Nutrient Neutrality: Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Damian Green Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean]

Yes, we have consulted local authorities, and I make no apologies for standing up and taking action when it is needed to help small builders in particular. The diversity of the sector in this country, unlike that in other countries, is disproportionately skewed towards larger developers, and it is therefore right for us, as a Conservative Government, to back small businesses. We understand what people go through to start a business, which is why we are taking action to help them.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

I welcome the Government’s balanced approach, which will improve the long-term quality of the River Stour in my constituency while allowing much-needed planning permissions for new homes to start again. Thousands of people, very sensibly, want to live in Ashford, and they want to see new homes built, not least in accordance with the local plan rather than being built opportunistically around the place, which is what the delays in permissions have led to. Can the Minister give us some indication of a timescale and when councils such as Ashford can start granting planning permissions again?

[Rachel Maclean]

My right hon. Friend is entirely correct and I thank him for his support. We need to wait for the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill to achieve Royal Assent—it must, of course, undergo parliamentary scrutiny in both Houses—but we are working apace. We have already started that engagement with local authorities and partners, Natural England and others, to ensure that they have all the operational detail that they need. What we need to see are spades in the ground as soon as possible.

Adult Social Care

Damian Green Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

May I start by saying how delightful it is to see you back in your proper place, Madam Deputy Speaker? You are very welcome back.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) not only on instigating the debate but on much of what he said. He said that he wished to speak in a non-partisan way, and he approaches the subject as the Chair of the Select Committee, while I approach it as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on adult social care. I found myself nodding in agreement with significant amounts of what he said, particularly the point about the need for long-term thinking and for a quite radical change in the way that we fund adult social care.

That is not just agreed across the House now, but has been for some decades. The hon. Gentleman went as far back as Gordon Brown. I can go back further: I have identified Tony Blair talking to the Labour conference in the 1990s, saying that social care was one of the big issues that he wanted to address in government. Here we are, a quarter of a century later, and we have got through it with a series of short-term efforts and sticking plasters. Long-term plans have been produced and promised but none of them has ever been put into policy. Throughout that quarter of a century of debate, the one thing that has been agreed is that the social care sector needs long-term funding.

The current Prime Minister and Chancellor have understood the importance of a long-term strategy and funding base for the sustainability of adult social care. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Sheffield South East said, the Chancellor was previously—by happy chance— Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, and that Committee produced a number of reports setting out the need for an additional £7 billion a year for social care. I note that the hon. Gentleman has just doubled that to £14 billion.

I am sure that the figure will rise, not fall; we have only to look at the demographics of the over-65s. Regardless of the rising number of working-age people who require social care of one form or another, if the same sort of percentage of over-65s end up requiring care, the bill will go up by something like 80% over the next 15 years. It is certainly true that demands on the social care budget will rise rather than fall in the coming years.

[Mr Betts]

Figures are bandied around, but I think that the figure is somewhere between £7 billion and £14 billion. It depends—the right hon. Gentleman is addressing this point properly—on whether we include the rise in demand, the need to have a real review of the workforce and pay, and the eligibility criteria. That is the way in which costs have been dampened in the past. We really need to revisit that whole issue.

[Damian Green]

I agree; indeed, I will mention workforce later.

The Government have, of course, responded to this issue in successive years, and have found extra central Government funds to pay local government, so we have proceeded from year to year, and although the system has been fragile, it has continued to operate. Of course, the background conditions are getting increasingly difficult. Inflation has an impact on social care providers. A cost of living survey done by social care provider MHA found that 94% of its community schemes had heard members or residents express concerns about the rising costs of living, and 49% of respondents said that the increased costs of transport specifically were a significant issue among their members. There is a danger that rising energy costs will significantly reduce the number of available services and have an immediate impact on discharge from the NHS into the community.

The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has reported that nearly half of all directors of social care services are not sure that unpaid carers will be able to cope financially with the cost of living crisis, which could lead to further increased demand on paid-for social care services.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that we still grossly undervalue carers?

[Damian Green]

My only caveat is that my right hon. Friend says “we”. In the community, we do not.

[Sir Greg Knight]

As a country.

