Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Regional Growth and Local Government (Luke Hall)]

We have so far allocated over £9 billion directly to councils since the start of the pandemic and local authorities are expected to receive over £3 billion of additional support in 2021-22, responding both to expenditure pressures and loss of income. This takes the total support that we have committed to councils in England to tackle the impacts of covid-19 to over £12 billion.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

On 11 November, I and other representatives from Sheffield met the Minister to express concern that the loss of income to leisure centres in Sheffield was not being refunded to the council because the centres are managed by an arm’s length trust. I understand now from the council that the Government have recognised that the extra expenditure given from the council to the leisure trust to compensate for loss of income has been refunded —at least significantly—by the Government. I thank the Minister for that and for the help that he has given. Unfortunately, locally the Lib Dems have tried to claim that some of this money has gone from the council to the trust not to fund services in Sheffield, but to fund leisure centres in Scarborough. Will the Minister reassure me and residents in Sheffield that the money that he has given to Sheffield City Council has gone properly to fund services in Sheffield and nowhere else, and indeed, as the chair of the trust has confirmed, that all the money given to the trust by Sheffield City Council is funding leisure centres in Sheffield and nowhere else?

[Luke Hall]

I thank the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee for that question. I was grateful to meet him and Julie Dore last year, and I know how important this matter is to the hon. Gentleman and his community in Sheffield. We have provided councils with a range of support for covid pressures on local leisure services, including unring-fenced grants, income compensation and the specific national leisure recovery fund. In all cases, Sheffield will comply with the funding conditions. My expectation would be that all that funding should be used locally to support local services in Sheffield and—he is absolutely right—not be transferred to other areas.

Liverpool City Council

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. We asked a lot of local councils, and we will do so once again as we come out of the pandemic. We want them to be regenerating town and city centres and investing in new housing, but we want them to do so carefully and not to invest in risky investments or transfer toxic assets from the private sector to the public sector. We have taken action as a Government through reforming the Public Works Loan Board. We are providing further guidance to local councils, including through the work of the report we commissioned from Sir Tony Redmond, to ensure that the sector improves the way it handles this situation. The allegations made against Liverpool City Council are of a different magnitude to the ones that we have seen in other parts of the country, so I do not want to draw direct comparisons, but there is more work to be done with some other local authorities as well.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

This is clearly a very serious situation. It is obviously a very major step to take powers away from elected representatives, so I really appreciate and accept the proportionate and correct response from the Secretary of State, as well as from the shadow Secretary of State. I also appreciate the Secretary of State’s comments about the many hard-working staff in Liverpool, including the chief executive, who bear no blame for this crisis, and his comments about the generally excellent performance of local government as a whole. The Secretary of State has set out very clearly his list of requirements from the city council and by when he expects them to be met. How will monitoring against these requirements be undertaken and how will Parliament be updated about them? Of course it goes without saying that if there is anything the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee can do to assist in that process, we stand ready to do so.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Committee. I would be happy to work with him should he require any further information or wish to discuss this matter further. If we go ahead with the proposal that I have made today, then the commissioners, once appointed, would report to me on a six-monthly basis and I would be happy to keep the House informed of the information they provide to me. We will ensure that there is an improvement plan in place for the city that is produced by the newly elected Mayor and their cabinet and supported by Liverpool City Council, but advised and guided by the commissioners. Then it will be absolutely essential that that plan is delivered. It will be for all of us in this House, and particularly for those Members of Parliament representing parts of Liverpool, to hold the council to account for the successful delivery of the plan. Our objective is to restore public confidence in the council as quickly as possible so that residents can have confidence that they have a well-functioning council in all respects, and so that all the legitimate businesses, developers and people wishing to contract with the council have complete confidence that Liverpool is a city open for business and they can work to drive up the city’s prosperity as we come out of the pandemic.

Fire Safety Bill

Clive Betts Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 22nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

There is not the time to say what the Government have done for leaseholders. The Fire Safety Bill, in the form the Government want to return it to, if they get the House to reject the Lords amendments, would place an automatic, unchallengeable financial burden on residential leaseholders in building safety remediation costs, even in circumstances where a lease may have excluded such an obligation. I refer the Minister, if he has time, to the article by Martina Lees in The Sunday Times “Home” section about some of the building costs that are not justified.

The bishops’ amendments are intended to protect leaseholders from being solely responsible for the costs. The Bill strengthens the landlords’ and freeholders’ legal rights over leaseholders. The amendments provide for more balanced liability for costs. These Lords amendments should not be overturned. The alternative, which the Government are asking us to agree, wrongly and disproportionately disadvantages innocent leaseholders. Many are unable to pay, and they are frightened.

