Greensill Capital

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 13th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will make a statement on the process by which Greensill Capital was approved as a lender for the coronavirus large business interruption loan scheme.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Paul Scully)]

Greensill Capital (UK) Ltd was approved by the British Business Bank for the coronavirus business interruption loan scheme and the coronavirus large business interruption loan scheme last year in accordance with the bank’s published guidance on accreditation. All decisions taken by the bank were made independently and in accordance with the bank’s usual procedure.

The criteria by which the decisions were made were based on those used in the existing enterprise finance guarantee scheme, dating back from 2009, and were set out in the CLBILS request for proposals, which was a publicly available document. These criteria included minimum requirements such as the ability to demonstrate a track record of lending to larger enterprises, provision of evidence-based forecasts, the ability to demonstrate sufficient capital available to meet the lending forecasts, a viable business model, robust operations and systems, that the proposed lending will not have unreasonable lender-levied fees and interest, and that the lender has all the necessary regulations, licences, authorisations and permissions to operate the scheme. All accredited lenders are subject to regular audit by the bank to ensure their compliance with scheme rules.

Following analysis of loan data as part of its standard due diligence, the bank opened an investigation into Greensill Capital’s compliance with the terms of the scheme in October 2020 and informed the Government of this on 9 October. That investigation is continuing and the Government’s obligations as guarantor under the CLBILS guarantee are suspended on a precautionary basis. It would not be appropriate to comment further on the investigation at this time.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I start by paying tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh, who was an extraordinary public servant. My thoughts today are with the Queen and the rest of the royal family as we all mourn his passing. They are also with the friends and family of Cheryl Gillan, and I would like to associate myself with the very moving tributes that we quite rightly heard a few moments ago.

I welcome the Minister’s presence, but it was the Chancellor who needed to come to the House today; the Chancellor who told David Cameron that he would “push” his team to amend emergency loan schemes to suit Cameron’s new employer; the Chancellor whose officials met with Greensill 10 times; the Chancellor who took the credit for Government business loan schemes when they were in the headlines and, indeed, who personally announced those schemes. Yet the Chancellor is frit to put his name to those loan schemes today. He has just spent £600,000 on communications. I would have thought that that would extend to communicating with Parliament. In the Chancellor’s absence, let me ask: what was the alternative that the Chancellor pushed his team to explore after David Cameron texted him? What discussions did the Government have with the British Business Bank about Greensill’s access to CLBILS after it had already been rejected for the covid corporate financing facility? Were the criteria for CLBILS amended so that Greensill could access the scheme? Why was Greensill the only supply chain finance firm accredited for CLBILS, and what due diligence was done?

Hundreds of millions of pounds of public money were put at risk by giving Greensill access to this scheme. With Greensill’s collapse, thousands of jobs—in Rotherham, Hartlepool and right across the country—have been put at risk. Those workers and taxpayers across the country deserve answers. The Chancellor said that he would “level with” the public. Why is he running scared of levelling with them on the Greensill scandal?

[Paul Scully]

I associate myself with the hon. Member’s words about the Duke of Edinburgh and, of course, our colleague Cheryl Gillan, both of whom will be sorely missed.

The Chancellor wrote to the hon. Member last week with a comprehensive response to her questions regarding engagement between Greensill and HM Treasury. The Prime Minister has asked Nigel Boardman to conduct a review to look into the decisions taken around the development and use of supply chain finance and the associated schemes in Government—especially the role of Lex Greensill and Greensill Capital—and to set out any findings as necessary. The Government recognise the interest in the matter. It is right that we now let that review happen.

In the interests of transparency, the Chancellor has provided all the messages that were sent from him to David Cameron on this matter; they relate exclusively to Greensill’s proposals for the covid corporate financing facility. The Chancellor is right to push officials, as we all have, to explore all ways of capital getting to businesses—large and small. That is what all Members of this House were asking and demanding the Government to do at that particular point. It is important to remember that the Chancellor rejected the idea that he should rewrite the CCFF to include any banks.

