Asbestos Removal: Non-domestic Buildings

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Emma Lewell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think my right hon. Friend the Minister would also agree, because in his 2022 Work and Pensions Committee report, he asked for a central asbestos register and a deadline for the removal of asbestos from non-domestic buildings. The previous Government rejected that recommendation. Even now, people are still shocked when they discover that, despite the 1999 ban, there is no national database or register and, as a result, the Government do not have a comprehensive picture of where asbestos is. Consequently, there is no strategic plan to have it safely removed.

I thank the Minister for his engagement with me on the issue to date, and for his consideration of a census, whereby it will be mandatory for the owners of non-domestic buildings to advise if their buildings have asbestos or, if the building was built before 1999, they believe it to be there. He has promised to meet me and the Health and Safety Executive as it works towards timelines and a delivery plan, but I hope he can offer some updates today. As we continue to push for net zero and retrofitting, it makes sense that we start to remove asbestos as soon as possible.

I again make the plea that we start the census and the removal of asbestos in South Shields, and that the Minister helps me to discuss with our colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care a specialist clinical hub for South Shields, to improve diagnosis, care and support.

These are all familiar asks to the Minister, not just from me but from long-time campaigners such as the TUC, Asbestos Information CIC, Mesothelioma UK and so many more who have seen the pain that asbestos causes and are living with it daily. I pay tribute to the work that they have done and continue to do and, in particular, to the kindness that Liz Darlison from Mesothelioma UK and Steve Boggan showed me after I spoke about my lovely grandad at Prime Minister’s questions.

My grandad, John Henry Richardson, was a sheet-metal worker. He worked in shipyards all over the north-east, and then went on to work in the Elsy Gibbons factory, making water tanks. While he was there, they introduced an annual health check scheme, and they found a shadow on his lungs. He retired at 62 through ill health.

Grandad always had a terrible cough and had struggled with his breathing for years, but because he worked in heavy industry, no one thought it was serious. In our area in the ’80s and ’90s, most men who worked in heavy industry had persistent coughs. As my mam said, everyone thought that was just part of the job. Grandad ended up with three inhalers and could not walk anywhere, even to the local shops. It would take him half an hour just to walk down the small flight of stairs in his house because he had to stop on every single one to catch his breath.

My grandad spent the first five years of his forced retirement travelling all over the country for medical tests, and at constant hospital appointments. He kept saying that the Government were hoping he would die before they had to pay out his compensation. When he was 69 years old, he was admitted to hospital with a heart attack because his heart could no longer take the pressure. After nearly a week in hospital, he suffered another heart attack. He was surrounded by my family, listening to the slow, dying breaths of this smart, kind, gentle, hard-working family man as his heart broke away. A little piece of ours broke away with him too. He died in a hospital that most likely had asbestos in it, and those caring for him have probably also gone on to suffer from this awful disease, which will continue to haunt the north-east and elsewhere for generations to come.

[Ian Lavery (Blyth and Ashington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a really powerful, personal speech, which is extremely important. Does she agree that it is not just the likes of her grandad and all those who worked in heavy industry, manufacturing, the pits and shipbuilding who are suffering from the likes of mesothelioma? As she said, it is now about where the asbestos currently lies—in Parliament, schools, police stations, town halls and NHS buildings. Asbestos-related diseases, particularly mesothelioma, have a latency period of up to 40 years, so the problem has not gone away. In this country, 5,000 people die of mesothelioma every year—more than in road traffic accidents—so we have got to get a grip on it.

[Emma Lewell]

I thank my hon. Friend, my colleague from the north-east, for that powerful intervention. He is absolutely right: in my grandad’s time, we did not know about the risk from those devastating fibres, but we now do, so we absolutely cannot let this happen to anybody else.

The last time the House debated this issue was under a Conservative Government. We now have a Labour Government, and it is in our party’s DNA to do right by workers and the people we represent. The memories of those we lost mean that the sufferers of this silent killer, and I, will certainly not be silent until the Minister gives us what we are asking for, and what he asked for previously before he was elevated to his current esteemed position.

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

I am delighted to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Western—for the first time, I think—and I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell) for bringing this important debate to the House. She made the point that this is the first time under the current Government that we have had the opportunity to debate this issue, so I congratulate her on securing this debate.

