Hospital Services (South London)

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Nick Raynsford

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander]

I acknowledge that a decision has yet to be taken, and I take this opportunity to press the Minister to confirm that the decision will be taken on 1 February. If it will be taken before then, it would be useful to know. We are here to present the case for refusing the recommendation.

[Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has been making a powerful case. I want to pick up on the Minister’s interjection to the effect that no decision has yet been made and to reinforce my hon. Friend’s point that if changes as fundamental as those proposed in the trust special administrator’s report are introduced but are not safe and do not have clinicians’ true support, we run the risk of repeating the very mistakes of the last reconfiguration, which created South London Healthcare NHS Trust, and which proved not to be as financially sound as was expected when it was proposed. That is a real risk, and I hope that the Minister will pay attention to it.

[Heidi Alexander]

My right hon. Friend has consistently made that point in the House, and I totally agree.

It is a fact that maternity services in south London are under enormous pressure. In the 20 months between April 2011 and November 2012 providers of maternity services across south-east London suspended services on 37 occasions. Women in labour were therefore turned away from hospitals and told that they would have to go elsewhere. Of those 37 suspensions, 26 were necessary because of lack of beds. King’s College hospital also tried to suspend services on a further six occasions, but was unable to do so as no other unit had capacity to accept the women it was trying to transfer.

National Planning Policy Framework

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Nick Raynsford

Thursday 20th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Raynsford]

First, I have given a number of facts. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should advise his Front-Bench team to be rather more respectful of the facts. Secondly, when I was the Minister for Housing and Planning in the early years of the Labour Government I inherited a position in which the reforms of the previous Conservative Government had resulted in large numbers of councils not having up-to-date plans in place. The main thrust of my work as Planning Minister was about getting the existing system to work better, rather than about imposing radical changes. I have advised the current Minister and his colleagues that they would do far better to try to work with the existing system than to seek a radical overhaul, which would be likely to create confusion and uncertainty and lead to paralysis in the planning system—which I am afraid is what we have got.

That leads me to the national planning policy framework. The problem with that document is that the Government have confused brevity with clarity. They have assumed that by reducing the volume of existing guidance they are producing a clearer and simpler statement, but that simply is not the case. The reality is that in many areas, some of which we have discussed today, sufficient care has not been taken with the definitions in the NPPF to give certainty and clarity. Sustainable development is one such area, and I endorse the views that have been expressed about the need for greater clarity.

Secondly, there is the “brownfield first” issue, another area where the Government have blundered and will need to change. Thirdly, there is not a single reference to new settlements and urban developments. There is no mention whatever of the principles that should apply to those. It is extraordinary that that should be entirely overlooked.

[Heidi Alexander]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on an excellent speech. Does he share my concern about the absence of the word “cities” from the national planning policy framework? I find it remarkable that we can have a planning framework for our country that makes no reference to our cities.

[Mr Raynsford]

My hon. Friend makes, as always, a very telling point. This is the problem: the NPPF has been put together in a hurry, and the Government’s objective has been brevity rather than clarity, and as a result it is wanting in many areas and will have to be rewritten.

The fourth area I want to highlight where the NPPF is defective is in respect of mixed developments to ensure that we have balanced communities with affordable and social housing as well as market housing. The NPPF’s statement is very inadequate, as the Minister knows only too well. There is a loose reference to “larger scale residential developments” benefiting from mix, but no definition of “larger scale”.

The problem, as the Minister knows perfectly well, is that in the absence of clear definitions and documents such as those that existed under the previous regime—the planning policy guidance statements—individual developers, local authorities and communities will form their own judgments, they will be in dispute with each other and there will be a rise in appeals and litigation. It will be the lawyers who determine the outcome rather than the Government, the local authority or the local community. That is the real risk of the position in which the Government are putting themselves and our planning system. In the absence of transitional arrangements, the need for which the Minister now belatedly accepts, people will reach for the lawyers to try to determine what should happen because plans are not fully prepared and in place in time to be referred to.

In summary, we have a planning system that plays an absolutely critical role in mediating between competing interests, which requires carefully considered judgments based on experience built up over decades. Against that background, it was unwise of the Government to proceed in a hubristic way with a year zero approach of trying to rewrite the rules. I am glad they are now beginning to recognise their mistake and to row back. I hope they will now apply rather more intelligence, thoughtfulness and consultation to preparing their revised NPPF, which should be a better document than the current one.

