Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Graham P Jones

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion)]

Few would now dispute that the Iraq invasion was the biggest foreign policy failure of recent times. The Chilcot report provides detailed confirmation that military intervention was by no means a last resort, and that all other avenues were not exhausted.

[Graham Jones (Hyndbura) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Caroline Lucas]

I will make a bit of progress and then I will.

Chilcot also showed that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the UK, and, crucially, that hindsight was not necessary to see those things. That seven-year Iraq inquiry, which cost £10 million of public money, also officially recorded detailed evidence of the vast discrepancy between the former Prime Minister’s public statements and his private correspondence. If we do nothing about that and take no steps towards accountability for it, it is unclear to me how we begin to restore faith in our political system.

Sir John Chilcot made it clear earlier this month that Tony Blair did long-term damage to trust in politics by presenting a case for the Iraq war that went beyond

“the facts of the case”.

Sir John told MPs he could “only imagine” how long it would take to repair that trust.

That need to restore trust in politics is a key reason why I support the motion. This should not be pursued as a personal or party political attack, and this should be reflected in our language and approach. This process must be based on the facts and the evidence.

Draft Onshore Hydraulic Fracturing (Protected Areas) Regulations 2015

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Graham P Jones

Tuesday 27th October 2015 General Committees

[Caroline Lucas]

Thank you, Mr Hanson, for allowing those not on the Committee to make short interventions. To be brief, I simply say that I very much agree with the analysis put forward by the hon. Member for Southampton, Test. The Government have made a spectacular U-turn and are undermining public trust even further by so doing.

Overall, the regulations fall far short of protecting our most precious wildlife sites and also our national parks and water resources. They also run contrary to the recommendations of the Environmental Audit Committee, of which I was a member in the previous Parliament.

The Minister will recall that that Committee carried out an in-depth inquiry into fracking and the unanimous view in that cross-party report was that there should be a moratorium on fracking. If there were not to be a moratorium, at the very least we made recommendations for the regulatory framework, including outright prohibition in protected and nationally important areas such as SSSIs, and in all watersource protection zones. The Minister is now, sadly, running against those recommendations.

I want to pick up on a point the Minister made in her concluding remarks. She said something that frankly beggars belief. She said that going ahead with fracking would help to meet carbon targets. Fracking represents a whole new fossil fuel industry, which will not displace coal because, by the time fracking comes on to our grid, coal will be off the grid. What it will displace are renewables.

There is real lack of understanding that fracking poses a risk to the shift that everybody says they want to a low carbon economy. Even if we had a perfect, generously resourced system of standards, regulation and monitoring—which we do not—fracking is not compatible with securing a safe and habitable climate for current and future generations.

[Graham Jones]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Caroline Lucas]

I will not because I have only two minutes. It is clear that globally we already have around five times more fossil fuel reserves than we can safely burn. The bottom line is that building this whole new fossil fuel industry is the very last thing the UK should be doing, especially if we are serious about securing a deal at the Paris climate talks.

The argument that shale gas is lower carbon than coal stacks up only if minimum methane emissions can be guaranteed. Recent studies suggest worrying rates of methane leakage from US shale operations. The inventor of the monitoring device routinely used by the industry warns that a fault in his invention means that historical estimates of leakage are severely underestimated. That means that fracked gas may not be better than coal in greenhouse gas emissions after all.

I can see that you want me to wind up, Mr Hanson, so let me simply repeat what John Ashton, the climate diplomat under the previous Labour Government, said:

“You can be in favour of fixing the climate, or you can be in favour of exploiting shale gas, but you cannot be in favour of both at the same time.”

Private Rented Sector

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Graham P Jones

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I also want to add my support to the many other hon. Members who have talked about the scandal of agents not allowing people on benefits to rent properties. That is absolutely despicable.

We need a national register of landlords so that we can better protect tenants. That would also be good for the landlords out there who are not ripping people off. There are good landlords, and their efforts are tainted by those rogue landlords who are using the housing crisis as a way to make a fast buck. A national register would also help us to implement the minimum energy efficiency standard for private rented homes, which is essential to protect our most vulnerable citizens.

Hon. Members will be aware of early-day motion 95, which reminds the House that the Energy Act 2011 placed a duty on the Government to introduce a minimum energy efficiency standard for the private rented sector by April 2018. The regulations have been significantly delayed, which is totally unacceptable and shows the lack of priority being given to this issue. Ministers must also ensure that the regulations are made clear and enforceable by specifying band E as the minimum standard in all cases and by keeping exemptions to an absolute minimum. People looking for somewhere to rent need to know who they can trust and to be guaranteed minimum standards to ensure that properties are of high quality, safe and efficient.

It must be made easier for families and individuals to get secure longer-term five-year and 10-year tenancies. The norm of short-term contracts leaves private rented sector tenants without security in their homes, and at risk of eviction and unfair rent increases. That volatility is particularly harmful for families with children, who often have to move schools as a result. Shelter has done some excellent research in this area. Longer-term renting could work better for both renters and landlords, as the latter could reduce void periods and expensive re-letting costs. It really is high time that the Government took steps to ensure that people can get five-year stable rental contracts, if that is what they want.

