Budget Resolutions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)]

In 2019, we made a promise. We promised to give the people of this country world-class public services and to strengthen the entire fabric of this country so that everyone benefits. Everyone is entitled to have access to the same opportunities to make the most of their lives, whether they are at school, at work or whatever their personal circumstances. That is what we meant, and what we mean, by levelling up: making this country fairer for all who live in it.

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

On the subject of levelling up, will the Secretary of State tell the House why he thinks it is acceptable for schools to be worse off in real terms now than they were in 2010?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Respectfully, it is quite the opposite. I will get to that point later. Schools will be £1,500 better off per pupil than in 2019-20—not even 2010— but we will return to that subject in a moment or two.

I was getting to the point about those who are more vulnerable. For those who are most vulnerable, levelling up means that extra support will always be there for them. The covid virus has put enormous pressure on all our public services, and I know the whole House will want to join me in again thanking our magnificent public heroes—our nurses and doctors, our teachers and nursery workers, our care home staff and our delivery workers—for how they have helped us all to weather the pandemic storm.

The national health service has been the frontline of this pandemic and we must build up its resources after an unprecedented 18 months. We are committing £5.9 billion to tackle the NHS backlog of non-emergency tests and procedures, which will include £2.3 billion for ensuring that there are at least 100 community diagnostic centres where people can get health checks, scans and tests closer to their homes.

Digital technology is transforming every aspect of our lives, so the package includes £2.1 billion over the next three years to support its use in hospitals and other care organisations to improve efficiency, freeing up valuable NHS staff time and ensuring the best care for patients, wherever they are. There will also be £1.5 billion from that package over the next three years for new surgical hubs, increased bed capacity and equipment to help elective services to recover, including surgeries and other medical procedures.

We have promised an overhaul of our adult social care system, improving social care outcomes through an affordable, high-quality and sustainable system. We are therefore allocating £3.6 billion for local government to reform adult social care provision, including capping personal care costs at £86,000.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), and I wish him well in his campaign for the university in Milton Keynes to be recognised and supported. I hope he will forgive me for picking up only that part of his speech, and focusing on some equally important but none the less parochial examples of my own.

The Grange Farm estate is just half a mile from probably the most famous establishment in my constituency, Harrow School, but the world in which the people on the Grange Farm estate live is very different from the world that the Harrow School students come from. However, I am pleased to say that the estate has secured funding and, through a programme of investment by Harrow Council, is being rebuilt. Members are therefore entitled to wonder why I should raise it in the context of a Budget debate. On the estate at the moment, because it is being rebuilt, a series of vulnerable families are living in the temporary accommodation that is now available there. Many of them have spent all their time in temporary accommodation, moving from one not very suitable house to another even less suitable house. As they face the prospect of being evicted, for understandable reasons—so that the rest of the programme of rebuilding works can be completed—they are wondering, not unreasonably, when, if ever, they will have the chance of a permanent social home.

While there are one or two examples of positive progress in the Budget in terms of funds to tackle homelessness, there is no sense of any recognition in the Treasury of a national need for investment in social housing. I hope that Members with constituencies outside London will forgive me for making the fairly obvious point that London remains the epicentre of the housing crisis. It has the severest homelessness rates in the country: there are more than 165,000 homeless Londoners living in temporary accommodation, representing two thirds of the homelessness in the UK overall, and some 250,000 Londoners are on waiting lists for council housing. Given that, according to an analysis carried out by the Local Government Association, those who are managing to live in social housing face a £2,000 lower housing bill than those who live in the private rented sector, we can understand why there is still so much support for investment in more social housing.

Harrow Council, which I think does a very difficult job as well as it can in managing the housing shortfall, desperately needs still further funds to invest in social housing. I hope that some of those funds will eventually become available, so that those vulnerable families who are facing eviction—many have recently come out of care, some have experienced domestic abuse in the past, and many are single-person households in work who are looking after children but facing the prospect of having to up sticks and move again at a cost to themselves, and who will face the same prospect yet again in three or five years—will finally be given hope by a significant social housing programme.

Apart from a very brief reference in the Secretary of State’s speech, there has been no mention of police funding. While it is good that police officers are being recruited, when the recruitment programme that the Government are funding comes to an end, we will still have fewer officers in the UK than we had in 2010. The number of police community support officers has fallen by about 40%, and those missing officers are not being replaced. What that means in practice for the communities in my constituency is that the local police team that they had become used to at the end of the last Labour Government—a sergeant and, usually, three police constables and four PCSOs for each ward in our borough, a highly visible police presence—has been cut to just one PC and one PCSO, and that is in no small part due to the efforts of the current Mayor of London. We need to see much more investment in the Metropolitan police, notwithstanding the significant need for reform that has again been revealed as a result of the Sarah Everard case and the cases of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. We are desperate to see a dedicated police team once again in central Harrow, and the British Transport police desperately need more funding, not least in my constituency, to improve safety on the tube network for women and girls. That issue has been raised at a number of meetings with the police locally.

I want to lament the fact that there seems to be nobody in Government who is seriously committed to the co-operative movement. Sadly, no investment in support of more co-op housing was announced in the Budget, and there is no sense of the need to give consumers more power. Many hon. Friends on this side of the House have rightly described the huge windfalls that the shareholders in water and sewerage companies have attracted over the years, and it is surely high time for consumers to be given significant power to decide when a discharge should take place, for example, or whether a chief executive’s pay should rise. That should be the most urgent consideration before a change of ownership takes place, and it would be good to see that happen.

Finally, Ministers have promised many times that there would be new investment in credit unions and a programme of legislative change to help to drive a significant expansion of that sector. There is still no evidence of when that programme of legislative change will happen. If there is anything that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury can do today, it would be lovely to have a date for when that legislative package might come forward.