Social Housing: Furniture Affordability

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 24th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Maynard]

I was waiting for the moment. I was looking eagerly at the hon. Gentleman, and he has finally taken the bait.

[Jim Shannon]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this issue forward. Covid had a medical effect on everybody, but it also brought about many broken relationships. What I have found in my constituency over the last three years is that families are parting because of domestic abuse, and the ladies are moving with their children into houses that are not furnished. In my area, I am fortunate that we have churches and charity groups that can help to furnish houses, but there are so many domestic abuse cases that not everybody can be helped. I support what the hon. Gentleman is putting forward. At this stage, maybe the Government, and particularly the Minister, should be looking to see what can be done to help people who have had to move out of their property because of domestic abuse and who find themselves with nothing but the clothes on their back, and certainly not the furniture that they need for their house.

[Paul Maynard]

I agree entirely. The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point, and he anticipates my 13th point, which I will come to, about why that does indeed matter.

The Minister might have thought that I was acting as a Labour Member of Parliament for the past few minutes, as I have been bemoaning the state of affairs and demanding that more be done. Of course the Government are doing something, but the challenge is that local government is not quite doing its part as well. The Minister will be more than aware of the local welfare assistance scheme. It is worth £167 million, which has been passported over to local councils to disburse as they see fit. Unfortunately, not every council uses that money to its fullest extent.

It is a wonderful pot of money, because it allows so many options: for example, that is where those fleeing domestic violence ought to go for help and support. The whole point of the local welfare assistance scheme is to meet that sort of need, but unfortunately, as End Furniture Poverty has discovered, 35 councils have now scrapped their local welfare assistance scheme, despite getting funding from the Department for Work and Pensions. Many more are spending less than 10% of what they have been allocated, which means that the burden is falling on a wider range of groups. Many charities, benevolent organisations and even churches are filling the gap that councils ought to be filling, including, sadly, Blackpool Council, which I gently chastise. I do not normally do that, but in this case I do, because it has shrunk its LWAS budget. The local welfare assistance scheme is there, but it is not being used by councils.

I urge the Minister not to overlook the existence of the local welfare assistance scheme, because since I started banging on about local welfare assistance about three years ago, the pandemic has come along, as has the household support fund, which dwarfs the LWAS in budget. The Minister now has a choice to make, and I am keen to hear her views. The household support fund is being put to so many different uses by so many different councils that it is marginalising the local welfare assistance scheme, but that means that there is now a focus on targeted pots of money for grants given to particular groups in society, which is how the household support fund has been devised, defined and decided on. That means less focus on the situation-specific support that is needed, such as for those fleeing domestic violence —as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said—who get squeezed out of the household support fund. If local welfare assistance schemes are not maintained, people cannot access the emergency support that they need to replace their furniture and white goods.

I urge the Minister to review the Welfare Reform Act 2012. Every time we have these debates, Labour Members say they want that Act to be reviewed. Even I am calling for it to be reviewed, not because I want to reverse much of what was in it, but because I want to look at the evolution of Government decision making, which I feel has been a bit patchwork. We make one change and then another, and then another, without considering the golden thread that ought to run through them, which is whether we are preventing people from falling into destitution. That is why the household support fund and local welfare assistance schemes are so important. I hope that the Minister will agree to meet me and End Furniture Poverty to discuss its ideas about how both schemes can be strengthened.

Of course, this should not just be down to the Department for Work and Pensions. One of my frustrations is that so many Departments are doing so many different things. It is often the Treasury. One of my great frustrations has been the slow gestation, and almost the non-birth, of the no-interest loan scheme, which would have enabled people to borrow money at no interest to purchase the white goods that they lack. I think the Minister needs to look at what other Departments are doing in support of that.

The private sector is doing stuff, too. Iceland—the supermarket, not the country—has a superb arrangement with a social housing provider called Clarion Housing Group to fund freezers for people who do not have one so that they can manage their food requirements more prudently and get more for their money. There are many, many ideas out there.

Another aspect of furniture poverty, particularly in social housing, is partly flooring and also the wider issue of furnished tenancies. Hon. Members might think that furnished tenancies are quite common. People often look for furnished flats and apartments in the private rented sector—Members of Parliament who are down in London for long periods of time certainly do that—but in social housing, they are vanishingly rare. A great deal of effort is being put in to encourage social housing providers to consider at least making 10% of their tenancies available on a furnished basis. I am pleased to say that Blackpool Coastal Housing does just that. It has recently approved a business case to do so, and it makes a lot of effort to improve furniture reuse, but that is by no means common across the social housing sector as a whole.

This is not about putting greater burdens on social housing landlords. A social housing provider in Yorkshire and Humberside called the Thirteen Group has gone down the path of improving its offer of furnished tenancies. It has seen its arrears fall from £7 million to £4.8 million, and the cost of a void tenancy has plummeted by £500 as those moving in can sustain their tenancies far better, because they are not lacking the essential ingredients of a household. Even the number of unstable tenancies that the social housing provider is carrying at any one time has reduced by more than half. It makes the point that it is not spending more money doing that; it is actually spending its money much better.

The Minister might wonder what in heaven’s name this has to do with the Department for Work and Pensions. This is about social housing, so it is for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Actually, the funding for a lot of that capital investment comes through the services charges that are permitted through the universal credit system. I urge her—once again, we can discuss this if and when she meets End Furniture Poverty—to ensure that the mechanisms within universal credit that allow these services charges to be made are slightly easier to understand for the tenant and the social housing provider to boost the demand for at least 10% of tenancies to be furnished.

It is clear that we do not speak about furniture poverty enough in this country. The Government are trying to do a lot to put in place a safety net beneath the safety net, but the problem is perhaps the fondness of Government Members not to ringfence things in local government, and to allow councils to spend as they see fit. That means that when we pull a lever here in Westminster, we find that it is not attached to anything out in the community.

