Department for Communities and Local Government

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), I wish to discuss the housing crisis in London, although five minutes is a very short time in which to try to describe a truly appalling situation. Some 360,000 families are on the housing waiting list in London—that excludes the large number of single people who usually cannot even get on the waiting list—and 750,000 Londoners are living in grossly overcrowded accommodation. The housing solutions for them are non-existent, and will be unless there is an enormous change in Government policy and in the policy of the Mayor of London towards this crisis.

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is an inner-London MP for an area that has a particularly severe overcrowding problem, but does he agree that this issue affects the outer-London suburbs as much as inner London? Does he acknowledge that a huge number of people in Harrow in my constituency are also waiting, without a great deal of hope, for a new home?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

This is indeed a time for inner and outer London solidarity, and I am happy to declare that act of solidarity with my hon. Friends the Members for Ealing North, for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) and for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), and with many other outer-London boroughs. To be homeless in London is to be homeless in London, to be overcrowded is to be overcrowded, and to be on the waiting list is clearly to be on the waiting list.

The solutions to this situation have to be sought. Sadly, what was offered in the Budget is not a solution; I suspect that it will result in those with deep pockets being able to buy yet more properties, which they will then keep empty, as part of the disgrace of private sector land banking that is going on in London. I will discuss the other solutions concerning owner-occupation, social rented housing and private rented housing in a moment. First, I wish to deal with the issue of the large number of empty properties, often at the high end of the market, deliberately kept empty by people who have large amounts of money that comes from dubious sources. They have bought these properties in order to make a great deal of money out of them at a later date when their value increases. Given the current housing crisis, we should be giving powers to local authorities to take over properties that are deliberately kept empty, so that the people in desperate housing need can get somewhere to live in London.

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[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I wish to raise two very different issues.

First, Marlborough and Vaughan schools—both excellent schools in my constituency—are in urgent need of rebuilding. They were built in the 1960s as temporary schools. They have problems with asbestos and other serious defects. Given Harrow’s growing population of young families, both schools also need to expand to become three-form entry schools. The council wrote to the chief executive of the Education Funding Agency last July to propose a financial agreement involving funding provided through the priority school building programme and Harrow’s share of the basic needs allocation. I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House will use his influence, at the very least to speed up a response to Harrow council’s letter to the EFA—one containing, I trust, positive news.

Secondly, I hope that the Competition Commission will investigate the funding of premiership rugby teams. Together with the Rugby Football Union, Premiership Rugby is the body that distributes funding to England’s top rugby clubs. It does so on an uneven and unfair basis. I understand that London Welsh rugby club received some £1.4 million from Premiership Rugby to help to fund players’ salaries, while other premiership clubs—notably the so-called founder clubs, such as Sale, Bath, Leicester and Gloucester—receive some £3.5 million a season. Indeed, figures I have seen for January suggest that Worcester, London Irish and Sale all received about three times the funding that London Welsh received. Given that they are London Welsh’s rivals for the relegation place, this hardly suggests that a fair contest is being played out. Indeed, bizarrely, recently relegated Newcastle also appears to have received three times more funding in January than London Welsh, while Bristol and Leeds, which were relegated some time ago, received almost double the funding that London Welsh received in January.

In short, there is a clear bias in how funding is distributed against teams promoted to the premiership. The funding arrangements have all the appearance of a cartel. They make it extremely difficult for newly promoted teams to survive or thrive. To their credit, Exeter and Worcester have done so, but the vast majority of promoted clubs struggle to survive beyond a season or two. I have therefore written to the Office of Fair Trading today asking it to request an investigation by the Competition Commission into the funding of rugby clubs. I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House will speak to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and encourage them to use their influence to support such an investigation.

There is, too, the fiasco of the five points deducted for messing up the registration paperwork of the London Welsh scrum half, Tyson Keats, even though no one disputes his entitlement to seek employment in the UK, his eligibility to seek work as a professional rugby player or indeed—should the call come—his eligibility to play for England. I very much regret today’s decision to turn down London Welsh’s appeal against this grim five-point deduction. Quite why the crime is so severe that it should merit such a huge penalty, when other clubs making similar mistakes have not been hit so hard, is frankly difficult to fathom. Exeter fielded an extra overseas player in one of its matches last season and was hit with only a two-point fine. Leicester fielded Manu Tuilagi some seasons ago, despite his effectively being an illegal immigrant. The club was not penalised any points at all. One would think there would be some expectation by the RFU that Leicester would have checked his status; instead, the RFU rallied round to help him to get his status resolved.

The premiership should surely be a genuine competition in which clubs battle it out on a level playing field. At the moment, sadly, a newly promoted team first has to climb a mountain to get to the playing field and is then expected to play with one hand tied behind its back. It is time that the funding of premiership rugby clubs became much more transparent and that newly promoted teams received appropriate funding.