Local Government Funding

Debate between Helen Hayes and Philip Davies

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) on securing this debate. There can be no doubt that local government has been hit harder than almost any other area of the public sector over the past six years of the Government’s austerity programme. Among local authorities, councils with the most deprived populations have been hit the hardest of all. I represent part of Lambeth and part of Southwark. For simplicity, I will talk about Lambeth today, but exactly the same picture is played out across the border in Southwark.

Lambeth Council is the 29th most deprived area of England, and it has experienced the 13th highest level of cuts to date, with tens of millions of pounds of cuts still to come. Councils have been through six rounds of efficiency savings, and Lambeth has consolidated the number of core office buildings from 14 to two, reduced the number of staff by 1,000, cracked down on fraud to raise an additional £3.6 million and innovated to deliver more services online and share services with neighbouring boroughs, but it has lost more than 56% of its Government funding since 2010. Despite efficiency savings and innovation, cuts of that scale mean that the council still faces further impossibly difficult choices.

As the Prime Minister is aware, cuts to front-line services are hard to bear. Councils are increasingly forced to make a kind of Hobson’s choice between: the essential statutory services upon which our most vulnerable residents rely, such as the safeguarding of children and social care for older residents; the services that bind us all together, such as libraries, parks and street cleaning; and the services that help us build for the future, such as planning and school places.

The Government have taken a system designed to allocate resources to councils on the basis of need and turned it on its head, so that the councils with the greatest needs are dealt the greatest cuts. While the Government have cut, needs have continued to grow. The Government’s disastrous approach to housing has resulted in a dramatic increase in families presenting as homeless and needing temporary accommodation. Lambeth’s expenditure on temporary accommodation has increased from £2 million in 2011 to £11 million last year, and an ageing population means that the need for social care continues to grow.

By 2020, councils will receive no revenue support grant from the Government and will be funded entirely from council tax and business rates, with 55% of funding coming from business rates. That is a fundamental shift from a system of local funding based on allocation according to need to a system that will benefit councils with strong council tax raising abilities, a large business sector and the capacity for economic growth. Although there will undoubtedly be some winners in that system, there could potentially be some very big losers. There are big questions about how the Government will redistribute funding to councils with significant need to ensure that those with limited capacity to raise additional business rates do not face unacceptable consequences.

There is limited time today, and I will finish on time, but I hope that the Minister will answer some of those big questions about the mechanism for redistribution, and about the better care fund and how it will be distributed across the country. Without those clarifications, this major reform of council funding is a big leap into the unknown, fraught with risk.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

Order. I call Jack Dromey.

Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill

Debate between Helen Hayes and Philip Davies

Friday 16th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to you for that guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker. My new year’s resolution was to try to stick to the subject on Fridays. As I have not always achieved that, I thought I would make a special effort this term to stick to the point, and I am rather pleased that you have supported my first attempt to do so.

On the part of the intervention by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) that is most relevant to the Bill, I accept her premise that it is important for everybody to be in a home that comes up to a certain standard. I am not aware of anybody who would disagree with that proposition. The issue is whether the Bill is necessary to achieve that. If I am allowed to make a bit more progress—time is pressing—I would like to set out my contention that the Bill is not necessary to achieve what she would like, which is exactly the same as what I would like. I cannot speak for the Minister, but I would like to think that he agrees—I am pretty certain he does—with the proposition that all housing should be fit for human habitation. We do not object to that principle.

The starting point for the Bill, as the hon. Member for Westminster North said, was the 1996 Law Commission report, “Landlord and tenant: responsibility for state and condition of property”. The explanatory notes to the Bill confirm that it is adapted from the Law Commission’s draft Bill, which was included in the report. The report was 230 pages long and covered many issues.