Furniture poverty needs to be part of the national conversation. It does not get debated here enough and I am not sure that it is properly understood by many Members of Parliament, yet if they went out to the more deprived parts of our constituencies, they would see it in house after house. I hope that the Minister will agree to have the meeting so that we can all learn a bit more, not least about flooring, about which I could have a separate debate. I also hope that the Department for Work and Pensions, in particular, can look again at how local welfare assistance schemes and the household support fund interact, and how universal credit can support the introduction of more furnished tenancies in the social housing sector.

Illegal Money Lending

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Maynard]

I will, of course. I was waiting for the moment.

[Jim Shannon]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing this forward. In Northern Ireland, we have real problems with illegal money lending, and paramilitaries are usually involved. People on estates are desperate, with energy prices and everything else rising to a level that is absolutely beyond their means, and they think the only way out is via illegal money lenders. In these trying times, with the rise in the cost of living, many may be tempted to go down this route for a quick loan, so does he agree that more needs to be done—I am looking forward to the Minister’s response—to make people aware of the damage that loan sharks can cause? A £100 loan could mean an £800 repayment, and that is outrageous.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. As ever, he speaks a lot of sense. His evidence from Northern Ireland shows why we cannot generalise about this issue—there are specific circumstances there—but I join him in looking forward to the Minister’s reply, and I am sure those points will be taken on board.

I was struck by one example in which an illegal lender took all a young girl’s money in repayments because she felt obliged to him, as he had taken the effort to go round and put drops into her pet dog’s eyes because she could not manage it herself. What an awful situation to be in. Coercion and intimidation are all too often encouragements to repay, and that should not be the case.

What about when a victim cannot pay? Illegal lenders have been known to add arbitrary late fees, causing the debt to spiral out of control, and to threaten their victims and even demand sexual favours. I know the Minister is more than familiar with the practices of illegal lenders and their economic abuse, but for the benefit of a wider audience, let me tell the House about Michelle. Michelle met her lender on the school playground. She needed money and her friend—her lender—offered to meet that need. She thought she was borrowing from a friend. When she struggled to repay, her lender made it her business to know when money went into her account so they could make her repay. The more she repaid, the more she needed to borrow, but that was not all. Michelle received threats, and she had her windows smashed. As she tried to sleep at night, she was shouted at, making her own home an unsafe place to stay. It got so bad that Michelle and her two children were put into temporary housing. Why? Because she borrowed £50.

I raise these issues not only because they are a blight on our communities, but because we are facing an increase in the cost of living. Those on the sharpest edges will be pushed further away from financial inclusion and the legal credit market into the hands of the most unscrupulous. I very much welcome the financial support that the Government have already given to support people’s incomes, but we must do all we can to prevent illegal money lenders from taking hold by supporting the illegal money lending team to do its job and provide long-term, scalable market solutions to financial exclusion.

The illegal money lending team is a specialised body equipped to identify and prosecute illegal money lenders, but its current scale is insufficient to meet rising demand. Money is scarce, but support to improve the team and its data capabilities would go a long way to improve understanding of this issue and better tackle it. I know the Minister will be aware of the consumer credit levy that raises funds for the team, but perhaps funds could be found from elsewhere in the Department, even in these straitened times. Another part of this support must surely be improving the quality of debt advice and its ability to identify clients who are borrowing from illegal lenders.

It is worth touching briefly on the Help to Save scheme, which is one of my pet favourite projects of the entire Government. It is a fantastic mechanism by which people on universal credit and some legacy benefits can save for a rainy day. To date, His Majesty’s Treasury reports that the scheme supports almost 360,000 people, but this is well below 10% of even those on universal credit. Improving access to and the uptake of this solution to financial resilience is a priority.

May I make a wider point? I have participated in numerous online sessions, meetings there, speeches—you name it—and often all I hear is how we remedy the consequences of poor financial resilience, not how we avoid it in the first place. Help to Save should be front and centre in all our debates about this, not waiting for things to go wrong when we could solve them further upstream. I urge the Minister, as he is new to the job, to make Help to Save a personal passion, because it can make so much of a difference to so many lives.

Finally, let me touch on credit unions and the consumer credit market more widely. Accessing credit should be something that everyone can do. It should not be stigmatised as wrong for certain types of people, as sadly I often hear in this place. We need to do much better through innovation at ensuring that those who most need credit can access credit that is affordable, and that successful repayments can open the door to future, cheaper forms of credit. That journey—the focus of the much lamented and unadvanced Woolard review—is crucial if consumers are to steer clear of illegal lenders.

Part of creating a healthy credit ecosystem is emphasising the role of credit unions, which are strong, community-focused organisations that offer low-cost, alternative credit. However, they are not currently up to the task of plugging the entire credit gap because of over-prescriptive legislation that is both old and in need of modernisation, as well as designed in such a way that it limits their growth, scalability, size and membership.

I know that this is an area of work that the Minister is taking an interest in, and I welcome the provisions in the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which he is shepherding through the House. The Bill will help to expand credit unions’ coverage across the credit spectrum and improve access to services, but if we are to truly scale these lending bodies, we need to reimagine what is called the common bond. By tweaking existing legislation to allow credit unions to have a maximum membership rather than a maximum potential membership, we might allow them to cover a wider geographic area, pool their talent into bigger, more professional bodies and compete with one another to offer the best services. That would create scale, and it seems to me to be a sensible, market-oriented Conservative policy. If only we had so many more of them at the moment. Come along—it cannot be that difficult.

More widely, it is important that the consumer credit market is fit and able to serve customers across the credit spectrum. I urge the Minister to undertake work to see whether the Bill can be adjusted to accommodate those views. Reimagining the common bond, promoting strategic mergers and supporting the illegal money lending teams to clamp down on illegal lenders are small tweaks. I know that those are issues that he takes seriously. I hope—I ask this in every Adjournment debate—he will meet with me and the Centre for Social Justice to discuss how we can take this agenda forward. I thank him for his time today and for listening to me. I thank hon. Members present and hope that, as I have been concise, the staff of the House can make it in time for kick-off.

