Building Homes

Debate between Angela Rayner and Paul Holmes

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. Again, the short answer is yes, it will be a rapid review. We were already speaking about this issue before the election. We want to make sure that people take part in the review, but we are also very clear that the discounts that the last Government applied to the right-to-buy formula in 2012 mean that councils cannot replace the houses that are bought under the right-to-buy scheme. We believe that people should have the right to buy, but it has to be balanced against the discounts given to the public on our social housing stock, so that we can make sure that we replace that stock for those who desperately need it.

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

Quite frankly, this announcement will be a disaster for my Hamble Valley constituency. Over the last few years, Liberal Democrat-run Eastleigh borough council has built double the number of houses required by targets and assessments. Can the Secretary of State confirm that she will take into account retrospective building numbers for areas that have already built more than their fair share? Why is she placing even more pressure on local services in the south-east, where house prices are the most expensive, but leaving cities alone and not increasing house numbers there too?

[Angela Rayner]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that the number of houses in cities will increase. The new method that we will be using is based on the stock and its affordability, so I ask him to look at the consultation. We will be honest: if there is a particular shortage—many areas have a particular shortage—we have to build homes. We stood on an election manifesto to do that. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman’s local authority has local plans, but we will engage with it. We do not have the homes that we desperately need. I say to the hon. Gentleman that he should engage with his local authority, get the local plans in place, and work with us to build the houses that his constituents desperately need.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Angela Rayner and Paul Holmes

2nd reading
Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I will just educate the hon. Gentleman: although I used to be a trade union official and I am a member of a trade union, I do not negotiate on behalf of a trade union. But what I would do is sit around the table and resolve this dispute with the trade unions. That would be better than what the Conservatives have done.

I come to the liability this Bill places upon trade unions. It says that trade unions must take “reasonable steps” to ensure workers comply with work notices, but what would they be? Will trade unions be liable for non-union staff? As for the burden put on employers, have they welcomed the bureaucratic nightmare that they will face? How will our already overstretched public services spare the resources to work out how many workers are needed to meet the minimum service levels the Secretary of State arbitrarily imposes on them, and to identify which workers should come into work and which should not? What will these bodies have to do? Will they have to do this before each and every strike day?

[Paul Holmes (Eastleigh) (Con)]

I would like to try again on this, because the right hon. Lady aspires to be Deputy Prime Minister and wants to negotiate with the unions in future. Will she outline for the House, because the Labour party has been very quiet on this, whether she backs a 19% pay increase for nurses? What costing has her party put forward as to how much she would award in pay rises to those public sector workers?

[Angela Rayner]

What I can say is that the Labour party would not have crashed the economy like the Conservatives did. We would not have inflation at the record levels we have at the moment. We would not have the disputes we have at the moment because we would negotiate with the trade unions and find a settlement.

What protections are in place to prevent unscrupulous employers from targeting trade union members with work notices? Or is this legislation a licence for blacklisting? The Secretary of State is hiding behind warped misunderstandings of the International Labour Organisation’s statute book and misleading comparisons with Europe. The ILO says that minimum service levels can happen only when the

“safety of individuals or their health is at stake”.

Can he explain how that relates to the list of sectors in the Bill? This Bill also makes no provision for the compensatory measures the ILO requires alongside such regulations. Countries such as France and Spain may have minimum service levels, but they have not averted strikes there; both lose far more days to strike action than the UK.

This Bill is a mess. It makes no sense. It has more holes in it than the last Chancellor’s Budget, yet we are being given next to no time to scrutinise it. This legislation hands far-reaching powers to the Secretary of State to not just impose minimum service levels, but decide what those levels would be. The legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg has called clause 3

“a supercharged Henry VIII clause.”

Where is the consultation the Secretary of State promised? Where is the impact assessment? The Regulatory Policy Committee says, in a scornful statement today, that it has not even received it yet. So why have the Government given only five hours for debate on the Floor of the House?

Let us look at what this Bill is really all about: a Government who are out of ideas, out of time and fast running out of sticking plasters; a Government who are playing politics with nurses’ lives because they cannot stomach negotiation; a Government desperately doing all they can to distract from the economic emergency they have caused. We have had 13 years of failure, and working people of this country cannot take any more. What this whole sorry episode makes clear is that this country needs a Labour Government. The Conservative party has proven itself incapable of cleaning up its own mess, and the disruption of the past few months simply would not be happening under Labour.