I share in the grief of all those who, like my hon. Friend, have lost somebody close to them as a consequence of exposure to asbestos. As she and others reminded us, it is still by far the biggest cause of work-related deaths in the UK—it is responsible for 5,000-plus deaths per year—and many people live with the impact of asbestos-related disease. I join my hon. Friend in commending the work of the journalist Steve Boggan, who has highlighted this topic very helpfully.

Hanging in my office in the House of Commons, a few yards from here, I currently have a portrait of Mavis Nye and her husband, Ray. Ray Nye became an apprentice in the Chatham dockyard in 1953 and worked there for a number of years. Asbestos was everywhere. In 1957, during his apprenticeship, he met Mavis. He refers to that encounter as

“the most wonderful thing ever to enter my life”.

They married, and Mavis used to launder his overalls. At some point she breathed in asbestos dust. Fifty years later, in 2009, she was diagnosed with mesothelioma.

We have heard about very long latency periods. It appears that in Mavis’s case, it was 50 years before she was diagnosed. Thanks to pioneering treatment at the Royal Marsden hospital, she lived for another 14 years. She and Ray established the Mavis Nye Foundation to inspire mesothelioma victims. She was a force of nature. She sadly died in 2023, but it was her wish that her portrait should be hung in the House of Commons. In fulfilment of that wish, it hangs in my office this afternoon. It will soon be returned to Ray, but I am glad that we have been able to fulfil that wish and help celebrate the contribution of a remarkable woman—just one of the many thousands who have died as a result of earlier asbestos exposure in the last couple of years.

In Britain we have a mature and well-established approach to the management of asbestos in buildings. The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, enforced by the Health and Safety Executive and other regulators, requires duty holders to assess whether asbestos is present, what condition it is in and whether it gives rise to a risk of exposure. The duty holder must then draw up a plan to manage the risk associated with asbestos, which must include removal if it cannot be safely managed where it remains. There is an existing legal obligation for duty holders to remove degrading asbestos and to share details of asbestos in their premises with people who work regularly in a building and may potentially disturb or damage materials which contain asbestos.

[Ian Lavery]

I place on record my sincere thanks to my right hon. Friend for the sterling work that he has done with regard to mesothelioma and asbestos-related disease in the past, but what has been mentioned is not working. We need the same as in other parts of this nation, where there has been a programme of statutory removal, but we are not doing that here in England. I wonder if my right hon. Friend can say why we are different from other nations of the UK.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I will come on to address exactly the point that my hon. Friend raises. He is absolutely right to do so. Let me just make the point that asbestos does need to be removed before any major refurbishment work or before demolition. Under current arrangements it will eventually be removed, albeit over an extremely long time.

There are around 40,000 notifications of asbestos removal jobs every year. The HSE inspects to check that duty holders are managing asbestos effectively, both in the public and commercial sectors. Those inspections, I am pleased to say, have been significantly stepped up since the Select Committee on Work and Pensions report published in April 2022, at a time when I was Chair of the Committee, and to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields referred. That report was critical of the decline in the number of asbestos inspections and enforcement notices since 2010. The report pointed out that between 2011-12 and 2018-19, while the total number of enforcement notices from the HSE fell by 10%, the number of asbestos enforcement notices had fallen by 60% to less than 200 in the year 2018-19.

Increased activity by the HSE on asbestos since then has seen the overall number of enforcement notices climb to over 300 under the Control of Asbestos Regulations in 2024-25. Inspection activity is a means of providing assurance that the regulations are effective and that those with duties are complying with them. For example, between September 2022 and March 2025, HSE inspectors have visited over 1,000 schools to inspect their arrangements for managing asbestos. They found good levels of compliance in those 1,000 schools with the responsibilities to manage the risk of asbestos—albeit with 8% requiring enforcement notice action to improve their performance. This is particularly important given, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields pointed out, the proportionately higher number of cases of asbestos-related diseases among retired teachers compared with other professions. So it is right to focus on schools as a particularly pressing issue, along with hospitals and NHS premises, which she also mentioned. In the last year—2024-25—this work was expanded to include inspections of local authority head offices and premises. In his intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) referred to council buildings as being of concern, and he is absolutely right to do so, so current plans for this year—2025-26—include a further 600 visits to schools and local authorities to be completed by March next year.

The HSE is also focused on the management of asbestos in commercial sectors. In 2024-25, its inspections dealt with the management of asbestos more than 2,330 times. Of the buildings found to contain asbestos, 40% required either written advice or an enforcement notice. This was the first year of a multi-year focus on asbestos in commercial sectors.