Listed Buildings Protection

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered listed buildings protection.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the Minister for his time today. He is becoming the Swiss Army knife of the Government—a multi-purpose Minister. Whenever Blackpool comes across the political horizon, I see the Minister. I have wanted for 12 years to have a Minister for Blackpool and I think I have now got one—and a very good one, at that.

I am here to talk mainly about the listing of modern buildings. I should declare an interest as a member of the Twentieth Century Society for getting on for 23 years. A couple of weekends ago, it was a true delight to take the Twentieth Century Society on a coach trip around Blackpool and Fleetwood. I was pleased to see their enthusiasm for the buildings they saw. I got to see things that I had not seen before, and to appreciate parts of our built environment that I had started to take for granted, as someone who lives in the area.

I am also pleased to be able to praise the Government; I do not always get the chance these days to do that. Just this week, we saw the listing of Quinlan Terry’s Brentwood cathedral. The platinum jubilee saw the listing of a number of buildings, from the Harrogate sun pavilion to the motorway markers on the M62 at the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. Obviously, the one on the Lancashire side is far superior to the one on the Yorkshire side. In the past couple of years, we have seen real efforts in Blackpool, listing our middle and lower walk colonnades by the Metropole hotel, as well as our excellent promenade shelters that hotel guests enjoy along the north shore. I can also praise the Government for the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill and all that contains, but I do not want to take part of the time for the Minister’s reply to me by detailing all that that includes.

As ever, Back Benchers like to point out what is not in a Bill. The Joint Committee of the National Amenity Societies, a group of the likes of the Twentieth Century Society, the Victorian Society and the Georgian Group, has made the point that there is often uncertainty among local planning authorities about the occasions when they are required to notify national amenity societies of applications for listed building consent. The Bill would be an opportunity to provide a reminder and clarification, and have the potential to offer the introduction of a more practical recourse to rectification than judicial review, when a decision has been issued without notification. I urge the Government to look at that.

There are more systemic issues that see the architecture of the past 120 years not getting the same protection, which it deserves, as older buildings in this country. In particular, that applies to interim protection. There is little or no protection for a building in England while a process of listing assessment is carried out. Indeed, the knowledge that a listing might be imminent sometimes encourages an owner who hopes to redevelop the site to rush deliberately to damage or demolish the building, specifically to prevent listing.

Setting up interim listing for England was to have been one of the most significant improvements delivered by the proposed Heritage Protection Bill that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport published in 2008. Sadly, that Bill never became an Act, and we can blame the Labour party for that, like so much in life, mainly due to lack of parliamentary time. Ever since, there has been a desire to plug that obvious gap. That is another potential addition to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill that I urge the Minister to consider.

We also see local authorities rolling out programmes of wider work enhancing the public realm. They forget that assets are sometimes listed. They do the analysis necessary for listed building consent and conclude that there is a wider public benefit that outweighs the loss of architectural significance, but that does more damage than is necessary to achieve the same public benefit. I recognise that many of my concerns, perhaps inevitably, are resource-related and right now is perhaps not the time to ask for more money—is it ever the right time to ask for more money —in this era of fiscal rectitude, which I hope will continue.

Local authorities’ constrained resources can mean long waits for assessment of potential listings, which leads to very strict triaging of requests to eliminate all but the most urgent applications. That means that developers or potential building purchasers develop proposals, only to be frustrated by last-minute listing decisions. I point to Government policies on converting office blocks and other buildings in town centres into accommodation and housing. That can often hit a brick wall when people discover that that very building is listed nationally or locally.

Listing intervention for modern homes on single plots at risk of demolition is a particular problem. A “for sale” sign is not enough to require intervention, and potential purchasers need to be able to make informed choices about their purchase before they buy. The key problem here is how Historic England defines risk. It does not view risk merely in the case of a property being sold. Waiting for “threat”, as it phrases it, is far too late in the planning process for developer and local authority certainty, as Historic England is very cautious when wanting evidence of threat. Developer purchase is not a in itself a threat in its book.

We need to look to more strategic levels than just building by building. There is a debate to be had about the appropriateness of the 30-year rule—the point at which buildings are automatically considered for protection. Historic England guidance states that buildings

“are not normally considered to be of special architectural or historic interest because they have yet to stand the test of time.”

But technology and architectural fashion are moving so fast now that I do not think that rule still applies. We have seen a branch of Sainsbury’s in Greenwich demolished after only 17 years—demolished for a blue IKEA box—despite being shortlisted for a Stirling prize and being at the forefront of environmentally-friendly architecture. I would love to see Historic England revive its post-war steering group to look at post-1992 national lottery buildings and millennium-era buildings, of which we have a profusion. That was done in the Netherlands very successfully with its post-war reconstruction built environment. We can learn a lot from that.

As I have said, the cycle of architectural styles is accelerating, and that makes the 30-year rule less relevant. We saw post-modernism flourish in the early ’80s. Some of those buildings have been listed because they are exceptional. I think of John Outram’s Temple of Storms on the Isle of Dogs—a pumping station with a fantastic neo-Egyptian edifice.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I know that back home our historic buildings, whether listed locally or in our case provincially, are very important, but the issue for the developer or the owner of the building that is being listed is mostly one of finance. Does he feel that perhaps the financial assistance available through the Minister’s Department might enable those buildings to retain their historic importance?

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Nothing would please me more than a pot of money to help save 20th-century buildings, but I fear that might not be forthcoming. My favourite building in Northern Ireland is Mussenden Temple. The biggest fear there is its collapsing into the sea, but that is not 20th century, so perhaps it lies outside this debate. However, he makes a perfectly fair point.

