is a collective effort. For most of us, most of the time, what we do in here is part of a team effort. Although that can sometimes drift into tribalism, there is no shame in the fact that politics is not primarily about what we do as individuals. Private Members’ Bills are one of the few ways in which we, as individual Back-Bench MPs, can make a difference, but in truth this, too, has been a team effort. I am grateful to the Minister and to the officials, who have been brilliant; it has been a joy working with them on this Bill. I also thank all the MPs, from both sides of the House, who spoke on Second Reading, who served in Committee and who are here today to see us through Third Reading.

Social Housing and Regeneration: Earl’s Court and West Kensington

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social housing and regeneration in Earl’s Court and West Kensington.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. Last Thursday, Property Week carried the story that Capital & Counties Properties plc, the promoter of the Earl’s Court development, is about to sell the Empress State building to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime for around £240 million. Capco confirmed the leak. Indeed, using the “cui bono?” test, Capco was responsible for the leak, which gave a glimmer of good news to its shareholders, who have only had bad news in recent years, ahead of its full-year figures for 2017 being published later this week.

At over 30 storeys, Empress State was the tallest commercial building in London when it was built in the early 1960s. When it was vacated and sold by the Ministry of Defence, the Metropolitan police rented it from its new commercial owners. When Capco acquired the freehold in 2014, it gave notice to the Met and got consent from a complicit Conservative administration—with only weeks to spare before they lost control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council—to approve Empress State’s redevelopment as 440 mainly luxury flats.

Why give up now on luxury residential development, which was previously seen as not just another licence to print money, but a way of integrating the key Empress State site into Capco’s master plan for Earl’s Court and West Kensington? The answer is that throwing in the towel on Empress State is the clearest sign yet that not just the master plan, but Capco itself is in serious trouble and is seeking to cut and run to save its own skin.

This is a story about arrogance and greed; about politicians who thought they could treat people as commodities, units of production and pieces on an electoral chessboard; about developers who could not believe their luck and then fell prey to changing political and market forces; about a vibrant part of London full of industry, commerce and entertainment that was ordered to be razed and replaced with monotonous high-rise blocks as safe deposit flats for the investment market; and about a proud community of 2,000 people who have stood firm for 10 years against the threat of their homes and community being demolished and dispersed.

Ten years ago, Capco conceived a master plan for 77 acres of land straddling the borders of Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea. It was dubbed Earl’s Court, although the majority of the land lay in the marginal North End ward of Hammersmith and Fulham. It was billed as the biggest urban development outside China, with an estimated built-out value of £12 billion.

The plan was audacious, because although designated as an opportunity area, this was no derelict, brownfield land. One third of the site comprised the Earl’s Court exhibition centre, including its iconic 1930s entrance, which is now sadly demolished despite the UK having only a third of France’s exhibition space and a quarter of Germany’s. One third comprised the maintenance, manufacture and stabling of a significant part of London Underground in the Lillie Bridge depot, which was a major employer of skilled labour. One third comprised two estates of predominantly council housing: Gibbs Green and West Kensington. Around 2,000 of my constituents live there in 760 good quality, spacious, affordable 1950s, 1970s and 1990s low or medium-rise homes.

In place of all that, Capco promised 7,500 high-rise flats, of which only 11% would be additional affordable homes that stretched that definition to its limits by, for the most part, offering nugatory discounts on extortionate market prices. Interestingly, now Capco is aching for a deal—any deal—to get out of the scheme, it does not say, as most developers do, “Look at our viability assessment. It is all that we could afford.” It says, “We did what Conservative politicians asked, and they wanted precious little affordable housing and not one new social rented home.”

At the start of the process in 2008, Capco told me with similar candour that it did not want to include the estates in the master plan. Developing the exhibition centre and depot meant negotiating with a single partner, Transport for London. Bringing in the estates meant not only a political minefield, but buying up the land interests of the hundreds of freeholders and leaseholders who had bought the desirable homes, flats and maisonettes on Gibbs Green and West Ken.

Why did Capco succumb? Because the ideologically driven council in Hammersmith and Fulham decided to attract the attention of its political masters in the Department for Communities and Local Government by showing that whole areas of social housing could be wiped and reconceived as luxury developments—they called it “sweating the asset”. For Capco, demolishing the estates was the price of the Tories’ co-operation with the scheme.

Capco drove a hard bargain. The inequality of arms between developers and local authorities is not unique to Hammersmith. The deal done with TfL on the exhibition sites was hugely preferential to Capco, despite TfL owning the freehold—perhaps the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) was also not trying too hard—but that looks like a master stroke compared with the deal that the Hammersmith Tories did for the estate land.

In 2013, Hammersmith and Fulham Council made a deal to receive £90 million for the estates, plus space in the new development to replace the homes lost. Uniquely in the experience of most planners and developers, however, that sum was not index-linked—as if property prices never rise in central London.

Moreover, the council needed to deliver vacant possession of the land. That meant buying out 171 leasehold and freehold homes, which is normally the developer’s task. The maximum needed to acquire the homes was budgeted as £60 million, although valuation experts assessed the true figure as between £150 million and £174 million. The council has already purchased 26 homes at an average price of £552,000, excluding compensation, which is well in excess of the estimated £350,000.

The true value of the land is not recorded, but reading across from the valuation of the exhibition centre site, which is, suggests that a more accurate figure is around £1 billion. By accepting no more than 10% of the land’s value and by underestimating the costs of acquiring vacant possession, the council could now be left with a zero receipt and a maximum of 672 replacement homes for residents of the estates, having sold 88 homes to cover its shortfall. That will also not guarantee a home for all residents in the new scheme.

For reasons of time, I must return another day to what I regard as one of local government’s great financial scandals: how not just prime land, but whole communities were sold for a song to serve an extreme political agenda of gerrymandering and social engineering. Most of the guilty men of the previous Conservative administration—and they were all men—have taken their poisonous philosophy elsewhere, but Capco still squats on Earl’s Court and West Ken like a toad.

Capco is represented by its chairman, Ian Hawksworth, who is now most famous for being on the guest list for the President’s Club dinner, and Gary Yardley, its managing director, who is quick to pick up lavish bonuses for the granting of planning consents with negligible community benefit and huge community loss. Its development partners are even less savoury. They include Hong Kong-based mega-developers Kwok Family Interests. One of the family, Thomas Kwok, is currently serving a five-year sentence for bribery.

Although I have referred, and will continue to refer, to Capco as the developer, in fact the estates were purchased through an obscure entity called EC Properties LP. The sole partner capital contributed to EC Properties LP is £2 paid in cash by Jersey-registered EC Properties LP Ltd. These and further labyrinthine arrangements appear designed to put Capco in control while shielding it from liability and allowing it to take advantage of offshore tax arrangements.

Before being tempted by the prospect of rich pickings in Earl’s Court, Capco’s business was commercial and retail estate management, specifically through its ownership of Covent Garden. It has no experience as a major land developer, and it shows. It does not have control of the master plan site; it has no option on Lillie Bridge depot, which is owned by TfL; the estate residents, through their lawyers, dispute that the conditional land sale agreement for the estates is enforceable; and now the deliverability of its scheme has been further undermined by the sale of the Empress State building.

Capco’s scheme, the value of which fell by 20% in 2016, includes £1.8 billion of enabling infrastructure costs. At £148 per square foot, that is more than three times the cost of larger development schemes in London. Other residential developers have commented on Capco’s extreme construction costs, which are thought to be 30% to 45% above the market rate.

Capco’s assumptions for residential value, which are significantly higher than the local market and schemes elsewhere in London, have not been realised. Sales are slower than expected: flats have been selling at a rate of less than one a week. At one point it was selling one flat a fortnight, at which rate it would take more than 150 years to sell the entire scheme, yet the business plan relies on a high sales rate of 480 private homes a year. Unsurprisingly, Capco has tried in recent months to sell some or all of the site to overseas investors in America, South Africa, Japan, China and Saudi Arabia, but it has had no takers. Frankly, any developer, however much of a gambler, would be beyond reckless to take any of the Earl’s Court site off Capco’s hands.

With no money in the scheme and none from outside, Capco’s only other option is to return to planning and come up with a new master plan with increased heights and density. Sadly for Capco, that option also looks like a dead end. With Eric Pickles at the Department for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip as Mayor in City Hall, and Stephen Greenhalgh in Hammersmith Town Hall, anything was possible, but the political weather has changed. Now Sadiq Khan is Mayor and has very different ideas about what constitutes affordable and sustainable development. He has also made a strong commitment to tenants’ ballots and said that he wants

“to make sure people living on social housing estates…are at the heart of any decisions”

involving demolition. Stephen Cowan, the Labour leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, has described the Earl’s Court scheme as “unviable” and “undeliverable” and called on Capco to return the estates to the council. He has the full support of the North End ward Labour candidates, Councillor Larry Culhane, Councillor Daryl Brown and Zarar Qayyum. It appears that he also has the support of the deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea, Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith, who spoke about the scheme at a meeting of the full council on 24 January.