Together with the guidance on asbestos published on the HSE website, communications campaigns are important in raising awareness and understanding. The Asbestos—Your Duty campaign was launched in January last year to reach those responsible for the maintenance and repair of non-domestic buildings built before 2000 and to raise awareness of the legal duty to manage asbestos. In his intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth and Ashington made the point that the current arrangements are not always working, and we need to draw people’s attention to their legal responsibilities. That campaign is running alongside the Asbestos & You campaign, which focuses on reducing exposure to asbestos for tradespeople.

[Ian Lavery]

Can my right hon. Friend say if there are any records of the children who were in the same working environment as a lot of the teachers who, sadly, have passed on? Is it the duty of the inspectorate or a responsibility of a Department to hold records of the children in that working environment who might wait 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years before a little tick of asbestos dust triggers mesothelioma?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend raises a very interesting point. I am not aware of any data about that. From time to time, however, one hears of or comes across people who have succumbed to mesothelioma in their 20s or 30s, and an obvious possibility is that they were exposed at school to the dangerous asbestos that led to that catastrophic outcome.

Both my hon. Friends have pressed the case for asbestos to be removed, and I want us to have a better understanding of the size and scale of the asbestos legacy in the built environment and an evidence base for future strategic decisions on removal. I have been working on this with the HSE since last July. I chaired a roundtable event with stakeholders last October to explore the issue and consider what we need to tackle Britain’s asbestos legacy effectively.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields pointed out, the Work and Pensions Committee made a strong and compelling case for the establishment of a national digital register of all workplace asbestos, bringing together into one accessible place all the separate records maintained—all over the place—by law at the moment. The Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 already require duty holders either to survey premises constructed before asbestos was banned or assume that it is present. A lot of duty holders commission external consultants to fulfil their obligations under the regulations, and they maintain records on their own databases, so compiling a national register would be a less gargantuan task than may initially be assumed. Establishing a national register would require significant resource from duty holders and the Government, at a time when resources are tight. With the HSE, I am looking at how we can develop better information on asbestos in buildings, and on ways of gathering a robust and reliable dataset to provide the foundation to inform longer-term strategy for the removal of asbestos.

If we cannot at this stage commit to a national register, a one-off asbestos census may be the way to start, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields suggested. The solution is likely to be a phased approach to improving information on buildings containing asbestos, to help us build an objective and reliable evidence base. A better understanding of the costs and associated impacts for the Government’s own estate—schools, hospitals and so on—would be a good place to start, before considering wider roll out. HSE is considering how best to take that forward in a way that will ensure we can obtain reliable, standardised data.

Alongside that, HSE is supporting digitalisation of built environment data, using building information modelling, or BIM. That approach enables improvements to the identification, recording, sharing and use of information on health and safety risks such as asbestos. The possibility of a surge in asbestos removal, triggered by actions on the part of the Government, needs to be planned for. Asbestos requires specialised waste disposal and removal, in many instances by licensed contractors. We would need to avoid the risk of duty holders removing asbestos without proper controls, and not disposing of it at licensed sites. That would present a significant exposure risk in itself.

In March, I attended part of the HSE’s asbestos research summit, which took place in Manchester. That brought together world-leading experts on asbestos, with duty holders, employer groups and mesothelioma support groups. I am pleased to say Liz Darlison was there. The summit was to inform where we should focus our efforts to ensure we continue to understand the nature of the asbestos exposure risk across the country.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I welcome the opportunity to discuss that proposal with my hon. Friend, to see what we can do. At the research summit, we talked about the need to ensure that everybody involved in the asbestos ecosystem understood their role and the impact their behaviours can have in preventing exposure for themselves and others through their activity at work.

[Ian Lavery]

I wonder whether the Minister is aware of the Asbestos Victims Support Group’s case against Cape plc, the producer of asbestos, and the claim for £10 million for research and development. If so, does the Minister support the claim?

Personal Independence Payment: Disabled People

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Blyth and Ashington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I give great credit to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) for bringing this subject to the Chamber.

There is not one MP here who was elected to make people poorer—not one. If there is, they should look at themselves in the mirror and feel a million shames. I look at the Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms)—a good friend of mine and a tremendous servant to this House—and I wonder what went wrong. Why, when the rich are getting richer, the very rich are getting even more rich and there are more billionaires and millionaires than ever, are we tapping people for pennies, taking away their livelihoods and making their lives so miserable? My constituency of Blyth and Ashington is in the bottom 10% for social deprivation. I have 10,467 people depending on PIP support just to live. They are not living a life of luxury.