Portcullis House is a very good example. It is not listed, despite efforts to do so, because it is not under threat. However, there has been a gradual diminution of the original features. The central pool was meant to cool it—we can see how that is working today. Also, the benches on the sides are now crumbling at the corners. It needs a programme of repair, but because those original details have been altered, it will be less likely to be listed when the time comes. And I have not mentioned the row over Richmond House and the relocation of the House of Commons. We need a rolling programme of automatic assessment of a watch list drawn up by amenity societies, perhaps based upon Stirling prize nominees or another range of sources, or maybe even the self-nomination system in Australia for spot listing.

Historic England has done a number of good things, thematic listing being one of them, but not in insufficient depth or breadth to list all the good enough buildings. It has been seriously resource-constrained. None of that is to criticise Historic England. Thematic studies of the motor era and amusement parks have been of great value in expanding Blackpool’s list of listed buildings. But banks and department stores are all being affected by commercial change and the changes in our high streets in recent years. We could do a whole lot more for parks and gardens. I could hold an entire debate based on the Gardens Trust’s campaigning and helping safeguard Stanley park, a hidden jewel in Blackpool. That might be for my next heritage debate to drag the Minister to.

If the thematic programme is not expanded, we inevitably risk losses in the built environment. We have local listing, which I am sure the Minister will bring up, but that is also variable. There is often uncertainty about the status of local buildings. Inconsistencies can lower the protection they receive in different local authorities. I welcome the Government funding for 22 areas that will be encouraged to build up their local listings.

Solar Flares and Electricity Grid Reliance

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 18th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to rise for my first Adjournment debate in many years—once a decade perhaps.

I am a little concerned that people might think that I am trying to be the new Lembit Öpik of this Parliament, in that he was famously obsessed with asteroid impacts that never occurred. Equally, people might think I have been spending far too much time during lockdown watching boxsets, such as “Cobra” on Sky Atlantic, which I was wholly unaware of until I watched an episode this weekend. I assure the House that it had no impact at all on me picking this particular topic.

People might wonder what on earth I am on about. What is a solar flare? A solar flare, also known as space weather or coronal mass ejection, is an event that has the potential to knock out our electricity grid by causing voltage instability, power transmission network instabilities and transformer burnouts. A modest one in Quebec in 1989 did just that for a few hours to the Hydro Québec grid.

A bigger solar flare is likely to be around the corner, even if we do not know when. The last so-called biggie was in 1859, called the Carrington event. That was a very different era, with fewer consequences. Events with limited impacts have occurred throughout the past 100 years, but as we become more reliant on technology, they have an impact on navigation systems, aviation and satellites, increasingly. As with Los Angeles atop the San Andreas fault, another episode is both expected and unavoidable.

It is important to prepare, and with the knowledge that we will have very little warning that such a solar flare is occurring before we suffer the consequences. Government say that we are the best prepared in the world but, without being unkind to them at the moment, those are the precise words used of our pandemic preparations. It is therefore worth exploring in greater detail whether we are truly prepared for any solar flare, let alone the right sort of solar flare. The concern in the UK is that, while there was some pandemic preparation, it was for the wrong sort of virus.



The Civil Contingencies Unit might be able to maintain the national strategic stockpile of body bags. The NHS might well have tried to foresee every strain of virus, and ensure that vaccines were available, but the collision of plans with reality is always the point at which flaws are revealed. I do not mean that we should be looking at websites for survivalists and preppers, or stocking up on tinned food—we have had enough panic buying this year. However, we should consider those risks that the scientific community believes to be worth mitigating.

It is fair to ask how far the Government have progressed since the 2015 space weather preparedness strategy. As good as it is to know that solar flares are on someone’s radar somewhere in Whitehall, some of its relaxed conclusions may need re-testing. For example, the document rather blithely states:

“Some of this resilience is not the result of planning for this risk but good fortune.”

It gives me slight pause for thought that we are relying on good fortune to see us through future space weather.

To me, the golden thread stretches from the Met Office alerting the Government to the imminence of a solar flare, to the National Grid then having a limited period of time—if any—to implement mitigating measures.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman’s coastal region has the potential to suffer the same problems from solar flares as my coastal region, and I am pleased that he has brought this forward for the House’s consideration. Is he aware that coastal and more rural areas like both of ours would be worst hit? We need to ensure that we are not left languishing, waiting for replacement transformers. Does he further agree that planning should include specifics for coastal areas in particular?

[Paul Maynard]

I was fascinated to see how the hon. Gentleman would respond to the challenge of this topic in an Adjournment debate and he has surpassed my expectations. I urge him to speak to EirGrid, which is the grid that covers Ireland. I am sure it will be interested in explaining to him what actions it is taking. But there are issues we have to consider. The 2015 space weather preparedness strategy indicates that the nearest radiation monitor to the UK is in Belgium. Can the Minister confirm whether that remains the case, and whether our decision to pull out of all EU agencies in any way jeopardises our access? Either way, what steps have been taken to develop sovereign capability in that regard? When was the last Met Office review of warning systems for space weather, and what role would he anticipate for the UK Space Agency?

The British Geological Survey has three operational magnetic observatories. Can the Minister confirm that that remains the case, and explain how resilient they are in and of themselves to space weather? The 2015 review described a number of priorities for future investment. Can the Minister update the House on what publicly funded research has now commenced on space weather, as per the strategy? Can he update me further on what progress has been made in working with international partners?

The Government’s 2015 report stated

“the GB power grid network is highly meshed and has a great deal of built in redundancy. This potentially makes it less susceptible to space weather effects than power grids in some other countries. Over recent years a more resilient design for new transformers has been used to provide further mitigation.”

That is all very positive, you might think, but a 2013 report by the Royal Academy of Engineering painted a slightly different picture:

“Since the last peak of the solar cycle, the Great Britain transmission system has developed to become more meshed and more heavily loaded. It now has a greater dependence on reactive compensation equipment such as static variable compensators and mechanically switched capacitors for ensuring robust voltage control. Thus there is increased probability of severe geomagnetic storms affecting transmission equipment critical to robust operation of the system.”