On Monday, I wrote to the chief executive of EC Properties, whose parent company is Capco, to seek a meeting to consider the site’s future. I told him that on 14 June the facts on the ground in Kensington had changed. I wrote:

“I want to make it very clear that I do not believe the continuation of this development under the current terms is right. And, as a minimum, if this is to continue I want to see more social and more truly affordable housing included in this scheme.”

I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) present, because part of the site is in her constituency. As she knows, my reference to 14 June was to the Grenfell Tower fire.

So what happens now? It is too late for the exhibition centres that were demolished in an act of vandalism, but it is not too late to build an acceptable replacement on the site. It is far from too late for the Lillie Bridge depot, which is still owned by TfL, to undergo sympathetic redevelopment to preserve necessary infrastructure for the tube and new affordable homes. If hon. Members will forgive me, however, I will turn my focus to the estates, or rather to the people who live there.

I first got to know West Ken and Gibbs Green in 1985 as the newly selected council candidate for Gibbs Green ward. The first campaign that I had to fight was to stop the then Tory council putting a relief road through the West Ken estate. It has been a pleasure to represent the area as a councillor and MP for 28 of the past 32 years. Although on aggregate it is a low-income community, it includes people from every walk of life, ethnicity, nationality and profession.

Residents reacted with horror to the prospect of demolition of their homes. At first, there was no guarantee of rehousing in the area—only the statutory requirement to rehouse secure tenants in suitable alternative accommodation. Even when residents were told that homes would be available on the site, there were strings attached. Homeowners, private tenants and households who moved into the estates after the land sale agreement was signed in 2013 have no guarantee of finding a replacement home in the area on eviction. Secure council tenants who move into the first phase of replacement homes could see their service charges triple to between £2,500 and £3,500 a year on top of rent. Having been initially promised like-for-like replacement homes, residents who currently have spacious flats and houses built in the 1960s and 1970s, some of which have gardens and off-street parking, have now been told simply that replacement homes will meet the legal minimum size standard. Even if the developer had the finances and political support to begin evicting residents tomorrow, redevelopment of the estates would still take at least 20 years to complete.

Residents have done everything they can to make it very clear what they do not want: demolition. In December 2009, a year after learning of the possible demolition of their homes, residents from 83% of households on the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates signed a petition to oppose it. In March 2012, 80% of residents who responded to the council’s consultation on the scheme said no to demolition.

Residents have also been very clear about what they want instead: community ownership. In March 2011, they formed West Ken Gibbs Green Community Homes, a community-controlled not-for-profit organisation with membership from more than two thirds of households on the estates. It was set up with the intention of exercising council tenants’ right to transfer.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his powerful speech. Does he agree that residents could do a lot worse than learn from the community ownership experience in a neighbouring estate? Walterton and Elgin Community Homes was set up in the face of a threat from Westminster City Council in the late 1980s. It has proved to be one of the most successful and popular models for social housing in the country. Does he agree that that experience shows exactly the approach we should take when estates are threatened?

[Andy Slaughter]

It is a pleasure to see my hon. Friend in the Chamber. I am not surprised to hear her champion one of the most successful community-held developments in the country. I will say a little more about that development before I conclude my speech.

The right to transfer allows council tenants to choose a different landlord for their area. The objective of West Ken Gibbs Green Community Homes is to become the community-controlled landlord for its members’ homes. For four years, it lobbied the Government to implement the necessary legislation to enable it to use the right to transfer under the Housing Act 1985, as amended by the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008. The necessary regulations came into force in December 2013, and in March 2015 members voted 100:1 to serve a right-to-transfer proposal notice. That is a comfort to those whose priority is simply to remain in their homes. Some residents have lived on the estates with friends and neighbours for 30, 40 or even 50 years and dread the disruption of redevelopment and forced transfer.

Estates are home to people who are the lifeblood of our towns and cities. Many residents are people on minimum wage or zero-hours contracts, who feel the rising costs of living the most. Demolishing and marginalising social housing will not work; more importantly, it dehumanises an entire category of people. Certain councils and developers generalise about social housing tenants. They assume they know better than the tenants what is good for them, and they tell them to be grateful when their homes are under threat. That is what the Conservatives did before agreeing the sale to Capco, describing estates as “not decent neighbourhoods”, “barracks for the poor” and “ghettoes of multiple deprivation”. Is it any wonder that communities such as West Kensington and Gibbs Green are bidding to take control and ownership for themselves?

So residents came up with the people’s plan, which shows the professionals how new development ought to be done. At the outset, Community Homes brought more than 100 residents into workshops and site visits with architects. Residents and architects together identified space for up to 327 new homes and devised plans for improvements to their homes, streets and community spaces. The plans were costed and valued, and residents were able to show that they could help to pay for improvements and subsidise the building of new homes at social rent levels through sales. Residents from 65% of households provided written feedback on these proposals, and 90% of respondents said that the plans were “excellent” or “good”, and “better” or “far better” than the Capco scheme. Here is some of their feedback:

“Everybody is trying to save our homes from these rich people. What do you want to destroy people’s lives for? For money?”

“I like that there is a plan to build new homes but I can keep my home. I don’t understand why they are going to demolish decent homes.”

“The most important thing is that we get to stay. I love it here. We know each other and look out for each other.”

I have two final things to say. First, I thank everybody in the community at West Kensington and Gibbs Green, and their supporters and advisers, for the struggle of the last 10 years. It has been gruelling, and 2,000 people have had their lives on hold, unable to move on with everything from modernising their home to planning their family’s future. However, it has created a fantastic community spirit and inspired people to create their own vision for the future.

Even before the political climate began to thaw, I knew that we would win, because I have known people such as Sally Taylor and Diana Belshaw, the chairs of the West Ken and Gibbs Green residents’ associations, and Keith Drew, the chair of West Ken Gibbs Green Community Homes Limited, for 20 years and more. They are strong Fulham people who are standing up for their communities, and they are not daunted by the dirty tricks of the developer and its political cipher.

I am delighted that so many residents have been able to attend this debate. I apologise if I cannot name them all, but they stand for the hundreds and thousands of people on the estates who have fought for their homes and their livelihoods over many, many years. That battle is not over, but there is at least some light at the end of the tunnel.

As I say, there are too many people for me to name, but I cannot leave out Jonathan Rosenberg, the community organiser for these 10 years, who brought not only his absolute focus and determination to an often exhausting David and Goliath battle, but 30 years of experience of community housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) knows, Jonathan is the chair of Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, which is in her constituency. He is a slayer of Shirley Porter and a champion of tenants’ rights. Jonathan has been ably assisted by a number of professional advisers—accountants, architects and planners—and by community activists across both boroughs, and indeed by residents who have turned up, often when everything looked hopeless and bleak, time and again to assert the identity of their community.

I must also mention Dave Hill, the former Guardian journalist who now runs—I will give it a blatant plug—the “On London” website, which he is crowdfunding for. Dave has written dozens and dozens of articles to expose what has gone on in West Ken and Gibbs Green over the last 10 years. I do not always agree with everything that he says—he is a good, independent journalist—but he has chronicled what I am afraid to say lazier and more partisan journalists would have otherwise missed. It is good that we have it all on the record.

In conclusion, I have only a couple of simple requests to put to the Minister. I know that, new as he is to his post, he will have listened attentively. From my time holding the justice brief, I know that he is serious and has intellectual weight, and I hope that he will give me good news today. First, will he please determine the Community Homes application for the right to transfer, which his Department has been waiting to determine for more than two years? When he does so, can he please heed the residents’ call for him to uphold their legal right to take back control—a phrase I am sure he is keen to hear in this Chamber—of their community, so that they can deliver the homes that we need?

Secondly and more broadly, I ask the Minister to get the Government, including his Department, to work with the residents, the boroughs and the Greater London Authority—they are all now of one mind, a very different mind from the one of 10 years ago—to provide decent, genuinely affordable homes across the Earl’s Court site for families? That perhaps includes families from Grenfell, and thousands of others who are in overcrowded, unfit and unaffordable accommodation in two of London’s most expensive boroughs.

This situation should not be seen as a tragedy but as an opportunity. If there is going to be redevelopment, it should be sympathetic and sustainable, and in the interests of the people who need it most. They are the people who need social and affordable housing in Hammersmith and Fulham, and in Kensington and Chelsea.

Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 19th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend will not be surprised to know that, as chair of the all-party group on legal aid, I very much agree with her. Many issues relating to advice and legal aid and other aspects of housing need still need to be resolved if the Bill proceeds.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

All of us, and our constituents, owe a debt of gratitude to my hon. Friend for promoting this Bill and for her perseverance because it is not the first time she has done this. Legal aid is already severely restricted for disrepair. The Government notes to the Bill say that it contains no financial provision—that is probably why they support it—but should we not meet the remedy that the Bill provides with the funds to allow tenants to enforce it?

[Ms Buck]

We expect that tenants whose conditions meet the criteria equivalent to disrepair would be able to seek legal aid, and I will be making separate representations about legal aid overall. My hon. Friend and I, and many other Labour Members, feel very strongly about this issue.

Homelessness Reduction Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 27th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter]

As the shadow London Minister, I welcome everything the London Mayor welcomes. I do not want us to go off on a tangent, but I will just say that we were beginning to make progress; we were beginning to make progress towards the end of the last Labour Government, and the best illustration of that is that under the coalition Government eight out of 10 council homes completed were started under the previous Labour Government. I do not mind the Minister taking credit and talking about the building of additional affordable and social homes, but his Government need to have their own record, not leach off ours.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Andy Slaughter]

For the last time, I will.

[Ms Buck]

I am extremely grateful. While we are on this topic, is my hon. Friend also aware that the Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that 250,000 social homes will be lost as a result of right to buy and other measures between now and 2020, so whatever assurances the Government are giving us about the construction of new affordable housing, they are the equivalent of turning on the taps while leaving the plug out?

[Andy Slaughter]

Absolutely, and when I mentioned the quality of members on the Committee from my side, I was of course particularly thinking of my hon. Friend—as well as the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East, and my other hon. Friends on the Committee. I am afraid that they put my feeble efforts to shame, but there it is.

My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) is absolutely right. We have a crisis in housing supply, we have a crisis in the private rented sector, and we also have—which the Government are directly responsible for through the benefit caps, the freezing of local housing allowance, and the cuts in Supporting People—a manufactured homelessness crisis which we are now seeing reflected in the figures I quoted earlier.

I pay tribute to the Minister for the work he has done on this Bill, as well as to the sponsor, the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), and the sincere comments made by Conservative Back Benchers during the course of this Bill, but they cannot put their heads in the sand and look at this Bill in isolation from everything else that is happening—and when they have looked at that, they have to change their policy. I am sure we are going to get the housing White Paper, possibly even this year, but when it comes, we will be looking for those matters to be dealt with, and that is the purpose of these new clauses. Their purpose is to make sure that this Bill functions and that Government policy as a whole functions in relation to homelessness. That is why I would like to hear from the Minister, if not warm support and acceptance of the new clauses, at least what he intends to do in relation to them.

School Funding

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I make no apology for talking about schools in my constituency, which is the eighth worst affected in the country, while the neighbouring constituency, Chelsea and Fulham, which makes up the rest of the borough, is the seventh worst affected. All 48 schools will lose significant sums, and the borough loses £2.8 million. According to the excellent work done by the National Union of Teachers and the other teaching unions, that represents £796 per pupil per year, or 15%.

When I look at where the money is going from, I find it particularly objectionable. Wormholt Park is the highest-losing primary school with £65,000 gone; while Burlington Danes Academy is the highest-losing secondary school. Both are excellent schools with excellent staff, but they are in two of the most deprived wards not just in my constituency and London but in the country: College Park and Old Oak, and Wormholt and White City. What do we expect? What sort of message does this send out to the pupils, parents and teachers of those schools, who are working hard to try to ensure that the excellent standard of education continues against the odds?

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Westminster’s is a mixed story, but a number of schools, including those that are among the 3% most deprived in the country, stand to lose substantially. Does my hon. Friend share my concern about the fact that the Government are finding resources for a number of free schools that have been unable to fill places? When the Government talk about efficiency, could they not question the efficiency of that?

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is right. It constitutes a triumph of ideology over practicality.

Let me quote what has been said by two of the people in my borough who know what they are talking about. The head of the borough’s schools forum, who is also the principal of one of our excellent local secondary schools, has said:

“If schools’ budgets are cut, at a time when costs are increasingly significantly, it can only have a negative effect on the education that we are able to deliver.

We will not be able to employ the number of high quality teachers and leaders that we need to be able to maintain standards.”

The council cabinet member responsible for these matters has said:

“It’s clear that the government is trying to redistribute a pot of funding that is just too small. Cutting funding hardest in London, rather than giving all schools the money they need for teachers, buildings and equipment, is divisive and just plain wrong.”

That is absolutely right. According to the National Audit Office, there are extra cost pressures amounting to £2 billion across the country, but London is far and away the worst affected region. It contains eight of the 10 biggest losers in the country, which are in most boroughs and most constituencies—although not in every one: I know that the constituency of the Minister for London is the 12th biggest gainer. I find that particularly objectionable because London is a success story, and success is being punished.

From the London Challenge to the London Schools Excellence Fund, ever since the days of the Inner London Education Authority, we have prized education, particularly for people from deprived parts of London. We see it as an opportunity. It is a shame that a London Member, the Secretary of State, is overseeing this denuding of resources from London schools.

Homelessness Reduction Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 14th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend saw the report from the chief executive of Birmingham City Council on the news this week. He made specific reference to cuts to homelessness prevention expenditure, which he directly linked to the quadrupling of rough sleeping in the city of Birmingham. Does that in any way shape my hon. Friend’s view of the resource requirements?

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We will debate homelessness in the main Chamber later today. I raised the example of social care not only because it is another example, and perhaps the clearest example, of the pressures on local authority finance, but because these matters are linked, and the Government need to look at them in a linked-up way. I note that the Government pray in aid the Bill in their amendment to the Opposition motion. That is all very well, but it works only if there is a joined-up and funded response to the pressures local government is under in terms of social care, supported housing, rough sleeping and homelessness legislation.

Homelessness Reduction Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 7th December 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Andy Slaughter]

The clause and amendments go to the heart of the dilemma that we talked about last week on clause 2. Almost everyone on the Committee supports the intentions of the Bill and the extension of the duties to local authorities, but that poses a substantial question about the additional burden and cost placed on local authorities. We continue to wait with bated breath for the Minister’s pronouncements on finance that we were promised for the Committee stage.

My amendments are probing—I do not intend to press them to a vote—because at the end of the day having a review provision in the Bill is right. I am sure Committee members have read the briefings we have had from London Councils and the LGA. London Councils estimates at least four additional stages for which a review might be requested. The very helpful explanatory notes to the Bill give eight examples of circumstances in which a decision may be reviewed.

Review decisions have become something of an art in local authorities. Highly experienced housing officers seem to spend their entire lives constantly writing reviews of homelessness decisions. In many cases, the decisions were thorough and proper—they have to be, one reason being that they are subject to review by the county court. Additional resources and staff are likely to be needed by local authorities not only internally, but because of a lot more proceedings in the extremely overstretched county courts, which already have substantial waiting lists for hearings.

There are two examples in the briefings. The group of east London authorities estimates that review processes will cost an additional £4 million a year. Swindon Borough Council estimates that it will need to employ two to three officers in addition to the existing seven employed in its homelessness section. These are substantial resources for individual authorities, but spread across the country they would be a huge additional burden.

I hope to keep my comments uncharacteristically short on the amendments because the Government have an opportunity to show that they have thought about the consequences of the Bill. The debate on Second Reading showed that we have largely discussed and agreed the principles of the Bill and the additional duties.

We want to know how the Bill will work. This is a good example of where the Government can show that they have already thought about it. When I talk to my local authority and others, particularly in London where pressures are highest, there is huge concern they will be overwhelmed when the Bill is enacted. In many cases, having cut their budgets by about 50%, they simply do not have the resources to deal with the provisions.

[Ms Buck]

I rise briefly to echo the points made by my hon. Friend on the review process. This is potentially life-changing. A review is important because it could be the difference between an individual and a family having a prospect of security in their housing conditions or being left to fend for themselves despite their vulnerability. It is essential that local authorities ensure that there is a proper review process at every stage. I support the principles of the Bill in ensuring that, with the additional duties and expectations it introduces, there is capacity for review at every stage of the process. However, as my hon. Friend said, it is critical that that process is properly supported and resourced.

