Christmas Adjournment

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

It happens every day.

[Eric Joyce]

No way. I cannot believe that level of cynicism, to be perfectly honest. We all research our subjects well before speaking.

I recently became aware of several such cases in the UK, including in the English health system—I am not simply talking about my own constituency, in Scotland, where this is a devolved issue. The number of young people suffering from eating disorders, particularly anorexia, has grown considerably. They tend to be in their early teens and they tend to be girls, although not always. It becomes obvious to parents when their child loses a substantial amount of weight, which can happen quickly, and there are various patterns that are easily observed. In the first few stages, it will sometimes seem that the child is trying to lose weight, perhaps to fit into a dress, because of fashion imperatives or whatever. Some weight is lost quite quickly, and the parents will be watching, but not necessarily thinking it a medical issue.

Then it continues. Over a brief period of perhaps three or four months, I child can lose 25% of their body weight. A child who is, say, 8 stone or 8 stone 2 lbs can drop below 6 stone very quickly before the parents have grasped what is going on. Then, they will alert their local GP, who might, or might not, be completely switched on to the subject, and in due course, they might, or might not, get a referral to local services dealing with that kind of thing. The hon. Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) briefly referred to mental health services in his area. The configuration of those services is pretty much the same in most areas, as far as I can see, although they operate slightly differently in Scotland.

By the time it gets to the NHS, the problem will usually be quite advanced. Often, if the child continues to refuse to eat, they will be admitted to accident and emergency in a period of weeks because their vital organs will be starting to fail, and they will be going slightly mad—that is my non-clinical term. The essence of it is that once a child gets to that stage, it is very hard and takes a long time for them to recover, because people have to persuade them of the common sense of eating—that it is good for them, that they should treat food like they would medicine. It will take years and years to get that child back on track, if ever they do get back on track, so it is essential that the disorder is identified earlier.

It is clear from reading papers by excellent organisations such as Beat that there is a gap in provision. Beat is an organisation that works on this issue, and I urge Members to google it and look at its website. The gap in provision is no one’s fault, as such; it is simply that the NHS, despite a considerable increase in funding over the past 10 or 12 years, is hard pressed. It works its budget hard, but by the time people approach the local services for those with eating disorders, they do not have the resources.

This is a subject that should concern everyone in this place. Having spoken to a lot of people about this, I have noticed that if someone has a child heading towards being admitted to A and E, their best chance is to put them in a private hospital using private resources. There is a clear pattern. The NHS will do what it can, but if someone can afford private health care, the child will stand a much better chance. This is not just about jumping the queue or opting for minor elective surgery; it is about life and death—some 20% of sufferers actually die—and the well-being of young men and women over many years. If a parent can beg, borrow or steal the cash, my advice, unquestionably, would be to use private provision.

We should all be sitting up and paying attention to that, because it is clear that the relevant services in the NHS are overwhelmed. Hon. Members might have a few cases, but my instinct is that we will all have more of them in the relatively near future, because it is a growth area. People are still not terribly sure what eating disorders are, but I can assure hon. Members, from the cases I have looked at, that they are devastating for those involved, and it is clear—this is what worries me most—that private provision is people’s best chance. The NHS should look carefully at how it resources its relevant mental health services for eating disorders.

I will stop there, Mr Deputy Speaker, except to wish you and every Member of the House a wild and crazy, or quiet and pleasant, Christmas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Blackman]

(Harrow East) (Con): It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). Last night I endured the great pain of West Ham inflicting a second home defeat on Tottenham in a season, which has not been known since I have been alive. At the beginning of her speech, I wondered whether the pain that the ladies she mentioned were going through was anything like the emotional pain I felt last night, but my pain pales into insignificance compared with what women are being put through at the hands of the NHS, and I thank her for bringing that matter to the House’s attention.

It is the great benefit of these debates that we can bring matters that otherwise would not be aired to the Chamber. At this time of year, when we often think of ourselves, our parties and our families, we should also think of those underprivileged people who are less fortunate than ourselves. I shall concentrate on the private rented sector, the overuse of beds in sheds and the massive overcrowding in many parts of the country, which is a growing menace to the whole of our society.

It is a fact of life that 9 million people now rent their homes right across England. That is fine and people make that choice—or alternatively, they have no choice. In my own borough of Harrow there are now twice as many privately rented homes as there are homes in the entire socially rented sector, whether it be council or housing association properties.

