Courts and Tribunals (Online Procedure) Bill [ Lords ]

Debate between Daniel Zeichner and Andy Slaughter

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am one of the few people in the room who does not have a legal background. I have an IT background, and I used to spend a lot of my time trying to explain to people that IT cannot always do the magical things that they think it can. One of the flaws in this discussion is that there is nothing about the digital infrastructure that underpins the Bill. The proposed amendment is actually rather sensible, given that the only IT expertise in this process seems to sit with the OPRC. I would like reassurance from the Minister that some thought has been given to the processes that will underpin the Bill. Has he considered whether it would be sensible in some cases for the Committee to say, “Actually, this is not going to work.”?

[Andy Slaughter]

I strongly disagree with Government amendment 9. It is very common practice for there to be dual control—the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice—in relation to a variety of matters. It seems sensible and is an important safeguard. Nowhere should that be more self-evident than when one is dealing with the practical operations of the courts and ensuring, as the Bill does, that new systems coming into operation have that practical guidance. Having perhaps accepted in principle the arguments that were very well made in the other place, particularly by Lord Judge, I cannot see that the Government now wish to weaken that by simply having consultation rather than concurrence. As the Minister often says to our Front Benchers, I would urge him to think about this again and see what he is gaining or has to be worried about in these provisions. It seems an unnecessary bit of control-freakery by the Government.

Housing Associations and Public Contractors: Freedom of Information

Debate between Daniel Zeichner and Andy Slaughter

Wednesday 6th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Betts. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) on securing the debate and making an extraordinarily persuasive case, as he always does. It was so persuasive that, were the Minister not constrained by her place on the Government Front Bench, I am sure she would agree with it entirely.

This is not a new issue. I should declare at the outset that when I worked for the public services union Unison before coming to this place, it was already a matter of great concern to us. We could see the way the world was changing and the potential pitfalls that lay ahead. We were delighted that through our work with the Labour party, via our Labour link, we were able to secure a commitment from the then shadow Front Bench that freedom of information would indeed be extended to all public service providers.

The coalition Government at the time did not agree with that and sadly—2015 did not see the return of a Labour Government—this woefully out-of-date position persists. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith said, the Information Commissioner agrees. In the weighty report—we have all been carrying it around—entitled “Outsourcing Oversight? The case for reforming access to information law”, the commissioner makes a compelling case. The argument is essentially that the Freedom of Information Act should be extended to all public services, even when they are carried out by private companies.

I will say a bit more about the report and give some examples of where this creates problems in my constituency—I suspect that similar cases would be found across the country. The Information Commissioner recently came to Parliament to launch her report at an event, which I was very pleased to be on the panel for, organised by the parliamentary internet, communications and technology forum. Her team has done an excellent job of highlighting the problem, which is central to the issues that my hon. Friend has pointed out.

The key point is to understand how different the world now is from the world of the late 1990s, when the Freedom of Information Act was first introduced. Government now spend almost a third of our total expenditure with external suppliers—some £284 billion a year, which is an extraordinary amount of money. These external suppliers deliver services on behalf of public authorities. They are often private companies, charities and other not-for-profit organisations, which are not necessarily subject to freedom of information, thus massively diminishing the accountability of public service delivery.

As we have heard, the Information Commissioner uses the examples of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the collapse of Carillion to show the consequences of a lack of transparency and accountability. They are both particularly awful examples. I have raised that concern with Ministers before. The answer was that extending the Freedom of Information Act would have made little difference, but I disagree. I think there is an essential problem with delivering public services in an opaque manner.

When councils run services, if we think they are doing a bad job, there is a simple solution: we vote them out—we get rid of them. That concentrates minds. Sadly, however good the service delivery may be through housing associations or public service contractors, or local charities providing social services and so on, when questions are asked it is much harder to know what to do about them. Extending the Freedom of Information Act hands that power of exposure and transparency back to citizens, and that ultimately is how to drive up standards. It reduces the risk of narrow or neglectful practices in the delivery of those services.

As constituency MPs—I am sure colleagues have the same experience—residents write to us about all manner of issues, some of which we have more control over resolving than others. In Cambridge, where the cost of living is extremely high, housing makes up a significant part of my postbag. For example, Montreal Square is a small area of housing—a delightful oasis of calm in the busy Romsey part of the city. Cambridge Housing Society, a local housing association, proposed to replace the 18 existing homes with 45 new, affordable, energy-efficient homes. Understandably perhaps, it wants to modernise existing homes on the site, and add more. Equally understandably, some of the residents who live there—some have been there for more than 35 years—are very unhappy about that fundamental change to their local community.

