Exempt Accommodation
Debate between Clive Betts and Chris Bryant
Mr Betts
I thank my hon. Friend for drawing the Committee’s attention to the issue, because he had had experience in his constituency, as he pointed out to us. He was the first Member who said, “You need to have a look at this. It is absolutely awful.” Unfortunately, he was absolutely correct about that. The idea of a fit and proper person test is interesting. We did not specifically address that as a Committee, but if we are going to have proper standards of accommodation and proper support on an ongoing basis, we need to ensure that the people doing that are legitimate people with legitimate objectives. He is absolutely right that if we are going to have standards, we need to enforce them. That is why local authorities need the powers and the resources, and why we need to bring all such properties within the HMO regulations, so that local authorities can send their health inspectors in to make sure that standards are kept and maintained.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Select Committee Chair is being his normal, moderate self, but what he is exposing is phenomenally scandalous and despicable activity by some people who are not just making a profit but profiteering from the misfortunes of other people and the taxpayer. Many of the most vulnerable people who are housed in exempt accommodation are people with acquired brain injuries, whether because they have been in a car crash and had a blow to the head, because of concussion in sport, or because of hypoxia. Can he ensure that the Select Committee feeds into the programme board that is looking at a national strategy for acquired brain injury? If we leave this part of the equation out, many vulnerable people will not get the support that they need to lead genuinely independent lives.
Mr Betts
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to identify a particular group of people who need support and proper accommodation, and who can easily be exploited. There are many groups in that situation, which is why we should not simply shut down accommodation; we need to make sure that sufficient supported accommodation of an appropriate standard to meet particular needs is provided for a whole range of different groups, including people with acquired brain injury. We will certainly feed that back, as he has suggested.
Leasehold Reform
Debate between Clive Betts and Chris Bryant
Mr Betts
On the first point, if a leaseholder at a tribunal asks at the beginning for a ruling that, if they win, costs cannot be passed on to the freeholder, the tribunal can so rule. The problem is that many leaseholders do not know about that requirement. The Government could do an awful lot immediately to publicise that.
Secondly, on service charges, we recommend that a standard format should be brought in, so that all leaseholders know what to expect and all information is given to them in a proper manner. The Government could publish guidance without having to wait for primary legislation. We hope that they will look at doing that very quickly.
On the Law Commission, I do not know how long it would take it to report, but the Government could make an immediate decision to ask it to produce a report. However, the Law Commission made it very clear to us that it currently does not have the resources in its budget to do that. It would need the Government to offer, and provide, sufficient funding.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The whole system of leasehold and ground rent is a racket, and it has gone on for centuries. It was invented by aristocrats who had stolen all the land from the monasteries in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a scandal that we, and successive generations of politicians, have continued to allow the thing to exist. Funnily enough, when it came to a moment when there was a dire shortage of housing, the house builders saw an opportunity. It is no wonder that we have ended up with the position we are in at the moment. Would it not just be simpler to scrap the whole system?
Mr Betts
I am tempted to say yes. What we said in the report was that we need to move to a whole new approach, where commonhold becomes the default option for flats, we abolish leasehold for houses, and if we put the sorts of restrictions on ground rents and permission fees that we have been talking about, there will not, ultimately, be any incentive for freeholders and that will drive it out of the market. I think the issue is twofold: stopping it on new properties and removing the incentive for freeholders, so their income streams, which are wrongly obtained now, will not be available in future.
House of Commons Financial Plan and Draft Estimates
Debate between Clive Betts and Chris Bryant(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Chris Bryant
I completely concur with my right hon. Friend, who has been one of the key people seeking to drive this forward, in his role as a Whip and given his responsibility for Opposition accommodation. He is fully aware of the problems there have been throughout the Palace. The new fire doors are absolutely hideous, but they are essential. I am sure that when we get around to restoration and renewal we will have a version of them that performs the same function, but is more in keeping with the building. Finally, we have allocated £3.3 million of the administration budget to the restoration and renewal customer and client team, which builds the occupation for R and R when it comes online.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, which are important to many hon. Members, are funded out of the resource aspect of the administration estimate, as is the History of Parliament Trust. We have tried to be as tough with each of those bodies as possible, to ensure that we are getting good value for money. The only comment I would make about the IPU and the CPA is that in many other Parliaments there is a foreign affairs department with a room to welcome guests from other Parliaments. It keeps a record of who has visited and where MPs have gone on visits. That is available to their foreign office. There is a kind of inventory of all the work that is being done on foreign affairs visits. That does not happen here.