I would like to know from the Minister what estimates his Department has made of the additional number of reviews that are expected in different local authorities. We know that the burden of responsibility will fall particularly heavily on London local authorities and those on the front line. What expectations does the Minister have of the additional costs? If those costs are not fully funded by local authorities, one disturbing consequence will be that the review process will be delayed.

I am sure I am not alone as an MP in frequently dealing with very distressed constituents who come to me saying that they have come to the end of the review process only for the local authority to ask for additional time, leaving them in emergency accommodation in very unhappy circumstances and often huge psychological distress. It is very important that we do not allow that to happen.

Finally, as my hon. Friend said, the Bill has to be seen in the context of an unprecedented squeeze specifically on funding for housing services in local authorities. Shelter has estimated that housing services—not the provision of housing; just the administration of housing services in local government—have fallen by 8% in the past year alone and by almost a quarter since 2010. That is a bigger single reduction than in any other area of local authority services. We all support the Bill, but it is absolutely incumbent on the Minister and Department to recognise that point, ensure that the resource implications are spelled out and understood by the Committee, and make a commitment to full funding.

Middle East

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Monday 30th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter]

With all due respect to the Prime Minister, my hon. Friend is quite right: his was a rather simplistic analogy.

Secondly, there is no functioning international alliance that can turn short-term military games into a programme for the peaceful governance of Syria. The Vienna talks are a start to such a process, but at present the aims of Turkey, Russia, Iran and the NATO countries are so disparate as to be chaotic.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is essential to build an international alliance in order to take action against ISIL/Daesh in many ways other than air strikes? That includes stopping the flow of weapons into Syria and, above all, blocking the revenue, particularly the oil revenue, that is flowing in at a rate of $1.5 million a day. We need to demonstrate that there is international co-operation on those things, alongside any measures that the Government may propose.

[Andy Slaughter]

I agree, and I will come in a moment to what I think we should be doing.

In addition to the lack of tactical and strategic bases, my third test is that the permanent defeat of Daesh in Syria requires the end of conflict, which is what allows it to thrive. Any short-term retrenchment will likely benefit the Assad regime, which is itself responsible for seven times as many civilian deaths as Daesh this year. That may mean a shift in the balance of forces, but it will bring us no nearer to resolution.

Short Let Deregulation (London)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Wednesday 7th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity at the 11th hour to explain to the Minister the concerns that I am picking up from constituents, residents, community associations and local authorities about the impact, particularly in inner London, of the proposals to deregulate further the rules on short-term lettings.

Residents in my local communities that are particularly affected—in areas where there is already a substantial proportion of private rented accommodation that is very much at the front of this kind of problem—are already under a number of pressures; I will develop that point later on in my speech. They are very anxious about how much that will be extended with further deregulation. I believe that measures can still be taken that can offset those problems for my local residents.

The Government’s logic in extending deregulation is that home owners should be free to take decisions about what they do with their own homes, within some continuing limitations. Of course, no one wants to put in place petty, bureaucratic restrictions. If a home owner wants, for example, to do a home swap when they go on holiday for two or three weeks, or to take advantage of their absence to let their home out for a week or two, they should not be subject to severe restrictions and enforcement action. However, what local authorities will say—particularly the central London authorities—is that they do not seek to enforce against that kind of casual and holiday use, but they do seek to use the existing law to enforce against the significant and growing problem of abuse of short-term lets. What seems reasonable when viewed as cutting red tape for the individual can feel very different when it is scaled up and applied to the residential economy of central London neighbourhoods. That is certainly the conclusion of the residents and amenity societies in Westminster.

Even before the deregulation, those neighbourhoods have been facing this pressure, and local authorities have been feeling the cost of enforcement, as residential neighbourhoods increasingly resemble an extension of the hospitality industry. That can be confirmed by spending a minute or two on home-letting websites such as Airbnb. The simple fact is that there is a strong economic incentive for inner London property owners in particular to turn over their properties to commercial use. Data collected by Westminster council a few months ago demonstrated that hospitality rents are far higher than those that apply to longer-term residential properties. It found that a one-bedroom flat would earn almost £800 a week in the short-term let industry, compared with £440 on average for a longer tenancy—and prices are rising proportionally.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has secured this debate. She mentioned Airbnb, one of the more aggressive marketers. Not a day goes by without constituents writing to me having been asked by this organisation to give their flat or house over. They are worried because they feel that residential areas are effectively turning into hotels, and as a consequence, there are fewer properties in an area where there is already great pressure, and there is also a lot of disruption to their lives.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Slaughter]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again; she is very generous. She has identified clearly the problem. It is with mansion flat blocks, and her constituency has even more of those than mine does. Many long-term residents, a lot of whom are now elderly, simply want the quiet enjoyment of their own home, but find themselves living in a highly disruptive atmosphere, often with groups of young people who do not take care of the property because they are there for days or weeks at a time and who are making their lives a misery.

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is a common theme. This often, but not exclusively, affects older residents, who describe their experience as one of being completely stranded in what used to be a neighbourly block, where they knew people, felt a sense of security and had the quiet enjoyment of their homes. Now, they find the constant movement of people in and out very bewildering and alienating, and find that it causes or is linked to a number of practical problems.

Another resident wrote to me to say that

“this will increase problems related to noise and nuisance for Westminster residents from the short-let tenants. It’s already happening within my own apartment block, and I’ve had to complain to Westminster Council 24-hour noise hotline due to loud parties and excessive noise every week from short-let tenants in my block. This is making me want to sell my home and move to a safer, quieter neighbourhood outside of Westminster.”

Of course, none of this means that all visitors cause problems or that all landlords, whether professional or casual, are careless of the consequences of their letting. That is far from the case. It is the cumulative impact and the nature of the high turnover in the visitor and tourist economy that is often the problem; it is not the behaviour of any single person or group of people. These blocks of flats—the properties are largely flats—were not designed to be part of the hospitality economy; they were designed to be part of a residential community, and they have changed.

In addition to the impact on residents and neighbours, Westminster council—I am sure that this is also true of other local authorities—is investigating some 1,600 properties for violations of the short-term-let rules with a staff of four, at a time of massive reductions in funding and staffing. Some councillors are having to use ward budgets for this purpose—I do not think that is what ward budgets were intended for—as complaints have risen. There have been 360 complaints in the last 12 months.

If resources were going on enforcement action against the home owners renting out their home for a few weeks while they are away—against the very people whom the Government claim the deregulation is aimed at helping and relieving the pressure on—money could be saved, but of course that is not the case. Enforcement action is aimed at the de facto commercial landlord, and the new deregulated environment will make that harder and costlier to pursue, with a requirement to meet a higher burden of proof. The reality is that a bigger burden will fall on councils that are increasingly ill equipped to deal with it.

The Government seem to accept the need to limit the extent to which professional landlords can take advantage of the opportunities offered by higher incomes from inner-London lettings; otherwise, presumably, they would abandon all restrictions, rather than simply change the limit to permit 90-day letting under the Deregulation Bill. Unfortunately, that is likely to work better in theory than in practice. As the Covent Garden Community Association explained to me:

“Some amateur landlords are causing just as many problems. Not only will it be very difficult to prove who is a genuine resident but short lets even by genuine residents can be very disruptive and insecure...we are hearing complaints about this sort of thing all the time now, with an estimated 200 flats in Covent Garden alone available to rent by the night on Airbnb at any one time.”

I say to the Minister that there is still an opportunity to use the Deregulation Bill to meet the legitimate and indeed cross-party concerns raised by civic and amenity societies and local authorities in central London. By amending it to give individual London boroughs the right to override any relaxation of planning requirements for short lets that the Secretary of State might introduce, and by making it clear that local authorities could restrict lettings in respect of residential properties that were not the sole or main residence of the lessor, many of the risks could be offset. The Minister should take that opportunity.

We think that it would also be useful to consider the findings of the review of property conditions in the private rented sector before proceeding. It would be useful if the Minister could provide further information on that. Finally, we expect regulations to be tabled, and they offer greater scope for local flexibility in response to what are obviously varying pressures.

However, local authorities and the communities that make up their areas need to be listened to. In the spirit of localism, to which we all pay tribute, the Government need to understand that it is local authorities that understand their communities, and this is a particularly excellent example of where decisions need to be taken closer to the ground, balancing a wish to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy against the pressing need to sustain healthy, safe and vibrant neighbourhoods, even and perhaps especially when these are on the fringes of the hospitality heart of the world’s greatest city.

Palestine and Israel

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Monday 13th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

I agree with my hon. Friend; I think this will be exactly as the vote in Syria was last year.