I pay tribute to Cambridge Housing Society and its chief executive, Nigel Howlett. It is an excellent organisation doing a great job, and Nigel is an outstanding leader in the sector. It is a charity that aims to provide the maximum amount of housing possible, but it also wants to take into account the concerns of the local community, so it is in a difficult position. It is trying to balance the needs of existing tenants against potential future tenants who do not have homes at the moment. That is a hard choice, but essentially it is a political one and, in my view, it should be taken by people who are democratically accountable. People come to me and ask, “Who makes the decision? What can be done about it?” If it was a council decision, the answer would be very clear.

Extending freedom of information to housing associations would not automatically solve the problem, but it would be a significant step forward. It would allow far greater accountability for residents and members of the wider community. It would give them a much stronger lever to question how decisions are being made and, most crucially, to get the information behind the decisions. I know that the Minister will say, “We are putting out more and more data.” It is not more data we want; it is the key data that they do not want to share that we want. That is what freedom of information gets to.

My hon. Friend already referred to the National Housing Federation’s briefing. I am delighted to say that there has been no collusion, but my reaction was exactly the same—my office colleague will testify to my reaction. The briefing states that extending freedom of information legislation could put

“not-for-profit providers at a disadvantage against commercial bodies in bidding for land...reducing housing associations’ ability to obtain private investment.”

As my hon. Friend so eloquently put it, those are fairly woeful excuses. The Information Commissioner has assured me that the Freedom of Information Act already has mechanisms in place to deal with such issues. It is a flimsy set of arguments, frankly. I certainly want to find ways of helping housing associations in their battle against developers for land, but diminishing public accountability is the wrong way to go about it. It would be much better to address the very real problem of secrecy in the commercial land market. It should not be forgotten, of course, that huge amounts of public money goes through housing associations, and has done so in the past, to provide essential homes for people. We must protect the democratic accountability of our public services.

I have two further examples in other sectors, which show how freedom of information can make a difference. Across the country, and in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire, we have seen mass academisation of schools, which is often unpopular. Parents, children and local communities feel very strongly about this issue. In my city there is currently a proposal for a merger of a local multi-academy trust with a large national one, which has caused some upset among my constituents, who are concerned—rightly, in my view—about the potential consequences.

Both academies and multi-academy trusts are subject to FOI, but the position is far from clear. Academies were brought under the FOI Act in 2010 and have to answer FOI requests. With multi-academy trusts, the situation is a little more complex. I sought advice from the Information Commissioner’s Office, which told me:

“MATs will be covered by the FOI Act (and are ultimately responsible for the FOI obligations of all the academies)”,

but

“the information requested must be held ‘for the purposes of the proprietor’s functions under Academy arrangements’. It’s very likely that the information held will fall into the purposes specified”.

However, it is not hard to imagine that if a multi-academy trust wanted to, it could use the FOI exemption for information that is a trade secret or

“would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of any person or body”

in some of those cases. Where questions have been asked locally regarding the merging of academy trusts, I have been assured by the MAT in question that it is releasing as much information as it is permitted to through the current FOI regime. I commend them for that, but it is easy to see that less scrupulous trusts may not always choose that course of action.

This is not simply about the facts of legislation; it is also about how it feels to the public, and the need for communities to feel that they have genuine ownership over the services that their taxes fund. After all, whose schools are they? I think they are our schools, but all too often it does not really feel like that. Extending the Freedom of Information Act in the way suggested might help a little, although I would argue that a much more substantial overhaul is needed.

This is not my first foray into arguing with the Cabinet Office about extending the Freedom of Information Act. I have an excellent exam board in my constituency, Cambridge Assessment, which is a major local employer. As Cambridge Assessment is a department of the University of Cambridge, it is subject to freedom of information requests. Other exam boards are not. That issue was first raised with me, astonishingly, as long ago as 2010, at a public hustings event hosted by Cambridge Assessment and chaired by the inestimable Simon Lebus, then chief executive. He challenged each candidate to declare whether they would pursue the issue and help him resolve it before his retirement, which at that point he thought was still some way off. As happens at public hustings events, we all pledged to pursue it. Little did we know that it would be quicker to build the fantastic new buildings that those visiting Cambridge see on the railway line—a huge set of buildings—than to get the Cabinet Office to move on this question. The skewed playing field for exam boards does a major disservice to Cambridge Assessment, because it is treated differently from its competitors. It argues that the Act should be extended to all exam boards because they use public money to perform a public service.