We have a multiplicity of different Committees and all-party parliamentary groups, and all the rest of it. For example, I went to Colombia in September, courtesy of ABColombia. It would have been interesting to have seen which other Members had visited there over the last five years and good to have exchanged information with them before going. Keeping such records is not something that we do, but it is one of the things that we should look at for the future.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Other Parliaments often have friendship groups, as they call them, which are serviced by staff from their Parliament, so there is a continuity to the visits and a base in the Parliament where Members can be serviced, and information collected and retained. That simply does not happen in this country.
Chris Bryant
That is absolutely right. When—if—Brexit happens, it will be all the more important, in relation to other European countries, that Members of this House and the House of Lords will be seen as diplomats or ambassadors on behalf of Parliament. We need to garner the information, ideas and contacts that come through that in the national interest. I worry that we do not do that very well at the moment.
The capital elements of the administration estimate are quite significant. We are talking about £236.8 million. Some of the figures in the report that we have published are slightly different from the figures that we are talking about now, because this is an iterative process. In a sense, the reason for having this debate was to be able to inform those decisions as they go forward to the commission. The two largest elements of this relate to the major ongoing building projects. Of that, £117.4 million relates to the Strategic Estates projects. I think everybody on the Committee would say that we worry about the Strategic Estates. It is not just that the Elizabeth Tower started off at one price and ended up at a completely different price—incidentally, it ended up being a rather different project. With the stone courtyard project, the money we were allocating for all five courtyards has been taken up on one. I am sure that both the Labour party and Conservative party would have moaned about this, but we also decided to close the cloister—one of the most beautiful parts of the Palace—and move all the staff out more than 18 months ago, yet work has still not started on it, even though it desperately needs work.
Chris Bryant
Yes; I never want to have the debate on whether we should put 3p or 5p on the price of a cup of tea ever again.
Chris Bryant
I am led by the Committee. It is a serious point that we sometimes obsess about small amounts of money, but, for example, it looks as if the fire safety budget will have gone from £90 million to £160 million, and it is perfectly legitimate to ask who made that decision and at what point a decision was made by a Committee of the House or by the accounting officer. If we cannot match responsibility and accountability, there is a real danger that financial mistakes will be made and significant amounts of money will go in the wrong direction.
I have already made the point, but I want to labour it, that we are too bound by Government pay scales. That has made it difficult to pay the right price to get the job done in one of the most complicated and difficult buildings and in the context of the most complicated and difficult political decision-making processes. Many staff who work here are admirable—they dedicate themselves to their task as much as any Member of Parliament and work many hours beyond what they are required to do—but, all too often, we end up bringing in experts on consultancy rates and paying more than we need to simply because we are trying to meet the Treasury’s rules. That is a mistake.
I worry that the building swamps the work financially. We are talking about spending dramatic amounts of money on the building, but what is really important here is the scrutiny work that we do, the public coming to understand how we do our democratic business and the engagement with the public. There are major projects that should be slanted much more towards the public.
A classic instance is that, of late, people have regularly queued for an hour or two hours—often standing in the pouring rain—to get into the building to watch democracy in action. We simply have to do better on such projects. I have heard lots of different explanations. Sometimes I am told that it is because one of the security arches is not working, or that people are working to rule because they are fed up with decisions that have been made elsewhere in the Palace—who knows? All I know is that the public feel they are getting a pretty rum deal. They are often late for meetings that they are coming to in Parliament. This should be an open place, not one that is almost impossible to get into.
