Road Safety and the Legal Framework

Debate between Clive Betts and Yasmin Qureshi

Tuesday 20th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Lady should know that she has only a minute or two remaining.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I will not comment on individual cases—the courts made their decisions, and it would be improper of me to comment on them.

Driving ban sentencing needs to be looked at again. Many hon. Members have referred to how the exceptional hardship plea is being used, and suggested that courts and magistrates have been granting it too readily. That clearly needs to be looked at. Maybe there needs to be a change in the sentencing guidelines that magistrates take into account when deciding whether to grant exceptional hardship. That area also needs to be revisited and reviewed. With respect to car-dooring offences, the Law Commission should perhaps consider whether there should be an accompanying offence that carries licence points.

I await the Minister’s response on a number of the issues I have raised, including the need for the Law Commission to look into these matters.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

If the Minister could finish by 10.58 am, that would allow two minutes for the mover of the motion to sum up. Thank you.

Housing

Debate between Clive Betts and Yasmin Qureshi

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Commons Chamber

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

If people listened to Government Members, they would not think there was a housing crisis in this country—but there is, because there are people who come to my surgery who cannot get a home to live in or who cannot get a home that they need. They cannot afford the rising prices or the rising rents. That is this country’s housing crisis.

I challenge the Secretary of State with the comments made by his then Housing Minister to the Communities and Local Government Committee three years ago, when he said that the “gold standard” on which the Government would be judged was building more homes than were being built before the recession. The Government have been building about half the number of homes that were built before the recession. However they choose to dress up the figures, they have failed by their own standards.

As some of my colleagues have said, that is not a terribly hard standard to meet, because the Labour Government did not build enough homes. We built more homes than this Government are building, but we did not build enough. We had a brilliant record on the decent homes programme and on putting right the wrongs of the underinvestment of the previous Tory Government, who allowed the stock to deteriorate, but we did not build enough homes.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

The Labour Government spent £18 billion in 1997 to sort out 1.5 million homes.

[Mr Betts]

Absolutely, and that brought great delight to many tenants up and down the country.

The Government can pray in aid the fact that with the fallout from the banking crisis the private housing sector in this country suffered a decline in demand, but they compounded the problem by cutting the social housing budget by 60%. The right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell) was at that time a Minister in the Government who allowed that to happen, and he should stand up and apologise for it. The reality is that the cut was 60%. Government expenditure as a whole was cut by 20%, but social housing capital expenditure was singled out for the biggest cut of all major Government programmes, which has compounded the problem.

I welcome the Labour leadership’s commitment to move towards building 200,000 homes in this country by 2020. That is a good commitment, but I want to see it go further in the longer term: we must get to 250,000 to get demand and supply back in sync. The reality is that the construction industry in this country is now in such a mess that it could not respond more quickly to a higher target: prices of bricks and labour are already going up in the industry, because it has got down to such a low level. It is therefore realistic to set that target.

The issue is that the private sector in this country, as has already been said, has never built consistently more than 150,000 homes. If we are to get up to a figure of 200,000, a large part of that must come from the social housing sector, from local authorities and housing associations. To enable that to happen, we will have to spend some public money. We must all recognise that: if this is a crisis that is a priority for us to deal with, some public expenditure will have to go in as well.

I hope that we can get to a general situation in which we recognise that to achieve the stabilisation of house prices and rents, as has happened in Germany, housing supply has to meet housing demand in the long term. To achieve that will require the sort of cross-party agreement that we had in the 1960s and 1970s, when successive Governments of different political persuasions built the homes that the country needed. I hope that we can get back to such a situation.

I want to refer to my Select Committee’s 2012 report on “Financing of new housing supply”, in which we considered and proposed the idea of a housing bank, with guarantees for institutional investment to go into the social housing and private housing sectors. I recognise that the Government have gone a little way towards that, but not sufficiently. That has been done in the Netherlands; why can we not do it here? Instead of giving guarantees for mortgages, let us put them into building homes.

We could take the cap off local authority borrowing, and 60,000 homes could be built immediately. I think that that has cross-party support in the House, so why do the Government not do that? It would not cost any more taxpayers’ money, and it could be done instantly.

We could look at the housing grant paid to housing associations, which lies on their books as a debt. If it was released tomorrow and that grant was written off—again, there would be no cost to the Treasury, because it has already been paid out—we could free up housing associations’ ability to borrow and build more homes as well.

We could look at self-build, which is the hidden element in a potential housing renewal. The Government could go to see what has been done in the Netherlands, where there is not so much self-building as self-constructing, which involves getting local authorities to lay out sites and getting planners involved on a simple basis. They could go to see how people in the Netherlands, often with the involvement of small builders, are building their own homes—the homes they want, because they have designed them—at about 80% of the cost of a house bought from a private developer. That could be another element.

There is no one silver bullet, but the report includes several measures which, if the Government implemented them straight away, would help to remove the immediate problems of the housing crisis and set us in the right direction.

Fire Service (Metropolitan Areas)

Debate between Clive Betts and Yasmin Qureshi

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent point.

We need either a risk-based grant approach, with a more even and fairer distribution of cuts across the fire and rescue services, or an alternative method of additional uplift funding to the mets that recognises their wider contribution to the safety of our societies and communities. I ask the Minister to recognise the unfairness and the unsatisfactory nature of the current grant mechanism.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend on obtaining the debate, and I hope that the Minister is listening to this part of it, as well as the part to which he responded earlier. The key issue seems to be that in the past we have received greater efficiency savings from the mets; and we have had bigger cuts in the first two years of the current spending review. The important thing now is to make sure that we do not get bigger cuts in the next two years. That preventive work must continue. There are high-risk steelworks in my constituency, as well as the deprivation that my hon. Friend has discussed. We cannot have a reduction in the number of fire engines and stations that cover those important responsibilities.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent point.

Greater Manchester fire service has had to make cuts, and it has done so. Now it must make a 9% cut, whereas Cheshire will get a 2% increase. Many right hon. and hon. Members have made that point this morning. A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that the only explanation for the disparity is that most of the Members of Parliament in Cheshire belong to the coalition parties, and most Members of Parliament in Greater Manchester are Labour. I hope that that is not the case. I have deliberately tried not to go into too many statistics and percentages, which I know the Minister will be well aware of. I have tried to make a case for the mets, and I hope that the Minister will consider the matter fairly and judiciously. I will not speak any longer, because so many right hon. and hon. Members want to contribute to the debate.