[Imran Hussain]

I forgot to say in my speech that I will vote against these measures if the Government push ahead. Will my hon. Friend do the same?

[Ian Lavery]

I will definitely vote against these measures. I was not elected to make my people poorer, for heaven’s sake, and to reduce support and benefits. There are some decent proposals with regard to getting people back to work, but the threat of a blanket reduction of benefits is scandalous. It is not Labour.

By the way, I will not take any lectures from the Tories, who have said categorically that they would double the amount of money that we are looking to withdraw from the benefits system—probably up to £15 billion. I will definitely be voting against these measures. I am a voice for people who need a voice in this place, and we need to oppose this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

Thank you very much indeed, Dr Allin-Khan, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to participate. I acknowledge the powerful speeches made by all Members this afternoon and my deep respect for the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). Nobody speaks with greater sincerity and authority on behalf of people who are marginalised and disadvantaged in our society. I pay tribute to her, to her work and to her contribution today.

I want to say a quick word about the history, as mention has been made of the Conservatives’ time in office. I acknowledge that genuine mistakes were made in the design of the welfare system that we have now. The system is clearly not perfect, but it was very much not perfect before: in 2010 the system was extremely complex, with high rates of benefit dependency. The introduction of universal credit and PIP helped to rationalise and bring greater order to the system, and to reward work rather than welfare. Significant improvements were made in that regard, including improvements in the number of disabled people who were able to work and were supported in work.

In the last year of our time in government, 300,000 more disabled people were in work than in the year before. There was genuine improvement. Nevertheless, not enough support was given to many welfare recipients; that was the consequence of our fiscal inheritance in 2010 but also of choices made by the coalition Government, which fell particularly hard on local authorities and the DWP. I acknowledge that point, which is often made by hon. Members.

Then something else happened, particularly around 2017 or 2018 and even more so after covid. We saw a significant rise in the number of people in receipt of health and disability benefits, including in the higher categories of the universal credit health element. People were stuck on benefits, in many cases indefinitely and forever. What explains the imperative for reform, which the Government are responding to, is that the number of people on the higher rate of UC has increased by a third over the past five years. The PIP budget grew by 50% in the last Parliament alone. The fact is that the benefit bill is unsustainable. However, it is also true that the system can be inhumane and ungenerous.

We have a paradox: a system that is bloated and unsustainable overall, leading to the large budgets we are facing, yet on the frontline, in people’s actual experience, the system is starved in terms of the consequence of the inadequacy of benefits for many people. This is a huge opportunity and an imperative for reform—genuine reform, not just the soundbite. I notice that we do not have any Reform MPs in Westminster Hall for this debate. We genuinely need real reform.

In 2024, the Government I supported had plans to bring in further reforms to the benefit system; we did not have the opportunity to introduce those reforms, thanks to the public. Labour was elected with a huge majority that includes many Members here. To my regret and surprise, after 14 years of complaints about Government welfare reforms, the Labour party entered Government apparently without any plans to change the system.

We have spent eight months waiting for reforms to be introduced, only to get what we have now: a crude and cruel set of cuts, without any reform to the system at all. It is purely in response to what the Chancellor has done to the British economy—induced a fiscal crisis and caused the Treasury to demand of the DWP that swingeing cuts be made to the welfare budget, without any opportunity to reform the system or to reduce demand for welfare. That is, of course, what we should be doing if we want to bring down the bills.

There are also, of course, tax increases, including on employers, making it much harder for people to move from welfare into work, which I will not discuss today, and the removal of vital support from pensioners through the winter fuel payment cut.

[Ian Lavery]

Would the hon. Gentleman care to tell us how much His Majesty’s Opposition propose to cut from the welfare bill?

[Danny Kruger]

The hon. Gentleman will be gratified to know that we are not in government, so it is not for us to come forward with precise plans. At the end of the previous Parliament, we had a manifesto commitment to reduce benefit spending and reform disability benefits and UC. We are now in a position of policy formulation, so I am afraid I am not able to tell him exactly what we would do. My role is to challenge the Government on why they have taken so long to come forward with an absence of meaningful reform plans. Unlike the hon. Gentleman, I want to see benefit spending reduced. I think we spend too much on welfare in this country, but that is because we have social breakdown and poverty. The answer to that is not simply to cut benefits without reforming the system, but to reduce the drivers of poverty.

