Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I am well aware of that issue, which has been raised in a Westminster Hall debate in recent weeks. We fully support sixth forms and want to see them continue, but the hon. Lady will be aware of the economic condition in which her party left this country.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

How can the Secretary of State be so sure that expanding grammar schools will enhance opportunities for our most deprived young people and not just perpetuate and reinforce existing social privileges?

[Nicky Morgan]

The hon. Lady might have misheard my answer to a previous question. This Government are in favour of expanding all good schools. I think that she will want to recognise that we have 1 million more children in good or outstanding schools as a result of this Government’s education policies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for spotting one of the things that we have not yet achieved in this Parliament. I agree with him that first aid skills are very important, and I was discussing that only this morning with Natasha Jones, who has been named Tesco community mum of the year for setting up a baby resuscitation project. We also welcome the work of expert organisations such as the British Heart Foundation to support schools in this aspect of teaching and we have been working with the Department of Health on helping schools to procure defibrillators at a reduced price.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

T7. Today is national secondary offer day, yet 24% of the country’s secondary schools are full or over capacity. Given that this Government have wasted £240 million on free school places in areas without any real need for them, what does the Secretary of State say to parents whose children are being crammed into schools that are over capacity?

[Nicky Morgan]

What I say to the hon. Lady, and therefore to anyone who wants to ask questions about this, is that when her party was in government, it stripped 200,000 places at the time of a baby boom and allowed uncontrolled immigration. At the last national offer day—[Interruption.] I suggest that she waits to find out what the offers are this year, but at the last national offer day, 82.5% of pupils were offered a place at the highest preference school and 95.5% were offered a place at one of the top three; and of course, seven out of 10 free schools have been opened in areas of basic need.

Preparing Young People for Work

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Schools already have a duty to ensure that young people are advised independently on all the options open to them. There is no doubt that one of the things we hear when we go around the country is the positive nature of apprenticeships, but often young people find out about them through a roundabout route. The company will be working with organisations such as the National Apprenticeship Service, but one of the most powerful things is for employers to go into schools and speak about the opportunities available to them. I was at Crossrail yesterday talking to one of the apprentices. We hope very much that he, and other apprentices, will go back into schools to talk about their experiences in the world of work.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am the daughter of a skilled manual worker and I went to an ordinary comprehensive school. When I was growing up I simply did not understand what jobs existed or how one might progress from entry-level jobs to top positions. What makes the Secretary of State so confident that her announcement today will change that, because it is still a problem for many young people?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank the hon. Lady for that question, and I agree with her that that is one of the issues. The whole point about the body is that it will be employer led. I mean “employer” in the widest sense of the word. It may very well be that young people have never thought about setting up their own company, or that they are not aware of the opportunities available to them in the third sector, the public sector or the private sector. The body is needed to inspire young people, and to tell them about all the options open to them, the fact that often they may go from one career to another and the impact of the subject choices they make at school. I want young people to be advised early on, when they are making GCSE choices and before they get any further, on their subject choices and on the amazing careers that are open to them. We saw this week the publication of a report that mentions 40 jobs that were not available even a few years ago. The jobs landscape is changing all the time.

Birmingham Schools

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. My predecessor certainly put in place a number of robust strategies to deal with this issue, and Ofsted has increased its use of no-notice inspections, particularly where it is concerned about behaviour or deteriorating results.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

The problems in Birmingham schools are serious and undoubtedly need to be dealt with, as do all cases of poor governance, mismanagement and misconduct. In London people are concerned about the £2 million fraud within the Haberdashers’ Aske’s academy chain. How many more schools will need to be found wanting before this Government accept that their systems of accountability and oversight are not up to the job?

[Nicky Morgan]

I utterly disagree with the hon. Lady. Schools have more accountability and are inspected more rigorously under this Government than they ever have been before, and the minute the Department is aware of any problems in schools, it will take swift action, as we have seen in relation to the schools in Birmingham.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I certainly will look at that speech—I am afraid I did not have a chance to read it in full before this morning’s Question Time. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that one of the tragedies of the situation that has evolved in Nigeria is that the girls who were abducted were doing exactly the right thing—they were in school and taking exams. We absolutely do not want to put girls around the world off their education. The UK remains committed to helping to find the schoolgirls. I shall look at the speech and think about how best to respond.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

2. What steps she is taking to close the gender pay gap.

National Planning Policy Framework

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Thursday 20th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

The hon. Lady speaks of 86% of planning applications having been approved, but does she have information on how many times those applicants have been round the block? In my experience, what tends to happen is that people apply once, get refused and have to apply again, having changed something. That is what we mean by a brake that is slowing the process.