The Minister has been good enough to sit down with me and her officials on a number of occasions on this issue, a while ago. The letter I received from her this week was profoundly disappointing. She told me that she had had discussions with the relevant Education Minister, with the conclusion that although

“the Minister of State agreed in principle that there are other awarding organisations that carry out functions of a public nature”,

because

“the Department for Education has undertaken significant reforms of A Levels and GCSEs, which has placed significant additional burdens on awarding organisations, the Government is currently not in a position to being another process of consultation and possible legislative change”.

That is a dreadful argument, even by this Government’s miserable standards—I am cross about this. They have made some woefully unpopular and regressive education policy changes, and they are using that as an excuse for not being prepared to make some that might actually improve the accountability and transparency of the way we educate our young people.

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend has a long track record of campaigning on FOI—far longer than mine—and I am grateful that he is here for the debate. Does he agree that the decision to move freedom of information to the Cabinet Office—I do not mean this to reflect on the current Minister—was a mistake? It has been put in with data protection, which is often about restricting access to information, for the right reasons. In the Ministry of Justice, and with the Justice Committee, there was a far more robust approach to calling out the Government’s questions. A reassignment of Department and Committee might be a suitable step.

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend is far more of an expert than I am on the matter. He has made an interesting observation that might be worth pursuing further. He may well have a very strong point there.

To return to my quest that is now nine years on. In fact, it is probably more than nine years, because I know that my predecessors, Julian Huppert and David Howarth, pursued the matter. I fear it might go back as far as Anne Campbell’s time. As I have said, I made a pledge to Simon Lebus that we would try to resolve the issue before his retirement. Sadly, it has not been achieved. I fear it might have to wait for a Labour Government, which I am sure will be along soon.

Freedom of information is sometimes considered a slightly nerdy issue—no apologies to colleagues present—but it is an incredibly important mechanism to secure proper accountability and democratic oversight. It is disappointing that we have not yet had a proper Government response to the Information Commissioner’s report, although, to be fair to the Minister, she has said that they are considering it carefully and will respond in due course, which of course is wonderful civil service speak. We will await events. We cannot let private companies get away with always doing their dealings out of the public eye when their decisions have a serious impact on the lives of all our constituents. We need the tools to provide the checks and balances. Too often it seems to be a carry-on behind closed doors and it cannot continue.

College Funding

Debate between Daniel Zeichner and Andy Slaughter

Monday 21st January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

I could not agree more with the hon. Lady, and I will come to that point in my speech. I want to turn to some of the effects of this underfunding, which is significant and has damaging consequences in sixth forms. In total, 50% of schools and colleges have dropped courses in modern foreign languages as a result of funding pressures, with A-levels in German, French and Spanish being the main casualties. That would seem to be the wrong way to go, especially when we are talking about global Britain.

Over one third of sixth forms have dropped science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, while two thirds have reduced student support services, such as mental health support, which we know is increasingly required. There are also, in many cases, limited careers advice services, and that also has a damaging effect. Two thirds of schools and colleges have moved from a four-subject offer to a three-subject offer, significantly reducing students’ choice and ultimately narrowing their options after study. For state schools with sixth forms offering post-16 study, the underfunding affects the education of all students, because, as we know, such schools frequently cross-subsidise post-16 education with funding that is meant for 11 to 16-year-olds.

Given that this country, quite rightly, requires its young people to participate in education or training until the age of 18, it seems quite incredible that across all 16 to 19 provision we reduce investment in education so sharply at the age of 16, from £5,341 for a 15-year-old to just £4,000 for a 16-year-old.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that the level of cuts is so extreme that very dramatic steps are being taken? Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College is one of the biggest in the country, but it has cut its A-levels completely. It has also cut back on English for speakers of other languages, because funding has not been available. It is now redeveloping its sites to release land, just to keep itself going. How can we plan for the future of FE, when there is so much uncertainty and so little finance available?

[Daniel Zeichner]

As always, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is very difficult for people working in the sector to plan ahead. With years of area reviews, and all the rest of it, it has been a tough time. At the moment, the situation ahead does not look that good.

Further education colleges provide our communities with access to skills across the board. We see even more diverse challenges there. Although, in their response to the petition, the Government acclaimed their commitment to the adult education budget, in reality the initial teaching and learning funding allocations for adult further education and skills in England fell from a baseline of £3.18 billion in 2010 to £2.94 billion in 2015-16—a reduction of 14% in real terms—and more for the non-apprenticeship part of the adult skills budget. Since then, there has been an increase in funding for apprenticeships, but that really cannot make up for the thousands of people across the country who have suffered as a consequence of these cuts, and who want to upskill and reskill, as technology changes our jobs and our lives.

