Glenda Jackson
Main Page: Glenda Jackson (Labour - Hampstead and Kilburn)Department Debates - View all Glenda Jackson's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(14 years ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker. In the calmer mood, I will give way to the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson).
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
Is it not also part of the right hon. Gentleman’s housing policy to ensure that rents in the social housing sector will rise to 90% of the median, and that the Government are considering abolishing secure tenancies?
Mr Duncan Smith
The answer is no for existing tenants. Our policy will apply to new tenants and new build, so the hon. Lady should check her facts.
Let us not forget that the private rental market is dynamic. That is the point that the Opposition fail to mention.
Nick de Bois
I will not give way until I have made some progress. I am sure the hon. Lady will understand that I have been here for many hours, and I am not sure whether there is anything new coming from the Opposition Benches.
Is it right to sustain a scheme that works against employment? No. What do I say to the employer who came to my surgery only last week and told me that people are queuing up for jobs, but they want to work for only a limited number of hours for fear of losing their house? How absurd is that? Whatever the Labour party’s good intentions when it was in government, its reforms produced a grotesque situation. What do I say to the people who come to my office and want to work, but are caught in the poverty trap—[Interruption.] I am sorry that hon. Members do not want to listen, but week after week in my constituency I see the evidence of a failed policy on my doorstep, and it is absolutely right to represent my constituents’ interests not only where there has been failure, but where there is an opportunity for success. That is what this Government are trying to do, and rightly so.
What will the changes mean? We are talking about the LHA, not social housing. Rents are high. There has been a 25% increase over seven years in the LHA sector compared with 15% in the private sector. It was interesting when an Opposition Member—forgive me, I cannot remember his constituency—said that the 40% share of the LHA market that the Government are driving is not influencing rents. It is utter nonsense to think that such a massive contribution can have no impact on the level of rents. Opposition Members may deceive themselves if they wish, but I assure them that in the real world that is definitely the case.
Nick de Bois
I will not give way at the moment. I want to finish my speech, but if there is time I will happily take a further intervention later.
A four-bedroom house will allow almost £20,000 of LHA, which is equivalent to a substantial amount of gross income. We talk about fairness, but it must work both ways. Hon. Members should come with me down the Hertford road in my constituency to meet those who are working hard to pay their rent and trying to look after their family on a low income. They should try to understand the frustration of living next door to people who may be living in a bigger house, subsidised by the state. We must bear that in mind when making judgments. We are all in this together, and we must reform and change.
The Labour Government believed that the answer to defeating poverty was to use targets and money—some £20 billion of our money in housing benefit. They rationalised that that was how to fix the problem, but it failed. It did not help; it hindered. Instead of releasing those in poverty and suffering inequality, it imprisoned many in a spiral of unwelcome state dependency. The time has come to change. Our proposals are part of a holistic, joined-up programme.
Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)
I am a firm believer—I always have been—that people should be rewarded for hard work. I am also a firm believer that we need housing and other benefits, but that they should be there as safety nets. The willingness of the Labour Government to pay more than £100,000 a year to someone on benefits is not, to me, a safety net. It has to be said that £100,000 is an enormous amount of money, which is sufficient to fund a lifestyle beyond the budget of many hard-working families in my constituency of High Peak. [Interruption.] I am sorry, but that has to be wrong; it cannot be right.
Labour Members claim that this is fair. Do they think it fair that, under current arrangements, someone paying rent below the local housing allowance level will be able to receive the local housing allowance and keep the change? People can make a profit on housing benefit. Does that seem fair? Is that fair to someone working hard to pay their way? Labour Members look askance, but it is true.
Glenda Jackson
In my constituency, private landlords are increasingly reluctant to accept tenants who can pay only through housing benefit. For an increasing number of people, there is a shortfall between what the local rent office deems a property to be worth and what the landlord actually charges. Not one single claimant of housing benefit in my constituency—and they number thousands—has money to take home from the local housing allowance. In many instances, they have to make up the shortfall themselves.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
I was interested by what the hon. Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) said. I think that it had something to do with hard-working families and the impact of the present housing benefit system on people who wish to work hard. I was reminded of the first Thatcherite regime, when the hon. Gentleman’s party deemed a living wage to be 75p an hour. I also remember that during our term in government, his party voted against every single move to take people out of poverty, including the national minimum wage.
The most interesting thing to emerge from today’s debate is the fact that Government Members have swallowed hook, line and sinker the myths that were originally used in the proselytising of their Prime Minister, who stood on the Floor of the House and castigated housing benefit for paying people £1,000 and £2,000 a week. He attempted to present that as the median for people claiming the benefit, and I was so intrigued that I tabled a question on the issue. There are, in fact, no claimants receiving £2,000 a week, and there are precisely 90 families, in London exclusively, whose housing benefit pays them rent of £1,000 a week, because those are extremely large families.
The myth with which the Government have been successful in their proselytising is that most people on housing benefit live in four-bedroom properties. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people on housing benefit live in shared accommodation or in one or two-bedroom properties. In my constituency, the amounts that those claimants will lose range from £21 a week for those in shared rooms to £246 a week for those who are fortunate enough to live in four-bedroom properties.
Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
The 10 families in my constituency who live in five-bedroom properties do so not because they have dressing rooms or extra en suites, but because of the nature of families nowadays. A mother and a father may bring in children from previous relationships. Government Members do not seem to be able to grasp that.
Glenda Jackson
That is a salient point, which can be replicated in my constituency. I know of a family with two children who are severely disabled and in wheelchairs, and two who are not so severely disabled. There are also a mother, a father and a grandmother, and they are all attempting to live in a four-bedroom property.
The other myth that has been propounded by Government Members today is that these changes are essentially fair. I distinctly remember the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister—who has proved himself to be the Maréchal Pétain of his generation—saying that the changes were not only fair, but made at a time when the Government were having to make extremely difficult choices to protect the most vulnerable members of our society. Throughout the afternoon, it has been clear that Government Members do not regard pensioners as vulnerable. Nor, apparently, do they regard them as being taxpayers. They do not regard people with disabilities as being vulnerable, and they do not regard people on low pay as actually working.
What I say about my constituency and my city of London is not scaremongering. We have been here before. As I said, some of us remember the Thatcherite regime, when people were forced out of their homes and some were sleeping on the streets because they could not afford to find anywhere to live. The bills for bed-and-breakfast accommodation were astronomical. I am sure that Government Members are smiling at that memory, because that, essentially, is what they wish to do.
Glenda Jackson
Let me finish the point. Government Members wish to get rid of social housing completely.
Anas Sarwar
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I promise not to annoy her again. I just want to highlight the fact that Government Members are finding much of this funny. They like to portray this issue as being about workshy or unemployed people taking benefit from hard-working taxpayers across the country. Is it not true that only one in eight people who receive housing benefit are unemployed? Government Members should take this debate more seriously.
Glenda Jackson
My hon. Friend is wishing for the moon. Government Members are not interested in facts; they discount absolutely everything that emanates from this side of the House.
Glenda Jackson
No.
Government Members also discount the briefings that we have all received, from organisations such as Shelter, Crisis, the Chartered Institute of Housing, Citizens Advice and the National Housing Federation, about the real danger and damage that these ill-thought-out plans are going to inflict on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
We have been here before. We have seen all this before. An earlier submission by Crisis pointed out that it will cost £60 a day for a room in a bed and breakfast. Let us look back to the earlier history of bed and breakfasts. The hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) referred to the history of 1945; I was somewhat surprised that he did not take us back to the much more recent history of what happened to people in this country under the first Thatcherite regime. The hon. Gentleman was concerned about children then—
Glenda Jackson
No.
I was somewhat surprised that the hon. Member for Colchester is not concerned about children this time. As he knows, the greatest damage inflicted on children was when they were stuck in those abominable bed-and-breakfast set-ups. Not infrequently, families were turned out on to the street at 9 o’clock in the morning and not allowed to return until 5 o’clock in the evening.
This, apparently, is the coalition Government’s way of taking people out of poverty. I find it totally incongruous that they should believe that they will take people out of poverty by making them homeless. That, essentially, is what they are going to do.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I am much obliged to the hon. Lady for giving way. We have sat through her speech with varying degrees of incredulity. While we admire her histrionic performance, we are still at a loss as to what her position is on the cap. Does she think it is right that in her—[Interruption.] I am fully entitled to ask the hon. Lady a specific question about her view on the cap. There are people in her constituency who are receiving far more than £20,000 a year on housing benefit.
Glenda Jackson
If the hon. Gentleman had been here from the beginning of this debate, he would not have been as ill informed as he is ill mannered. There are not people in my constituency claiming housing benefit at that rate, as I have had occasion to say. The majority of housing benefit claimants live in one and two-bedroom properties. We have already said that we would certainly introduce a cap, but not by the method that his Government propose. There should be a regional element.
Glenda Jackson
From a sedentary position, the Minister is waving his hands in disbelief. This afternoon he was leaping to the Dispatch Box asking questions about what my party would have done if we had been in government. He knows, and I know, that if my party had been in government and his party had still been in opposition, and we had introduced the policies that he is supporting now, he would have fought them tooth and nail.
The Minister has absolutely no cover any more. As I have had occasion to say before in the House, his party has become the “30 pieces of silver” party, and nowhere is that more marked than in what it is proposing to do to some of the most vulnerable people in all our constituencies. I say to Government Members that the problem is not exclusively London’s; this will affect the whole country. When the second tranche of the Government’s approach to social housing comes in—the increase of rents to at least 80% and the removal of secure tenancies—the impact will run and run.
Michael Ellis
Are not hard-working people on low incomes also vulnerable, and do they not also need to be treated fairly by our society, as opposed to those on whom so many of the hon. Lady’s Opposition colleagues focus—people on housing benefit who are receiving more from the taxpayer than many of the working poor could dream of paying for themselves?
Glenda Jackson
I am intrigued to know how the hon. Gentleman thinks it will benefit low-paid hard-working families who are not claiming housing benefit if we make low-paid hard-working families who are on housing benefit both unemployed and homeless. They will then have to move from where they are currently living—and, I hasten to add, where they provide services that the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends would never dream of providing for themselves. We are all dependent on those services, and on the people who provide them. I know the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues do not like it, but when that happens in the centre of London we are going to see—