I cannot resist pointing out that we are nearly 20 years on from when the report was produced. I hope it has not escaped everybody’s attention that since 1996, we have had 13 years of Labour Government. They had plenty of opportunity to put the draft Bill into legislation if it was a matter of great importance, as the hon. Member for Westminster North claims.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the growth in the number of people who live in the private rented sector—40% of people in the London Borough of Lambeth now live in the private rented sector—gives rise to the need for additional protections for tenants against irresponsible landlords? Responsible landlords have nothing to fear from the Bill, but that additional protection is urgently needed.

[Philip Davies]

I think that the hon. Lady is going down a rather dangerous line of argument, if she does not mind my saying so. She seems to be saying that as long as only a few people are affected, it does not matter what the condition of houses in the private rented sector is, but now that a lot of people live in the sector, all of a sudden it does matter. I would argue that the standard and condition of the housing matters regardless of how many people live in the private rented sector. It does not matter whether it is 40%, 20%, 5% or 2%—we should make sure that all accommodation is fit for human habitation. I do not accept her premise that this has only become an important issue because there are so many people in the private rented sector.

[Helen Hayes]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Philip Davies]

I will give way in a second, if the hon. Lady is patient.

Anybody who was living in the private rented sector between 1997 and 2010 would have thought that this was an important issue, but for some reason the Labour Government, which I presume the hon. Lady supported, did not think that there was any necessity to introduce this legislation. I am happy for her to explain why that might have been the case.

[Helen Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. By the extension of his argument, it should not matter whether a landlord is a small landlord with only one property or a large private sector landlord with many properties—the same rules and regulations should apply to all, and all tenants deserve the same level of protection.

[Philip Davies]

I do not think anybody has disagreed with that proposition, either. I certainly have not said that there should be different rules for different sized landlords, and I do not agree with that view.

I was merely making the point—I will reiterate it because I obviously made a dog’s dinner of explaining it clearly the first time around—that it is unnecessary for the House to keep passing legislation that affects landlords because there is already lots of legislation that makes it perfectly clear that homes should be fit for human habitation. When this House adds more and more regulations, it does not achieve anything for tenants because there are already rules and regulations in place. All it does is pass on a huge burden to landlords who have to work out whether they are complying with the law today compared with what it was yesterday. Good landlords who want to do the right thing find it difficult to keep up with all that. We had lots of legislation that affected landlords during the last Labour Government and the coalition Government, much of which was very challenging for landlords.

My contention is that we should make the law for landlords reasonable and sensible, and then leave it at that and let them get on with it, rather than introducing a law and then 10 minutes later introducing another law that does exactly the same thing but that sends out the message that this is so important that we can send a press release to our local paper saying that we really care about tenants, even though the law already applies. This legislation does not achieve anything; it just causes a lot of grief for many people who did not deserve it in the first place. I reiterate that if the Law Commission report was so important, the Labour party had plenty of opportunity to implement it, but it did not bother to do so.

The 1996 Law Commission report states:

“This is the third occasion on which the Commission has considered possible reforms to the law on repairing liability in leases. The recommendations in the first of our two previous reports, Civil Liability of Vendors and Lessors for Defective Premises, were enacted in part by section 4 of the Defective Premises Act 1972. Our second report, Obligations of Landlords and Tenants, has not been implemented.”

Its point was that the previous report had not been implemented, yet now we are moving on to another one.

Understanding what is meant by “fitness for human habitation” is crucial to this debate. The Law Commission report stated:

“When the implied term of fitness for human habitation was first introduced in 1885, the term ‘fit for human habitation’ was not defined. The meaning of those words was therefore a matter for judicial decision alone, at least in the context of the implied term. It was only in the Housing Act 1936 that an attempt was made at some form of statutory definition.

Before the introduction of statutory criteria for determining whether or not a property was fit for human habitation, the issue was treated as one of fact to be determined according to the standard of the ‘ordinary, reasonable, man’. A property might be unfit for human habitation not just because of structural defects or internal physical conditions, but because of ‘external causes, such as want of ventilation, noxious effluvia, etc’, In the earlier decisions, the standard was held to be satisfied quite readily. It was ‘a humble standard’ and it ‘only required that the place must be decently fit for human beings to live in.’”