That is a little less positive.

Right now, National Grid seems to be focusing on hanging on to its role as the electricity system operator, as well as balancing expanding offshore wind farms and building interconnectors to them. Does it have the bandwidth that it needs to keep checking whether its network of transformers can withstand an event of space weather? Back in 2015, it calculated that some 13 transformers were at risk, and the likes of the US are stockpiling back-up transformers. National Grid is supposed to have spare transformers, but it is not clear how many. If we were to need more, do we even have the industrial capacity to build them, notwithstanding the eight to 12-week lead-in time, and the need to transport them by road to their destination? What more can Government do to assist increasingly commercially oriented companies such as National Grid in this regard, and what progress has been made on developing transportable recovery transformers, as was suggested as far back as 2013? What progress does the Minister believe National Grid is making on installing such mitigating inventions as series capacitors and neutral current blocking devices? Interconnectors are a good thing in themselves. They are also direct current equipment, and as such are not affected. However, during a solar flare, they may be affected, because the convertors to alternating current at either end will come under risk. As we develop ever more interconnectors, what steps is the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy taking to ensure that those new interconnectors are made as resilient as they can be? Crucially, can I ask when the last national risk assessment update was conducted by the Government?

Some dangers never come to pass—Y2K passed without incident—but just occasionally, I believe it is worth posing the question “What if?” and not just trusting that it will all be fine, because that is the answer we want to hear and the alternative is perhaps far too unpalatable. Covid-19 teaches us many lessons about preparing for worst-case scenarios, and making sure that we assess all possible outcomes must surely be one of the key lessons that we learn. I look forward to learning what the Minister has to say.

Flybe

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Tuesday 14th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

The hon. Gentleman may have heard my answers, but I will try again. I am working hard with the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk, to make the UK a global leader in reducing aviation emissions. The hon. Gentleman may want to wait and see our proposals when they are introduced.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon]

Absolutely—thank you so much. I thank the Minister for his response. He will know that the success of George Best Belfast City airport is down to the Government policy of connectivity and how important that is. It is also down to the success of Flybe. The Minister is probably aware that it flies from Belfast to 14 destinations in the UK—the largest number of any airline company. Some 3,400 jobs depend on Flybe across the United Kingdom, but 100% of those jobs are important to Northern Ireland. In the light of the new dawn in Northern Ireland—the Assembly is up and running, so responsibility falls on its shoulders—has he had an opportunity to speak to anyone in the Assembly such as the First Minister to ensure that Flybe retains its critical position for Northern Ireland?

[Paul Maynard]

Naturally I welcome the resumption of Stormont. I note the fact that 68% of passengers at Belfast City are Flybe passengers, so the company is clearly important there. I am in close contact both with the Northern Ireland Office and with the devolved Administration.

Serco Justice System

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Thursday 4th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. The role of the Crown representative is relatively new, having been introduced under this Government. It continues to take shape. It looks different in different companies. When I was a rail Minister, I worked with a number of Crown representatives who performed very different roles in the companies that they were involved in. I understand the point, and I will mention it to the Cabinet Office, which has responsibility for this wider policy area.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the Minister for his responses to questions. Can he outline what discussions he has had with the Ministry of Defence, to ensure that the MOD will get service provision at an appropriate price and only for services that are required, to prevent a repeat of this?

[Paul Maynard]

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly valid point. I personally have had no contact with the MOD. However, I know that the chief executive of the civil service has contacted all Government Departments to ask them to review the contracts with the most “criticality”—that is the word used; it is not a word I like because it does not really exist. He is ensuring that all Departments are taking careful note of this issue.

Business of the House

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware that the Leader of the House is taking this issue extremely seriously. She has played a key role, working with the shadow Leader of the House on the working group that is trying to come up with a cross-party consensus on the steps that should be taken. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will agree that any workplace bullying—whatever the venue—is wrong, more so than ever in this place. We all rely on the people who work so hard in our private offices to manage both the constituency end of the business and what we do here in Westminster, and they deserve to be treated with respect at all times.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Let me first say that I am grateful to the Prime Minister for lengthily raising the importance of the freedom of religion or belief in her Christmas message. In December last year, I mentioned the alarming scale of deaths caused by persistent violence between the Muslim Fulani herdsmen and Christian farmers in Nigeria’s middle belt. The new year parade saw several attacks on Christians in five communities in Benue State, where more than 50 people were killed. Will the Minister request a statement to review the training that the UK provides to the Nigerian armed forces to ensure that Nigeria’s citizens are protected?

[Paul Maynard]

The hon. Gentleman is, quite rightly, an assiduous campaigner on this issue, and there are numerous debates on it. I am struck by how many of my constituents also contact me with these concerns. I congratulate him on his persistence and urge him to continue with those debates on this very important issue.

Defending Public Services

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Monday 23rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to be called to speak in this debate on the Gracious Speech. There is always a theme in these debates on the Queen’s Speech—a list of goals that are not present, a list of what should have been in there that was not, and what people do not like about it and what they do like about it. What has saddened me is that the common theme from the Opposition is that they do not think that there is much in the Queen’s Speech, and yet, as we have just heard, there are 21 separate Bills. There is quite a lot in there.