The reason the Chancellor is not here is that the question is about the CLBILS. I suggest to the hon. Lady that she asks her question in a different forum or that she asks a different question, because the coronavirus large business interruption loan scheme, to which this question pertains, is administered by the British Business Bank. The Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is the sole shareholder in the bank. As such, the responsibility for the delivery of the scheme sits with BEIS. The accreditation process for any of the covid loan schemes is run independently by the British Business Bank; neither BEIS nor HM Treasury had a role or were involved in the CLBILS accreditation decision for Greensill.

There were two other non-bank lenders accredited under the CLBILS, with over 75 accredited for the CBILS. It was an important feature of the covid loan schemes that there was a diversity of lenders to ensure a broad range of choice for borrowers, enabling them to access the finance they needed to survive and recover from the pandemic. Greensill was not accredited to provide supply chain finance through the CLBILS. It was only accredited to provide invoice finance, term loans and revolving credit facilities.

Planning for the Future

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

The new affordable homes programme, which we announced yesterday, will be over £12 billion. We have not yet finalised the details, but will set them out shortly. They will show the proportion of those homes that will be for different tenures, from shared ownership and affordable rent to social rent. We want a significant increase in the number of those homes in the social rent category. I hope we can make a positive announcement on that shortly, when we have finalised the details, having spoken to and listened to the sector.

I am very sympathetic to the argument that my hon. Friend has made in the past about properties that are not eligible for right to buy and, indeed, about some councils and housing associations that are making it more difficult. I would like to work with him to take action on that. We need to ensure that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, takes housing seriously. As I have said before, we will never be able to meet our housing targets and ambitions as a country unless London pulls its weight, and I am afraid that at the moment we have a Mayor whose ambitions are way below what we should all be expecting at every level of the market. As long as he continues in place, which I hope is not for very much longer, the Mayor needs to get building in London.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State has just been talking about the delivery of homes for social rent, but I would like to ask him about the impact of two of his Government’s policies on the delivery of homes for social rent. The first is yesterday’s changes to the Public Works Loan Board when it comes to the delivery of homes for social rent by local housing companies. The second is the First Homes policy, which, because it is delivered through section 106 as it is currently designed, is likely to lead to a reduction in the production of homes for social rent by local councils. What is his response?

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Lady will know as a follower of Treasury matters that what we announced yesterday in the Budget with reform of the Public Works Loan Board makes it cheaper for councils to borrow to invest in housing and regeneration. I hope that she will support the changes that we made. The changes we are making to the PWLB will make it harder for councils to waste money on speculative investments outside of their boundaries and get highly indebted, and make it easier to spend money on things that really matter. We have lifted the housing revenue account borrowing cap, and many councils across the country are responding to that and building council houses at a pace that we have not seen for many years, as was reflected in the statistics I gave earlier. We built more council houses last year than we have done for many years, and I hope that her local council in Oxford will do the same, if that is what she wishes.

Housing and Planning

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) on securing this debate. I have two specific and brief questions for the Minister. The first concerns the first homes scheme. The Government’s consultation document on the scheme, released last month, includes an extraordinary sentence. It states:

“We are mindful of the trade-off between the level of ambition for First Homes, funded through developer contributions, and the supply of other affordable housing tenures.”

Yet, astonishingly, the consultation mandates that section 106 must be used to deliver first homes, rather than asking whether that is appropriate in the first place. We should not use section 106 contributions for this, especially at the late stage when many local plans have just been concluded or are in contention, and without any ameliorative action to preserve local councils’ abilities to facilitate council and other social housing.

I note that my own local authority has already been prevented by the Government’s planning inspectorate from requiring developer contributions to social homes from smaller sites. There are already problems, which will be massively exacerbated if the first homes scheme is ruled out in such a way. Will the Minister commit to conduct a proper impact assessment on the impact of the first homes proposal on the provision of new social homes? Secondly, on the Oxford-Cambridge arc, some contest the need to have any additional housing along the arc. I am not one of them, and I very much concurred with some of the words spoken by the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) when it comes to the need for additional housing and looking at the issue in a manner that is not hypocritical.