[Damian Green]

Publicly, as a country, we may well do so. They are a hidden army of people acting well, purely out of generous motives and the desire to help loved ones, which is natural. They do not get enough reward and praise from the general public, even though many of those people are the best members of the general public.

There are other specific measures that the Government could take. I would hope that following April, adult social care providers could be defined as a vulnerable sector as part of the energy bill relief scheme; I think that would be of significant help. The County Councils Network has estimated that with inflation, it could cost councils £3.7 billion extra to keep social care services running. If that figure is anything like accurate, the quality of care will decrease if those providers are not defined as a vulnerable sector.

I will now move on to the central point of the debate, which is funding. The hon. Member for Sheffield South East has very eloquently made the case for what we all know to be true: adult social care is a huge strain. The way in which we currently fund it is something that local councils find unsustainable, and therefore, the system is now kept going through repeated one-off injections of central Government cash. That in itself is not sustainable as a system. Some years ago, I suggested an alternative way of getting the extra money we all need into the system. I will return to that proposal now, because if we step back, the problem is that social care—especially for the elderly, perhaps—is too opaque for those trying to understand it, with no apparent logic as to which conditions receive free NHS treatment and which do not. Moving directly on to the financial point, it is also unfair not to reward a lifetime of prudence. Those who have saved feel that their savings will simply disappear, while those who have not saved receive the same level of care.

There is also the fact—which is not often discussed—that funding social care out of council tax means that local authorities are reluctant to allow too many care homes, or indeed retirement housing, to be built, because they do not want an increasingly elderly population. The ageing population means that something like 50% of some councils’ spending already goes on social care. As the hon. Member for Sheffield South East said, that figure is projected to rise to 60%, and given the demographic trends that I have already mentioned, my fear is that some higher-tier authorities that are funding social care will end up as basically social care providers with a few libraries and a bit of money to spend on potholes, and not much else. A lot of essential council services will be swallowed up by the need for social care, as well as the fact that the problems in social care put extra pressure on the NHS.

We need a radical change to the system in order to meet five objectives. The first is to provide enough money to cope with the increasingly ageing population. The second is fairness across generations, so that today’s working-age taxpayers are not asked to pay for both their own care in the future and the care of the generation above them today. The third is fairness among individuals, ensuring that no one has to sell their own home—has to lose all their assets to pay for care—and ending the dementia lottery that the hon. Member for Sheffield South East mentioned, where one condition is treated on the NHS and another is not. The fourth is increasing the supply of care beds and retirement housing. My fifth point is perhaps slightly ambitious: in an ideal world, we should secure cross-party consensus, with a lot of consultation before we move to a new system, but with the people moving to that system having confidence that Governments of any stripe will keep it going.

The model I take, because we can see it more or less working, is the pension system. The basic state pension has been increased significantly in recent years, taking many pensioners out of poverty, but at the same time, most people save additionally through their working years to provide comfort and security in old age. Auto-enrolment in pensions has been a great cross-party success story, encouraging millions more people to save towards their own security in old age; for an individual who starts saving in their early 20s, the benefits will not come for decades, but they will be huge when they arrive.

Similarly, just as the basic state pension has been improved in recent years, I think we should offer a universal care entitlement, offering a better level of care—both homecare and residential care. For those who need residential care, that would cover the core residential costs. The needs would be assessed locally, but the money would come from central Government, which would take away the pressure on local councils. The state element of that funding should come centrally, rather than locally. Will that involve extra money? Of course it will, but given the annual injections of extra money that the Government put into the system, they have already implicitly admitted that it needs much extra money, so I think this is a necessary increase in public spending. I accept all the pressures and controversies that it will cause, but it seems unavoidable to me.

On top of that, we need to find an acceptable way to allow those with the capacity to improve their own provision to do so. I suggest we should create what I call the care supplement: a new form of insurance designed specifically to fund more expensive care costs in old age, just like the private pension system that tops up the state pensions of millions of people. It would allow people to buy insurance at the level they can afford in order to provide peace of mind. I do not think that the care supplement should be compulsory, as indeed auto-enrolment for pensions is not compulsory, so we would not get into the slightly sterile debate about death taxes and dementia taxes, phrases that both of the main parties have thrown at each other over the years.