I recognise many of the problems with PIP, and I understand the imperative for change. Members have powerfully made the case that the system is currently inadequate, particularly for people with fluctuating conditions. We have heard powerful testimony about that in the Work and Pensions Committee—the Chairman and many other members are here. In fact, just this morning we heard powerful evidence from people talking about mental health. People who have a set of very complex, interconnected needs might not reach four points on any one measure, so could lose PIP under the Government’s proposal. I have read evidence from the MS Society that makes the same point: 48% of PIP recipients with MS do not reach four points in any one of the measures, so would be at risk. I am very concerned on behalf of those individuals.

I am also concerned that we do not even know how many such people there are. Members made the point that it took a freedom of information request to get the figure of 1.3 million out of the Government. That is not the figure that was officially released. As the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) said, we are also unclear about the effect on passported benefits, which is a significant question for the Government to answer. Most of all, we do not know what the Government’s announced assessment review will come forward with, yet we are making the cuts before we understand how the method of assessing eligibility will be reformed.

I implore the Minister to pause the measures set out in the Green Paper. We need a proper review not just of the assessment but of the way the whole system works. We absolutely need to bring down the benefits bill, but we do that by reducing demand for welfare, and many of the levers for that are of course outside the DWP. Nevertheless, we should redesign the system itself because of the many problems I have identified. As Members said, we should do that with claimants, not to them.

People voted for change in 2024, but they are not getting it. The Prime Minister promises more of the same—to go “further and faster” on the course he is already on. I deeply regret what he is doing. I have very great respect for the Minister. Few people have spoken in Parliament with greater authority, conviction and expertise on the subject of welfare in recent times. I have great sympathy with him for having to defend this policy position, which I do not think he would have defended in opposition.

I echo the points made by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and the right hon. Members for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. They said that Labour should be better than this, and I agree: we should all be better than this. My party will stand with Members who oppose the changes.

Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Western]

The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that we lose a total of £55 billion a year to fraud across the public sector; the Bill will recover £1.5 billion. However, it is part of broader measures—certainly on the Department for Work and Pensions side of the Bill —to save £9.6 billion across the forecast period. By the very nature of the changes that we are making with the Public Sector Fraud Authority, we are designing them to be scalable. As the PSFA becomes more familiar with the work it is undertaking, we think that it will be able to save a significant amount more.

As I was saying, Madam Deputy Speaker, with benefit fraud alone costing £7.4 billion in 2023-24, this is a major problem that is getting worse, not better. We cannot afford to ignore it, and we certainly do not accept it. Fraud against the public sector is not a victimless crime. Our public services, everyone who depends on them, and the taxpayers who fund them, all suffer. And they are increasingly suffering at the hands of fraudsters who use ever more sophisticated techniques to steal money meant for the public good.

The private sector has evolved and adapted its tools and tactics to respond, but, as the scale of the losses that I have just outlined make clear, the same cannot yet be said for the public sector. With this Bill, we will put that right. There will be new powers for the Public Sector Fraud Authority to investigate and deal with public sector fraud outside the tax and social security systems, and new powers for the DWP to modernise its response to fraud and error in the benefit system.

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said on Second Reading, this Bill is tough and it is fair. It is tough on the dodgy business people who try to defraud our public services and it is tough on the criminal gangs and individuals who cheat the benefit system. It is fair to claimants who make genuine mistakes, by helping us to spot and prevent errors earlier. And it is fair to taxpayers, who deserve to know that every single pound of their hard-earned money is being spent wisely.

[Ian Lavery (Blyth and Ashington) (Lab)]

The Human Rights Act 1998 was one of the best pieces of legislation ever passed by a Labour Government. Can the Minister assure the House that this Bill in no way contravenes the secrecy part of the 1998 Act?

[Andrew Western]

I can give my hon. Friend that assurance and, indeed, that all of our legal obligations have been satisfied as part of the consideration of this Bill. The imperative thing for me as a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions is that we are supporting those who need the social security safety net, not the fraudsters who pick holes in it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Andrew Western)]

As the right hon. Gentleman rightly says, a number of benefits are currently delivered under agency agreements. It is very much for the Scottish Government to broker a conversation with us about either extending those agreements or bringing them to an early conclusion. I am yet to have any such conversations, but should I have any, I will be very happy to let him know.