What about those who work in colleges? College staff were mentioned earlier. Staggeringly, college teachers are paid on average £7,000 a year less than those in schools, according to the University and College Union. In conjunction with busier jobs and fewer resources, this is stretching staff to breaking point, as any of us who go into colleges will hear.

Fur Trade

Debate between Daniel Zeichner and Andy Slaughter

Monday 4th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and near neighbour. Complicit is a word I have already used, and that is effectively what we are by maintaining this trade.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on a very fine speech. By banning fur imports, we would depress that market, but would we not also set a good example to other countries? We have a proud record of humane treatment of animals in this country and we could inspire other countries to do the same.

[Daniel Zeichner]

All my hon. Friends are so prescient that my hon. Friend has now stolen my peroration, but never mind; we will come to that in time.

On the subject of faux fur, I do not think anyone, on witnessing or reading the evidence given recently to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee about the living space allocated to some of these poor animals, could help but be sickened.

Transport for London Bill [Lords]: Revival

Debate between Daniel Zeichner and Andy Slaughter

Monday 16th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I acknowledge, as have others from both sides of the House, that TfL, like many other public bodies, is trying to deliver savings against a tough backdrop. We recognise how difficult that is at a time of deep spending cuts, and we all want TfL to be able to utilise its unused assets, but we think it should be done without damaging future transport provision and in a way that works with local communities.

The Minister delivered a eulogy on the joys of travelling in London that I am not sure all our constituents would recognise, so I make her an offer—she referred to a white van: would she like to join us on our pink bus for a tour of London so that her eyes might be opened to these very joys? [Interruption.] We’ll stick with the pink bus.

In 2013, TfL’s operational funding was slashed by a quarter, which, combined with earlier funding reductions, has required it to identify £16 billion of savings by 2021. We have asked the Government for an insight into what is going to happen next, but they are keeping shtum about next week. It is no great secret, however, that the Department for Transport’s budget is facing another deep cut—perhaps about 30%. We do not yet know what the consequences will be for TfL, but it is hard to see how they might be positive. So we appreciate the difficult background against which the Bill is being brought forward—it has been coming forward for a long time—and we understand TfL’s desire to maximise the value of its assets and to increase its revenue to reinvest in the capital’s transport network, but we are deeply concerned about some aspects of the Bill and are disappointed by the lack of progress made during the long period that has elapsed since it began its slow progress in the last Parliament.

TfL, caught, like so many bodies across the country, between a rock and a hard place, faces difficult spending decisions. With some 5,700 acres of land and more than 500 major potential development sites, it is one of the capital’s largest landowners. As we have said, Labour supports TfL earning revenue by utilising its underused facilities, but we have to be absolutely sure that such activities do not risk having an adverse impact on the current provision of transport services and, importantly, on TfL’s ability to expand transport services in the future. We do not want it rushing to sell its assets, given that we have to build a future transport system for the city. We saw the same issues in my city of Cambridge: had we rushed into the same decisions a few years ago, some of the excellent initiatives there would not have been possible because the land would have gone.

The changes must allow us to meet increasing demand. I heard your warnings, Madam Deputy Speaker, about discussing housing, but Labour Members’ points about the desperate need for affordable housing in our city are real. When we have a public landowner with so much resource, it is hardly unreasonable for us to raise these issues, and it is right that we demand a commitment to maximise affordable housing in developments in which TfL has a stake. For goodness’ sake, if TfL is not going to do it, who in this city is going to do it, if people on the public side are not going to stand up for our citizens?

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is making a very considered speech. He identifies first that we expect TfL to run a proper transport system and, secondly, that if TfL as a public body is quite properly going to develop land, it must be done in the public interest. That is not what the Bill provides. Given that neither the Minister nor the sponsor was able to justify the Bill in any terms, does my hon. Friend agree that it should not be revived in this Parliament?

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely right that at the heart of this debate is the issue of whether public bodies exist just to make a quick buck or to act in the public interest. On the Labour side, we understand that public bodies need to exercise some responsibility in the long-term interest of our citizens.

Let me return to my point. It is TfL’s proposal to enter into limited partnerships with private companies in order to develop its land and increase revenue that is at the heart of tonight’s discussion. That is the aspect on which I shall focus most of my comments.