Chris Bryant
No, not quite. Anyway, I am grateful.
I will respond to some of the earlier comments about R&R, or whether we should value this building or go off to a park in Milton Keynes—people always choose Milton Keynes. The problem with the argument for moving out of here and going somewhere else entirely is that because our system has the Executive within the Parliament we would effectively have to take the whole of Government with us as well.
I know that people argue, as I have myself sometimes, that Britain is far too London-centric, and that too much of the economy is focused on London and the south-east. However, the truth is that moving the whole of Government out of London to some other place, building some massive building, buying an enormous site and then providing accommodation for all those people would be more expensive than staying here, not least because this is a world heritage site. It is one of the most recognisable buildings in the world. We would still have to maintain it, even if we were going to hand it over to someone else anyway.
There would therefore be no cost saving. There may be political arguments, which I do not share, about the Union from the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), and about other elements. However, in the end I do not think that there is any real alternative that is financially advantageous to the taxpayer that involves moving us out of the Palace in the long run. The hon. Gentleman also said that we will build a Chamber exactly like the one we have at present. There may be many good reasons for changing the way in which we do our business, but restoration and renewal is not one of them.
If we want to make changes, that is perfectly within the will of the House, but it is up to the House to make those decisions, rather than to have them foisted upon us because of some kind of building project. As I understand it, the Clerks are already working on IT so that we will be able to vote in the Division Lobbies with our thumbprints or fingerprints, instead of having to walk through and tell them our names and all the rest of it.
As for the main substance of today’s debate, it is important that we scrutinise the finances of the House. They are not the biggest numbers in all Government expenditure, but they are very significant numbers, and over the next few years they will grow rapidly. One of the concerns of our Committee is that there is not much transparency about where decisions are made and whether they have been good decisions. As we move into the process of restoration and renewal, there is a danger that, if there is an extended period with a shadow Sponsor Board and a shadow delivery authority, where decisions are actually being made on very dramatic amounts of money will be even more opaque.
For instance, major decisions are being made on the northern estate project, which at the moment is not part of the restoration and renewal project, regarding the design, how many floors there should be, and what planning applications we should be submitting. Those decisions are currently being made somewhere between the Finance Committee, the accounting officer, and the commission. The shadow sponsor body will start to make key decisions, but, because it will not have statutory effect until the law is brought in, those decisions will have to be ratified by the Finance Committee advising the commission.
If that period goes on for too long, there is a danger that we will end up with bad decisions, uncertain outcomes and uncertain delivery of the project and the finances. The Government can make a material difference to that by introducing the legislation. We have it in draft form at the moment, and we are delighted that that has sped up a bit, thanks to the Leader of the House. However, we need to ensure that in the next Session we get on with passing that legislation as fast as possible.
The one caveat I add is that we should consider very carefully the fact that until 2004 the Palace, like all other royal palaces, was its own planning authority. Since 2004, we have not been our own planning authority, and we are subject to the planning decisions of Westminster City Council. We have a very good working relationship with the council at the moment, but in essence the project will completely dwarf its whole planning department. To all intents and purposes, we will be paying for a new planning department foisted on Westminster City Council. There is an argument for us saying, “Frankly, we should just have it in house, rather than being subject to Westminster City Council.”
I say that because one of the key decisions that is yet to be made concerns the lighting in Westminster Hall; I think that battle has been going on with the planning authorities for the best part of 12 years. That is why we still have hideous arc lamps on the side, on chunks of scaffolding poles, in one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe. If we are unable to make timely decisions, we will end up making more expensive decisions. We need at least to examine whether we should make ourselves our own planning authority.
I am enormously grateful to all those who have taken part in the debate and, in particular, to Myfanwy and her team, who are admirable.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the House of Commons Financial Plan 2019-20 to 2022-23 and draft Estimates for 2019-20.
Points of Order
Debate between Clive Betts and Chris Bryant(5 years, 11 months ago)
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