[Heidi Alexander]

I do not have the figures that the hon. Lady requests, but I was about to go on to say that we need to look at more than planning policy; we need to look at the planning process. That may address one of the issues that she touches on.

I accept that it can take a long time to get planning applications approved, but we have to make sure that there are enough resources in council planning departments to deal with applications speedily and sort out, at the outset, some of the problems to which the hon. Lady refers. We all know that council and, indeed, planning department budgets are coming under huge pressure as a result of the Government’s austerity programme.

We also have to look at perceptions of the planning system and do more to encourage developers and planners to work more collaboratively. I say this as a politician: one of the biggest frustrations for developers is the politics in all this, such as the planning application that gets stuck in a council a year before an election and is not decided. A whole range of issues impact on problems with the planning system. The Government are wrong to look at planning policy on its own, and it is wrong to assume that a slimline version of the NPPF is the answer to the country’s economic woes.

It is wrong to assume, too, that just because the NPPF is much shorter than previous planning guidance it is any clearer—a point that has been made in our debate. There is a real danger that the NPPF is a blank cheque for planning lawyers. As Simon Jenkins pointed out when he gave evidence to the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government this week, the document is littered with adverbs. On the basis of the NPPF, developers can argue for “acceptable” returns. Acceptable to whom? Something that is acceptable to me is probably very different from something that is acceptable to the chairman of a big house-builder. The document refers to the fact that councils can refuse applications where the adverse affects “significantly” and “demonstrably” outweigh the benefits. If ever there was a word for lawyers to fight over, surely “significantly” is it. The document is sloppy and ambiguous, and it could have a raft of unintended consequences.

My other main concern about the NPPF relates to whether it does enough to address some of the big challenges that we face as country. Let us take the example of affordable housing. The framework does away with previous targets for the amount of affordable housing that should be provided by developers when they are building schemes where the majority of homes are for sale on the open market. It is left to councils to decide whether they have such targets. It is the same for the threshold for when any affordable housing requirement must kick in: local councils can decide. That is not to mention the issue of what constitutes “affordable housing”, or how housing requirements are properly assessed.

Decent Homes

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Baroness Morgan of Cotes

Thursday 27th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the thoughtful speech of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal). It is probably one of the most thoughtful contributions that I have heard from a Government Member in my time here. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) on his thoughtful and knowledgeable opening remarks. I have the pleasure of serving under his chairmanship on the Communities and Local Government Committee, and I am pleased to be able to make a contribution to the debate on “Beyond Decent Homes”, which was published before I joined the Committee.

I am also pleased to be taking part in today’s debate because, precisely eight months ago today, when I spoke for the first time in the House of Commons as the newly elected MP for Lewisham East, I pressed the Government on when we would have the chance to debate the future funding of the decent homes programme. I did not think that it would take eight months to get to this stage, but I hope that it will be worth the wait.

For many of my constituents, having a decent place to call home is still more of an aspiration than a reality. Many people in my constituency—in places such as Catford, Downham, Grove Park and Blackheath—live in homes that do not meet the decent homes standard.

Thanks to the previous Labour Government, thousands of properties in my constituency are in the process of being upgraded by housing associations, such as London and Quadrant, and Affinity Sutton, and thousands more are benefiting from improvement works being carried out by Phoenix, a new community-led housing association.

However, many of my constituents, particularly those who have remained local authority tenants, are still waiting in the hope that, at some point, it will be their turn to see their flats, houses and estates turned into places where they feel proud to live, and where decades of under-investment can be put right. I want to focus on how we can achieve a decent place to live for those who are still waiting, not just in my constituency, but in the borough of Lewisham as a whole and in London more generally.

Having a decent home is something that many of us take for granted. It was rightly the ambition of the previous Government to ensure that everyone had a decent home and that those organisations delivering huge housing investment programmes were fit for purpose— efficient, well-run and well-managed organisations that could cope with the complexities of multi-million pound capital projects.