This is a Home Office Bill, and the Home Secretary gave this as her reason for rejecting previous Lords amendment 4:

“Because the issue of remediation costs is too complex to be dealt with in the manner proposed.”

I say, and I think people on both sides agree—and probably the Minister does so privately—that what is being proposed cannot be supported. It is too simple: it loads costs on leaseholders, who are the only people who cannot be responsible for putting right a building that they do not own and will never own, and of which in legal terms they are only the tenants.

I ask the Minister to ask his colleagues to let him agree to accepting these Lords amendments, and to let the leaseholders free.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

I support the Lords in the message it has sent back. The Lords is proposing very important changes to the Government’s position. First, not just leaseholders but tenants should not have to pay. For example, in a block where the social housing provider is the freeholder, according to the Government’s proposals, leaseholders would not have to pay, but social housing tenants—if it is not ACM cladding that is being removed—would have to pay through their rents for the removal of cladding. That tenants have to pay and leaseholders do not simply cannot be right.

We are not quite sure what costs leaseholders in blocks under 18 metres will face, because there is still an awful lot of vagueness and lack of clarity about what the Government’s loan scheme will actually mean. When the Minister for Building Safety and Communities came to our Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee recently, he said that leaseholders would not be responsible for paying the loan, but neither would freeholders; the charge would be on the building. A building cannot be legally responsible for a charge on a loan placed on it. Some organisation or some individual has to be responsible. Is it the freeholder? Is it the leaseholder? There is an awful lot of unclarity about that, and about how we limit leaseholders’ charges to £50 a month. There is a great deal of confusion. The Government are still working that through, so as things stand there cannot be an absolute assurance that leaseholders will not have to pay on blocks of under 18 metres.

Finally, there are issues other than cladding. It is not just that cladding will have to be taken off; very often, the cost of doing other fire safety work on blocks of flats is greater. Again, we were told that if the other work is associated with the removal of cladding, it will be covered by the Government’s financial help. If insulation is a composite part of a building’s structure along with the cladding, presumably it can be removed, as it is associated with the cladding. However, if the insulation is completely separate and distinct from the cladding, the Government funding might pay for the cladding removal but not the insulation removal. Very often, leaseholders simply cannot afford to pay for that, but the Government will not allow any of their funding to go ahead unless the leaseholders can find the additional costs.

None of those positions is acceptable. I support a position where neither leaseholders nor tenants are asked to pay to make their buildings fire-safe.

Levelling Up

Clive Betts Excerpts

Tuesday 16th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I am very much a fan of the “can I have some more?” approach, so I think it is completely appropriate that he should ask for more funding, even though, as he says, he has already secured nearly £24 million. I will convey his invite to the Secretary of State and the Minister for Regional Growth and Local Government, and I have no doubt that both or either of them will soon be up to visit.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

May I say to the Minister that it is one thing to announce lots of policies and lots of money, but another to make sure the policies and the spending are successful in delivering the achievements that he obviously want so make? What indicators are going to be used to demonstrate the success of levelling up? Are the Government going to set targets so that we can all decide at the end of this Parliament whether those indicators have been achieved? If he cannot set them out for us today, I would be more than happy if he wanted to put that list in the House of Commons Library so that we can judge them in due course.

[Eddie Hughes]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. With regard to the Government providing funding and the impact or success of it, I understand that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has allocated more than £40 million to the Sheffield city region through the brownfield fund, so it will be up to local people there to determine whether that money has been spent wisely. I hope he will contribute to ensuring that it is. The criteria for allocations of the funding, or applying for the funding, include

“need for economic recovery and growth, need for improved transport connectivity and need for regeneration.”

I know that this is not quite what he asked, but I suggest to him that if we are going to determine the success of these projects, the British electorate will probably do that at the next general election. I look forward to seeing how that turns out.

