British House Building Industry

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes with concern the ongoing shortage of housing and the housing crisis across England; further notes with concern the number of families in temporary accommodation and the number of people rough sleeping; acknowledges that there are over one million households on housing waiting lists; recognises the Government’s target to build 300,000 new homes each year; acknowledges that this target has been missed in each year that the Government has been in office and that the number of homes constructed by housebuilding companies that are deemed affordable is insufficient; notes the pay ratios between executives and employees in FTSE 350 housebuilding companies; and calls on the Government to tackle the housing crisis as an urgent priority.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for today’s debate and all the Members who will participate. It is amazing to see so many Members here, given the week we have had. At the request of Madam Deputy Speaker, I have stripped quite a lot from this speech because so many people want to speak—I will do my best. I want to give credit to the High Pay Centre and the best possible exposition of its amazing research for this debate on the state of the house building industry.

No Member of this House, whatever their party, can but be fully aware of the crisis in housing and homelessness in all our constituencies. I will open the debate by looking at the scale of the current housing crisis, by considering the record of the FTSE 350 house building companies and their contribution to solving this crisis and finally, and most amazingly, by analysing the utter pay inequality that is rife across the British house building industry.

On streets across our country and on the very doorstep of Parliament, British citizens who simply cannot afford a place to call home are sleeping rough. For the general public, they are the visual representation of our homelessness crisis. As highlighted by the Children’s Commissioner last month, homelessness is far more common in 21st-century Britain.

Not a single week goes by without a normal, hard-working family in my constituency being evicted from their privately rented property and sent to temporary accommodation miles away from family, their schools and their jobs. They join over 83,700 households across our country, including 124,000 children, who are living in temporary accommodation.

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (IGC)]

May I add to the picture the hon. Lady is painting by telling her that Enfield has significant problems on housing and homelessness? We have the capital’s highest eviction rate and the second highest number of residents in temporary accommodation, and homelessness has rocketed by 250% since 2011. Does she agree—from what she is saying, I think she clearly does—that the Government’s policy is not only hurting the housing market but causing a huge set of social problems, too?

[Siobhain McDonagh]

The social and financial cost of homelessness far exceeds what we spend on temporary accommodation, which was £1 billion of taxpayers’ money last year—every £1 of it badly spent. Some 6,980 families in my constituency are trapped in bed and breakfast accommodation, having been there longer than the six-week legal limit, including 810 children. Others are stuck in hostels far away from their schools, families and friends.

Some of my constituents are housed, at least temporarily, in Connect House, a warehouse on the busiest south London industrial estate. For anybody who wants to see what Connect House looks like, please have a look at the video on my Twitter account.

I am just crawling through my speech, because I see more and more people here.

Other families who have come to see me are on the ever-expanding waiting list, with 1.2 million families across our country now waiting for a place to call home—1.2 million. Just 6,464 new social homes were built in 2017-18, the second lowest number on record. At that rate, it could take 172 years to give a socially rented home to everyone on the current waiting list. That is utterly appalling when we compare those figures with the 150,000 social homes delivered each year in the mid-1960s or the 203,000 council homes that the Government delivered in 1953. It has been done before and we all know that we can do it again.

In Merton, where my constituency is based, 10,000 families are on the housing waiting list, with lettings for just 2.5% of them in 2018-19. What hope can I give the other 97.5% that they will ever find a place to go? I would like to provide statistics on home ownership but, again, I will move on to some of the other data in my speech.

The statistics and the stories that I have detailed this afternoon should provide thoroughly fertile ground for the British house building industry to get on and build, but its record does not match the potential. Here is the reality: our country’s housing target is 300,000 new homes a year—a figure that has not been reached, as we have already identified, since 1969, when councils and housing associations were building new homes. England is now on course for the worst decade for house building since the second world war.

I would like to look specifically at the performance of the leading house building companies in our country. To the best of my understanding, the figures are all correct as of June. In the last financial year, just 86,685 homes were completed by the 10 FTSE 350 house building companies, despite an extraordinary collective pre-tax profit of more than £5.37 billion. That is a mind-boggling figure, which is better understood when broken down.