As for the arc, I am astonished that the Government have not provided even a signal or an expectation on two critical issues: first, the proportion of new homes, which should be available for social rent and genuinely affordable; and secondly, the energy efficiency and broader environmental performance of those new homes. It is not good enough to suggest that local authorities will deal with all the issues. The Oxford-Cambridge arc is a central Government programme, staffed with dozens of central Government civil servants, and central Government have the power, should they wish to use it, to ensure that the new homes are genuinely affordable, that they include many social homes, and that they are sustainable.

Finally, will the Minister please commit to determining two targets or standards, or even just expectations, for the arc for the percentage of new homes that should be affordable, including social homes, and for the expected environmental performance of the homes?

Homelessness

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

In the brief time I have available—I am very sorry the Secretary of State is leaving, just as I am starting to speak—I want to focus on the Government’s approach to delivering directly funded services for rough sleepers. I am sure we could all talk a lot about the drivers of rough sleeping, but I want to focus on the approach to directly funding those services, which is very problematic. It is based on a very short-term approach, which is failing many people who need those services. I will set out why in the time I have left.

I welcomed the stamp duty surcharge, especially once the Government had resiled from their previous decision to slash the amount coming from it by two thirds. At least it has been put back to the previous amount. I welcomed it because I thought it would lead to a situation where we would not have a bidding-led system of a pot into which different bodies have to bid for very short-term funded projects. But no, we seem to have the same approach now. The problem is that it does not lead to reliable support for projects that we know work. For example, in Oxford we have received funds from the rough sleeper initiative and the rapid rehousing pathway. I am really grateful for them—of course I am—but they are only for a year or 18 months. We have had absolutely brilliant projects— the hub at Bonn Square and the Trailblazer project—but they were funded only for the short term. Virtually by the time staff had been taken on and services got going, the funding was evaporating.

Oxford City Council has just set up a brilliant facility, Floyds Row, investing £2 million in capital—of course, it is not the authority that should be funding it in the first place, but it has done so because of the rough sleeping crisis we have in Oxford—but it will now be at the behest of finding different pots of short-term funding to deliver the running of that facility, as is St Mungo’s, which will be helping with it. So much effort is going into chasing around after short-term funds—I could not have agreed more with what my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) said about the situation there. This is really problematic not just for the staff who are trying to deliver excellent services without knowing whether they will be employed in the future, but for the users. We have the data and we know the evidence. We know that when the same workers are delivering services, especially to those who are hardest to reach, they are far more effective. I would be delighted to send the Minister evidence from the Old Fire Station, working with Crisis, which shows that clearly in black and white. We need that continuity of provision. If he reports back on anything at the end of the debate, please deal with the issue of the funding being too short term.

Deaths of Homeless People

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Luke Hall]

The importance of the 2017 Act is that now we are really going to have some evidential information about why. If Members look at the information we have from the first year, they will see the progress that has been made, especially on supporting single men, and the importance and priority of early intervention. The hon. Gentleman raises an extremely important point, though, and there is no shying away from the hugely difficult set of statistics released today. We will strain every single sinew going forward. We are increasing the funding, with £54 million more next year, £30 million from NHS England to support health projects and £2 million for urgent intervention in community health services.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

There have been some groundbreaking projects to help with the rapid rise in rough sleeping in Oxford, but they have really suffered from being short-term funded. Most of the money the Minister is talking about is just for the short term. The stamp duty surcharge on overseas property buyers is sustainable funding that is meant to last over the long term, but his Government decided that it was going to be set at a third of the level they originally committed to. Will the Minister explain why his Government apparently decided to prioritise the wealth of overseas property investors over the needs of vulnerable rough sleepers? I just do not understand it.