I am a member of the Communities and Local Government Committee. When we looked at the private rented sector, one of the problems highlighted in the evidence we received was that the poorer quality of the private rented sector housing damages the health and well-being of the people who live in those homes. The English housing survey conducted earlier this year shows that properties in the private rented sector have the lowest proportion of the three standard insulation measures—cavity wall insulation, good loft insulation and full double-glazing—and they are most likely to fall into the lowest energy efficiency bands. Over a third of private rented homes are not classified as meeting the decent homes standard. We would not expect people to live in socially rented accommodation of that standard, and the number of private rented homes is almost double that of socially rented homes. At the same time, almost one in five fail the housing health and safety tests, compared with just 9% of social sector dwellings. Also, damp is more likely to be found in private rented sector accommodation than in any other type of housing, and it is less likely to be dealt with by landlords. That is a scandal that must be addressed.

There are currently few requirements on landlords, and few ways in which tenants can complain about a property and get things put right. Tenants often refuse to complain about the quality of a property because the landlord could evict them rather than fixing the problem. These problems often befall those on the lowest incomes, who have the least choice about where to live. They and their families therefore have to live in unacceptable conditions. Landlords often evict tenants without reasonable cause, and the tenants have no right of redress, even when they have not caused a problem. Tenants do not have the rights that they probably should have.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech with interest. I intend to follow much the same theme when I speak later. Does he agree that one of the many problems associated with the private rented sector is the six-month assured shorthold tenancy? It gives the landlord no incentive to respond to a tenant’s demands and, because the tenant has no security of tenure after the six months, they are unlikely to complain. Also, the tenant has no incentive to do anything in the community because their prospects of remaining in the area are so limited.

[Bob Blackman]

When we were gathering evidence for our report, the Communities and Local Government Committee went to Berlin, where people have much longer tenancies and where a partnership approach is taken between the tenant and the landlord. That is a much more appropriate way of dealing with these matters. Unfortunately, the use of six-month assured shorthold tenancies has grown in this country, more often than not to protect landlords by giving them the right to evict a tenant and recover the property if they so choose. These concerns clearly need to be addressed. We need longer tenancies that give greater assurance to tenants and place greater responsibility on landlords. It would also be helpful if landlords became members of the housing ombudsman service. In that way, they would be more likely to carry out the necessary work and the tenant would have a means of complaining if that did not happen.

I am sure that all hon. Members have houses in multiple occupation in their constituencies. When five or more persons form two or more households in a building, it is a requirement for the landlord to register that property as an HMO. Unfortunately, there can be all sorts of issues involved, including whether fire safety standards are being met. It is a fact of life that, under the terms of the Housing Act 1985, the maximum penalty for operating an unlicensed HMO is currently £20,000. In my borough, there are 89 registered HMOs. I encountered a case three weeks ago in which a three-bedroom semi-detached property was found to be housing no fewer than 11 adults, none of whom was connected in a family sense. They were sharing bedrooms and all the other facilities, and they were each paying £160 a week in rent. That was a nice little earner for the landlord. The property was not registered as an HMO. There are now 100 such cases under investigation in Harrow, and I believe that they represent the tip of a very large iceberg.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Blackman]

Clearly, as the hon. Lady says, people who are here legally and have the proper status are often not aware of their complete rights and therefore are exploited by unscrupulous individuals acting as landlords.

One of the consequences of the changes in housing benefit has been to encourage young people under the age of 35 to go into shared accommodation because that is the only rate of housing benefit they will qualify for. I welcome that as a move towards ensuring that accommodation is used properly, but as more and more people share housing in the private rented sector, there is the unfortunate consequence of overuse and overcrowding of such properties.

Under the right circumstances a local authority may be able to force a landlord to repay rent or housing benefits if an HMO is unlicensed. Unfortunately, it appears that this is not well known among the public or even among London authorities or councils outside London. If it were known about, it would immediately dissuade landlords from taking in vulnerable people on benefits and exploiting them.

What do we do about the problem? It is up to local authorities to enforce the rules. If a landlord is operating an HMO—I have written to my council about a huge number of properties that I suspect are HMOs but are unlicensed—appropriate and stringent enforcement action needs to be taken to fine the landlord and to make sure that the properties are brought up to a decent standard. A clear attitude should be adopted towards rogue landlords who give good landlords a terrible name.

