Housing Benefit

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Lord Evans of Rainow

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), and I declare at the start that I have more experience of council housing than many colleagues. Similar to the hon. Gentleman, I too grew up on a council estate, in south Manchester, with my mother, father and four siblings. It was not big, but it was home. We lived there because we needed to and because the state was able to help us find a home that we could fit into and was affordable to my hard-working parents.

Social housing is there for those in need. Housing needs change as families expand and contract. The needs of a family with four children are different to those of a divorced empty-nester. The hon. Gentleman used the example of a council estate where a house is also a home and a place to live. In my personal circumstances, when my father died 30 years ago and my mother was on her own in a three-bedroom house, she moved out and now lives in a one-bedroom flat, thus releasing that property back to the housing stock.

[Mr MacNeil]

How often does the hon. Gentleman envisage that people should move homes during the course of their adult lives?

[Graham Evans]

I cannot really answer that because it varies so greatly. I have moved several times but I am now settled with a family and envisage not moving for a while. It varies due to individual circumstances.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Lord Evans of Rainow

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Graham Evans]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He raises an important point relating to his constituency. My understanding is that money is available for students from across the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, to attend Auschwitz. I believe that the Treasury has allocated funds for that exercise.

I have also been privileged to meet survivors and listen to first-hand accounts, but they are harder and harder to find as time takes its toll. As time goes on, it is essential that we work harder than ever to ensure that people remember the holocaust; we cannot allow it to become a remote and distant memory for future generations.

So why should this debate be taking place here in the Chamber today? Those who fail to learn the lessons of history risk repeating them. The holocaust was not the first genocide; nor, sadly, was it the last. That murder by the state on an industrial scale occurred in what was one of the most modern and, arguably, civilised nations in the world at the time. Anti-Semitism, homophobia and prejudice still exist all across the world. Wherever there is unrest, economic difficulty or social imbalance, it is human nature to search for a group to blame. As the global economy falters, those conditions exist across the world, in Europe and even in Great Britain today.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

I have been to Cambodia and Rwanda, and what the hon. Gentleman has been saying is particularly worrying. Having seen those countries, and knowing the history of Europe, I cannot say with certainty that such things will not happen again. Today gives us an important opportunity to express our best hope that they will not, and to alert people to the dangers, but does the hon. Gentleman know of any ways in which we could act in a stronger, more robust, manner to lessen the chances of them happening again?

[Graham Evans]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. It is only 15 years since the genocide in Rwanda, in the mid-1990s, when the whole world stood by and allowed it to happen. He is right to say that we need to remain vigilant in relation to Rwanda and other countries.