Let me first reflect on the controversial developments at Earls Court, to which several Members have unsurprisingly drawn our attention. It exemplifies the problems that clause 5, which would allow TfL to enter into limited partnerships, would bring about. The dismantling of Earls Court exhibition centre to make way for, exactly as we have heard, totally unaffordable flats in what some have described as London’s worst major regeneration scheme, is the result of an agreement between TfL and a private developer, Capital & Counties. Our concern is that aspects of the Bill make it more likely that TfL will use limited partnerships more extensively for more ventures, based on the model of the Earls Court development. Let us reflect for a moment on what that might mean.

Just looking at this development within the Earls Court project area, facing prospective demolition are the Gibbs Green and West Kensington housing estates, containing 760 homes. Labour Members continue to watch closely the discussions about the future between Capital & Counties and Hammersmith and Fulham council. According to the council’s own consultation in 2012, a huge majority—80%—of residents oppose demolition. Hammersmith and Fulham’s Labour leader Stephen Cowan has described the scheme for the redevelopment of the estates, which was agreed by the predecessor Conservative administration, as

“a bad deal for residents”—

and it seems that the residents agree.

The issue goes beyond housing. Just a few weeks ago, the 1,300 tonnes roof of Earls Court exhibition centre was removed and there have been justifiable fears about asbestos exposure and worsening air quality in the area as a result. The consequent health impact of the proposed demolition on nearby residents is clearly a cause for concern. Let us be clear: we want improvement and regeneration, but with the consent of local people, not at their expense and not while private property developers obstinately stick their fingers in their ears and wilfully ignore local objections.

[Andy Slaughter]

I would like to thank my hon. Friend for highlighting the issue of Earls Court. I have the fortune to have both the Earls Court development site and the Old Oak site—the two sites most mentioned today—in my constituency. What is being proposed by TfL and Network Rail amounts to a terrible deal for residents, but also for TfL itself. Despite being the freeholder of the land in Earls Court, it is ending up with a 37% stake—evidence that TfL does not do good deals and that the developer always wins.

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point that a number of other Members have made: we are not convinced that TfL gets good deals, so why should we make it easier for it to make even less good deals in the future? We worry about that.

Our fear is that the really contentious clause 5 will make it still harder for local people to have influence over major decisions that affect their community. Our view is that regeneration is much better done from the bottom-up, with the assent of those who will be most directly affected—not top-down. Given that the land has already been sold off, the Earls Court development seems to be a bit of a done deal. What we seek to prevent are further lopsided private-public agreements that steamroll over neighbourhoods in the name of regeneration. We understand that TfL wants greater commercial freedoms, but those freedoms cannot come at the cost of denying a voice to ordinary people in London.

The core of the issue is the imprecise nature of the limited partnership itself. A partnership of that kind is not a distinct legal entity, and a lack of clarity surrounds the roles that would be played by each party in the partnership, where responsibility and accountability would lie, and who would really benefit most, the private developer or the public. We are advised that a limited partnership is able to change its general partner, but the partnership agreement would be unlikely to be made public, and its terms would not be open to public scrutiny. To be in the public body interest, genuine partnerships need far more transparency and accountability.

Furthermore, unless it is agreed for a fixed term, a limited partnership will be at will. A limited partnership at will may be dissolved on notice by a general partner, but, unless the agreement provides otherwise, not by a limited partner, which TfL is likely to be. Limited partnerships clearly vest a large amount of risk in their ventures, and we do not believe that these issues have been properly addressed. There is a real danger that TfL would be taking very large risks—indeed, unlimited risks. We do not think that it has considered carefully enough the long-term impacts of introducing powers to enter into such partnerships. For those reasons, we are cautious about the potential precedent, and we believe that the Government should also assess very carefully the appropriateness of other public transport authorities’ entering into limited partnerships.

Some of my hon. Friends have made powerful points. Much of what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry)—who is no longer in the Chamber—hit the nail on the head. She was particularly critical about the prospect of a partnership’s changing at some future stage. It was telling that, when she challenged Conservative Members to explain how the process might work, they looked thoroughly uncomfortable and were unable to provide any reassurance.

I think that what my hon. Friend said about the price of a flat being £826,000 was one of the most telling comments that we have heard tonight. It told us so much about the current crisis. I feel deeply about that crisis, being an almost outer-outer London Member. Cambridge, which I represent, reflects all the attributes of the London housing market nowadays. [Interruption.] These are serious issues. Conservative Members are chuntering away as though it did not matter that people cannot afford to live in our great cities, but it does matter. The point that we are making is that if public bodies like TfL do not take this seriously, we are not relying on anyone else to do it.