Let us start with the four FTSE 100 housing companies: Barratt, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Berkeley. In the most recent financial year, Barratt completed just 17,579 homes—slightly more than Persimmon, which finished 16,449 homes, with profits of £1.1 billion, of which half was down to public subsidy through the Government’s Help to Buy scheme. Taylor Wimpey came third with 15,275 homes completed but, in fourth place, despite an astonishing pre-tax profit of £934.9 million, is Berkeley homes, which completed a pitiful 3,894 homes. Together, those four companies collected a pre-tax profit of an unimaginable £3.68 billion, despite completing just 53,198 homes—less than 18% of the Government’s house building target.

What went wrong? Did they perhaps just not have the land to build the houses? Those four companies are sitting on a land bank of more than 300,000 plots between them. If we add in the rest of the FTSE 350 house building companies—Bellway, Bovis, Countryside, Crest Nicholson, Galliford and Redrow—the collective land bank is a staggering 470,068 plots, yet they completed 86,685 homes between them.

Antisemitism in Modern Society

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Wednesday 20th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Ind)]

It is a great sorrow that we are once again debating the rise of antisemitism. As a Labour party member for 40 years, now a former member, I am sickened and ashamed that we have seen antisemitism rear its ugly head in British society—and at the core of British politics: in Her Majesty’s official Opposition.

Yesterday, I made the terribly painful decision to resign as a member of the Labour party. I could not remain a member of a political party whose leadership allows Jews to be abused with impunity and the victims of such abuse to be ridiculed and have their motives questioned and integrity called into doubt. It is that antisemitism that is found on the left, and the connection between it and anti-Zionism is what I particularly want to address today.

There is nothing antisemitic about criticising the policies and actions of the Israeli Government—millions of Israelis do so every single day—but there is an undeniable link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism: those who deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, who attempt to demonise and delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state and who invoke antisemitic conspiracies accuse Jews of dual loyalty and—most offensive of all —compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis during the holocaust. To deny the link does a disservice to the victims of antisemitism and prevents us from tackling evil.

Let me be clear: no one can pretend to be an ally to the Jewish people while denying their right, and only their right, to self-determination in their historic homeland. No one can oppose antisemitism if they also oppose the existence of a state that exists to provide the ultimate safe haven for Jews facing antisemitism. No one can declare themselves to be a lifelong anti-racist if they single out for disproportionate criticism, above and beyond that expected for any other democratic nation, the world’s only Jewish state and its citizens and deny the religious significance of Israel to the Jewish people.

Over the past three years, we have seen in the Labour party how quickly hatred of Israel and attacks on Zionists can morph into vile racism against Jews—whether through repellent myths about the Rothschilds or the sewer of holocaust denial. Those in the current Labour leadership opened this door. They have shamed and demeaned a once-great party. They have allowed its bonds with Israel to be severed, its anti-racist credentials to be shredded and Jews to be driven from its ranks. I can no longer fight for the values that brought me into politics—equality, solidarity and against discrimination—from such a party. I respect my former colleagues—and still my friends—in the Labour party who have made it clear that they will carry on that fight from inside the Labour party. It needs to happen inside and out. I hope that what I and other colleagues have had to do will be a real wake-up call.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) for the moving, thoughtful and inspirational way that he opened this debate. Last spring, as he said, we had the honour to join the annual March of the Living which, alongside holocaust survivors and young people from around the world, took us from Auschwitz to Birkenau. During the week, we stopped in places such as Belzec and the forest of Zbylitowska Gora, where 6,000 Jews, including 800 children, were murdered. It was a very moving experience.

Those memories are very much in my mind today as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day and the tearing of people from their homes under the threat of persecution and genocide. Once again, I am reminded of lives cut tragically short, communities uprooted and destroyed, and the sheer depravity of the systematic attempt to slaughter the Jews of Europe. I am also reminded of something else from that journey last spring, and the fact that even in the midst of places of great horror and suffering, we celebrated life.