It takes me back to 2010, when I first became an MP, because this Queen’s Speech is all about why I wanted to come into politics in the first place. Looking back to 2010, I see that on my website I described myself as the fresh-faced MP for Blackpool North and Cleveleys. That is no longer true—I look in the mirror now and see that the lines are slightly deeper, the eyes slightly more sunken; I am on the wrong side of 40—but one thing has not changed: my belief that I got into politics to stand up for the people who are directly under the state’s care who have no one to stand up for them. They include the patients in hospital, whom we discussed in opening today’s debate; the young people in care waiting to be fostered or adopted, who the Prison Reform Trust told us today are over-represented in the youth justice system, not just by a small amount but by an absolutely massive amount; and the prisoners in our prisons who are not being educated properly or rehabilitated, which has a direct impact on the number of victims there will be if we do not reduce reoffending. Getting that right has to be the right thing to do.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern about the radicalisation, both Islamist and neo-Nazi, that takes place in prisons? Is there not a need for the Government to tackle that? People are going into prison with some sort of innocence in terms of religious belief and coming out with a radical opinion. There has to be something done.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He tempts me to indulge in a nine-minute disquisition on how we balance the presence of faith in our prison system with the need to safeguard against radicalisation. I agree with him broadly, but I do not want to go down that path, tempting though it may be. I would much rather focus on the fact that what brings all this together—standing up for those who have no one else to stand up for them—is this idea of life chances, which is the theme behind the Queen’s Speech.

The Whip should listen carefully now: although I hate the phrase “life chances”, he should not write that down in his little black book, because to my mind what we are really talking about is social justice. Like Ruth Davidson, I am proud to say I am a John Major Conservative. I believe in equality of opportunity. I do not believe in equality of outcome because it cannot be guaranteed, but I do believe that part of achieving social justice is taking ownership of the consequences of our policies. We have to have some regard for the outcomes.

That can be hard to justify when we look only at globalised national statistics. They do not give us the granular narrative detail of individual lives. Many times in this Chamber we have debated how we measure child poverty, what the best indicators are, what they mean, and how we tackle child poverty. We can disagree constructively on what those indicators are and how we utilise them, but I believe we need to go down another level. A good example is an article I urge everyone to read that appeared in The Atlantic magazine last month about the proportion of Americans who, if landed with an unexpected bill for $400, would not be able to meet it out of their earnings. Shockingly, some 47% of Americans would not be able to pay that bill for $400 without recourse to either borrowing from others or payday lending. I shudder to think what the figure is in this country. No doubt a sociology department somewhere is preparing a research funding request as we speak to find out that information. We need to burrow down so much more into the detail to get a true understanding of how to improve life chances.

Think about the connection between social isolation and ill health—the number of lonely elderly people in my constituency who probably do not speak to anyone day in, day out, and the younger people with serious health conditions who may feel socially isolated. Social isolation is the key predictor of future ill health and therefore future demand on the health service. That has to be taken into account. Think also of children. I visit many primary schools and I know that in the more deprived parts of my constituency there is a major problem with the number of children arriving at school aged four who are untoileted. Think of the burden that places on the staff in toilet training them, taking them away from the educational aspects of their job.

Another wider issue for older children perhaps, those who are eligible for free school meals, is how many of them are not fed properly during the school holidays. I know the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) is deeply concerned about that. Although all that is difficult to measure, it gives a different dimension to the story of life chances from the national global figures for whether child poverty is going up or down in any particular set of years we all focus on. We need to be much more creative in our approach.

I had hoped that by talking for an extra five minutes, my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy would have returned to his seat to hear what I am about to say about Department for Culture, Media and Sport issues. I know he has to wind up the debate and I was hoping to help him. He published an excellent culture White Paper just before the Queen’s Speech—the first since Jenny Lee’s ground-breaking document in the 1960s. The key element of the latest White Paper is about broadening participation. I had not really thought about it in those terms, but I was invited by a constituent, James Nash, to a concert by the National Youth Orchestra at the Liverpool Philharmonic hall a few weeks ago. James plays trumpet at grade 8 —grade 8 is a requirement to play in the National Youth Orchestra. He is very proud of his participation and thoroughly enjoying the experience. He went to a local comprehensive and is very musically talented so this is a fantastic opportunity for him, yet that orchestra is a charity, supported by the Arts Council.

I had the pleasure of hearing Thornton Cleveleys Brass Band the Sunday before last. For the first time ever, it has won a regional division of its national brass band competition at the fourth tier, I gather, of brass bands. It will soon compete in Cheltenham in the national competition. That band is looking for funds and it will be going to the Arts Council, which now supports brass bands thanks, I believe, to the Minister’s intervention. That broadens participation by so many young people who enter music through the local brass band.

There are many ways in which culture is broadening horizons, but unfortunately in Lancashire there is one way in which those horizons are narrowing rapidly—through the very sad decision by Lancashire County Council to close so many of our local libraries. Almost half of Lancashire’s libraries are being shut. I am losing Cleveleys library, which has a children’s centre attached, and Thornton library, which is just over the constituency boundary but I feel I have a share in it with my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace). We all recognise that councils have to make savings. What I find so frustrating is that when others have come up with solutions to help to keep libraries open and make the savings, Lancashire County Council will not sit down and listen.

Wyre Borough Council wants to convert all Wyre’s libraries into a community interest company, thereby forgoing many of the business rates and other associated costs that make them so expensive to run for the county council. By doing that, it can save the money the county council wants to save and keep every single library open, but shockingly the county council will not even sit down and talk about it. The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) rightly praised councils that innovate. Please could she have a word with Lancashire to persuade the council to innovate? Many other councils of all stripes have rethought how they do library provision. Why can Lancashire not do the same? Does it want to make a cheap political point? I desperately hope not, because that would be a tragedy.

I remember back in 2008 the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) taking the visionary step of calling a public inquiry because Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council had chosen to close so many of its libraries. I attended that public inquiry. I know he is not here, but I very much hope that my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy will agree to meet me to discuss whether Lancashire’s plans are enough to justify another public inquiry under the terms of the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964. The council has an obligation to provide a “comprehensive and fair” service. My concern is that what Lancashire is planning is not fair—I know that is a subjective term—and it is certainly not comprehensive.

My constituents, who have been accustomed to going to Thornton and Cleveleys libraries will now have to go further afield, to Fleetwood and Poulton, shortly after seeing all their bus connections to such areas slashed by the county council. That is doubly frustrating. I urge Ministers at least to arrange for me to have a conversation with my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy to discuss those issues.