[Luke Hall]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that point, which I am happy to look into in more detail. In Oxford, as in so many other areas throughout the country, the rough sleeping initiative is reducing rough sleeping—it is down by 19% directly since 2017 and there has been a 32% reduction compared with where we would have been had it not been introduced—but I absolutely take seriously the points that have been raised from all parts of the Chamber.

Oral Answers to Questions

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I am pleased to say to my hon. Friend that some further positive steps have been taken since my visit to India last October to forge those relationships between the midlands and Maharashtra in India. I hope to be able to give him some positive news very shortly on signing a memorandum of understanding to really regularise that and underpin how we ensure we have that shared expertise to create jobs, boost trade and take other steps to cement this and create that positive sense of prosperity that I know he strongly advocates.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

T8. Why has the Housing Minister not accepted the need for new primary legislation to implement the Letwin review’s call for land value uplift to be properly captured? That would support social housing construction, including in areas such as Oxford.

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

We cannot wait for primary legislation; we have to get on with it now. In particular, there are lots of things in the Letwin review that can work with the grain and the weave of current planning policy. For example, we will shortly be issuing guidance on housing diversification, which is one of the key suggestions in the review. We are encouraging local authorities to introduce local plans, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) urged us to do, so that landowners can realise the obligations placed upon them and so that the value of community contributions and affordable housing can be factored into the land price.

Vagrancy Act

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

In fact, this comes back to why the Act was controversial 200 years ago, let alone now. The use of the Act is damaging and counterproductive in tackling rough sleeping. Rather than addressing the root causes of homelessness, which we all know are incredibly complex, the Act simply displaces people from one area to another, which is particularly problematic given that the funding of support is still to an extent based on local connection.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Layla Moran]

I give way to my constituency neighbour.

[Anneliese Dodds]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent case, and I am very pleased that it is one that my party supports as well. When I have had discussions with rough sleepers—at the new hub, O’Hanlon House, the Porch, the Gatehouse or, indeed, doing a St Mungo’s round—in every case those discussions showed that people really need the support she is talking about, rather than to be criminalised, which can of course set them back substantially. Does she agree?

[Layla Moran]

I completely agree. Indeed, we know very well from our city how much our local constituents care desperately, and care and compassion, as has been mentioned, is actually the driving force behind why people care so deeply about this matter. The legislation acts as a barrier to cultural change. It sends a message that the act of rough sleeping itself is morally wrong, and it treats people who are sleeping rough as a negative problem to solve, rather than individuals in need of positive support.

In 2018, I met the Leader of the House on this matter, and asked if she could help me to repeal the Act. She was sympathetic, but she told me that some homelessness stakeholders wanted to keep the Act in place. This was reaffirmed by the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs Wheeler), who is the Minister for homelessness, when we met last year. However, in my second meeting about this with Ministers, I got positive engagement. I am disappointed that the Minister for homelessness is not on the Front Bench today, because I am going to answer some of the questions she raised in the meeting. However, she made the point that the Act was used to encourage rough sleepers to get off the streets and into shelters.

I listened carefully to those arguments, and I continue to disagree with them. The thing is that threatening rough sleepers with the Vagrancy Act to coerce them into shelters is not the way to help them. It is paternalistic and it claims that it is for their own good, but it actually has the opposite effect. In a survey of people sleeping rough carried out by Crisis, 56% said that enforcement measures such as the Vagrancy Act contributed to their feeling ashamed of being homeless, and 25% said that following an enforcement intervention their alcohol consumption increased. What does that say about the effect of the Act on the human level?

Tenant Fees Bill

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 5th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am pleased that the Government have finally accepted the need to ban tenant fees, for which my party has called for for no fewer than five years—I have personally campaigned for the ban for four years. I support the Labour Front-Bench amendments, because the Bill does not go far enough. We need further specification of the fee regime to make it more user-friendly, and we need to increase penalties for those landlords and letting agencies that flout the new legislation.

