David Lammy
Main Page: David Lammy (Labour - Tottenham)Department Debates - View all David Lammy's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Alexander
No. I am keen to make a little progress, by looking at the individual measures that the Government are advancing.
When the Secretary of State speaks, will he explain why the Department for Work and Pensions is not producing an impact assessment on the whole package of changes to housing benefit before the House? An assessment has been made of the introduction of the LHA measures during 2011-12, as the Social Security Advisory Commission requires, but that is partial, and of course does not take account of the effect of the consumer prices index cap on LHA rates from 2013.
We would also expect a separate impact assessment of the jobseeker’s allowance measure and social sector size limits to follow once the secondary legislation is published. At this stage, however, it is unclear whether an assessment will be made of the CPI changes. The fact that no comprehensive impact assessment has been completed before the announcement does nothing to reduce the widespread anxiety about this package of reforms. I therefore hope that the Secretary of State will now accept the concerns of his colleagues and undertake to publish an assessment of the whole package.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Will my right hon. Friend confirm that it is a statutory duty of the Secretary of State to undertake to give an impact assessment, on the basis that this greatly affects London’s ethnic minorities—and if there is a disproportionate effect, to do something to alleviate it? It is extraordinary that that impact assessment has not yet been published.
Mr Alexander
That is an outstanding point made by a tireless fighter for the people of Tottenham. I know that my right hon. Friend has already taken the opportunity to raise this matter directly with the Secretary of State, who I hope will be able to find an opportunity to respond to it.
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)
I rise to oppose for a number of reasons the motion moved by the Opposition. I will deal with it quickly, and then move on to the rest of the rationale behind the speech by the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander).
In the past two weeks—particularly, in the past two or three days—the right hon. Gentleman has started trying to reset the tone in the motion. None the less, the facts are exaggerated. For example, there is the ridiculous fact that we might have to spend an additional £120 million to provide temporary accommodation. That is ludicrous. There is no policy in this motion at all. Despite the major deficit that we have inherited, and despite the fact that housing benefit is running out of control, he did not say a thing about what he is planning to do. Opposition comes with responsibilities, and one of them is to have some policies before criticising, but the Labour party has none.
The right hon. Gentleman is basically a reasonable man, and I look forward to dealing with him—[Interruption.] That is very kind. Thank you. So we are all reasonable across the Dispatch Box. But what is not reasonable is what has gone on over the past two weeks. I am pleased that in the past few days he has suddenly entered the fray, because he was suspiciously silent when a lot of his colleagues were running up and down the place trying to frighten the public about the changes. In many senses that was quite disreputable. Two weeks ago, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)—the right hon. Gentleman’s hon. Friend—accused us of deliberately trying to “socially cleanse” London, and that is in Hansard. Furthermore, in the other place, one of the right hon. Gentleman’s great friends, Baroness Hollis, talked of
“Weeping children, desperate mothers, defeated fathers …carnage”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 November 2010; Vol. 721, c. 1743.]
This has gone too far. I should also say that, encouraged by a nod and a wink from his Front-Bench colleagues, one of their great supporters in one of the national papers—a columnist—talked about our “final solution” for the poor. What they have actually managed to do—
Mr Duncan Smith
I will give way in a minute, but not right now, because I want the Opposition to chew on this for a little. The way in which they have behaved over the past two weeks has been atrocious and outrageous. They knowingly used terminology used to describe events such as the holocaust, making shrill allegations of bitter intent that they knew would frighten rather than inform. I say “rather than inform”, because until Saturday, when the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South gave his interview to The Guardian, the Opposition’s manic rabble-rousing had failed to tell the public a rather interesting point: that had Labour Members been re-elected, they knew that they would have had to take strong measures. I will read a few quotations that should explain to his Back-Bench colleagues just exactly what Labour was planning to do.
The first quotation that I want to give them is from somebody whom I hope they will identify: their right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. He said:
“Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford.”
In the run-up to the election, the then Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), said that Labour’s LHA—he was describing his own party’s reform—had discouraged employment and was unfair. He made it clear that the policy was set for a major change and that Labour was to blame.
Mr Duncan Smith
Before I do, I want to finish this one off. My predecessor, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), went even further before the previous election, hinting strongly at a much bigger change. She said that
“it isn’t fair for the taxpayer to fund a very small minority of people to live in expensive houses which hardworking families could never afford.”
I wonder who was in power for those 10 years, but none the less. While acknowledging that Labour’s flagship LHA reform was in an expensive mess, she went on:
“We will publish further plans…to make the system fairer, and to make sure housing benefit encourages people into jobs.”
Of course, as with everything else that Labour Front Benchers did before the last election, they cynically refused explicitly to tell their own Back Benchers or the public—the electorate—what they were actually planning. So now we learn that, according to the hon. Member for Rhondda, all those Back Benchers apparently stood on a secret manifesto to socially cleanse London. Knowing the hon. Gentleman as I do, I am sure that had Labour Members been in government and raised such matters, he would have been the first to jump to their defence, like he always was. The answer to that is: shame on them for scaring all those people in London.
Mr Duncan Smith
I want to deal with some of the allegations. Opposition Members made the allegations, so let us get the record straight. The first was that London will somehow end up like Paris—socially cleansed so that people live only on the outer circle.
Mr Duncan Smith
Oh, it is true? Okay. Let me remind the House about one simple point. The proposed changes to the local housing allowance concern the private rented sector. London has nearly 800,000 social homes—by the way, the Labour Government built far too few in their time—and the changes do not affect them. London has social housing embedded in its heart, and that will not change. So Labour Members must have known that they were scaring people with a complete pack of lies and nonsense. [Interruption.]