[Ian Lavery (Blyth and Ashington) (Lab)]

T6. Many people with mental health conditions rely heavily on personal independence payments so that they can continue in work and remain active in their communities. Can the Minister provide advice to the many constituents of mine who have contacted me terrified by the rumours that the Government are about to scrap this vital support for those who already have mental health issues?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is right that there has been a particularly big increase in mental health problems among young people. Given what the last Government did, I can well understand people being worried. We will continue to support people with mental health problems in the health and disability benefits system. The proposals for reform we will bring forward in the spring will make sure the system is fit for purpose and fair to the taxpayer, and they will deliver the support in work that people such as my hon. Friend’s constituents need.

Household Support Fund

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) on securing this extremely important debate.

We have to look at who is in most need with regard to the household support fund. These people are so desperate. What are they after? They are after food. It is 2024, and we have people pleading—begging—for food. The people in receipt of the support are people who are on the breadline, as other speakers have explained. It is a lifeline—it is a lifesaver. Why on earth the Government are considering not continuing the fund, or have possibly already made the decision not to continue it after the next month or so, is beyond me.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend, like me, seeing more and more people coming to his constituency advice sessions who are in desperate need, pushed into penury and really struggling to make ends meet? What they need now is certainty that the Government will say, “Do you know what? Yes, we’ll extend the household support fund and we’ll do it now.”

[Ian Lavery]

I totally agree. These people are after food; they are after soap powder; they are after sanitary products. Potentially, they are after heat, warmth and light. This is 2024, for goodness’ sake! We all understand it; we all have people in our constituency surgeries who are suffering greatly as a consequence of this.

As politicians, we all have decent lives and we are all very comfortable, but we see constituents who are in desperate need of help. They are not after luxuries; they just want to keep themselves clean and feed their kids. That is what the household support fund is for.

I place on the record my massive thanks to Northumberland Communities Together. It is led by Julie Leddy, who is getting into the community and has been able to speak to people. The people who need support the most are the hardest to reach. Julie and her team have been absolutely fantastic.

The household support fund needs to be funded adequately and needs to be renewed on a multi-year basis. We need to encourage non-digital applications. Most of all, we need to ensure that the fund continues in the best interests of the people who, sadly, we all see in our constituency offices on a regular basis, who have got absolutely nothing.

Two-child Benefit Cap and Child Poverty

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Kim Johnson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution. I believe that the incoming Labour Government should make every effort to look at eradicating poverty in any way, shape or form. We are seeing a resurgence of Victorian diseases such as malnutrition, rickets and scarlet fever. Children are going to bed with empty bellies and going to school unable to concentrate or learn to their full potential. In recent years, we have heard many heartbreaking stories of children mimicking eating from empty lunch boxes or even attempting to erase their hunger by eating paper and erasers. Children are incredibly aware of the stigma of poverty, and the pressure can have lifelong psychological effects on top of the material impact on educational attainment, life chances and associated health problems.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

It is great to see my hon. Friend bringing this extremely important debate to the Chamber. In the north-east, 12,000 children and families are unable to claim the universal credit benefit because of the two-child cap. Some 5,400 are also not considered eligible because of their child tax credits and their situation with universal credit. Will my hon. Friend say what sort of impact that has on ordinary families not just in the north-east, but up and down the country?

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman]

As I think I have made clear, I do not accept the arguments about poverty. I am not aware of the specific LSE paper that the hon. Lady mentions, but I would make the simple point that in this country we have never given more welfare support or paid higher figures for pensioner support or disability support. Without a shadow of a doubt, there has been massive cost of living support, as I will outline, to the most vulnerable.

[Ian Lavery]

The Minister makes the case for how good this Government have been on benefits, support and work funds. Minister, that is 4.2 million children living in poverty. He cannot be happy with that; he has to admit it is far too high. Secondly, does the Minister think kids sitting round the tea table at night are worried about whether they are in abject poverty, absolute poverty or relative poverty? If you have an empty belly, you have an empty belly, and this Government should be totally ashamed of themselves because of the high statistics and figures that are rising week in, week out.

[Guy Opperman]

With respect, I do not accept that the figures are rising week in, week out. The simple point is surely this: over the past two years, the taxpayer has contributed £94 billion of support to vulnerable households, and that support is ongoing. For example, the energy price guarantee will remain in place as a safety net and a support for households until March 2024. The cost of living payment, which I can go into more detail on, features a further £150 payment to 6 million people, over and above existing benefits, which have gone up by 10%. Over £900 will go to 8 million households on means-tested benefits over the course of the year. The first £301 payment to those on means-tested benefits was made in April.