Few places in the country are in more need of this legislation than Oxford. Only 39% of people in the city own their own home or have shared ownership—that is well below the national average. Nearly half—49%—rent privately, and that figure has risen by more than a fifth since 2001. Private renting is not just a stopgap in the city; it is the only option for huge numbers of people.

The cost of setting up and maintaining a tenancy in the private rented sector is a huge problem in the city. The sharpest end of that is seen with the exponential growth in rough sleeping in Oxford. On some nights in the 2000s, nobody would be recorded as sleeping on the street, but nowadays having 60 people rough sleeping is the new normal. That is relevant to this debate because the core reason why people in Oxford become homeless has changed. It used to be relationship or family breakdown, but that is no longer the case. The key reason for homelessness now is landlords ceasing tenancies, often because of non-payment of fees.

There are many excellent landlords and letting agents in Oxford, and I find some of the mischaracterisations of the Opposition’s approach in this area bizarre. We all know excellent landlords and letting agents in our constituencies, but a small number bring the rest of the sector down and pollute its reputation, because they do not act in a responsible manner. A significant proportion of my postbag is taken up with tenants who have been asked for unreasonable fees, as well as people who are simply unable even to rent. In fact, I have a meeting in a couple of days with someone who is trying to move into Oxford but cannot afford the different costs associated with getting into a tenancy, and that is even with the private rented sector deposit guarantee scheme operated by the local authority. People are not able to move into Oxford’s private rented sector anymore.

Labour’s amendments would ensure that the new regime that the Bill will rightly introduce would be sufficiently watertight. I welcome some of the changes that the Minister specified, but we need the fee regime to be upfront in the manner specified by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby. We need a user-friendly regime that tenants can easily understand, and that is not presently the case under the Bill.

We also need to make sure that the fees are sufficient. Oxford has one of the strictest regulatory regimes for landlords, operated by the local authority. Many landlords support it because they see that it squeezes out the rogue operators, and that it has removed many of the most unsafe and unhealthy properties from the housing market in Oxford. The regime pays for itself, and it is important that the regime under the Bill pays for itself, too. That means that those fees have to be sufficient. We have already had a lot of discussion about the cuts that have been made to trading standards, but it might also be helpful to look at how those fees—the Minister asserted that they would be sufficiently deterrent—compare with some of the profits obtained by landlords in areas such as my own.

The average property rent in Oxford is currently £1,919 per calendar month, so £5,000 is very obviously less than three months’ rent—we can all do the maths. Now, I appreciate that not all that rent will be profit, because of course there are associated costs. However, estate agents encouraging people to come into the buy-to-let market in my city inform those people that they will have an average annual return on their investment of 18%. When we talk about whether a fee is deterrent and whether a £5,000 fine is sufficient, we should reflect on that figure.

Comments have been made about the role of central Government and local authorities. Yes, it is absolutely right, as the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) said, that there are local authorities that do not fulfil their responsibilities. There are others that want to go further but have been able to do so only at the behest of central Government. Please can we get to a situation in which local authorities that want to have more stringent regimes do not have to wait to get the okay from central Government? We need more local control.

[Bob Blackman]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) and the passionate view of her constituents. May I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?

In the absence of the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, I had the honour of chairing the Select Committee pre-inquiry into this legislation. We looked at a lot of the evidence that is now coming forward. I am delighted that the Minister has seen fit to make some changes during the passage of the Bill and to accept many of the Select Committee’s recommendations.

The hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) raised the matter of how many weeks’ rent a deposit should be. It is a shame that she has not tabled an amendment to that issue on Report, because I think several Conservative Members would feel very sympathetic towards restoring what the Select Committee recommended, which was a compromise. There was an argument for four weeks and an argument for six weeks, and we took the view that five weeks was the appropriate compromise for two reasons. First, if the limit is four weeks’ rent, there is a risk that the tenant will just refuse to pay the last month’s rent at the end of a tenancy. Secondly, a deposit of six weeks’ rent would almost certainly become the norm for most landlords, and would therefore be inflationary on the amount of deposit that would be charged.