Localism Bill

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Nick Raynsford

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to the two amendments in my name, although it feels rather strange to be doing so when we have already had much of the debate. I will speak to amendment 351, which relates to the establishment of a London housing and regeneration board, and seeks to guarantee that at least 50% of the membership of such a board would be made up of representatives from the local authority. I will also speak to amendment 352, which we have already debated at some length, and which relates to the process that has to be gone through to establish a mayoral development corporation. Under the amendment, the agreement of any council that is affected would be required before an MDC could be established. I am conscious that there is much to debate this afternoon, so I will limit my remarks.

I will move on to why I tabled the amendments. I should say at the outset that the amendments have been promoted and supported by London Councils, which, as hon. Members know, is the cross-party organisation that represents London boroughs. We can debate the localist merits of the Bill as a whole, but the provisions on London are distinctly regionalist. Whereas in other parts of the country there is the abolition of regional spatial strategies, we still have the London plan. The Bill proposes the winding up of the London Development Agency and the London part of the Homes and Communities Agency, with their powers being transferred to the London Mayor. Due to the Government’s understandable desire to ensure that the regeneration legacy of the Olympics takes effect, there are proposals in the Bill to enable the Mayor to set up a mayoral development corporation. However, as drafted, the Bill suggests that there could be an MDC anywhere in London, and not just at the Olympics site. My amendments would act as a brake on the concentrating powers that the Bill puts into the hands of the Mayor of London. They would give councils and councillors a voice, and they would give people in London the same say as people elsewhere in the country.

Amendment 352 would make it a requirement that a local authority in a proposed MDC area must agree to its establishment. If more that one local authority is affected, all must agree. The Bill as drafted gives complete power to the Mayor and the Secretary of State. Under Government amendment 213, the support of two thirds of the assembly will be needed for a proposal to move forward. That is not a sufficient assurance. There could be a situation in London in which local people are completely against the setting up of an MDC, councillors and the local authority in the area are completely against the setting up of an MDC, and the GLA constituency member is completely against the setting up of an MDC, and yet if the Mayor wants it to happen, it will happen. I ask hon. Members, what is localist about that?

We had some fun in Committee. On Second Reading, my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) talked about the prospect of a new Mayor of London—perhaps Ken Livingstone in a year’s time—choosing to establish a mayoral development corporation in Bromley. I will not repeat those comments.

[Mr Raynsford]

Why not?

[Heidi Alexander]

I will not repeat them because I am under strict instructions to keep the debate moving as quickly as I can.

English for Speakers of Other Languages

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Nick Raynsford

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander]

This issue is so important and has such knock-on effects that investment in English language courses is fundamental. That is why I have called for the debate today.

I was making some points about the wider societal importance of English language skills and had spoken about the NHS. Let us think now about schools and what happens to many children who grow up without English as their mother tongue. They go to primary schools and hundreds of teachers throughout the country do a sterling job in improving their language skills and helping them to integrate with their classmates. Then they go home, where perhaps they revert to speaking the language of their mother and father. Is it not much better for those children to be able to hear both their parents speaking English—perhaps not all the time, but at least so that they can see and hear that their parents can speak the language? Is it not much better for their parents to be able to understand the letter from school, to be able to speak to the teachers and to be able to contribute to the wider school community?

[Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on the very powerful case that she has made. Like me, she represents an area in south-east London with a very large number of relatively poor migrants and she will know the number of occasions on which in our surgeries we are confronted with constituents who bring a child to translate for them. Her point is very powerful: in the interests of community cohesion, it must be right to encourage those families to speak English at home and not just to depend on their children to translate for them.

[Heidi Alexander]

My right hon. Friend is entirely right. Like him, I have had that experience at my surgeries.

We are coming to the nub of the debate now. Time and again, people at the top of the Government have talked tough on immigration and community cohesion. It is often a simplistic narrative that runs the danger of inflaming tensions rather than dealing with them. However, its simplicity, even if it is problematic in many ways, demonstrates how critical language skills are to building a shared sense of what it means to be British, what it means to live together in our towns and cities and how we might all be able to develop respect and tolerance for someone else’s way of life.

That is why, on 30 March, I stood up in the Chamber and asked the Prime Minister to reconsider the Government’s plans for ESOL, given his desire to see everyone speaking English. His response was illuminating. He said:

“We will have to take some difficult decisions over student numbers, and the priority should be to ensure that our universities can go on attracting the best and the brightest from around the world...That is why we have said that there should be a post-study work route. However, it does mean that we should be tough, particularly on those colleges that are not highly regarded. The fact is that over the last year, about 90,000 students were coming to colleges that did not have proper regard at all.”—[Official Report, 30 March 2011; Vol. 526, c. 342.]

I could not quite believe what I heard. I was so incensed as I sat there that I am surprised that I did not get a “Calm down, dear.”