Jackie Doyle-Price
My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is easy for Opposition Members to say, “It’s all about those evil Tory reforms to housing benefit,” but the housing market is much more complicated than that. It involves a lack of supply and, under the failed regulatory system, the over-provision of credit by our banks. All of us together have a big job to do in tackling it, but I am glad that we have seen fit to grasp the nettle and do exactly that.
Jackie Doyle-Price
Let me address some of the specifics. We are talking about putting a cap of £250 a week on the proposed maximum for a one-bedroom flat. That would amount to £12,000 a year to be spent on rent. I am afraid that not many people who are working can afford to spend £12,000 on rent.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I hope that all of us across the House can agree that the best kind of community is a mixed community—a community of young people, old people, people on middle incomes and people on large incomes; a community that is ethnically diverse. That is why, when we think about the proposals in relation to London, hon. Members have described them as something akin to what we have seen in Paris. Most London MPs will recognise that those claiming housing benefit in London largely come from the ethnic minorities. They are families from Somalia, Turkey and Africa. I am deeply concerned that the Secretary of State has not yet produced an equality impact assessment of how the proposals will affect those families. He should be able to tell us that the effects of his proposals are not discriminatory, but he cannot do that. He should also be able to tell us how they impact on women and disabled people, but he is not able to do that.
There is a real concern that the proposals will drive people from central London to outer London. My constituency has some of the highest homelessness figures in London. We have 19,000 people on the housing register and 5,000 people in temporary accommodation.
Members on both sides of the House agree that we have not built enough affordable housing. In the past year in London, under the leadership of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, many local authorities failed in that regard, and overwhelmingly they were Conservative. I have the list: 83 affordable homes built in the London borough of Kingston-upon-Thames; 100 built in Kensington and Chelsea; and 200 in Westminster. Given such a backdrop, an exodus from inner London to outer London will exacerbate the problem.
My father arrived in this country in 1956. Like most other West Indian immigrants at the time, he lived in a doss house. This was a London that was still experiencing the effects of the war; there was a shortage of houses and money. Many immigrants huddled together in bedsits. My father lived with four others in a small bedsit in Finsbury Park. He often talked about how he had to huddle around a paraffin heater because of the cold.
I am concerned that these proposals will lead to even more excessive overcrowding in London. I warn the Minister that what we saw in Paris was serious social unrest as a consequence of overcrowding. That is why it is unacceptable to hear the rhetoric about social cleansing, but not to produce an assessment of the effect of the Government’s proposals, which is now a statutory duty as a result of the previous Labour Government.
There is a caricature of the fecklessness that leads people into this situation. Londoners will find themselves in this situation largely for two reasons. The first is that house prices have gone up. For my constituents, they have gone up by over half in the past 10 years. A person needs to be earning £60,000 a year to afford a house in the London borough of Haringey, which is way beyond the reach of most people. Secondly, it is not to say that people are on welfare and that welfare is bad, as was said by one Government Member. Welfare is a safety net for people on low incomes. These are the people who will clean the Chamber long after we have left tonight, and these are the people whom we are letting down as a result of these proposals.
So of course we stand against this motion—[Hon. Members: “For!”] I mean we stand for the motion because of the paucity of evidence backing up the Government’s proposals. Given that the Minister has aligned against him senior members of the Church in this country and given the deep concerns in the city of London and, as we have heard, elsewhere in the country among ordinary, hard-working people, including the 2 million pensioners who rely on housing benefit, he should think again.
Steve Webb
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Housing benefit will be reformed so that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford. When we do that, Labour Members are against it. When we propose a cap, they are in favour of it —until we set a figure, and then they are against it. When we propose to cut non-dependant deductions they are in favour of that—unless it actually affects anyone. The shadow Secretary of State said that he wanted regional caps, when the cap would principally affect central London, because he does not want a cap that actually caps anyone. What we need are credible Opposition propositions, not opportunism.
Three main themes have emerged from the debate. The first is that the impact of these changes has been grossly exaggerated. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said at the beginning, talk of highland clearances and the final solution is a disgrace. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) pointed out how offensive such language is to people, but even in this debate we have heard talk of highland clearances, and of Paris.
The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) does not seem to appreciate that in substantial parts of central London—in the borough of Southwark, for example—48% of properties are in the social rented sector, and will not be affected by either the cuts or the percentiles. The suggestion that central London will be devoid of people on low incomes is complete nonsense. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to correct himself, he is welcome to do so.
Steve Webb
I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman has followed the proposition. It involves new houses and new build. People in existing tenancies do not face that change.
We have heard talk of the impact of these changes. I appreciate that it is a shame to introduce facts at 9.45 pm, but I shall give it a try. As was pointed out by the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Miss Begg), this is not just a London issue, but obviously the impact of the cap will be felt particularly in London. There are 400,000 people on housing benefit in inner London, which ought to be where the impact will be greatest. Of those, 313,000, or 77%, will be unaffected because they are in social tenancies, and a further 30,000, or 7%, will be unaffected because they are in the non-local housing allowance sector. That adds up to 84%. A further 6% receive local housing allowance, but will not be affected. That means that 90% of people on housing benefit in central London will not be affected at all, while another 3% will be affected by less than £10 a week.
The mistake made during the debate is that people have assumed that any shortfall is equivalent to homelessness. That is a ludicrous leap. We know that people experience shortfalls in a number of ways. Of all the people on housing benefit in central London, 7% will experience shortfalls of more than £10 if there is no change in rents.