Before travelling to Poland, we were encouraged to read the stories of some of those who survived the Shoah. They were stories of tragedy and loss, but also of bravery, love, and the endurance of the human spirit. They were about men and women such as Freddie Knoller, who fought in the French resistance, but when captured chose to confess that he was a Jew rather than denounce his comrades. Eve Kugler—she has already been mentioned—wrote after the second world war that

“we started again with nothing except the Jewish beliefs and values that the Nazis could never take from us.”

Their stories recall the words of the late Martin Gilbert who said:

“Even in the darkness of the Holocaust, there were sparks of light.”

Our journey also gave us the opportunity to celebrate the life of the Jewish people’s homeland, which was reborn in the aftermath of the holocaust. We recalled the contribution of the survivors to the state of Israel, and all that many of us admire so much about its achievements, its values, and its resilience.

However, remembrance and celebration alone are not enough to truly honour those who died in the holocaust and those who risked all to save the lives of others; we must also learn from the holocaust. Tragically, the flames of racial and religious hatred continue to be fanned around the world. Antisemitism remains a scourge of the modern world. Hideous antisemitic tropes, repugnant conspiracy theories and malicious examples of holocaust denial are all used by populists and demagogues for political ends throughout the middle east and in Europe.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that so much more needs to be done to tackle the scourge on social media? It is an absolute cesspit on sites like Facebook and Twitter—the degree of antisemitism that we see. As we remember the holocaust today, we remember also that it did not happen in a vacuum; it happened because of the context—prejudice and the dehumanisation of people. We see that today on social media. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we must see more, both in terms of legislation and from the social media companies themselves, to deal with this scourge?

[Joan Ryan]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, with which I absolutely agree. Much is said, but not enough is done, about this pernicious form of hate crime.

Here in the UK, on campuses, in trade unions and even, sadly, as we have heard, in the Labour party, pernicious comparisons have been drawn between Israel and Nazi Germany. In the United States, we see neo-Nazis, racists and white supremacists tolerated, excused and encouraged by those at the highest levels. We must stand up with courage against antisemitism and racism each and every day, wherever we find it.

One of the greatest weapons at our disposal in this fight is education. As Sir Ben Helfgott—also a holocaust survivor—has suggested, we must all do our

“utmost to help create greater harmony, mutual respect and understanding amongst people”.

So I commend the vital work of organisations such as the Holocaust Educational Trust, March of the Living and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. By teaching younger generations about the horrors of the past, they are working for a future that is free of hate. Let us remember, too, the moral duty that each of us has to play our part in this struggle. That duty was best put by Elie Wiesel, who wrote:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

Local Government Funding

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) for securing this important debate. It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel).

We have heard many worrying examples today of how eight years of Government-imposed austerity and cuts to local government funding have damaged communities up and down our country. Sadly, and not surprisingly, that is also the case for our community in Enfield. Since 2010, Enfield Council’s central Government funding has been slashed by £178 million—a cut of £800 per household in the borough. If we had known that in 2010, we would have dismissed it as completely unsustainable.

Enfield’s adult social care budget has been gutted by £30 million since 2010, and there was a loss of £3.2 million from Enfield’s youth services budget between 2011 and 2016—a reduction of more than 57%. Almost every school in Enfield faces further cuts to their already stretched budgets. By 2020 they will have lost £12.5 million due to central Government cuts—a reduction of £273 per pupil. The Government’s willingness to cut those services is denying a generation of young people the best opportunities in life, and making it much harder for them to realise their potential and achieve their aspirations.

On top of that, Enfield Council is being forced to find another £18 million of savings next year. To put that in context, £18 million is more than the council’s current combined net spend on housing services, parks and open spaces, leisure, culture and library facilities. Our Labour Council is doing all it can to protect our local public services, and squeezing every penny to make ends meet, while having to cope with increasing need and the demands of a growing and ageing population. Some 34,000 young people in Enfield are now living below the poverty line, food bank usage has rocketed by 13% in the past three years, and the borough now has the highest eviction rate in London. That is the background to the cuts.