On a wider point, whenever I come here, I desperately try to believe that all of us are here for the right reasons—we all want to make things better for the people we represent in our constituencies. Some of us hide it better than others, perhaps, by our conduct in this place. Some are more bolshie, some are ruder, some cat-call me from a sedentary position and some chunter away, but I always try to find something positive in what the other person is saying, and I urge all Members to try to do that.

Whatever we think of the phrase “life chances”, the issues that it covers are surely the reason why we came here today. I urge all Members to look for the positives in what this Government are trying to do. I know that the Opposition have to scrutinise us, but I hope they will open their hearts occasionally to find the good stuff that we are doing and help us to do it better still, rather than just criticising us for being anti-public sector, anti-everyone and anti-everything.

Youth Participation: First World War Commemorations

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan. I thank the Minister for his time.

It probably does not take me to alert the House and the nation to the fact that we are rapidly approaching the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of world war one, which will unfurl four years of solemn remembrances of different events. None of us would disagree that it is important that we remember and commemorate, but equally important is how we commemorate and what we do as part of the commemoration. That matters as part of our sense of national identity.

For our close allies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, sites such as Vimy ridge and Gallipoli are not just sites of memory or commemoration, but part of a national story, not of constitutional development so much as the birth of real nationhood—of real people losing their lives on the battlefield. That is why nations truly came into being; it is not just that they received a constitutional charter.

I pay tribute to what the Government have already announced as part of the commemorations of world war one, to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), who has chaired a group, and to the Minister’s work. I pay particular tribute to the notion of spending of £5.3 million on sending children to visit the battlefields, not least because my own constituency is a hotbed of school travel—bizarrely, it is our one growth industry. I know that it is a particular pleasure to the WST school travel trust and the school travel forum.

I went on such a journey for the first time last autumn. I studied history at university and I have studied the period, so I have always wanted to go and see what I had been studying. I had never been; I have driven past quickly on the motorway, if ever at all.

What the visit brought home to me was that the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission is the one of the greatest publicly funded pieces of civil art ever undertaken in the history of humanity. We do not fully appreciate that in this country. The work of Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Reginald Blomfield is testament to the ability of architecture to inspire emotion and encapsulate complex feelings. Even to this day, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is one of the best run and best presented of our public bodies.

It is hard not to feel a sense of hopelessness when standing at a memorial such as the one at Thiepval—those grand Indo-Saracenic arches. All the schoolchildren were running around and making noise. Then the rain started to fall and they all scattered to the shelter of the visitors centre. I was left in the silence of a Somme morning—misty and cloudy—and I had a real sense of the tragedy of the loss of 20,000 people in one day. It is hard to imagine just how many people that is, but that is what occurred. At a time when we are once again debating what should be in our history curriculum, 1 July 1916 rarely seems to feature as a focal point for our national story, yet I believe it should be at the heart of what we think about when we study history.

I was fascinated and inspired by Thiepval, but I also visited some of the Canadian sites at Beaumont-Hamel and Vimy ridge, to which I referred earlier. The reason why I secured today’s debate is to promote a Canadian idea that we could learn from. Visitors to those two Canadian sites are greeted by a young Canadian student, who is there for four months, and explains what is available to people of all ages, what they could do on their visit, why the location is there and what it means to Canadians.

There is an interesting contrast with Thiepval. We have put great effort into an excellent visitors centre there, which I cannot praise highly enough, but on arrival, people are not greeted by a young person or someone who can explain to them why the place matters. For visiting schoolchildren, being welcomed by someone of their own age group would connect them more to what they are about to see; it is not just a theme park, but something that someone of their own age thinks is sufficiently important that they are spending a long time there welcoming people.

The scheme might also benefit more elderly visitors, who often visit battlefield sites. Perhaps it is unfair to cite reported speech, but we often hear criticisms such as, “Oh, the children run around. They don’t show respect. They don’t understand what they are coming to see.” I do not think that that is true, but such a scheme would encourage older generations to think that what they had done in world war two and indeed in world war one was not in vain, because younger generations were still explaining it to their children and their children’s children.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way on an important educational and historical issue. The first world war is important in Northern Ireland. The 36th (Ulster) Division suffered and gave greatly at the battle of the Somme. In Northern Ireland, we have tried to bring both communities together on the back of the story about the battle of the Somme. There were Ulster divisions, but there were also Irish divisions that died and fought together in the first world war. It is a good historical issue.

The Bowtown community group in Newtownards try to educate young people on the estate about the importance of the first world war and to bring together other communities, so that nationalists and Unionists can look at what happened in the first world war together.

[Paul Maynard]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman’s observation is replicated in all our constituencies, up and down the country. Everywhere we look, we can find examples where we utilise world war one as a means of communicating across generations.

It would be naive of me to pretend that the Canadian model is cost-free. As we approach the Budget, cost considerations become all the more important. The cost of the Canadian scheme is roughly £400,000 per annum, of which about three fifths are salaries for the guides. University students are subsidised for four-month stays at the two sites. The Canadian Government own accommodation in Arras where students can lodge, and air fares are refunded on the successful completion of the course. The Veterans Minister, Steven Blaney, wrote to me:

“Without a doubt, the student guides’ enthusiasm serves as an inspiration to the many school and other tour groups that visit Vimy and Beaumont-Hamel each year, as well as to their peers when they return to Canada.”

That is an angle that I have not yet touched on. Once someone has served the four-month internship, they can return home and spread the message of what they have done. That is doubly welcome.

We have an eminently sensible opportunity to build on what the Government are already doing with the National Citizen Service—a chance to recruit young people who are between A-level and university or other employment to spend a set period of time at one of the major memorials to the missing, to welcome visitors, explain the facilities and the opportunities available and to try to connect each visitor with their own experience of what they are about to see. What connects them to the location?