I gently remind the Minister that in the last Budget the Chancellor allocated some £20 million towards a national rental deposit scheme, following representations from me and several other colleagues to set one up. The Department has not yet set up that scheme, but by saying that the limit will now be six weeks, instead of four or five, the Minister is going to reduce straightaway the number of families that can be assisted under the national rental deposit scheme when the Department finally does bring it forward. I ask him to look at this figure again, because it will limit the number of people who could be assisted through this programme.

On the issue of enforcement, I welcome the changes proposed by the Minister. Many of the changes, which are very clear, go above and beyond those proposed by the Opposition. Having looked at the evidence in relation to this legislation, many of us will share concerns about the difference between what I would classify as true costs, and charges. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), the key question is, who does the letting agent work for? The letting agent works for the landlord, not the tenant. It is the responsibility of the letting agent to acquire tenants on behalf of their employer—namely, the landlord—and therefore there should not be two charges incurred. The letting agent should charge the landlord for their fees, not charge the tenant for acquiring.

However, there are costs associated with acquiring a tenant—for example, when there is a requirement for a credit check. If a prospective tenant were to fail that test, there is a cost that someone has to collect. If an applicant makes a request through a letting agent and a credit check is then undertaken that is failed by the prospective tenant, it is reasonable that the cost should be passed on to that individual, particularly if they were going to knowingly fail the credit check in the first place. That is an example of a true cost as opposed to a fee charge. My hon. Friend has set out a set of areas and then a limit on the charges that a letting agent may charge a tenant. I trust that he will not press his amendment to a vote, because that goes completely against the spirit of this Bill and what we are proposing.

Building Regulations and Fire Safety

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

My hon. Friend makes some powerful and important points about the nature of a system, the external cladding, how that fits within certain other structures and systems and what that actually means. That is why it is right that we look at the consultation in that way. He points to important recommendations that Dame Judith makes. Equally, she has made clear statements about what system products can and cannot be used for, how they should be developed and their use made essential. When we look at the report, both in terms of its specificity and broad nature, it points to significant change. As he rightly says, I want to consult on combustibility and get on with this.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Fire safety regulations were wrongly covered by the one in, two out statement of new regulation. Will the Secretary of State commit today to excluding fire safety regulations from the statement’s successor, the business impact target, which is currently being devised for this Parliament?

Housing and Homes

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)]

I wonder how many of us here have experienced living in a home that is not fit for purpose and its damaging impact on a person’s physical and mental health. How many of us here have had to struggle to scrape together agency fees, find a deposit to put down on a rental property and find the first month’s rent, while still paying all the other basic bills, paying for essentials for the family and dealing with the added constant pressure of thinking about how ever to come out of the cycle of renting rather than owning a property? Countless times, well-meaning people have advised me, as a non-homeowner, that renting is throwing money away and that I really ought to save for a deposit on my own property. I think I can speak for most private renters when I say that, of course, that is everyone’s preferred route, but it is increasingly unlikely to happen because of the cost of living compared with income.

People who rent are faced with significant up-front costs and often very short tenures, and they have to pay more fees and find large deposits every time they move. Young people in particular have to move more often and, in England, the length of a let is so short that they face those up-front costs time and again.

Then there is the real problem of what the rented property is like. A home should not damage someone’s health, but we know that housing conditions can affect a resident’s health and wellbeing in the most appalling ways. Housing conditions such as cold and damp can affect health, as can factors such as the accessibility of the home. One estimate put the cost of poor housing to the NHS at £1.4 billion a year in England. With a growing private rented sector in England and Wales, that cost is likely to increase.

Do not get me wrong: several million people live relatively happily in rented homes, but a substantial minority do not. Some 756,000 households live in privately rented properties that are likely to cause residents to need medical attention.

Since becoming an MP, I have witnessed at first hand the poor conditions that some people are living in. In the worst properties, you can smell the problems before you see them. Damp and cold have a distinctive smell. Working taxpayers in my constituency are paying private landlords for families to live in homes where the state of disrepair is jaw dropping: cupboards lined with black mould; broken and dangerous appliances—it is simply not good enough.