Rough Sleeping

Clive Betts Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I praise the local councils in my hon. Friend’s area, such as Exeter, for the good work that they have done, and East Devon District Council; we have seen the snapshot fall to a decrease there as well. Significant progress is being made in all parts of the country. He is absolutely right that we now need to ensure that those individuals we have helped off the streets can be moved into better accommodation. We have made very good progress in that respect, despite all the challenges of the year. Over 26,000 people who were brought in off the streets into emergency accommodation are already in more secure accommodation. That is quite an achievement, considering the constraints on capacity in local authorities. There are now a further group of individuals—currently around 11,000—that we have to ensure make the same transition, and that is the focus for my Department and those local councils in the months ahead.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

I thank the Secretary of State for the statement. Looking back to last March, it is undeniable that the Everyone In initiative was a success, and I congratulate the councils, the charities, the Government and of course Dame Louise Casey. It was successful because it did precisely what it said: everyone, without exception, was taken off the streets and found accommodation. Does “Everyone In” still mean that while there is a public health emergency, councils have the right and the responsibility to house everyone, including those with no recourse to public funds? Recently, local authorities have told the Select Committee that there is a great deal of confusion about their legal position. Does the Secretary of State accept that if those with no recourse to public funds are not housed, “Everyone In” will have to be renamed, “Some people in, and others left outside”? Surely that cannot be acceptable.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee. In the light of the health emergency we were in, and that in many respects we remain in today, we took the decision to advise local councils that although the law remains unchanged with respect to “no recourse to public funds”, they should take into account the health emergency, and more recently the winter weather we have been experiencing, and they should offer a compassionate response to people regardless of their circumstances or their country of origin. That is what local councils have done. Thousands of individuals who do not have recourse to public funds have been supported through the Everyone In programme. I have met some of them—just a week ago, I was with Westminster City Council in Bayswater, where I met members of the public who had been supported into safe accommodation, some of whom did not have recourse to public funds.

As we leave the health emergency, thanks to the success we are making of the vaccine programme, the law will remain unchanged. It is important that we have a robust immigration policy, as other countries have. I am working closely with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to establish how we can use our newfound powers as we leave the European Union to create an immigration policy that does not attract individuals to this country, but that, if people do come here and find themselves in the precarious position of living on the streets, helps them in a compassionate way to return to their home country and to rebuild their lives there.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

What progress he has made on the design of the loan scheme to fund the removal of cladding on buildings under 18 metres in height.

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

Hundreds of thousands of leaseholders will be protected from the cost of replacing unsafe cladding. Funding will be targeted at the highest-risk buildings in line with long-standing independent expert advice and evidence, while lower-rise buildings with a lower risk profile will gain new protection from the costs of cladding removal through the long-term, low-interest, Government-backed finance scheme through which leaseholders will pay no more than £50 per month. We will publish more details on how the scheme will work as soon as we are in a position to do so.

[Mr Betts [V]]

I thank the Minister for his answer; I look forward to more details. In the meantime, will he confirm that the loan will be a charge on the freeholder, that there will be no addition to the debt of any individual leaseholder, and that it will not affect the valuation of leasehold properties? On the money that is to be raised from the levy and financial contributions, will that be in addition to the £3.5 billion that the Government have announced, or will it go to offset the amount of the £3.5 billion that the Government will have to find?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am obliged to the Chairman of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee for his question. We certainly do not wish for any costs to follow the leaseholder through their life, so he is certainly right to assume that the charge will be applied to the building and not to the leaseholder and that, therefore, their credit rating will not be affected by it. He also asked about how the funding mechanism will work. The Chancellor will say more about that at the Budget, so I do not think I should say any more at this point, but we certainly want to ensure that leaseholders are appropriately and properly protected from unforeseen and unfair costs.

Building Safety

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I praise my hon. Friend, who has been a fantastic Member of Parliament for Kensington since she was elected and has raised with me this and other issues arising out of the Grenfell tragedy almost every week—in fact, we meet every week to discuss these issues.

My hon. Friend is right to say that this is a very substantial intervention. We have already made £1.6 billion available, and we estimate that it will require another £3.5 billion to complete the remediation of unsafe cladding on buildings over 18 metres and to make good on the promise we have made today to leaseholders. In addition to that, we will bring forward the financing scheme, the details of which, as I said, will be published shortly, but it is a very generous scheme and there is a significant cost to the taxpayer in ensuring that the £50 cap gives that added level of protection and reassurance to leaseholders.

The total intervention that we are making today is, as my hon. Friend says, one of many, many billions of pounds. That is a difficult judgment, which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have made with me, but we believe this is a fair and generous settlement to help everybody to move forwards.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

On behalf of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, I thank the Secretary for his statement and welcome it—as far as it goes, because in terms of the Select Committee recommendations, it only goes so far. I invite him to come back to the Select Committee to discuss the issues in more detail shortly after the recess. First, immediately, will he confirm that as a result of the loan scheme, no leaseholder will be placed in negative equity? Secondly, has he done any assessment of the total amount of additional non-cladding costs to deal with building safety that will fall on leaseholders? Finally, will he confirm that there is no help in his statement for councils and housing associations, and that as a result, to carry out essential safety work, they are going to have to put up rents, cut maintenance or cut the number of affordable homes that they can build?