For pensioners, an additional £300 on top of the winter fuel payment is being paid to over 8 million pensioner households. Such a degree of support has never been provided before, and whatever people’s views are of this Government—positive or otherwise—they have stepped in to the tune of £94 billion with cost of living support over the past two years. As I say, the first £301 payment was recently issued to local people up and down the country.

In-work Poverty

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for bringing this important debate to the Chamber.

I will start with a couple of statements made in the past week or so that I think are absolutely outrageous. The first was:

“I want people to be reassured that we’ve got to hold our nerve, stick to the plan and we will get through this.”

That was from the Prime Minister. People who are in work, in poverty, will be wondering what on earth the Prime Minister—one of the richest people in the country—knows about in-work poverty. I have no doubt that the Prime Minister works very hard indeed, but he gets the rewards. As my hon. Friend the Member for Slough said earlier in his fantastic contribution, the likes of the Prime Minister will not have seen their kids go to school with an empty belly, holes in their shoes or clothes that have been passed down from older siblings or somewhere else. Indeed, will he have used a food bank, for heaven’s sake? I have to ask that question.

The second statement I want to raise was from the Governor of the Bank of England, who said that

“we cannot continue to have the current level of wage increases…the current levels, I’ll be absolutely honest, are unsustainable.”

This is a man who is on more than half a million pounds. The same applies to him: he will not have had any difficulties when he has been making these decisions and telling people who are in poverty and cannot feed their own kids that they have to accept that they cannot have decent pay increases. The fact that inflation is as high as it is has nothing to do with wages for ordinary people. Ordinary people have not had wage increases. There has been wage stagnation. The facts show quite clearly that there has not been much of an increase since 2005—and look at the situation in the country.

I have been on the picket lines with many people over the past few years. Most of them are fighting for decent wages, terms and conditions. Most of them are now having to use food banks. I ask the Minister: why on earth, in this day and age, in the sixth richest economy in the world, should teachers, nurses, doctors, ancillary workers and public sector workers have to rely on food banks? This is the UK. We are not a third world country. Can the Minister please tell us why it is right and why it is acceptable that people in the health service can do a hard day’s graft and have to visit the food bank to feed their kids? Why are teachers having to do the same? Why are public sector workers, including one in five of those working in the DWP, claiming universal credit? It is an absolute outrage. The fact that people are saying that the route out of poverty is work is an absolute nonsense.

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman]

No, I am trying to answer this particular point. The reality of the situation on free school meals—[Interruption.] Hon. Members may chunter away as much as they like, but I am going to try to set this out. On free school meals, under the benefits-based criteria, which I believe is what the SNP Government wish to use, 2 million of the most disadvantaged pupils are eligible for and claim a free school meal. That is 23.8% of all pupils in state-funded schools. The number eligible for free school meals has increased since 2016-17 from 1.128 million to 2.019 million. Almost 1.3 million additional infants enjoy a free healthy and nutritious meal at lunchtime, following the introduction by this Government —to be fair, in the coalition—of the universal infant free school meal policy in 2014. This Government have extended eligibility more than any other. Taken together, we spend more than £1 billion per annum delivering free lunches to the greatest ever proportion of schoolchildren —to more than one third of schoolchildren.

I will move away from those particular policies, because the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) raised a couple of points that I want to address. He was very critical of the Prime Minister, and it is perfectly his right to be so. The Prime Minister is a gentleman of wealth now, but the hon. Gentleman should remember that he is the son of a pharmacist and a GP, who grew up in Southampton.

The hon. Member also talked about his constituency. He will be aware that I set up the Northumberland Community Bank in Ashington in his constituency. The bank is the fastest growing credit union in the north and is, without a shadow of a doubt, doing amazing work in providing support for loans to local people in Northumberland. I say respectfully that that is an amazing institution, which I hope he supports.

[Ian Lavery]

Will the Minister kindly inform the House what those last remarks have to do with this debate?

[Guy Opperman]

The hon. Gentleman raised issues about support for working people. The Northumberland Community Bank is a fantastic institution that provides savings and loans to those in difficulties. It is a co-operative, which I am sure he supports; it was set up in Northumberland; it is a success story; and it is based in his constituency. I will move on.

