Whitsun Recess

Jim Fitzpatrick Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat), who has been very active in the Chamber this week. I am sure that he is active every week, but he has been on his feet and successfully been called every day that I have been in the House, and I have been in on each of the past four days. I congratulate him on his activity.

I am conscious of your admonition to be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I shall try to rattle through a number of issues. It is a pleasure to see the Deputy Leader of the House in his place and my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) in hers and I look forward to their responses in due course.

As an east London MP, it would be wholly wrong of me not to start my comments by referring to the Olympics. Sometimes my classic cockney accent confuses people, but my constituency is in docklands and we are looking forward to the Olympics very much. My wife, Dr Sheila Fitzpatrick, and I attended a test event two weekends ago and the excitement at Stratford—at a test event—was palpable. As we have all seen on the television this week, the arrival of the Olympic torch has shown that excitement is building. Clearly, there will be much to enjoy this summer and we wish for successful outcomes for the British athletes and Olympic team. We hope that transport arrangements in London work as effectively as they ought to and I am sure that under Peter Hendy, the chief executive of Transport for London, that will be the case.

On the subject of TFL, we are desperate for another river crossing—at least one. I know that the Government and the Mayor of London are committed to two, and we want to see them as quickly as possible. The area east of Tower bridge is now lived in by almost half of London’s population and we have only four crossings. West of Tower bridge, there are 20-plus crossings. We need extra crossings on the Thames, or else east London will gridlock and the driver for this great capital city for the next generation or two will be stalled.

As a former Vice-Chamberlain of Her Majesty’s Household, I look forward to the diamond jubilee and to the celebrations of that, which will be a portent of those that will follow during the Olympics.

I want to mention the ten-minute rule Bill proposed recently by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) on the labelling of food, particularly halal food, in relation to animal welfare. That debate was sidetracked and ended up being presented as an attack on the Muslim and Jewish communities. My support for that Bill was based on animal welfare grounds. It has subsequently been publicised that the percentage of halal meat in the UK coming from animals that were stunned is around 90%. The debate about meat labelling in relation to animal welfare therefore ought not to be about whether meat is halal or kosher but about whether the animal was stunned or unstunned, because the vast majority of people want to buy food that is labelled accurately and honestly, and animal welfare is a huge issue for many people. This is not an attack on Islam or on the Jewish community; it is about promoting the best animal welfare standards. I give credit to Mehdi Hasan for his very insightful article in the New Statesman, which clarified these issues and demonstrated that we should be promoting this not as an issue of prejudice but as an issue of animal welfare.

Let me address an issue of increasing significance in east London—leaseholders’ rights. Whether leaseholders are former council or social landlord tenants who have exercised the right to buy or whether they are private tenants who have bought a leasehold property through a mortgage, there can be a hike in service charges and insurance charges, and there is a gap in protection in relation to management companies, particularly disreputable ones. I am talking about a lot of professional people in east London—lawyers, doctors and architects—who have bought very expensive properties and are then paying tens of thousands of pounds in parking charges, service charges and insurance charges. There is a gap in the protection available to people from those who have the freehold of land. Once someone signs a leasehold agreement, they are basically at the mercy of the freeholder into the future. This issue needs to be addressed.

In today’s papers, there was a story about the lady who was, sadly, bitten by a dog and is suffering from rabies. I had a meeting this morning with the World Society for the Protection of Animals, which is seeking support from the Departments for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for International Development. The WSPA has an initiative called “Red Collar” under which it is immunising dogs in third-world countries against rabies. Our citizen, who was bitten when she was in a foreign country, might well have benefited from that programme, and I encourage DFID and DEFRA to support the WSPA’s “Red Collar” campaign.

The main issue I want to raise is that of housing benefit. I supported Ken Livingstone in the mayoral campaign, but I have to give credit to the Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson for certain comments that he has made in recent months and years. In October 2010, he told BBC London:

“The last thing we want to have in our city is a situation such as Paris where the less well-off are pushed out to the suburbs”.

He went on:

“I’ll emphatically resist any attempt to recreate a London where the rich and poor cannot live together…We will not see and we will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.”

He concluded by saying:

“On my watch, you are not going to see thousands of families evicted from the place where they have been living and have put down roots.”

This Tuesday morning, I had a meeting with Jobcentre Plus officers from east London, as a result of which I have come here today to raise this issue. For two years I have been going to the Table Office to bid in the draw to ask a question in Prime Minister’s questions, but I have been spectacularly unsuccessful. I have bid again for our first week back in June and if I get a chance to ask the Prime Minister a question, it will be about the housing benefit cap, which will result in the forced eviction of hundreds of families from my constituency. Jobcentre Plus told me that there are 900 households in the constituency of Poplar and Limehouse whose benefits exceed the cap that the coalition is bringing in by an average of £200 but that some exceed it by £800. Those people are getting letters this week and next week in which they are basically being told that on 1 April next year they are going to be evicted from their home. Nobody supports scroungers or benefit cheats. There are many hundreds of decent people in those families who have not been able to secure employment, through no fault of their own, and they are trying to do their best. The members of those families who will be punished are the children. That is not fair.

Many Government Members are concerned about the issue and London coalition MPs have raised it with the Government. I encourage them to continue to do so. If the plans go through, hundreds of families in my constituency and thousands more across inner London will be forcibly evicted. I cannot imagine what that will do for the future of the children.

My last point is about Bangladesh, although I do not want to encroach on the Adjournment debate to be introduced at 6 o’clock by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe). He will be raising the abduction and disappearance of Mr Illias Ali, a senior member of the Bangladesh Nationalist party.

Between 20% and 25% of my constituents are Bangladeshi. The Labour party and the Government party in Bangladesh—the Awami League—have strong connections, and I am a big supporter of the Awami League Government. However, there are noises from Bangladesh about civil society there. The USA Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, expressed concerns when she visited Dhaka recently, and the Foreign Secretary has been raising the issues, and I have written to him, the Bangladesh high commissioner and the Prime Minister of Bangladesh about them.

As everyone knows, Bangladesh is one of the five poorest countries in the world. Its population is twice the size of Britain’s in a land mass two thirds the size of England. A quarter of the country is under water for a third of the year. There are massive problems.

Bangladesh is a young democracy. We are an old democracy, but we still make mistakes. In Bangladesh, some mistakes are made. When the Bangladesh Nationalist party won the previous general election, Awami League Members boycotted Parliament for a year, and I criticised them for that. When the Awami League won the election, BNP Members boycotted Parliament for a year and I criticised them too. We need to support Bangladesh and the Awami League Government and to give every assistance to make sure that the people who disappeared are found, and that there is justice and transparency in civic society. Through the Department for International Development, we also need to give support for the economy, which is growing at 6%—unlike the British economy, which shrank by 0.3% in the last quarter—so that Bangladesh continues to make progress.

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise these questions, and I look forward to the responses in due course.