I want to speak briefly about homelessness. It is important to recognise that the rise in homelessness can be traced directly to decisions that the Tories have taken since 2010, despite their keenness to ignore and deny that. There have been 13 separate cuts to housing benefit since 2010, including the bedroom tax and breaking the link between private rented sector housing benefit and private rent. In addition, the National Audit Office has revealed that vital funding for homelessness services has fallen by 69% since 2010.

I am of the opinion that a home is a right, that a home should be comfortable and in no way damage a person’s health, and that people should be able to stay in the area where they were born if they want to do that.

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

When my hon. Friend says that housing is a right and particularly that it is a right not to live in damp housing, does she agree that, thanks to the efforts of a Labour Member, tenants can now take their landlord to court, but they need legal support to do that?

[Laura Smith]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes a very good point.

I am of the opinion that someone should be able to aspire to buy a property; that good-quality council housing should be available to those who require it; and that those who rent out properties have an obligation to look after them and the welfare of those they are making money out of. Finally, I am of the opinion that the only way that the housing and homelessness crisis in this country can be solved is by getting rid of this out-of-touch Conservative Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Oxford is now the least affordable place in Britain to buy a home, with the average home costing 16 times average salaries. Rents have rocketed, and we now have up to 60 people rough sleeping on our streets of a night. That has happened despite huge local efforts to improve the situation.

At least half of new developments in Oxford must be affordable housing, of which 80% must be at social rents. We have one of the strictest regimes in the country for landlord registration. The council is establishing a new local housing company and is investing to ensure that our council homes are of a decent standard, and we have retained full council tax relief for low-income families, despite Government cuts.

Even with that local effort, rents and purchase prices are massively out of reach for many. The lack of affordable rental properties, as well as three other factors, is fuelling our rough-sleeping crisis. The hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) referred to this, and my estimation of the other factors driving this has not been plucked out of the air; it comes from my discussions with professionals, many of them former rough sleepers, who know what is driving the massive increase in Oxford from a time when on some evenings we would have not a single person sleeping rough. Now up to 60 people sleep on our streets on some evenings. The three factors that have driven that, in addition to the lack of affordable housing, are: benefit cuts and freezes; cuts to hostel funding by our county council, as a result of central Government cuts; and cuts to support services in mental health and in addiction services.

Despite that, we are trying to do what we can as a city to improve the situation: we have 180 beds now for rough sleepers in Oxford, with more coming next year; we have a new specialist hostel being set up in Cowley; and we had innovative joint working between our churches and our rough sleeping services over the winter to try to unlock additional places. However, all of that has been against the grain of wrong-headed Government policies, which are stopping my city from being a city for everyone, which it always has been until now. It is becoming a place where people can get on and be secure only if they are wealthy, particularly if they have housing wealth.

It is estimated that another 25,000 homes need to be built by 2031 to keep up with demand in my city. That is an incredibly tall order, given the green belt around Oxford, which is no longer suited to our population’s needs. The Secretary of State suggested that the response was just to build on brownfield land or to build up, but there is not a lot of brownfield left in my city. Although we are increasing the density of housing in my city, I would like Members who have children to reflect on whether we have gardens for our homes and whether anyone here lives in a highly dense area, for example, a tower block, with their children and without a garden. There may well be, but I do not imagine there are very many Members who do, and if it is good enough for us, it should be good enough for our constituents and we should provide them with a decent place to live, particularly for their families.

Meeting current demand is also unachievable given the woefully low levels of public investment in housing, which was described ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). That is compounded by foolish policies such as the changes to right to buy, which have made it harder for councils to build and, thus, further pushed up private rents.

The Secretary of State is no longer here, but I wish to finish my speech by inviting him to come to my city so that he can talk to those families in need. He will be able to talk to the overcrowded families—those whose children are sharing tiny bedrooms—and to those people sleeping on the streets to find out from them what needs to change.