Proper advice needs to be given to people who rent properties so that they understand their rights, what they can demand and what they can take on. There should be accreditation and licensing for private landlords, particularly those that choose to operate HMOs. It should be for Government and the Department to ensure that tenants and landlords are educated about their rights and responsibilities.

There is hope on the horizon. There was a case in which a landlord, who happens to live in my constituency, was operating a property empire in the neighbouring borough of Brent, where he put 28 flats into four houses. He was prosecuted and ordered to pay £303,112 under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. This demonstrates that local authorities can use their power to stop rogue landlords in their tracks and take appropriate action. Rogue landlords will listen to only one thing: losing their income and assets. We must ensure that the people living in those properties are given decent facilities to live in.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important contribution. Does he agree that it would be a good idea to have much better co-ordination between London boroughs, perhaps through the Mayor’s office, on chasing down rogue landlords and, as the Select Committee recommended, to have a much simpler form of harmonisation for all the regulations so that landlords and tenants know their rights within the existing law, never mind those that might be introduced in future?

[Bob Blackman]

I completely concur with the hon. Gentleman. We must rationalise the regulations to make them simpler and easier to understand and to ensure that the responsibilities are clearly understood. We must co-ordinate action across the London boroughs in particular, but the whole of England—and beyond, I suspect—is affected by those activities. Whether that co-ordination is done through London Councils or the Mayor’s office, for example, should be determined outside this Chamber.

However, it is equally clear that one of the problems is the level of bureaucracy. The mayor of the London borough of Newham pointed out that a landlord has to fill out a form for each property when registering, which seems to make no sense for the landlords who operate a good service, compared with the rogue landlords, who ignore the rules anyway. We need to identify those landlords and the properties that are not properly registered and ensure that the rules, which should operate for everyone’s benefit, are implemented thoroughly and appropriately. I think that there is a potential for doing what the London borough of Brent did last year when it enforced the rules on a particular rogue landlord to ensure that all the others understand their responsibility and know that they will not get away with it.

In my borough I have called on the council to operate a similar heat map so that we can identify, in the early hours of the morning, all the properties that do not have planning permission and are not registered as HMOs but appear to have people living in them. Anecdotally, I know that in many parts of my constituency homes have been built in gardens. Of course, they have been built as garden huts to shelter lawnmowers and other items of garden equipment, but uniquely they have kitchens, bathrooms, beds, windows, curtains, central heating and double glazing. That is clearly an affront to the planning rules. It means that the council is losing council tax income and that people are frequently being forced to live in substandard properties.

It is clear that this is the tip of an iceberg. It needs Government action now. I welcome the fact that they have undertaken to fund a few local authorities that have a problem, but we need to encourage every authority that realises it has a problem to take enforcement action to end it and to bring the people causing it to justice.

I conclude by wishing you, Madam Deputy Speaker, the staff and all hon. Members a merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful, prosperous and above all, particularly from my perspective, healthy new year. I trust that we will all have an enjoyable time over the recess.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I am pleased to be able to contribute to this debate. Sadly, I start with a complaint. Although I welcome the opportunity of a Christmas Adjournment debate and the fact that a Member can raise any issue they want, the system that we have had in other times when there have been themed debates with a Minister replying is a far more satisfactory way of dealing with parliamentary business. I do not doubt that the Deputy Leader of the House will report in great detail to each Minister concerned and ensure that we get an answer, but the whole point of the House of Commons is to hold the Government and Ministers to account rather than using it as a sounding-board Chamber where anyone can raise anything they like and it then disappears into the ether.

I strongly compliment the staff here—as I am sure does everyone else—for their work, loyalty, and sympathy to both Members and the public. They often do a difficult job, and I admire them enormously and want to put on record my thanks to them. As a Parliament, we should value them a lot more. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said, the treatment of the staff in the Tea Room, their change of contracts and deteriorating working conditions are simply not good enough. We should be much better employers and we should value the service and the loyalty that those staff give us. We need to remember that we should provide a good example of employment practices and not work on the basis of gross exploitation of people. Indeed, we should not be losing our very good and experienced staff. We should reflect on that. None the less, in the same spirit as everyone else, I wish all the staff here a good Christmas and new year and thank them for the work that they do.