As I was saying, Operation Protective Edge, Operation Cast Lead and Operation Pillar of Defence have all been, despite how the names sound, attacks by a major military power on a civilian community. I have heard two views in opposition to the motion. The first is from people who have no intention of ever recognising the state of Palestine—unfortunately they include the leadership of Israel at the moment. This view used to come just from people such as Ariel Sharon, but now it comes from Naftali Bennett, the Minister with responsibility for the economy, Avigdor Liberman, the Foreign Minister, and the Prime Minister himself, Binyamin Netanyahu. Bennett has said, “I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state.” Those views are articulated publicly in Israel now because people are emboldened by their own actions and by the international community’s failure to do anything about them.

Who can defend settlement building—the colonisation of another country? We are talking about 600,000 Israeli settlers planted on Palestinian soil. I disagree fundamentally with the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), who said that Gaza was no longer under occupation. It is under occupation; the life is squeezed out of it daily from land, sea and air. Anybody who has visited the west bank and not come back thinking that it is an apartheid system has their eyes closed. The daily indignities suffered by the Palestinian people there would make many people rise in rebellion, and what we have there is a strong movement for peace, led by President Abbas.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I went to Gaza together in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of Operation Cast Lead. Does he agree that, in addition to the staggering level of destruction wreaked on Gaza then, which has now tragically been repeated, one abiding story is the frustration and rage that the people feel about the peace process no longer being a realistic option and about how something needs to be done to break the logjam? I hope that we are starting to do that tonight.

[Mr Slaughter]

It is indeed, but who can doubt that the Palestinians think like that when they are subject to the arbitrary use of extreme violence against civilians, not just yearly, but often on a weekly basis?

The second voice I have heard against this motion comes from people who say they agree with it but place every obstacle in its way. I also heard that in the speech from the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington, when he talked about the Palestinians not yet being ready to have their own state. If that were true—I do not believe it is—it would be a direct result of Israeli policy. Just after Operation Cast Lead, I stood in Gaza in the ruins of the Palestinian Parliament, which was deliberately bombed. Every organ of civil society, of the economy and of democracy in that country had been systematically destroyed by the Israelis, and they have just done it again. Every concession given by the Palestinians is taken and then more concessions are demanded, and the remorseless colonisation continues. How long is this going to continue?

The motion is a positive step, but my constituents wish to see more. They would like us to stop supplying arms to the Israelis when those arms are being used for the occupation and to kill people in Gaza. They would like us to stop importing goods from illegal settlements—illegal under international law. They cannot understand why, if the settlements are illegal, the goods should not be illegal as well. The motion does not ask for any of that. It was supposed to be a consensual motion that simply proposes giving the same rights to the Palestinians as we extend to the Israelis. This is about equity.

Finally, this country has a special duty here. It is easy to try to duck that duty. We are the authors of the Balfour declaration and we were the occupying power. Anybody who goes to the middle east knows—I am sure that the Minister would agree with me on this—that the views taken by the British Government and the British people run powerfully in the region. We should set an example. Yes, 135 countries have recognised Palestine and yes, we are behind the curve in this matter, but it is not too late for us to set an example to Europe and the rest of the world and show that we believe in equality and fairness in international statecraft as much as we believe in our own country. That is all that this motion is asking for tonight. It is not asking for special privilege or treatment. It is not a provocative act. It is simply saying: lay the basis for peace and equality in the middle east and resolve this issue and much else will follow.

Deregulation Bill

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Monday 23rd June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

I want briefly to reinforce the points made by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) relating to concerns about the impact that the relaxation of the rules on short-term letting proposed by new clause 21 will have.

Most of the inner-London local authorities, across the parties, and the amenity and residential associations in Westminster have raised three main objections to the relaxation of the rules. The first relates to the loss of residential stock. As we have heard, the pressure on inner-London residential stock is already acute, and the amount of money involved in the hotel and tourism trade is such that the sector is already eroding extremely rapidly. A further relaxation of the rules is likely to lead to a further diminution of stock in areas such as Lancaster Gate, Bayswater, Maida Vale and St John’s Wood in my constituency and, of course, in south Westminster.

The second issue is the cost involved and the resources needed for enforcement. We already know from Westminster council that, as the rules stand, an average of about 500 enforcement actions have been taken against short-term lets. The Government’s proposed rule change is likely to make it even more difficult and even more expensive for local authorities to enforce the rules. They will have to demonstrate not that a property is being let short term, but that it is in habitual short-term use, which is a much more difficult and higher bar to overcome, and it is likely to lead to a burden on council tax and resources.

The third issue relates to residential properties such as mansion blocks, which are very attractive properties for the purpose of short-term letting. The rapid turnover of tenants resulting from short-term lets means that a sense of neighbourliness and community is being eroded. It also leads to a higher incidence of antisocial behaviour, such as problems with noise and rubbish collection. That is not necessarily because the tenants or holidaymakers are antisocial, but simply, in common with boarding houses, bed and breakfasts and hotels, because the situation generates more of that kind of behaviour. That will also lead to additional problems, and there are real concerns.

Of course, we do not want to have to take enforcement action. The classic example, raised on the back of the Olympics, is that people might want to do a home swap or let their property for a fortnight.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I think that all inner-London MPs will agree with my hon. Friend and her fellow Westminster MP, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). The consequences may be unintended, but they will put more pressure on the private and rented market, where at the moment nobody is able to get a property with decent rent. This will simply make things more difficult and more complicated in that market.

[Ms Buck]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend—those are exactly what the consequences will be. No one wants enforcement action to be taken against someone who lets their home for a few days or a couple of weeks, or who does a home swap, but there will be unintended consequences in a high-value, high-turnover and high-pressured area such as central London. Kensington and Westminster councils have made it clear that it is not those sorts of letters against whom they would take enforcement action, but the persistent trade in short-term lets. I hope the Government will think very carefully when they draw up the regulations for the enforcement of this particular provision.

Health

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

It is often in the specific and the particular that we understand how public policy is most effective, far more than in mission statements, PowerPoint presentations and the sub-sections of the legislation that we pass. That is particularly true of the NHS. We have heard two striking examples of that already in the contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) and the hon. Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) talking about social care. It is also true of the reconfiguration and change in the health service, which I shall address in the few minutes available to me.

In many respects we understand across the piece what changes need to take place, yet we find that so many of the changes that have taken place at a higher level of public policy, particularly those implemented by the Government through the Health and Social Care Act 2012, have made it harder rather than easier to bring about the change that we need to deliver. In London in particular, an exceptionally complex environment, we saw that set out very clearly by the King’s Fund in its report last year, which made it clear that the Government’s reorganisation of the health service, carried out at considerable expense, had made it harder rather than easier to deliver the fundamental changes that we need by fragmenting its structure and undermining its capacity to introduce strategic leadership.

In north-west London, which we have already heard mentioned today, we are facing one of the most fundamental changes in the delivery of health care since the establishment of the national health service. The “Shaping a healthier future” agenda is rooted in a set of principles with which most of us could agree. We want to reduce the number of accident and emergency attendances and, in particular, to reduce the number of accident and emergency admissions when patients can be better cared for elsewhere, particularly within primary and community services, and we want to reduce the length of stay, particularly for elderly patients who would be better and much happier to be cared for with appropriate social care support in their own homes. Those are undeniable facts that are supported by the general principle that in many cases the higher level of acute care is more efficaciously provided in larger and more specialist units. Those things go together and they are worthy objectives.

It is in the detail of the implementation that we have a major problem. NHS England is apparently seeking to have a total of 780,000 fewer patients admitted to A and E over the course of the next two years. The “Shaping a healthier future” agenda translates into a reduction of 15% in the number of A and E admissions to be achieved in north-west London. As the King’s Fund’s health economist John Appleby has said, that is “not realistic or feasible”. The problem is not that it is not desirable or that we do not want to see it achieved over time, but that we are in the middle of a period of rising demand for A and E and the capacity simply is not there, either elsewhere in the acute hospitals sector or in community and primary care services.

Only a few months ago, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, at the heart of the “Shaping a healthier future” agenda, said:

“We are yet to see any impact of primary care and community Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention…schemes and therefore are planning to maintain the level of emergency care we provided”

over the course of this winter. So, a hospital is saying that it cannot rely on the primary and community services being in place to divert people from A and E, yet almost in the same week the Secretary of State’s letter confirmed that the closure of the accident and emergency units at Hammersmith and Charing Cross, as we understand them, will go ahead as soon as possible. We now have a date in September, and his letter stated that

“the process to date has already taken 4 years causing understandable local concern”.

[Mr Slaughter]

My hon. Friend has written a devastating critique to the new chief executive at Imperial about the fact that Hammersmith A and E in my constituency as well as other A and Es are being closed before there is appropriate provision to replace them. I would not hold my breath for a reply if I were her. I am still waiting for one to the letter I wrote to the clinical commissioning group on 26 April on the same subject of failure to provide primary care.

