Renters’ Rights Bill
Debate between James Cleverly and Dave Robertson(1 month ago)
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Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)
Earlier in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales), the shadow Secretary of State said that my hon. Friend did not need to pay any attention to the people in his inbox who had contacted him. Was he not advocating exactly that—we should not listen because it is a small number of people, and we should accept these amendments so that this legislation can be watered down? Is he not arguing both sides of the same coin on this?
Sir James Cleverly
If the hon. Gentleman was going to criticise what I say, he should have at least listened to what I said. What I said was that extrapolating—
Sir James Cleverly
No, no, get it right first time. What I said was that extrapolating from a Member of Parliament’s inbox is not a good way of gauging the full spectrum of opinion within a cohort of people. At no point did I say—and I would never say—that we should ignore the people who write to us, and no one should assume that we do. I am pretty certain that the hon. Gentleman would not, and I certainly do not. That is absolutely not what I said.
The point I am making is that the Government’s argument was, “There aren’t that many people, and frankly they’re all posh, so we can ignore them.” That was basically the framing of their argument, but tell that to the extended families of people, typically of ethnic minority origin, who often live in close proximity to each other. There will be communities all across the country where the elders of the family have rented properties that have tenants in them, but because those properties are near where they live, they envisage at some point in the future members of their extended family moving into the properties in order to provide care for them. Disregarding and diminishing this as an idea just because it is something that the Government Front Bench accuse only the posh Members of the other place of doing is rather distasteful.