One local resident told me of her heartbreak at being given one month’s notice to leave the flat she had hoped to stay in for a few years, even though being given notice in that way was technically against the law. She had spent time planting strawberries in hanging baskets on the fire escape, re-grouting the old tiles in the bathroom and hanging pictures. She wanted that place to be her home, and I think she deserves better. That is why I have tabled an amendment to today’s motion to give good tenants the choice of a five-year stable rental contract as standard. Five years as standard is what Shelter and the campaign group Generation Rent are rightly calling for, and I share their view on that.

One of the reasons why the private rented sector is expanding and rents are soaring is the decimation of our social housing stock through the right-to-buy programme. Enormous, unjustified discounts and the failure to replace the stock that was flogged off cheap have a large part to play in our current housing crisis. To begin to make a dent in our long-term housing crisis we must address the lack of affordable homes, too. One of the biggest cuts in Government funding during this Parliament has been the 60% cut in funds for social housing, which has pushed even more people into expensive, insecure places in the private rented sector.

This is a problem caused by successive Governments, who have simply not built enough houses, particularly affordable ones. A recent House of Commons Library note shows a long-term steep decline in house building in England in the past 35 years. Nearly 307,000 homes were built across all tenures in England in 1969-70, but the number fell to just over 107,000 in 2012-13. There was a minor increase in housing association building over that period, although it amounted to less than 15,000 dwellings. What is most striking is that the steepest decline was in the building of council houses, which fell from 135,000 to 1,360 over the same period.

My amendment seeks to remedy this scandalous missed opportunity with a call to start building council homes again. Done well, council housing works. It gives affordability and security of tenure. In 1980, under the Thatcher right-to-buy legislation, council housing stock was decimated and we were left with the scandalous situation of landlords receiving huge pay-outs in housing benefit for properties that were sold off cheap at the taxpayers’ expense. I want a real central Government commitment to build council housing, so that individuals and families can stay in Brighton and Hove without being at the mercy of rip-off landlords, and so that they can put down roots and not be forced to move their children from school to school.

We need fully to lift the cap on local authority borrowing to allow councils to build new council houses. Councils are bound by prudential borrowing rules anyway, so the cap is unnecessary; it is just stifling the building of local authority homes. This measure needs to be bolstered by direct capital investment to allow for a mass programme of sustainable, warm council housing. We urgently need a commitment from the Government to replace all affordable homes lost through right-to-buy policies. Such a commitment was another candidate for inclusion in the housing Bill that was so conspicuously absent from this Government’s programme, which is in large part sleepwalking us towards the general election.

Updating our housing infrastructure and giving people a way out of the cripplingly expensive private rented sector could also be a win-win. No one is suggesting that that is a silver bullet, but if we lifted the restrictions and allowed councils to borrow to build homes, and if they started to build on the necessary scale, we could start to pull people out of housing emergency. We could stop the expensive and distressing knock-on problems that bad housing creates, while at the same time creating a major boost to the provision of skilled jobs.

Generation Rent is getting bigger and being squeezed harder. That is why I support the call for smart rent controls, which would mean that rents could not increase by more than the rate of inflation. I am also calling in my amendment for a living rent commission. Excellent work has been done by the living wage commission, albeit not under the initiative of the Government. The Government need to follow that lead and do some work to determine what a living rent would really look like. We must have an official benchmark for fair rent levels and, to get that, we need major official but independent research into what a living rent would be and how it could be achieved. A commission would look at whether there were ways to bring rent levels into line with the basic cost of living, and take into account the impact on, for example, landlords’ ability to pay their mortgages.

[Graham Jones]

Is the hon. Lady also suggesting that we should look at stock condition?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am indeed suggesting that we should look at stock condition as well.

A living rent commission could learn a lot from the living wage commission. It could set out how much a living rent might be, so that landlords could opt in, just as employers have opted into paying the living wage. More broadly, I would be interested to hear what other hon. Members thought about the need for a royal commission on housing, with a strong focus on the private rented sector. I do not advocate that lightly, and I know that royal commissions happen only rarely, but this is arguably an issue of such importance that such a move should be considered. Housing policy is central to health and well-being and to our economy. Sky-high rents are a barometer of housing policy failure, which is why we need a living rent commission.

[Graham Jones]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am sorry, but no. Other people are waiting to speak.

There is still time for Ministers to admit that they have got this badly wrong, and to act on solutions to our housing crisis that would help people trapped in the private rented sector, tackle health inequality and disadvantage, create skilled jobs and, crucially, provide stable tenancies at rents that people really can afford.

Energy Bill [Lords]

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Graham P Jones

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Graham Jones]

The hon. Lady mentioned hard-to-treat homes and solid-wall insulation. Is she saying that those who are able to pay should not benefit from the ECO?

[Caroline Lucas]

If money were no object, I would love to see hard-to-treat homes subsidised through the ECO, even for those who are able to pay. We are living in financially constrained times, however, and I am therefore suggesting that we focus all the money in the ECO, which should be increased, on low-income and vulnerable households, of which a subset would be those low-income and vulnerable households in properties that are hard to heat and therefore need solid-wall insulation.