[Ms Buck]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who reinforces my exact point.

Since the Secretary of State’s letter and the decision to proceed with the Hammersmith and Charing Cross closures, it has been reported in the Evening Standard that Imperial is having to use winter pressure beds routinely to cope with patients displaced by the planned A and E closures, admitting that there are “risks” of over-crowding, and warning that ill patients will have to spend longer in ambulances. This is a demand for winter pressure beds in the middle of the summer. The expectation is therefore that there is already insufficient capacity years before the construction of a planned new and improved A and E unit at Imperial hospital. The closures are going ahead and Imperial clearly cannot cope. An Imperial official said:

“We have extra acute beds at St Mary’s Hospital, normally used during the busy winter period to ensure we can quickly admit those patients”

in need. That is fine, but what will happen if and when we have a winter crisis or simply during the additional winter pressures? That capacity will not be available to help deal with them.

None of this is meant to suggest that there are not fine people in clinical and managerial practice focusing their attention on ensuring that services are in place to assist with that transition, but the scale of the challenge appears to be beyond what can be achieved realistically within the timetable. In the middle of all this—and no doubt connected to it—there came halfway through the year a letter from the west London clinical commissioning groups announcing that they have

“made an important decision to put funding into a central budget…£139 million…which means CCGs with a surplus will be supporting those with a deficit…We also agreed to explore how to bring together commissioning of primary care services across organisational boundaries”.

That seems to me to be perilously close to the end of clinical commissioning groups as far as we understand them. My understanding was that clinical commissioning groups were designed to be rooted in their local communities, to work in effective local partnerships and to reflect the local service providers, particularly primary care service providers and patients, at a local level. That has all gone with the wind in west London and I am extremely worried about it.

I am all the more worried because the whole transition programme is predicated on the delivery of improved social care, and it is social care with which we are now struggling to cope. In my local authority area, 1,000 fewer residents are getting social care than in 2010, and there will be a further £2.9 million cut this year. It is no surprise that the chief financial officer at Imperial trust, Bill Shields, has said:

“The cynic in me says”

that the proposal to take money away from the national health service to fund social care

“is a way of taking money from the NHS and passing it on to the local authority…this will allow them to make good the cliff edge they have been through in the last few years and rebuild the local government public finances.”

It would also mean

“a significant real-terms reduction in NHS income…going forward”.

[Mr Slaughter]

My hon. Friend makes a point about this panicked attempt to find more money in the primary care budgets and slosh it around west London at any consultation, and that is exactly the issue on which I am still waiting for an answer. This is chaos in the health service and is a reaction to closure programmes that have been carried out on financial grounds and that have now reduced the health service in west London to a chaotic and dangerous state.

[Ms Buck]

It is extremely worrying because the whole thing is shrouded in a lack of transparency and a lack of effective communication about what is going on. The local authority is cutting its own social care funding and needs money to fill its black hole, whereas the trust at Imperial says that that is exactly what it is worried about. It says it is concerned about the transfer of money because that might not give it the increased local community services that would allow it to reduce emergency A and E admissions, which is what we want. In fact, those things are so far from being effectively integrated in a common purpose that the different sectors of the health service appear to be at war with each other financially, if not in any other way.

The problem is that the fragmentation and delay caused by the reorganisation in the national health service since 2010 have undermined what should have been a sensible method of progressing and building up community services to reduce the pressure on the acute sector. Meanwhile, today and in the coming weeks my constituents will find that their hospital is at capacity but is expected to deal with the extra demand from the Hammersmith and Charing Cross accident and emergency closures, whereas the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) face the loss of their accident and emergency units without any appropriate provision. It is a shambles, I am extremely concerned, and I hope it is not too late to ensure that we can put something in place to prevent a true winter crisis this winter that would be of the Government’s own making.

Health Services (North-West London)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise some issues in this short debate, and I welcome the Minister to her role. It is good to have a London colleague here to respond to the debate, which deals with my serious concerns about the management of the delivery of health services in north-west London.

I asked for the debate with considerable sadness. I have been involved with health care delivery in north-west London for decades, on the community health council, when it existed, and as a member of the health authority for the same area; and for many years I enjoyed positive relationships with hospital management and primary care trusts, so it is of concern to me that I shall be describing a diversion away from such good relationships and communications, and the serious implications of that.

The debate is not about individuals, although I have concerns arising from the communication of some individuals’ views about health care delivery in recent months. The problem is structural, and it is not fixable just by improvements in the exchange of e-mails. It goes to the heart of trust and clarity in the way health care is provided. I am not alone in my concerns—I know other elected officials feel the same; but this is not just about politicians having our noses put out of joint when communications are not handled effectively. It is about some fundamental questions that have arisen, to do with how care is and will be provided to my constituents, and residents of the London borough of Westminster, where St Mary’s hospital is situated.

Because the challenges are so great in north-west London, as they are, indeed, in many parts of the health service, it is even more incumbent on those who deliver and manage health care to ensure that communications are clear, that there is a shared strategic approach to planning, and that there are common assumptions. As the Minister knows, the backdrop to the issue is important changes in the provision of hospital care and the “Shaping a healthier future” strategy for north-west London. That, of course, proposes the closure of several accident and emergency units in north-west London.

Fortunately, from my point of view—because it something about which we all care very much—A and E will not be closed at St Mary’s hospital in Westminster. It is good to see my hon. Friends the Members for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) and for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) here for the debate; I know that my colleagues have concerns about how emergency services will be provided in their areas when A and E units close.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend shares my pain. Four out of nine accident and emergency units are designated for closure, and two of those are in my constituency; but the point that she is making is that every MP in north-west London shares the pain, because there is simply no capacity in the system to cope with such a decline in emergency services. The sooner the Government and the NHS realise that, the better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Buck]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Of course, the proposed closures and the “Shaping a healthier future” strategy are themselves set against a financial context that puts extreme pressure on delivery. North-west London hospital services must accommodate a £125 million reduction in service between 2011 and 2015. At the same time—and this is pertinent to the core of my comments—local authorities have imposed dramatic cuts in their social care budgets. That is particularly germane to the issue, because the work of local authority care services relates to prevention and hospital discharge arrangements, and needs to be integrated with those areas, so that the highly pressured hospital service can work effectively.

Of course, another factor is the impact of the top-down NHS reorganisation that we were told would never happen, and the £3 billion that it cost, which has taken valuable resources and a great deal of energy away from the planned delivery of services. The slow death of the primary care trusts and the slow emergence of clinical commissioning groups during a time of massive changes has been part of the problem.

Colleagues such as my hon. Friend have legitimate concerns about the effect of the proposed A and E closures on their communities. St Mary’s hospital was not scheduled to lose its A and E unit, and we were pleased about that. I and others were briefed about ambitious plans for the development of a new, improved emergency care service, to be built at St Mary’s hospital. During the discussions and briefings there was no suggestion that there would be any specific consequential changes in the pattern of hospital services at St Mary’s. Therefore, when, at the invitation of my hon. Friend, I attended the independent review panel called to consider the A and E closures in other parts of west London, I was somewhat taken aback to be asked by the chairman how I felt about the closure of up to 200 beds at St Mary’s, and the movement away of most or all elective surgery, as part of the consequential changes resulting from “Shaping a healthier future”.

I immediately contacted the chief executive of the Imperial college health care trust, to ask whether that was accurate, what the implications were, and why I and others had not been told. That was not because I am automatically totally opposed to consequential changes in service delivery. We must be grown up about such things, and it is right that hospitals evolve and change. Things should not be, and never have been, set in stone. Good clinical reasons and financial necessity may drive change. However—and this is my theme today—to make that change work there must be clarity and partnership, and everyone must understand what is being proposed and how decisions are to be taken.

First, the Imperial trust referred me back to the “Shaping a healthier future” proposals, and to a slide pack that was shown to me and the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) in the spring. That set out very broad headings for how services at the three hospitals in the Imperial group—Hammersmith, Charing Cross and St Mary’s—would develop. There was nothing in it that would have led me to conclude that St Mary’s would lose the bulk—or all—of its elective surgery.

I checked with Westminster council, to see whether I was missing the blindingly obvious. I am grateful to the excellent health strategy officer at the council, who has been a model of clarity in explaining how things worked. He told me, with, I believe, the full agreement of local authority members, that the authority—a statutory partner, which there is a requirement to consult about major changes in hospital services—

“did not receive any indication that there would be significant consequential changes to elective surgery at St Mary’s Hospital as a result of Shaping a Healthier Future. Furthermore, Westminster City Council has not been informed of any proposals to re-locate much or all elective surgery currently performed at St Mary’s Hospital to Charing Cross and any developments in this area would be submitted to both the Cabinet Member and Chairman of Health Scrutiny to investigate.”