When the Government make cuts to Enfield Council’s budget, they are making a clear choice: they do not see the needs of local people as a priority. That is also reflected in their position on community safety. The cuts have had no greater impact than on our police service and the safety of our communities. Whenever I talk to people on the doorstep about crime in Enfield, as I did this Saturday morning—nobody in north London is unaware of the situation—many residents tell me how concerned they are about rising crime in Enfield. They have good reason to be concerned, as violent crime has soared by more than 90% since 2010—the figures sound unreal. In the year to November 2018, there was a 20% spike in knife crime offences in Enfield, compared with a 1.1% rise across London. We are at the top of that league table, where nobody wants to be. In the same period, our borough saw the highest serious youth violence rate in London—up almost 9%, in contrast to a decrease of 5.2% across the capital. I think we can make a special case for Enfield, alongside the case for London and the rest of the country.

Neighbourhood policing should be at the heart of our communities, but the Government have cut the Metropolitan police’s budget by £850 million since 2010, resulting in the loss of 3,000 police officers and 3,000 police community support officers across London. The Met is expected to make a further £263 million cut by 2022-23. That has led to the loss of 241 uniformed officers from Enfield’s streets over the past eight years.

Enfield’s Labour council has funded 16 police officers from its own budget to ameliorate that loss and tackle crime and antisocial behaviour. By working with the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the council has secured a second dedicated police officer patrolling the streets in every ward of Enfield. We cannot blame the people of Enfield for thinking that Ministers are reducing the priority they place on keeping our young people and our communities safe, given the Government’s staggering cuts to the police budget.

To tackle the rise in violent crime, we need a fully-funded, multi-agency approach. That means properly and adequately funding the police and local government, which has an important role to play. As I have set out, those agencies and our public services are being put under severe financial pressure. The Government should be ashamed. The effects of eight years of austerity have been laid bare. They must end the cuts to Enfield’s public services and invest in our communities and in our children’s futures. Until that happens, I fear that the safety and aspirations of people in Enfield will continue to be put at risk. We will continue to see rising crime, youth violence, knife attacks, loss of life, serious injury, robberies and muggings.

No matter what Enfield Council and the Mayor of London do to address the situation, the ultimate responsibility and solution rests with the Government. Only they have the resources to provide our communities and our public services with the financial support they desperately require. I hope that the Minister will address those issues, and that the Government will prioritise properly funding our councils and public services.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Govia Thameslink/Rail Electrification

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

Indeed, that is one element we will look at as we assess whether GTR has managed to stabilise services following the introduction of the new interim timetable on 15 July.

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

People in Enfield who aspire to get on a train are running up and down the platform in the mornings, but the trains are full by the time they reach us, because of the delays and cancellations. Yesterday, almost half of all trains were either delayed or cancelled, and on 15 July we get our third timetable in two months. This cannot be acceptable. The Minister is a sight too relaxed for my liking about this matter. Does he realise that people in Enfield and further afield have completely lost faith in the Government’s ability to manage the railways? And the Government do manage the railways!

[Joseph Johnson]

We are working urgently on improving GTR’s performance. It has a new chief executive coming in as we speak whose task is clear with respect to the instructions he has received from the Department, which are to get performance back to where it should be as rapidly as possible.

Anti-Semitism

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

I think we all know that one purpose of holocaust denial is to undermine the moral foundations upon which the state of Israel was established 70 years ago. I have just spent a week in Poland participating in the March of the Living, joining survivors and young people in visiting the places where history’s greatest crime was committed. When I first entered Parliament 21 years ago, I never imagined that some in my party would suggest that that horror should somehow be a matter for debate. Will my hon. Friend join me in saying shame on them and shame on any who refuse to speak out against them?

[Andrew Gwynne]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The holocaust was a dreadful chapter in our world’s history. It happened, and we should never ever forget what happened during those very, very dark days. Those who deny that the holocaust happened need to be called out at every opportunity. They are wrong, and the deeply wrong and deeply hurtful views they spread have no place in a modern democracy.

We have seen the debate change since 2016, with triple parentheses to identify individuals being employed as an online dog whistle to single out targets by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and those who share their views. Each of the three parenthesis represents anti-Semitic claims of Jewish involvement in mass media, mass immigration and global Zionism. These people even developed an app to help them to better co-ordinate and target individuals. Earlier this year, the CST reported that online abuse had fallen slightly from last year, in part due to improvements in the policies adopted by social media companies and better reporting, but anyone who uses social media can see that this remains a very serious problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council for organising last month’s demonstration, which I attended, alongside many Members from both sides of this House.