Speech Therapy Services (Children)

Debate between Jim Shannon and Paul Maynard

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard]

I agree entirely. The hon. Gentleman has anticipated my next point. Speech and language therapists are there not just to help children, but to help the entire children’s work force understand that communication needs to be the golden thread running through everything they do. They need to be equipped to train staff, teachers and others who work with children, as well as the children themselves. I ask the Minister to confirm that she will do all she can to ensure that we recruit more speech and language therapists to meet the unmet needs that are out there.

The better communication action plan made a specific commitment to universal screening as part of the healthy child programme. Many major bodies, including the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, which I suspect has managed to get many supporters to attend the debate, wants to see that occur at age two and five, in advance of the reading assessment. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that that aspect of the action plan is taken into account?

Another important aspect that is often overlooked is that when we discuss children’s speech therapy we often think of those aspects that are what I describe as being high incidence, but low need. In other words, many children face communication difficulties, such as language delay, but their support needs are actually quite low. There is a much smaller group, which has much more complex needs, but the incidence of that need is relatively low. That poses a particular problem in commissioning. I wonder what the Minister’s views are on how we balance those two competing aspects, because where there is low incidence but high need, it is often more of a health intervention, rather than an educational intervention, that is required.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Just this last year, I witnessed what I can only describe as the transformation of a young boy from being unable to communicate to being able to talk quite clearly within a matter of months, so I have seen at first hand the work that can be done. One of our concerns, which is shared by many people who look after young boys and who try to train them, relates to the financial provision. In relation to the comprehensive spending review cuts that have been made and how they will affect provision, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the front-line service of speech therapy should be retained and that people should know that the moneys are there for young people?

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I agree entirely. That is why we say continually that the most vulnerable are those that really should be protected, and front-line services will be protected.

Whenever we try to abolish quangos in particular, we can always find one saving grace in every quango that gives us a justification for keeping it. With Becta, which provides educational technical equipment, one of the saving graces was the work that it did in the augmentative and assistive communication sector—AAC for short, to save me a bit of time. Can the Minister confirm whether the funding that was originally to go through Becta to the AAC sector will still go to it to fund not just the specialist provision of AAC equipment, but the leadership roles in the sector? That is another part of the better communication action plan that I hope will be continued throughout the year of speech, learning and communication in 2011. Will she also commit to re-examining the issues of provision in the AAC sector? She may not be aware of the problems facing the ACE—Aiding Communication in Education—centre in Oxford, which faces closure as a result of some of the changes in that charity and the funding of the wider sector.

Will the Minister support the proposals from the communication champion, Jean Gross, for a new AAC commissioning model that reflects the differences between high incidence, low need, and low incidence, higher need, which are crucial to a proper appreciation of the sector’s needs?

I said that I did not want continually to go in for shocking statistics, but let me give just one, which is that 55% of children in the more deprived areas arrive at primary school with some form of language delay. That does not necessarily mean that there is anything going on; it just means that they are delayed in the formation of basic skills. That happens for a range of reasons, but often it can be something as simple as mum and dad not talking to them when they were babies.

Booktrust, a charity of which many hon. Members may be aware, does fantastic work in more deprived areas just by handing out bags of books to young mums to encourage them to read and by saying to young dads, “It’s a good thing to sit down with your young child and read them a story. Don’t just watch the football match. Read “Peppa Pig” or whatever children’s literature you happen to have to hand; it helps your children.”

Can the Minister confirm, in light of the CSR, that the very important funding that Booktrust receives from the Government, which allows it to access £4 of private funding for every £1 of Government funding, will continue in order to help us to deal with that language delay and gap in the most deprived areas? That is just one example of the philosophy of early intervention, which is gradually receiving unanimous, all-party support as a principle. What it means in policy terms often varies greatly, but the principle of early intervention is now accepted by all in the House, I hope. It allows us to escape the departmental silo thinking that has bedevilled public policy formation in this country for far too long.

How does the Minister think that the pupil premium, which both coalition parties advocated pre-election, will benefit children requiring speech and language therapy at the moment? In particular, does she agree on the importance of appropriate diagnosis and that improving the quality of diagnosis might lead to fewer children being diagnosed as having special educational needs? Does she recognise that one goal of speech, language and communication therapy must be to take pupils off the SEN register because their language delay has been dealt with, the gaps have been filled and they are now able to participate fully in society? I ask that because there is a particular problem with stigmatisation.

Even 30 years ago, when I had speech therapy, I was taken out of my primary school and transported down to the village health centre. I was regarded as different—special—because I had to be taken out. That was 30 years ago; one would like to think that things had moved on. Unfortunately, the stigma is still there. I urge the Minister to ensure that more and more services can be delivered in the school setting and do not require the pupil to be stigmatised, or made to look different or special.

Let me explain one way of doing what I have described. At Fleetwood high school, in the constituency of Lancaster and Fleetwood, which neighbours mine, children with special educational needs are dealt with under the same umbrella as those who come under the gifted and talented scheme. There is not such a difference between them as one might think, because very many people with special educational needs, and in particular speech and language needs, are also very gifted and talented young men and women. The two are very often the same group. I urge the Minister to consider how such an approach can reduce stigmatisation.

I warmly welcome the ambition of the forthcoming Green Paper to equip parents to have more choice in and more say over how their children are treated by the “system”. One of the grave frustrations of so many parents whom I meet in my advice surgeries—and, I am sure, those whom other hon. Members meet in their surgeries—is that when they take their children to the office of the relevant public organisation and sit down to have a discussion about their child’s needs, they immediately find that there is a form before the public servant in front of them and they are then forced somehow to adjust their child’s needs to fit the existing boxes on the form. If their child’s needs do not quite fit, there is a problem; they do not quite get the tailored support that they need.

Can the Minister make any suggestions about how we start to change the tick-box culture? I think that this is the most crucial question in public policy at the moment: how do we get away from a situation in which services are designed for people to fit into and move to a situation in which services are designed to fit around the needs of the individual? That is important.