I appreciate that answers to unasked questions are a common occurrence in politics, but I am afraid that the ignorance the Prime Minister’s reply demonstrated was in another league altogether. I was not talking about international students coming to the UK to learn English, about bogus colleges or about 90,000 students coming to study at institutions with no “proper regard”. I actually had to watch the clip of our exchange again on Democracy Live because I thought I must have been so vague and ambiguous that the Prime Minister could not possibly have understood me, but, no, I was relatively clear, and the Prime Minister did not know what I was talking about.

I was talking about the thousands of people who are settled in the UK and who need to be able to speak our language. I was talking about the mums in Lewisham, Sheffield and Liverpool who are desperate to learn English. There may not be many such mums in Witney, but if the Prime Minister is going to insist on giving us lectures on immigration and community cohesion, he should at least have a basic grasp of the things that can make a difference to communities such as the one I represent, and ESOL is one of those things.

Before I close, I want to refer to some of the stories of Lewisham college’s ESOL students, all of whom have contacted me about the proposed changes. Solange Makaba is originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She has lived in the UK for 11 years. She says:

“I heard on the news yesterday that the government is going to change everything about studies in this country and I feel disappointed and depressed about it.”

Speaking of when she first came to this country, she says:

“I didn’t know where to start and I was unable to do anything because I had a problem with my English. It was too hard at the beginning, but when I found an ESOL class, it helped me a lot. Now I am able to do something because I improved my English.”

I have another e-mail, from Nanthankumary Sivakumar, and the Minister should already be familiar with these comments, as the e-mail was copied to both of us on 10 February. Nanthankumary says:

“I am writing to you because I feel worried about the proposed cuts to ESOL English classes. I came to England in 2005, when I couldn’t speak English and no one could help. First my life was hard. Then my husband found work. After that my children joined a school. It was very difficult for me because I couldn’t understand English at my children’s school and GP. I couldn’t answer important phone calls during that period. I thought about going back to France. Then I found an English class at Lewisham College. I couldn’t speak very well but I could manage everything. If I had to pay for my course I wouldn’t have improved so quickly”—

my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) touched on that—

“and I wouldn’t be able to help my children. I am worried that after the cuts people will not be able to access education.”

There is also the story of Maryam Zeinolabedini, whose e-mail the Minister was also copied in on. Maryam says:

“I am writing to tell you that I am very worried about the proposed cuts to ESOL courses…When I came to England, I couldn’t speak English. I was living in Nottingham and one day I was very sick. I went to hospital and nobody could help me. I was very upset and for 4 hours I waited for an interpreter.”

After that, she decided to learn English. She says:

“I went to college and English classes. I was very happy because I got a part time job in a factory and in the afternoon I went to college and discussed with my classmates and teacher and improved my English. If I had to pay for my ESOL course I couldn’t come to college and would feel very unhappy and couldn’t communicate with people.”

Finally, there is Percy Tabaoda, who says:

“I am writing to you because I’m so worried about the proposed Government cuts to ESOL and the effects they’ll have on the most vulnerable people and their families. I come from Peru and I’ve been living in this country for more than 10 years. I’m a British citizen now but in my experience as an immigrant I’ll tell you that what helped me gain confidence and integrate into the society was courses like ESOL. I believe the government will be making a big mistake if they proceed with the cuts because it is not a solution to the problems the country is facing.”

I repeat: the changes are not a solution to the problems the country is facing—Percy hits the nail on the head. The danger, of course, is that the proposed changes to ESOL will not only not be a solution, but will make some of the problems in our country much worse. I implore Ministers to look again at their proposed change. They should look hard at the impact assessment when their civil servants put it in front of them. They should look again at the Prime Minister’s speeches and ask themselves whether they really think their changes will result in more people being able to speak basic English.

I have not come here to score political points, but because the Government did not do their homework before announcing the changes to ESOL last November. I want to give the last word to another constituent, Nick Linford, who is a further education funding consultant and the managing director of Learning and skills—events, consultancy and training, or Lsect. I must thank Nick for his help and advice over the bank holiday weekend when I was preparing this speech. He sums up the current situation better than I ever could when he says:

“The change to inactive benefit policy will impact on tens of thousands of English language learners, something it is clear the Government did not properly consider when they announced the policy…in November 2010. It is an unintended consequence and a rethink whilst embarrassing is more than worth it…as aside from the impact on communities and people’s lives, it would avoid tens of millions in funding going unspent.”

In referring to unintended consequences, Nick gives the Government the benefit of the doubt, and the debate gives the Government an opportunity to show that he is right to so.