Community Payback

Debate between Grahame Morris and Lyn Brown

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Brown]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Community sentences work because they include punishment while maintaining a link to the community and enabling progress on the problems that drive crime in the first place. The link to the community is perhaps the most important thing, because it helps people to maintain the hope that is necessary to change their life. Community payback orders can give people experience of work that helps their neighbourhood to thrive. The work can and should be hard, but it should also be rewarding, which can, in and of itself, create a motivation for further change.

What are the barriers to making this kind of sentence work well? A lack of investment in the probation service is part of the problem. When I was a shadow probation Minister, I frequently heard of probation staff taking on huge, extraordinary numbers of cases. Good, valued probation staff are not just an early warning system for when an individual is going off the rails; they are agents of hope, healing and personal change. That can only happen if professionals are given the time and resources to develop the real relationships that are essential if we are to turn lives around. It is about understanding the needs, vulnerabilities and risks of the people they are supervising. We need probation staff who organise unpaid work to have good links with employers, councils, colleges and local charities. They need a range of opportunities to be available so they can tailor the service to a person’s skills and needs. Most of all, they need the necessary time and trust to inform the courts of the most effective, most appropriate and fairest type of sentence.

[Grahame Morris]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. The Minister suggested that Opposition Members do not appreciate the work of probation officers, so will my hon. Friend please set the record straight? We really do appreciate the work of probation officers, and we acknowledge the hiatus caused by the privatisation of the probation service. I hope the Government will recognise the value of probation officers in the current pay talks.

[Ms Brown]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we are to turn around people’s lives, and if we are to make a dent in the crime on our streets, we have to resource those who are working with people who often have immensely disorganised lives, who may have a history of trauma and who might need a proper intervention by social services or the probation service to enable them to put their life straight. All too often, the only contact we have with the probation service is to criticise it for not recognising that somebody is about to go off the rails or has already gone off the rails and for not having a close enough eye.

The reality is that our probation service needs the resources to work properly with the people in its care, as well as resources for healthcare, drug rehabilitation, alcohol dependency and so on to use as tools in its work.

Section 21 Evictions

Debate between Grahame Morris and Lyn Brown

Thursday 6th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Grahame Morris]

The Minister is shaking her head. However, where we have had a landlord licensing scheme in a small defined area, that has proven to be effective. However, that has simply pushed the problem into another area.

The consensus is around a scheme that I believe has worked very effectively both in Liverpool and in Newham in London. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), who has hosted visits from local elected representatives.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

We had very fruitful discussions with a Minister about the need for a private sector blanket ban in Newham. The only bit that the ban does not cover currently is the new build in the Olympic village. That has meant that there has not been anywhere else in Newham for people effectively to fly to, in order to escape even worse conditions. We had a very effective conversation with the Government. I urge my hon. Friend to keep pushing at this issue, because that ban has made a real difference to tenants in my constituency.

[Grahame Morris]

I am grateful for that intervention; it is really helpful. I think that such a policy will make a difference and we will keep pushing for it. It is not our intention to introduce a blanket ban on private landlords; we simply want to have a scheme whereby the absentee private landlords will behave in a reasonable fashion, including towards their tenants.

In conclusion, I support the abolition of section 21. Abolition would strengthen tenants’ rights. However, until we address the wider housing crisis, for example by building a new generation of social housing properties in the numbers that we did in the 1960s and 1970s, the national housing crisis will worsen. I saw some figures recently that showed that up to 40% of the council houses that were originally built are now in the hands of private landlords and on average the rents are double what they were when they were in the social sector.

Our children will be burdened with high rents or unmanageable mortgage debt, and they will live in insecurity, worried about reporting repairs or poor housing conditions for fear of eviction. Our communities will also be burdened—particularly those in villages such as Horden in my constituency—as properties are mismanaged by absentee private landlords, whose interests seem to lie in making quick profits rather than in engaging with others to make a sustainable community. So I hope that the Minister will listen to the concerns of my constituents and those of Members from all parties in the House, and that she will take the time to examine this issue and consider how she could help to transform and regenerate not only housing but the life opportunities of many people, including those in the communities of Horden and east Durham, who I represent.