He said the authority would consider the assumption by the chief executive of the Imperial hospital group

“that these proposals were in the Decision Making Business Case to be incorrect”,

and continued:

“At Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust’s Board meetings on 24th July and 25th September, we were informed that Imperial were considering their options.”

Indeed, the chief executive of Imperial verbally, when I met him, and in writing indicated that no decisions had been taken and that the timetable for such decisions was for conclusion in the New Year. On 23 August, he wrote:

“I can assure you we are very much in the modelling and evaluation stages of any changes so are yet to consider whether we should propose moving any clinical services between our sites”—

note the use of “any”. That letter was widely circulated, so clarification could have come from other members of the local health service family, but no such clarification was received—to coin a phrase.

Meanwhile, a quick look at Hammersmith council’s website showed me that it was promising its community a reinvigorated Charing Cross hospital, but on a basis that did not appear to have been explained by Imperial to anyone in Westminster. Hammersmith announced in September:

“News that elective surgery is now on the list of possible future services would further boost the amount of expertise at the site, meaning patients in the local community benefit from the care it gives, and giving it greater status as a teaching hospital.”

[Mr Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is making a good case for the second of our concerns, which is not the closures themselves, but the chaotic, shambolic and amateur way in which they are being carried out. In the past six months, I have been told that Charing Cross hospital will close and be a clinic, a local hospital, a specialist social care hospital—whatever that is—or an elective surgery hospital. The person who told me most of those things, the chief executive of Imperial, has just left, suddenly, after only two years in the job. That is typical of the utter chaos in the hollowed-out NHS in north-west London and, no doubt, elsewhere.

[Ms Buck]

I totally endorse my hon. Friend’s words.

To return to my point about how Hammersmith council is presenting its achievements in winning services for Charing Cross that no one in Westminster or at St Mary’s hospital knows about, Hammersmith continued:

“Charing Cross will also become a specialist centre for community services which means that the many thousands of older and chronically ill patients, who need regular visits to hospital, will have less far to travel. It will mean local people will be better supported to live independently at home”.

It was good of Imperial to share that vision with Hammersmith and around Charing Cross, but it is a great shame that it chose not to share a single word with Westminster city council.

Reinforcing my hon. Friend’s point about chaos, however, I am not sure that even that is the true picture, because when I showed the press releases on Charing Cross from Hammersmith council to the chief executive of Imperial in September, I was told that it was spin on Hammersmith’s part and that what was proposed was only a 23-hour ambulatory care model, with no new beds at all. It is hard to square that with Hammersmith council’s vision and harder still to know what is true.

I do not begrudge Hammersmith residents their hospital—quite the reverse—but I am concerned about any sense of deals being done to secure their future, at the expense of local residents in Westminster and, critically, without so much as an opportunity for Westminster council even to consider the matter or to think about support services or the community care dimension, which Hammersmith so rightly talks about as important in a local hospital context and which can be applied to Westminster. If Hammersmith council can proudly claim that its new hospital means that

“the many thousands of older and chronically ill patients, who need regular visits to hospital, will have less far to travel”,

surely that cannot mean that older and chronically ill Westminster residents, who also need regular visits to hospital, should have further to travel—with no debate and no chance to put in place social care support or travel arrangements.

Things get worse. Four weeks after my meeting with the chief executive of Imperial, all my follow-up questions about what that means, whether decisions have been made or what services will be located where still remain unanswered. That is no doubt partly a consequence of the unexpected departure of the chief executive, who has been replaced in what is clearly a holding operation, in a manner that does not indicate a smooth and planned transition.

Hospital Services (West London)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)]

rose—

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Slaughter]

I give way to my hon. Friend and will give way to the Minister in a moment.

[Ms Buck]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He was with me when we met representatives of north-west London recently and were advised that the number of A and E attendances is rising by about 10% a year. Does he agree that, even for those of us who agree that in an ideal world, we would reduce unnecessary A and E admissions through the provision of quality care in the community, it is wrong to propose the closure of A and E units before we have a demonstrable improvement in the community facilities that would allow for that reduction in unnecessary A and E admissions?

[Mr Slaughter]

Indeed, and I will come on to that when I talk about the process and history of the closure of services.

Pay and Consultants (Public Sector)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Slaughter]

Oh, I do welcome the review. I think that the hon. Gentleman may be quoting from The Guardian article in the debate pack. It said:

“Treasury review of the extent to which civil servants channel salaries into tax-efficient private firms is to look at more than 4,000 postings across Whitehall and its quangos—and is expected to conclude that such schemes must end for full-time permanent staff, even if the arrangement led to a net financial gain for government departments.

The Department of Health is deciding whether to cancel contracts paid to at least 25 staff via private firms worth over £4m… The Guardian has been alerted to similar schemes operating in NHS trusts and primary care trusts. In one recent case, the Milton Keynes Hospital paid its acting chief executive Mark Millar via a partnership called Millar Management Associates. There is nothing illegal in staff being employed as consultants, especially if they are temporary.”

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

While my hon. Friend is on the subject of acting consultancies in the national health service, does he share my concern about the signal that was sent out by the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust last year when it appointed an interim chief executive allegedly on an arrangement of £2,000 a day for up to 200 days. Does he accept that, with a £35 million deficit, that sends out a very worrying message to the public? Moreover, does he not think that the fact that the chief executive has now been appointed the permanent managing director—I welcome that move and do not throw any doubts on his competence to do the job—implies that that consultancy arrangement was wrong?

[Mr Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Our constituencies share the world-renowned Imperial health care trust. When I was first introduced to the new chief executive, I assumed that he was just that—a paid chief executive. It was only when I read the articles in The Sunday Times that I understood that he was being paid £2,000 a day as a consultant. I do not know whether it was always the intention to regularise his position or whether it was The Sunday Times and perhaps my hon. Friend who acted as a prompt. I am, however, pleased that the chief executive, Mark Davies, applied for the job and has now been appointed to the full-time position. If that is a precedent in removing such anomalies and abuses, I hope that it will be followed.

Going back to the point made by the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert), I do not object at all to the review. However, as he will have seen, the issue goes wider than Departments and non-departmental public bodies. It is my understanding—the Minister may want to correct me when she responds or even now—that that is the limit of the review at the moment. Even in the statement on 2 February, my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) asked about local government—a topic to which I will return—and the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) asked about the BBC. Will the Minister update us on whether the terms of reference of the review have been extended to cover those areas, what progress has been made so far and when will we see a report?

Social Housing in London

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Thursday 5th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

I am sorry; I meant my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown).

All those speeches addressed, with slightly different emphases, the impact of the housing crisis on people—on families in overcrowded accommodation, homeless families and families forced into constant moves and changes of address. The statistics matter, but it is important that we should remember that people are at the heart of the issue. I suspect that most of us in the Chamber, on both sides, have sat in advice surgeries with people weeping with distress as they have talked about the conditions in which they live and the number of times they have been uprooted and forced to move. They crave only a stable home.

Opposition Members drew out something important about social housing policy—that it has come about as a consequence of market failure. It is precisely because the private housing sector could not meet the needs of low-income and vulnerable people that council housing came about—and before that, there were the great social housing developments of Peabody and Octavia Hill. Subsequently, the housing association movement grew up in response to the catastrophe of the private rented market, particularly in places such as my previous constituency, the home of Rachman and Hoogstraten.

As the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) said absolutely rightly, most landlords are not bad landlords at all—I am happy to place that on the record. However, the grim truth is that a substantial minority are, which brings the entire sector into disrepute. We already know from the English housing survey that 40% of private houses are below the decent homes standard and the conditions in the private rented sector are worse across the piece; a larger proportion of them fail to meet that standard. That is a particular challenge if vulnerable people are in the part of the market that has failed. That is exactly why the housing association movement developed. It is sad to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith how some housing associations seem to have strayed so much from their original purposes.

[Mr Slaughter]

I want to get something off my conscience; I promise that this will be my last intervention. Last Friday, I got a planning application—again, I am afraid, from Notting Hill Housing—for 41 high-quality houses, including four new five-bedroom houses on St Peter’s square. They go for about £3 million each. Not one of those 41 houses will be an affordable home because there is not enough equity in the scheme. That is what some of our housing associations have descended to.

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is right, and that is extremely sad. In some cases, there appears to be a deliberate straying away from the original aims and objectives; in others, the kind of thing that he describes is a response to the constraints under which housing associations now operate.

