Housing Benefit and Supported Housing

Debate between John Healey and Simon Hoare

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend characteristically puts in a couple of sentences the main point that I am making, and he does so extremely well.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman rightly says that we all have constituents in accommodation such as sheltered housing, and he knows that all Members, irrespective of their party, care about our constituents. Will he dissociate himself from the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) that Conservative Members, in seeking to bring forward changes, do not care, because we do?

[John Healey]

It is down to the hon. Gentleman and his Front-Bench colleagues to demonstrate that case to those who are watching the debate, and especially to the people whose homes and lives are at risk.

As I said, every Member of the House has constituents who are threatened by the Chancellor’s crude housing benefit cut. In the Minister for Housing and Planning’s local authority area of Great Yarmouth, there are some 258 people in supported housing and at least 139 in sheltered housing. The numbers are even higher for Swindon and Tunbridge Wells. What do we say to these residents and their families? What do we say to the committed charities, churches, housing associations and other groups that provide such specialist housing and are so concerned?

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between John Healey and Simon Hoare

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

We had intended simply to leave the Government to deal with the mess of their own making in this debate; and this debate is about the Housing and Planning Bill. With respect to the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), it is not about the Union, or about justice for a part of the Union. This is, quite simply, a motion and a debate about the Housing and Planning Bill.

The rather ridiculous proceedings that we have seen this afternoon, and the over-excitement, underline the flaws in rushing reform of the House without proper consideration, without proper consultation and without proper cross-party agreement. We want, and recognise the need for, a stronger voice for England in this Parliament, but we have always said “a voice, not a veto”, and this Legislative Grand Committee constitutes a veto simply for those Members who are eligible. That should not be happening in this way, in a unified Parliament of the United Kingdom.

[Simon Hoare]

The hon. Gentleman appears to have neglected the apposite point that was made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and reiterated throughout the Procedure Committee’s discussion of this proposal, namely that it meant a change in Standing Orders on an almost “suck it and see” basis, so that we could see how it would work out. The great totemic change in the rules of the House that is supposed to have taken place does not exist, in statute or anywhere else. If we need to tweak this, we can, because it is only a change in Standing Orders.

[John Healey]

Standing Orders can always be altered, particularly by Governments, but by doing it unilaterally the Government have, on this occasion, created an extremely unsatisfactory procedure, as this afternoon’s debates have amply demonstrated.

Let me say something to the Scottish nationalists. I have not seen, none of my colleagues have seen, and the House has not seen them present in such numbers in debates on the Housing and Planning Bill, and at no stage—not on Second Reading, in Committee or on Report—have we seen them vote on the Bill. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said this afternoon, “We have little interest in this Bill”, and he was right, because so little of the Bill concerns Scotland. He and his party would do much better to concentrate on his own poor record in government, and on improving what the SNP Government are doing about housing in Scotland. There are 150,000 people on the council house waiting list in Scotland and there is the lowest level of house building in Scotland since 1947. This debate—these proceedings—is simply preventing us from getting on with the proper job of holding this Government to task on the Housing and Planning Bill in this Chamber, and I hope we can move on to Third Reading without any further delay.