People could save for that insurance over many years through their working life, or they could make a one-off payment—possibly using something like equity release from a part of their house value—at a suitable time in their life. I will pause on that point, because too much of the social care debate has devolved into questions about home ownership and whether a person has to sell their home. Under a mass insurance system, nobody would have to lose all of their assets or sell their home; a sliver of the money that is now in free equity in housing owned by the over-65s would cope with this challenge. There is £1.7 trillion in free equity in housing owned by the over-65s, and if a very small percentage of that money were applied to insurance for social care, it would mean that people had peace of mind in old age.

I have been told by successive Ministers that that system would be too complicated, and that we cannot set up an insurance system. All I say in response is this: of course, setting up a new system is complicated and difficult, but we know that the current system is not working. If we carry on doing the same thing, the system will continue to be frail and rickety for years—possibly generations—to come, which is not acceptable. We have to do something radically different. If somebody can come up with a better way of getting some of that wealth to pay for social care, fine, but we have to try something radical.

Funding is one key issue, but since the debate is about adult social care, I will identify four areas in which we need new thinking if we are going to fix social care. The first is the workforce, which has already been mentioned. It needs to be bigger—bigger by more than 100,000—and to achieve that, it needs to be better paid and have a higher status. I would like nurses working in the care system to be on the same Agenda for Change pay scales as those in the NHS, otherwise they will keep moving from the care system to the NHS.

The second area is the voice of care within the new integrated care boards. That change represents a chance to improve the integration of the health and care systems without creating another massive bureaucracy, but I slightly fear that the ICB system is settling down with the voice of care providers not being loud enough at the table. Local authorities are clearly a key player in the system, but so are other providers, and their voice needs to be heard.

My third point is about the use of technology, not only for sharing information between different parts of the system, but for giving those in receipt of care more control over their daily life. We are not exploiting the range of available technology anything like enough to do that and, if we get it right, the prize is that more people will be able to stay in their own home for longer. That is better for them, most importantly, but it is also better for the taxpayer, so it ought to be a high priority. It is particularly important for people living with dementia.

The fourth area is an extension of that notion of people staying in their own homes for longer through the provision of housing. As it happens, in one of the Minister’s previous incarnations, I spoke to him about this issue. We are failing to build anything like enough supported housing for older people, particularly in retirement villages. Taken together, the last two measures I mentioned—technology and the provision of suitable housing—would mean that many people were able to stay in their own home for longer. As I say, that is a double win: it is better for the taxpayer, but most importantly, it is better for people as well. Most people want to live in their own home for as long as they can.

My original idea for a universal care entitlement accompanied by a care supplement would take the burden of social care funding away from local authorities, which is good, and, more importantly, offer certainty and security for the increasing numbers who will need social care in old age. No one would have to sell their house and see their inheritance disappear, everyone would have the chance of receiving better care and fewer people would be left unnecessarily in hospital beds as they wait for social care to be available. I am conscious that none of this is easy and that it will take political courage and possibly political consensus to achieve, but it is absolutely necessary if we are to provide peace of mind and security to frail, elderly people who richly deserve it. I commend these ideas to the Minister.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Green Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Across the House there is a determination to ensure that the terrible tragedy of Grenfell is met with appropriate steps, both legislatively and in regulatory terms, and also that those who are trapped in buildings through no fault of their own are given the opportunity to move on with their lives. We will shortly be publishing the details of those contracts. We are meeting lenders to discuss moving away from the situation in which so many people have found themselves, and we are also talking to the insurance industry about the steps we need to take.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

T3. In the care White Paper the Government committed to investing £300 million in supported housing for people with long-term health conditions, the numbers of whom are likely to go up by 125,000 this decade. In the wake of the autumn statement, will the Secretary of State assure me that that money is still available?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Felicity Buchan)]

The Government remain committed to our 10-year vision for the reform of adult social care, and we are taking forward proposals in the “People at the Heart of Care” White Paper. As my right hon. Friend will appreciate, following last Thursday’s fiscal statement, Departments are reviewing specific spending plans, and details will be announced in due course.

Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme

Damian Green Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

They absolutely will have access to that support. Anyone who acts as a sponsor will face light-touch vetting checks initially, and subsequently will be visited by those from local government who, to be fair, and as the hon. Lady rightly pointed out, are experts in safeguarding.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

I very much welcome this announcement, and I am grateful to the Secretary of State and the Government for listening to voices from across the House who have been urging this kind of action. Let me return to local authorities, and particularly lower-tier local authorities. My council in Ashford has been active and generous in helping refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. What should such local authorities that want to help be doing today to plug themselves into the system?

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend and the One Nation group of Conservative MPs helped in the development of our policy with some of the ideas that they shared with the Department. I am grateful to him and his colleagues, and to individuals across the House who played a collaborative part in that. The money that we are giving to local authorities will go to lower-tier local authorities, and I will ask my Department to ensure that in Ashford, and elsewhere, and through the good offices of the Local Government Association, local authorities know how to access the resources they need.

Levelling Up

Damian Green Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady is right. Bradford is a fantastic city—it has seen significant investment, not least in cultural renewal, and it has a wonderful university—but it also has areas of real deprivation, not least in the constituency that she represents. I look forward to working with her, and with Tracy Brabin and municipal leaders in Bradford, to ensure that the policies in the White Paper can deliver for her constituents.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

I very much welcome this White Paper—a genuinely one-nation Conservative document. I particularly commend my right hon. Friend and his colleagues on the health commitment it makes. Five years’ extra healthy lifespan will be absolutely critical in spreading opportunity not just to disadvantaged people but to disadvantaged communities, because health inequalities hold people back almost more than anything else. Frankly, we can have all the transport infrastructure we like, but if people in middle age are too unhealthy to lead full lives and to stay in work, they cannot benefit from it. Will he go into a bit more detail about how he will achieve that ambition?

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely. My right hon. Friend is right: this is a one-nation document that is in that Conservative tradition. He is also absolutely right that addressing health inequalities is vital, not just to relieving pressure on the NHS for taxpayers but to giving people the full lives that they deserve. We outline in the White Paper some of the steps that we are taking, not least to deal with obesity, but, in addition, my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary will be bringing forward a health inequalities White Paper a little later this year, and I will be working with him to take forward some of the insights of Professor Michael Marmot and others about what the drivers of health inequalities are and how we can tackle them.

Building Safety

Damian Green Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Lady makes an important point about modular construction. Through the Buildoffsite Property Assurance Scheme guidance, we require appropriate adherence to principles with modular construction, which should keep buildings safe. She is right that the Grenfell inquiry has also had a number of accounts from a number of witnesses that raise issues of concern. Although it is important that we continue to take action even before the inquiry concludes, I would not want to pre-empt the inquiry’s conclusion on all the issues she mentions.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is entirely correct that this is a substantial step forward, and he and the Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) are to be congratulated on it. May I return to the subject of those developers and companies that have gone broke and disappeared since they did the things for which the Secretary of State has rightly castigated them? Some of those have disappeared not for nefarious reasons. Has he quantified how much money will be absent—how big a hole there is in the money that ought to be available—for compensation from such companies? Who is going to fill that hole?

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. We want those we can identify as the responsible owner or freeholder of properties to contribute to and meet the needs of fire safety costs, but we are already looking at the wider development community and at construction products manufacturers to help to ensure that we have sufficient resources to provide relief to leaseholders everywhere.

Planning and House Building

Damian Green Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell).

In the late 1990s, as a new MP, I led a campaign in my constituency against plans by John Prescott, now the noble Lord Prescott, to impose top-down centralised targets for house building in Ashford. I would have been shocked and depressed had I thought that, 20 years later, I was having to make all the same points about proposals from a Conservative Government.

Of course, life moves on. The latest manifestation of the gentleman in Whitehall knowing best comes with that essential 2020 attribute—an algorithm. People have said enough about algorithms already today, but I say gently to the Minister that algorithms are a tool for mathematicians, not politicians. I object to this particular algorithm for two reasons: in principle, because a national algorithm destroys local decision making: and, in practice, because it will bake in over-development in the south and under-development in the north. It is exactly the opposite of what the Government’s excellent levelling-up policy should be about. This will not be levelling up; it will be levelling over green fields with concrete.