[Robert Jenrick]

I thank the hon. Gentleman and the members of the Select Committee for their expert advice on this issue over a number of years, and to me personally as Secretary of State. I would of course be delighted to come before the Committee to discuss this issue further in the near future.

The hon. Gentleman says that this announcement does not go as far as he would have liked. I appreciate that sentiment, and no doubt there will be leaseholders watching today who would wish to go even further, but this is a very significant intervention—we do have to keep coming back to that fact. Broadly speaking, English property rights are based on caveat emptor—buyer beware—and the contents of the leases, contracts, warranties and insurance policies that we as homeowners sign. What we are doing today is stepping in in a way that Governments have not done in the past—that they have not done when people’s homes have been flooded or subject to subsidence or other unforeseen and incredibly difficult and challenging issues. We have chosen to do this because we have immense sympathy for the leaseholders affected and, as a matter of basic public safety, we have to get these unsafe materials off buildings as quickly as possible. I think this is the right judgment and the right balance to strike between the interests of the leaseholder and those of the broader taxpayer, but I would be delighted to come before the hon. Gentleman’s Committee to discuss this issue in more detail soon.

Local Government Finance (England)

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I declare an interest as I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I also echo the thanks that the Secretary of State and shadow Secretary of State have rightly given to local authorities, councillors, and their staff for the incredible work they have done for our communities in the past 12 months. Whether that work was particular to covid-related issues, or whether it involved social care, public health, environmental services, paying business grants, or keeping day-to-day essential services such as refuse collection going, they have been a credit to our communities and we should thank them for their work.

Recently, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee held hearings into local government finance, and we heard from Councillor James Jamieson, chair of the LGA, and Councillor Richard Watts, chair of the LGA resources board, which showed how the LGA works cross-party. They both gave us the same message: a recognition of the help that the Government have given to councils to meet the costs of the covid crisis, but also a recognition that those costs, particularly the loss of revenue that has affected many councils in different ways, have not been fully compensated. They estimated a gap of around £2.6 billion between the money that councils spent and have not received in income, and what the Government have compensated them for.

It is not often that I agree with the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), but he referred to the problems faced by some councils that do not run their leisure services directly, and that is equally true of Sheffield. Ours is run by an arm’s length trust, and because the losses of the trust are paid for by the council, with the council paying more than £12 million to keep our leisure services sustainable, that is not regarded as a loss of council income but a council cost—extra expenditure—and has not been compensated for in the same way. There is an unfairness there that affects many authorities in the country, and it needs addressing.

The Government’s scheme to compensate councils for losses in council tax and business rate collection is welcome, but it is only for 75% of the losses. That needs to be monitored, because we can all see that, as the economy hits rocky times in the next 12 months and more people lose their jobs and more businesses are liquidated, councils will need extra support. We do not know what the ongoing costs of covid will be or how long the lockdown will extend for, so we still cannot estimate all the pressures on councils for the next financial year. I hope the Government will retain a degree of flexibility about any further support that councils may need in the next 12 months.

Of course, the costs of covid come on top of a very precarious situation for local government finance as a whole and for many local councils in particular. Estimates from the LGA and others show about a £5 billion gap before covid hit, due to councils facing the biggest cuts of any part of the public sector since 2010 and the rising costs of social care. Those pressures have led to really heavy cuts to important services such as road safety, bus services, libraries, street cleaning and many others.

The position is unsustainable. Rob Whiteman, the chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, told the Select Committee the other day that he knew of 12 authorities that have had to go to Government to ask for extra capitalisation of revenue expenditure, to ensure that their books can balance. Some of those councils may have particular problems, some may have created particular problems and others may be badly hit by covid, but in the end, it reflects a long-term problem for councils. As Rob Whiteman said, those 12 councils are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Many other councils could be entering very similar grounds for having to come to the Government for extra help in the near term, as their position substantially worsens. That is not a sustainable position for the long term.