Anti-Semitism is not just a problem for the Labour party; we see it across the middle east, in European Union states and, of late, in the USA. However, it is simply not good enough for a party that prides itself on its record of fighting racism and discrimination to offer this is an excuse for its failure to get its own house in order. Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Macpherson report, and some people need to be reminded of its core principle that a racist incident is

“any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim”.

When Jewish people tell us that the scenes they witness at some Labour party meetings, the bile they view on social media, or the words they hear in defence of an anti-Semitic mural cause them great offence, we should not question, ridicule or reject such an assertion, but accept it and tackle it—full stop.

Some say that this is all about shutting down criticism of the actions of the Israeli Government, but that is a pernicious lie. Let there be no doubt, however, that refusing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, equating Zionism with racism, or requiring of Israel

“a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”,

as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance puts it, are all forms of anti-Semitism.

A year ago, I apologised to those in the Jewish community for the actions of some in my party. It is a tragic and shameful fact that here we are, 12 months on, and they have been subjected to further anger, pain and hurt. I hope that actions will now speak louder than words, that enough is enough, and that my party—and, most especially, the leadership of my party—will act to drive out anti-Semitism. I hope that Labour can once again be the natural home for all those who are committed to decency, respect, tolerance, fairness and human rights.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

It is an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers). We have visited the synagogue in Southgate together. I know how strongly she feels about these matters, as I think everybody does now.

Holocaust Memorial Day marks the darkest hour in human history. We remember and mourn the 6 million Jews murdered, as well as the Roma, disabled and LGBT victims of Nazi atrocities. We have a moral responsibility to listen to the stories of holocaust survivors. They speak not only for themselves but for those who did not survive to tell their story.

Earlier this year, I heard one such testimony from Edgar Guest, who spoke to pupils at Oasis Academy, a school in my constituency. Edgar was born in Budapest. In 1941, when Hungary joined the war, he lost his citizenship and was classified as an “alien Jew”. After Germany invaded, many of Edgar’s relatives were deported to Auschwitz and he was sent to the Budapest ghetto. He was marched halfway towards the railway station before being told to turn around and return to the ghetto. There he was forced to sleep in a room of 30, in a ghetto of 70,000 Jews, where he survived by earning an extra cup of soup a day by clearing away the dead bodies in the streets. His story is one small remembrance of the barbarity of the Nazi regime.

Edgar lives in Britain today, and he is still sharing his story at the age of 87. I would like to pay tribute to his courage and strength. The impact he has on school students is something to behold. We must give serious thought to how we carry forward such a message when we no longer have survivors with us to provide such powerful testimony.

The holocaust reminds us of where racism and anti-Semitism can lead. We must remember that the holocaust was the end of a process of state-sponsored racism that began on the streets of Munich and Berlin. The twisted road to Auschwitz began with a political party whose racist rhetoric won an election in a democratic society. There must be no complacency in the fight against anti-Semitism. We must tackle racism at its roots, weeding it out wherever we find it.

I applaud the Government for their adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. It gives us clarity in this fight, and it is unequivocal in stating that holocaust denial, comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and allegations of Jewish conspiracies are modern forms of this ancient hatred. I would also like to voice my support for the proscription of far-right fascist groups.

Despite the horrors of the holocaust, anti-Semitism has not disappeared. We have even seen its rise in British society recently, including, I am ashamed to say, in my own party. We must condemn unequivocally and combat relentlessly this despicable trend. We must remember that the fight against racism is also one of education. We must fight for our anti-racist values and ensure we instil a respect for tolerance, equality and human rights in future generations. I would like to thank Karen Pollock and the Holocaust Educational Trust for their dedication to this task, and in particular for facilitating talks by survivors, such as that of Edgar Guest in Enfield. We must hear the words of survivors; we must remember the holocaust’s victims; and we must commit ourselves to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism wherever it rears its ugly head.