Like the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), whom I compliment on his contribution, I want to raise the issue of housing in London. I represent an inner-city constituency, which has somewhat different characteristics from those of Harrow. Nevertheless housing is a huge issue. Roughly speaking, my borough divides 40:30:30—council and housing association houses and social rented accommodation make up about 40% of the borough’s housing; private rented houses about 30% and owner-occupied houses 30%. The owner-occupation rate is well below the national average, and falling very fast. The private rented sector is well above the national average and rising very fast. The social ownership section is increasing a bit through the work of the housing associations and the council’s commendable building programme to try to provide homes for people who desperately need them.

The problem we have is an enormous housing list of people in often desperate housing need. The chances of them being housed in a council-owned house or a housing association place are very limited, so the council fulfils its obligations to them in the only way it can, which is by placing them in the private rented sector. Many of those private flats are not in the borough; they are some distance away. That in itself creates a problem. The applicants accept the accommodation because they have no choice. They aspire to return to the borough, so the large numbers of families who are placed outside the borough make very long journeys to ensure that their children maintain a place at the same school, which is important from the point of view of the continuity of education for primary school-aged children.

The other issue is that the benefit level cap on housing expenditure, the housing allowance, is way below the average rent in the private sector. The transitional money the Government approved on the introduction of the cap is drying up and disappearing. Frankly, what we are going through is nothing more than a process of social cleansing from inner London, as families on benefit—sometimes in work, and sometimes not in work, as it affects them almost equally—can no longer remain in the borough and must therefore be accommodated elsewhere. That exacerbates the whole problem.

We have a high degree of housing stress among those families. I meet families all the time and I am very worried about the impact of such a degree of housing insecurity on a whole generation of children as they grow up. Members of this House all earn a good salary, have reasonable accommodation to live in and do not feel a sense of housing insecurity. We should try and put ourselves in the mindset of young parents trying to bring up children in the private rented sector knowing that they have no security of tenure and could lose their flat within six months. If they complain, they are likely to find that their tenancy is terminated. The effect on the parents is extreme stress, but the effect on the children is great uncertainty about their place in life and the ability of their parents to provide for them. We are damaging a whole generation of people through the housing policies that are being adopted in this country.

I am not making a partisan point, because my party, when in government, certainly did not do enough to build the necessary new housing. It certainly did not do enough to bring in much tougher regulation of the private rented sector any more than this Government have. I applaud what my council is trying to do by developing new council properties of a good and high standard and what it has achieved through the decent homes standard. The estates are in a much better condition than they ever used to be. Nevertheless, we live in an area where property prices are rising fast. I think I am right to say that more than 80% of the borough does not earn enough money to be able to buy a property within Islington, so the only option for those people is the private rented sector.

There are areas in which the sector must be reformed, and quickly. I have with me a copy of the report by the Communities and Local Government Committee on the regulation of the private rented sector, which is an interesting, well-written document that calls for the simplification of the regulation of the private rented sector and better education of both landlords and tenants. I agree with all that. Sometimes, the report’s proposals are a bit too timid but I agree with the general thrust of what it is trying to say.

We must be a little bolder. I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on the subject, and I want to see fundamental change in three areas of the private rented sector. The first is the role of the letting agents. At the moment, there is almost no regulation of letting agents. Anyone can set up a letting agency, there are no checks on them whatsoever and anybody can claim to be a letting agent and start renting out properties. I think they should all be regulated so we know who is working where, so that they have to provide proper information to all prospective tenants, and so that they are not allowed to introduce arbitrary and often totally unfair charges such as search fees, which are always non-returnable and often expensive. There should also be much clearer explanation for prospective tenants of what they are getting into.

Agents are also often deeply discriminatory. A sign in a window that reads “No DSS” shows first of all that they are deeply out of date with the structure of the social security system in this country—it is now the Department of Work and Pensions and it is a housing allowance, not DSS as it was about 20 years ago—and also fundamentally discriminates against somebody who is perfectly legally claiming what they are entitled to from the DWP. Why should they not be allowed to rent because they are claiming? The investigation by “Panorama” showed the race discrimination and racial profiling by the agencies, which are a scar on our society that deeply disfigures people’s lives and life chances. Discrimination is wrong in any aspect, whether it be financial in respect of benefit claimants or racial discrimination as operated by some agents. We must have proper regulation of these agencies.

A number of London boroughs are actively considering setting up their own letting agency to manage the number of people they place within in the private rented sector and offering the service to landlords and tenants alike. I think that would be a wholly good thing—it would be properly run, properly managed and probably a lot cheaper for everyone concerned than the present system.