All my right hon. and hon. Friends critiqued aspects of Government policy. A number of them drew particular attention to the risks inherent in the cuts to the local housing allowance. We heard from Government Members extreme examples of high-cost private sector tenancies. We agree. Indeed, the Labour manifesto stated that measures would be taken to deal with some of those extremely high costs. I completely accept that, but if it was the objective of Government policy why was it not confined to tackling the relatively small number of high-cost cases? I think I am right in saying that the Government have not even been able to tell us how many, if any, properties cost more than £100,000 a year, yet throughout the country—not just in London—nearly 1 million households will have their local housing allowance cut.

My hon. Friends the Members for West Ham and for Edmonton raised concerns about what would happen when people are displaced, particularly from the central London broad market rental area where only 5% of accommodation will remain affordable, and a knock-on displacement moves those families to highly stressed, poorer communities on the fringes of London and beyond. Many Members talked about social housing investment and tenure, and I shall return to those issues briefly.

We heard thoughtful and reasonable contributions from Government Members. I single out particularly the hon. Members for Ealing Central and Acton and for Battersea (Jane Ellison), not least because they are still here. They made good points. In some cases, there is shared understanding of the impact of the housing shortage, particularly in central London.

From the hon. Ladies and from the hon. Members for Hendon (Mr Offord), for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) and for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), we heard support for Government policy on market rents and the end of security of tenure, which it is asserted, without significant evidence, will deal with the shortage of social housing that we are all concerned about. Frankly, that assertion is a triumph of hope over experience, and I shall spend a moment or two deconstructing it.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Hendon is no longer in the Chamber. He revealed a little of the attitude towards social housing and social tenants that permeates so much of the Government’s thinking about the problem—that secure and affordable social housing traps individuals in deprivation and unemployment, and the language of welfare dependency reinforces that belief. However, as several of my hon. Friends said, the fact that social housing is now such a scarce resource means that people with social problems are concentrated in it. Far from being the problem for many vulnerable and poorer families, it is an essential part of the solution.

We all agree that the problems facing social housing in London are complex, long term and difficult to resolve. Anyone who claims to have a magic bullet is lying. We know that the supply of social housing has been squeezed for decades, principally through the non-replacement of right-to-buy stock during the 1980s and 1990s, but in retrospect it is a shame that more properties were not built under the Labour Government, as several of us have pointed out. It would be hypocritical of me not to say that, as I lined up many times during the Labour Government to make exactly that point. However, as has been said, we can be proud of the substantial investment made during those years in the decent homes initiative, which brought millions of homes to a decent standard.

The decline in supply is not the only problem. London is a global city; foreign, national and business money distorts the market, and the fact that house prices have risen so much over the decades has its consequences. One striking issue about social housing is that between 10 and 15 years ago there was a steady outflow of tenants buying their home, sometimes through right to buy but often in the private market, which has effectively silted things up, as people on modest incomes are no longer able to afford a house. The relationship between the private housing market, owner-occupation and the social market must be properly understood. The Labour Government invested in decent homes and new buildings, so by 2009, the lead-in time for planning and investment led to a high of 16,000 starts in London. We now know that that was the golden age.

The coalition Government have a package of investment and policy suggestions, which are likely to combine to cancel out almost all the hoped-for objectives. They want more social homes—don’t we all?—but they have made, as we heard, a 63% cut in the affordable housing grant. Consequently, the 16,000 starts peaked in 2009-10 and will fall away to nothing, according to the Homes and Communities Agency, in 2012. The Government want housing benefit to take the strain—to fill the gap in the affordable housing grant—but they also want housing benefit expenditure to fall. Those two things are incompatible.

The Government want to improve work incentives—don’t we all?—but they propose 80% market rents, which will make work incentives much harder to achieve. If it is hard to make work pay when rent is £100 a week, how much harder will it be when rent is £400, £500 or £600 a week? They want more social homes, particularly, as the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton said, more family-sized homes, but the overall benefit cap means that housing developers and housing associations do not want to build family-sized homes. The set of policies is completely incoherent. Something has to give.

The Government want mixed communities—don’t we all?—but they suggest throwing people out of their homes when they achieve a certain amount of income. What could be a worse work disincentive than saying, “If you earn a certain amount of money, you’ll be out on your ear”? What nonsense that makes of the concept of mixed communities. However, the Mayor of London proposes a £60,000-plus ceiling for access to socially assisted housing, which cuts across the stated objective of not allowing people with a decent income to be assisted with housing.

The Government want to tackle under-occupation—don’t we all?—but they are doing so in a way that possibly even some of my hon. Friends have not yet fully internalised. They propose doing so through a cut in housing benefit for social tenants who have one or more bedrooms more than they are deemed to need. That will hit 150,000 London households with an average of a £21-a-week loss in benefit. I do not have the London figures to hand, but I know that, nationally, if every single person affected by the proposed cut in housing benefit tried to avoid that penalty, it would mean that every one and two-bedroom property allocated in the social housing sector for the next five years would have to go to those households. That is clearly nonsense and would lead to a catastrophe of homelessness and overcrowding. Indeed, the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) let the cat out of the bag by making it clear that the policy’s intention is not to tackle under-occupation, but to save money. As far as the Government are concerned, the fewer people who move, the better.

The Government also want to end security of tenure. When I, like my hon. Friends, was on the campaign stump last year, and warning people that a Conservative Government would mean a move to market rents and the end of security of tenure, we were howled down and accused of lying. Our only error in robustly defending that position was not realising how quickly it would happen.

I have been remiss in not making the point earlier, but shadow Communities and Local Government Ministers, who are out campaigning today, are rightly opposing those measures in the Localism Bill.

The Government’s policy is fundamentally flawed and deeply incoherent. It will have the opposite effect, almost across the board, to what it seeks to achieve. At the very least, we know that the Mayor of London’s re-election campaign is on a cliff edge as new housing supply drops to nothing. We therefore look forward to a campaign that will replace the Mayor, who has talked the talk, but is not walking the walk. He will not deliver new social housing; he is not standing up for London tenants or those who face a housing crisis.

Although the crisis has been long building and slow burning, it is reaching one of the most critical points that I have ever known. Whether for people in social housing, people in the private sector waiting to obtain social housing, those in the queue or those facing homelessness, it is clear that the Government’s policies will do nothing to resolve that crisis. It will take a Labour Mayor and a Labour Government to resolve the crisis of social housing in London.

Gaza

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Karen Buck

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Ms Buck]

Yes, but this will be the last intervention for the moment.

[Mr Slaughter]

The general tone of the interventions so far seems to suggest that Palestinians have brought this upon themselves by electing a Hamas Government. Does my hon. Friend agree that, whatever the political issues in the middle east, punishing the Palestinian people collectively for exercising their democratic right is entirely wrong?

[Ms Buck]

I agree totally and that is the main thrust of my contribution today. There are issues of proportionality and collective punishment. The 1.5 million citizens of Gaza should not be subjected to the impact of the siege because of the Government that they chose—or, in many cases, did not choose—to elect.

Israel has stated frequently that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005 with the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers. However, as it has at any time since 1967, Israel has remained firmly in control of Gaza’s sovereignty, controlling its borders, airspace and coastal waters and retaining the right to enter at will. Gaza is surrounded on three sides by a security fence, and a seam zone extending up to 1 km into the territory is enforced by snipers to prevent anyone from approaching the fence. Palestinian farmers entering the zone are liable to be shot at by border guards, while fishermen seeking to fish away from the highly polluted coastline are regularly fired on by the Israeli navy. Leaving aside the casualties of Operation Cast Lead in 2009, 31 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and 116 injured since the beginning of 2010 alone. On 7 June, six Palestinians were killed off the coast of Gaza.

Since 2007, the control of Gaza’s borders has tightened further, to the extent of its being an all-encompassing siege. The people of that grossly over-populated strip—measuring only 10 km from east to west—have been denied all freedom of movement, have extremely limited access to vital goods and services and, perhaps most crucial, have been denied access to construction materials needed to rebuild the many homes and facilities destroyed during Operation Cast Lead.

The agreement on movement and access stipulates that 15,500 trucks a month should be allowed to enter Gaza via the crossing points with Israel. Since June 2007, however, the actual volume has typically been about 20% of that number. Between May and June this year, only 400 trucks entered Gaza—one third of the pre-siege level. The trucks are supposed to contain everything that the 1.5 million people of Gaza need to survive, yet only 73 sanctioned items were permitted. Items that were blocked—there has been very recent movement on this—included pasta, powdered milk, jam, cooking oil, school books and textbooks and T-shirts.