When I first became a councillor in 2004, Lewisham’s housing service, as it was then, could not be described in that way. I represented a ward in which 70% of the population rented their homes from either the council or a housing association, and day in, day out, I came across an attitude that can only be described as, “The computer says no.” I sat in evening after evening of tenant and resident association meetings, being told by people that they were ashamed to invite friends round to their flat, not because they did not have a reasonably modern kitchen or bathroom, but because they were embarrassed to ask their friends to walk up eight flights of foul-smelling stairs when the lift had broken down. They were embarrassed by the broken communal doorways, the peeling paint in the corridor, the broken windows and the leaking roof.

Although Lewisham’s new ALMO has got to grips with the culture of the old housing services and, indeed, with some of the housing management challenges, I am ashamed to say that some of the conditions on estates in my constituency resemble what I have just described. It is not right that people in the 21st century have to live this way. Sometimes, a new kitchen, a new bathroom or new windows are not going to make the sort of changes that are needed. Heathside and Lethbridge is a ’60s estate of nearly 600 properties on the edge of Lewisham town centre, and the only real answer is to knock it down and start again. However, Government cuts to the Homes and Communities Agency budget put the future phases of that redevelopment in doubt. The council has been working hard with its development partner to get the regeneration programme started, and the new Government must step up to the plate and find the funds to ensure that future phases can be built out. If they do not, they will condemn hundreds of residents to a life in completely substandard accommodation. The situation is the same with Milford Towers and Excalibur, which are smaller estates in my constituency, but whose needs are no less pressing or complicated.

Although regeneration funding is incredibly important for many areas of Lewisham, so too is the amount of money that the Government will make available to local authority landlords to carry out decent homes works. That was an issue that my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) raised earlier, and it is the issue to which I will now turn.

I have already touched on the transformation that has taken place in our local ALMO. It has been a long, hard slog for the board, and I pay tribute to the resident chair, Julia Cotton, and the chief executive, Andrew Potter, for bringing about that change. However, as a result of the Government’s announcement in the comprehensive spending review, Lewisham Homes finds itself facing increasing uncertainty about the amount of money that it will receive to carry out desperately needed works. Of the ALMO’s 13,000 tenanted homes, 7,300 do not meet the decency standard.

In March 2010, the previous Government indicated that £154 million would be made available to Lewisham Homes to carry out the decent homes programme if it met the two-star rating, which, I should say, it achieved last summer. However, last October, as part of the CSR, this Government insisted that local authority landlords would have to fund 10% of all outstanding improvement works themselves. Lewisham’s bid has therefore been reduced to £126 million, to be spread over four years from April this year. Like many other ALMOs and local authorities throughout the country, we are waiting to hear the outcome of our bid.

My biggest fear—my right hon. Friend touched upon this—is that Lewisham Homes will not get anywhere near the amount of money that it needs. In the CSR, the Government announced £1.6 billion to meet the outstanding decent homes requirements of local authority landlords. London local authorities alone estimate that their outstanding investment need is £2.5 billion. London has 46% of the 150,000 homes identified by the Government last year as eligible for that funding. Therefore, even if London gets 46% of the overall sum, £736 million is a long way off £2.5 billion. I must therefore question whether Lewisham will get £126 million of that money.

Lewisham Homes has also received scant recognition for its work in achieving a two-star rating from the Audit Commission. As the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) has said, the Government’s current approach does not seem to take account of all the hard work put in by ALMOs that have achieved the two-star status. I think that that says to those people, “Tough luck—you’re now lumped back into the mix, just like everyone else.”

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I understand what the hon. Lady is saying about the two-star rating and, listening to this debate, I can see both sides of the argument on the two stars. However, I represent part of the borough of Charnwood, in which Charnwood Neighbourhood Housing is the ALMO. It has struggled for a long time to get to its two-star rating. Under the previous Labour-controlled local administration, it had no stars. We are now up to one star, and are trying very hard to get to two. The difficulty with the hon. Lady’s argument is that the tenants, through no fault of their own—the problems with management are not their fault—have lost out on any investment over the past 13 years in relation to decent homes. Now they are in round six and still face receiving less money. Does she appreciate that point?