The second area relates to points raised by the hon. Member for Harrow East about the condition and maintenance of private sector properties. Yesterday, I met an interesting gentleman from the Electrical Safety Council, who told me his concerns—they were held by the fire service and many others, too—about the lack of regular electrical checks in the private rented sector. It can often be an extremely dangerous place to be. There are supposed to be gas checks and all kinds of checks, but they are often never carried out.

I have had experience of tenants in the private rented sector making wholly legitimate complaints about the condition of their flat—the lack of insulation, the poor quality windows, the high energy bills they incur because of all that and infestation by vermin. They usually find that nothing is done about that, and if they contact the environmental health service, they might find their tenancy terminated at the first possible opportunity by the landlord. It is scandalous that if tenants try to exercise their rights, they lose their property. Although that might mean that environmental health can enforce better conditions for the next tenant, it is not much help for the tenant who has been evicted for having the temerity to try to exercise their rights.

The third area is probably the most controversial—the question of the rent levels charged. If I look across the whole country, I realise that the rent levels charged in the private rented sector vary enormously, often over quite short distances. The rent levels in central London are massive; if we move a short distance towards the outer London boroughs, the rent levels are a bit less; if we move a bit further out of London, they become much less; if we move to other regions in the country, the rent levels might not be the main problem, but there could be other areas of regulation.

My private Member’s Bill—I have no notion of whether it will ever become law; certainly not in this Parliament, although I hope the idea will become law at some point—is not only about empowering local authorities to set up letting offices and agencies, but about requiring simplified advice to be given to landlords and tenants about how the properties will be operated. Authorities will also have the power to impose a level of regulation on the rent levels charged in the private sector.

In that respect, a number of formulae could be adopted. One would be simply to take a figure and declare it to be a reasonable rent for the area. Rent levels could be based on the capital value of the property and the cost of maintaining its value if money has been borrowed to purchase it. Alternatively, because the structure of the private rented sector is changing fast, we could require large private sector landlords—there are some of them around nowadays—to provide at least 50% of their properties for rent at an affordable level, as we would require for any new large housing development.

If we do not regulate the private rented sector, we are condemning, in the case of my borough, a third of the population to a life of insecurity—and the numbers of private rented properties are likely to rise considerably over the next few years. All the predictions are that while it is around 17% nationally now, it will probably be 25%, if not more, by the end of this decade. Other countries manage to have a pretty fully regulated private rented sector. The hon. Member for Harrow East referred to the Select Committee visit to Germany, which has a very regulated private rented sector—often, interestingly, with much larger landlords, who often manage the properties a lot better.

One of the problems in my constituency is that it contains a large number of very small landlords who only ever think of the headline return in the form of the rent. They never think of the cost of maintenance, the cost of repairs, or the cost of simply managing a property. We need to devise a much better system. The Select Committee report was a good start, but the Government’s response was more than disappointing. No doubt we shall return to the issue in the future.

Let me end with this thought. We all want to enjoy a nice Christmas—who doesn’t?—but we also want to enjoy a degree of security in our lives, and I think that we should consider for a moment the very large number of people who live in the private rented sector. Not all landlords are bad; some are good, decent, generous people who look after their tenants in the way in which we would all want to be looked after ourselves; but, unfortunately, not all of them are like that. There are some terrible rogue landlords, and some terrible practices. We used to say awful things about Rachman and what he did in winkling secure tenants out of north Kensington all those decades ago, but there are very few secure tenancies now. Landlords no longer need to winkle people out. They can end assured shorthold tenancies after six months, move another tenant in, and charge the new tenant a higher rent—and so the whole situation continues.

If we are to maintain the social and cultural diversity of London, and indeed other cities, we must maintain the diversity of housing, and of housing options and opportunities. Like all Members, I visit hospitals, Royal Mail sorting offices, police stations and fire stations. I always ask people where they live, and I find that fewer and fewer of them can afford to live in central London. They are commuting for longer and longer distances, at greater and greater cost to themselves.

We must address the housing issue. Yes, we can do that by building more houses and providing greater security and better conditions, but what is crucially and urgently needed is proper regulation of the private rented sector, so that we can provide the sense of security that we would all want for ourselves.

[Bob Blackman]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. At the beginning of my speech, I inadvertently failed to draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. May I correct that through your good offices, and apologise to the House?