The Government’s support is underpinned by the wider welfare system, and I will try to set out some particular points on that. In 2023-24, we will spend around £276 billion through the welfare system in Great Britain, including £124 billion on people of working age and their children. Benefit rates and state pensions have increased by 10.1% for 2023-24 and the benefit cap has increased by the same amount. The reality of the situation is that this country has never spent as much as it presently does on this support.

Asbestos in Workplaces

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I thank the hon. Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) for bringing this extremely important discussion to Westminster Hall.

I want to pay tribute to a number of people—I will be brief—who have been campaigning for generations on asbestos-related cancers. These are the people in the field, who deal with individuals who have died, and who assist and support people through the darkest period in their lives. Asbestos-related cancers and, in particular, mesothelioma are dreadful diseases. As has been mentioned, 60% of people when diagnosed with mesothelioma die within a year, but by heck has it been a struggle to get rightful compensation for many of the people involved—not just for them, but for the families, and everyone who has suffered.

I give a big thank you to the TUC, the Joint Union Asbestos Committee, the Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum and the different forums up and down the country—I can see members present. I also say a big thank you to Mesothelioma UK for all its work, but by heavens, that has been a very difficult task, because successive Governments have not done anything to protect people from mesothelioma and other asbestos-related cancers.

With mesothelioma, it is not just people in heavy industry, but, as the hon. Lady mentioned, teachers—and if it is teachers, it is kids. We should not forget that kids are more susceptible to mesothelioma in that environment. They are five times more likely to get the disease than teachers. I think 400 teachers have died since 1980— 21 a year. What have we done about it in this country? Absolutely nothing. The Government have failed at every turn to do anything at all about mesothelioma.

What has happened as a result of that? People are dying, and not just teachers, but plumbers, doctors, nurses and people in the NHS. We are talking about people in the building industry and patients in hospitals. People within the school and educational estates are dying. It just takes a drawing pin into asbestos and a little bit of dust lodges in someone’s lungs. They do not feel it. They could have that little bit of dust in their lungs for 10, 20, 30 or 40 years and die as a result of it once they are diagnosed.

It is essential that we do more as a Government than we have ever done before. We are one of the only Governments in the world where cancer-related diseases and deaths are on the increase, and we are doing absolutely nothing about it. That is really not acceptable. It is as if we have kicked the can down the road to 30 or 40 years’ time. Mr Paisley, you will remember Alice Mahon, the MP for Halifax, who recently died of mesothelioma—after being in this place, by the way, for more than a decade. It was because of her work in the national health service as a nurse, and she died as a result of mesothelioma. She had an awful death.

I could speak for ages about this issue, but I understand that lots of people want to get in on this debate. It is important to recognise that every now and again we speak about mesothelioma, cancer-related diseases and everything that is killing people, but we do nothing about it. We will have another debate in 10 years’ time and say we have not done anything. We have to get our act together. We have to make sure that we support people who, unfortunately, have lost loved ones because of diseases like this. They need proper compensation and proper support. But listen: if we prevented this and took action in the first place, we would not need to support those people, and we would not have the deaths that we are having.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mims Davies]

There is incredible work going on across DWP, including the launch of Jobs First. We are in every bridging hotel, our work coaches are at the forefront of helping people into work, and we have great news and great stories every day.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

T4. The Minister will be very much aware that Dupuytren’s contracture is a prescribed industrial disease, but the prescription for that disease is causing so much confusion and concern. Will the Minister be kind enough to agree to a meeting with me and others to discuss those outstanding issues?

[Chloe Smith]

I recognise the points that the hon. Gentleman is making, and I think he will be pleased to see some updates coming out very shortly on this matter.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 8th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. If the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) had not tried to intervene on me, perhaps I could have given the fuller answer that I intend to give now.

It is my intention that the Department will respond to the Canadian embassy on this matter. My hon. Friend will know that UK state pensions are payable worldwide and there is often a reciprocal arrangement in place where that is a legal requirement. For the last 70 years, it has not been the policy to initiate new agreements. However, I understand the points that he and other Members have made in their representations and we will continue to consider the matter carefully.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) [V]]

There is real and understandable anxiety from individuals in our former mining communities about a range of DWP issues including Dupuytren’s contracture, pneumoconiosis, mesothelioma and other prescribed diseases. Will the Minister meet me, as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on occupational safety and health, and others so that we can attempt to resolve those continuing, avoidable outstanding problems?

[Justin Tomlinson]

Yes, I would be happy to host such a meeting. I know that the hon. Member has a long-standing track record of raising very important issues in this area.