I know what links the bad proposals from the 1990s with today’s bad proposals: the eternal view of the Department, which has changed its name many times but which is always fixed in its views, that we do not build enough houses because local councils pay too much attention to nimby residents. That may be true in some places, but I can absolutely say that it is not true in Ashford, where local plans for years have designated building new homes in the high hundreds and where the physical evidence can be seen in new estates. The same is true all over Kent. My neighbouring colleagues, my hon. Friends the Members for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson), and for Dover (Mrs Elphicke), make the same point. We are in danger of turning the garden of England into a patio.

What is frustrating is that I agree with many of the things that the Government are trying to do: we need to build more homes; we need to design them better; we need to take more account of the countryside, and that includes green fields and not just green belt; and we need to continue with levelling up. The instincts are right, but it is the execution that is wrong. I have stood at that Dispatch Box often enough to know that it is all very well to hear people around you moaning, it is what should be done instead—that is an entirely reasonable thought. The answer for the Minister is that, instead of taking away local powers, the Government should be looking at the number of planning permissions given that do not result in houses being built The Secretary of State has said that it is his ambition to build 1 million new homes during this Parliament. CPRE—I should declare an interest as vice-president of Kent CPRE—has pointed out that there are about 1 million housing plots with planning permission in this country. The Secretary of State could achieve his very laudable ambition without granting a single extra planning permission in this Parliament.

At this point, it is usual to blame greedy developers for land banking. I do not blame them. If anyone had a product that they could sell for £200,000 this year and £250,000 next year, they would delay selling it as well. It is the system that is wrong. There are any number of ways of changing the system. We could have planning permission lasting only for a few years. We could charge council tax, perhaps at punitive rates, on the plots of houses that are not being built. There are a number of other ways that I know people could think of to make sure that planning permissions actually turn into homes, because it is new homes that we want.

There are good parts of the planning Green Paper, but if the Government do not respect local input into decision making about numbers as well as zones, the good will be thrown out along with the bad. I urge Ministers not just to prepare a few minor concessions, but to start again, scrap the algorithm, work with local communities, not against them, and give us the planning policy the country desperately needs.

Local Government and Social Care Funding

Damian Green Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Politics is a question of priorities. I often remember the 2017 Budget, when the Government put forward measures to cut the bank levy by £5 billion. We tabled an amendment to the Budget proposing that £2 billion of that same money should go to fully funding children’s services, because we see precisely the cost-shunting that I talked about earlier with children’s services. It is frankly scandalous that vulnerable children and families are not able to access the support that they need.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. I say this, again, in the spirit of co-operation across the Chamber. He makes the point about adult social care. At whatever level it is funded, he and others have pointed out the unfairnesses between different parts of the country because it is funded through local provision. Has he considered, or would he consider, going back to a system where the money is provided and distributed nationally rather than locally, so that this particular problem will be taken off the backs of local government?

[Andrew Gwynne]

Of course, I would be very happy to look at any suggestion. My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) leads on social care issues for the Labour Front-Bench team, but the fundamental issue is that the money has to come from somewhere and some of that has to be centrally provided. We have set out how some extra resources can be put forward for social care.

Windrush

Damian Green Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) for her kind remarks about my predecessor. She asked a number of questions, but she started by saying it is not just about a personnel change. Of course, it is not; it is about action and having the right policies, and that is certainly what she will see from my Department.

The hon. and learned Lady talked about the kind of immigration policy she would like to see. I commit to a fair and humane immigration policy that, first, welcomes and celebrates people who are here legally—people who have come in the past or who are looking to come, and who want to do the right thing and contribute to our country—and what they have to offer our great country, but that at the same time clamps down decisively on illegal immigration.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

I assure my right hon. Friend that he will receive very strong support from Conservative Members in his new job, which I am sure he will find stimulating and challenging in equal measure. Can he give some more detail on the progress of the special taskforce set up in the Home Office to deal with the Windrush problems? Clearly, the best way to remove the anxiety that so many people are feeling is to ensure that the taskforce gets on with its job quickly and gives people the assurance that they are getting the rights they have always deserved.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his comments. The taskforce was set up on 17 April and it has already looked at a number of cases. It has received some 6,000 calls, of which we estimate some 2,500 fall into the category of the Windrush generation. They are all being dealt with by an experienced case officer in a sympathetic way. More than 500 appointments have been scheduled and more than 100 cases have already been successfully resolved.