Councillor Jamieson and Councillor Watts both said that when looking to the future of local government finance, we simply have to sort out the funding of social care. The 4.6% extra spending for councils next year is welcome, but it is clear that the costs of adult social care and children’s social care, rising above inflation in the future, cannot continue to be funded by council tax and business rates. It is simply not sustainable, so finding another way forward to fund social care is essential. I draw the Secretary of State’s attention again to the joint Select Committee report published nearly four years ago, which the Government still have not responded to. In that report, we put forward a social care premium as a solution, similar to arrangements that have worked for the long term in Germany and Japan. The Government have not yet come back to us. My Select Committee may look at this issue again, because until we sort out the problem of social care funding, the rest of local government finance will always remain challenged and not properly addressed.

The Local Government Association emphasised again that it understands, as does the Select Committee, precisely why the Government could only give a one-year settlement this year. However, as well as asking the Government to sort out the long-term funding of social care, we want to say as strongly as we can to them that local government must have a four-year settlement as soon as possible, by which we mean for the financial year from 2022 onwards. That will give local government the certainty to be able to plan ahead in a way that makes the best use of the resources available to it and gives the best value for money for its constituents.

Unsafe Cladding: Protecting Tenants and Leaseholders

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

I begin by thanking the Father of the House for his very kind comments. Certainly, we have worked together on these issues. I congratulate all the members of the Select Committee as well. We have looked at the issue of building safety, particularly cladding, on a number of occasions, and we have produced a number of reports, all of them unanimously. It is to the credit of all members of the Committee—I notice that the next speaker will be the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who is an important member of the Select Committee—that we have done so on a cross-party basis.

I will quote one or two of our very clear recommendations. In 2019, we said that the Government should provide funding to remove

“any form of combustible cladding…from any high-rise or high-risk building”,

regardless of height. In our 2020 report, we recommended:

“The Building Safety Fund will need to be increased to address all fire safety defects in every high-risk residential building—potentially costing up to £15 billion.”

Then we did pre-legislative scrutiny of the Building Safety Bill, and we said:

“The Government must recommit to the principle that leaseholders should not pay anything towards the cost of remediating historical building safety defects”.

We have been very clear on all those matters: leaseholders should not pay. They should not pay some unidentified, affordable amount or fair amount, and neither should we get into a position of offering them loans to pay off the debts, because what do loans do but put leaseholders in more debt? At the same time, loans would put many of them into negative equity.

The leaseholder should not pay, and we know that developers and others eventually should be held accountable, but as the Father of the House has just explained, so many potential organisations could be held accountable and the legal arguments will go on and on. Many of the developers have gone out of business and do not exist anymore. Yes, we should pursue them, but in the meantime, the Government have to stand up and commit far more funding than is in the Building Safety Bill, which simply does not cover anything like the £15 billion of potential costs. Eventually there might need to be an industrial levy to pay part of it, and it is for the Government to come forward with recommendations, if they so choose.

The issue is not just about high-rise buildings over six storeys—I think the Minister has accepted that point. It is about all buildings where people could be at risk, including residential homes, care homes and so on. It is also not just about cladding, but about all potential fire risks in buildings, such as dangerous balconies, faulty fire doors, missing firebreaks and faulty installation —all the things together that need putting right to make the buildings that people live in safe.

Finally, we talk about numbers, but in the end behind all these numbers are individuals and families living in potentially dangerous buildings with debts around their neck that they cannot afford to pay, unable to sell their homes if they so wish. We owe it to them to get action on this issue immediately.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Betts Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Let us head to the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, in Yorkshire, Clive Betts.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

Thank you, Mr Speaker—happy new year to you. I am sure it would be remiss of me if I did not say that your local constituency football team have made rather a good start to this year.

In saying happy new year to the Minister as well, I am sure he would want it to be a happy new year for all leaseholders, but he did not really answer the question from the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). Even if a loan scheme were introduced to cover the costs of these defects, and even if it was a very low-interest scheme, that would still be a capital charge on properties—a capital charge that would be a considerable financial burden on leaseholders, would put many of them into negative equity, and would mean that their properties were unsaleable. Will the Minister accept that a loan scheme that puts an additional debt on leaseholders is not a fair way out of this problem and that he should instead look to the industry and to Government to cover the cost of putting these defects right?

[Christopher Pincher]

The Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right—we should look to developers and to building owners to remedy the defects in their buildings. We have made available to owners who are not able to remedy those defects quickly and effectively £1.6 billion in order to remedy those defects. As I said in my earlier answer, we do not want and we do not expect hard-pressed leaseholders to bear unfair costs of defects for which they are not responsible. That is why we are working quickly to bring forward a long-term solution to ensure that costs are met, that defects are remedied, and that the position that leaseholders find themselves in is remedied too.