Oral Answers to Questions
John Slinger Excerpts(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Angela Rayner)
This Government are getting on with fixing the mess the Tories left behind. We will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation, and at the Budget this week the Chancellor will set out the next steps, including an additional £500 million for the existing affordable homes programme to deliver up to 5,000 new social and affordable homes.
Angela Rayner
Again, my hon. Friend makes an important point. We want to support councils to make a greater contribution to affordable housing supply. That is why the Chancellor will set out at the Budget our plans to allow councils to keep 100% of the receipts generated by right-to-buy sales and to increase protections for newly built social homes. We are committed to giving first-time buyers a first chance to buy homes and to introducing a permanent, comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme.
John Slinger
At Rugby borough council, there are 300 households on the waiting list for social houses. Officers and councillors are working hard to meet the demand. They have knocked down older tower blocks and are replacing them with one to four-bed, energy-efficient, good-quality homes. Last year was the first year for many years that they built or acquired more social homes than were lost through right to buy. Does my right hon. Friend agree that while that is good work, my council is ultimately able only to tread water? My constituents who are in need of decent, affordable social homes desperately need a Government who will help councils to reverse this trend. Will she consider visiting Rugby to see the great work being done in difficult circumstances?
Renters’ Rights Bill
John Slinger Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
I congratulate Members from across the House on their excellent, humorous and moving maiden speeches.
Most landlords are good landlords and play a vital role in the housing market. I am glad that the Secretary of State changed the name of the Bill from the Renters (Reform) Bill to the Renters’ Rights Bill, because decent housing is a human right. However, making that right meaningful to private rentals has been rendered meaningless in recent years. Bizarrely, but perhaps not surprisingly, that is because the rights of those with vested interests have been allowed to trump those of millions of hard-working people, families and, especially, young people.
It is part of what I call “the moon landing paradox”: human beings can land a man on the moon and, here in the UK, we can build the Elizabeth line under London, but we cannot provide decent, affordable private rented accommodation. We can do the spectacular, but not the simple. In previous Parliaments, I imagine constituents who asked their MPs about the issue were often given the answer that providing such accommodation was too difficult. That is why I am delighted that this new Labour Government are simply not accepting that something so fundamental to human dignity is too difficult.
I wish to touch on a couple of areas raised by my constituents in and around the town of Rugby. First, ensuring that rent increases are more controlled and predictable will greatly help my constituents who have suffered from landlords demanding rent increases with as little as 10 days’ notice. That is wrong and this Bill will protect people by reinforcing the rule that rents can be increased only once a year and with at least two months’ notice.
Secondly, abolishing section 21 no-fault evictions will help protect constituents such as mine who have been evicted from their private rented properties at short notice for no other reason. This has left some of them on the street, rendering them homeless, which is shameful. Supporting this Bill will give them greater protection and peace of mind. Preferencing the interests of ordinary working people over the vested interests of others requires that we overcome what I term the “moon-landing paradox” and achieve something that is obviously much needed, that is a right and that should be possible in the year 2024 in a country as rich as ours. I know that this Government can and will do it for the renters of Rugby and across the country.
Finally, when a constituent comes to my next surgery, I am glad that I am one of an intake of MPs who will be able to say, after many decades and thanks to the efforts of my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State, and her Ministers, that it is not too difficult, that it is doable and that soon it will be done.
Planning Policy: Traveller Sites
John Slinger Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) on securing this important debate. He spoke about a two-tier society. He spoke about one law for all of us. He spoke about being “on their side”—the side of the law-abiding community. I seek a one-tier society, frankly. I represent all citizens, as we all do in this House.
I declare my interest: I serve on Rugby borough council. All citizens, including the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, have an equal right to their housing needs being met; I have had that confirmed by officers, and I think we are all aware of that fact. Their right is equal to that of every other group within society—every other citizen. We should reflect on that.
I want to reflect briefly on a case that I was involved in, and it talks to some of the issues that have been raised by other hon. Members in this debate. Six applications relating to a site in my constituency came before the planning committee, which I served on. They were rejected, but the context is critical. Rugby borough council had not met its obligation to provide sufficient pitches for the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community. They have a statutory obligation to do the surveys and ultimately to provide those pitches. They have failed to do that over many, many years.
They have tried calls for sites, as I am sure colleagues will be aware of, and those resulted in no sites being offered by local landowners. As I said, applications then come in. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton referred to the case in his constituency. I appreciate that he said that proper sites are available and I accept that point, but in this case there were not.
Inevitably, the local community was very exercised and angry about these applications. The then Conservative-run local council, which had a majority on the planning committee, rejected those applications. I would argue that the rights of those citizens were not respected by that decision. Their rights to housing were not respected, and their additional rights, which have been referred to by other Members, were also not met. In a sense, they became second-class citizens.
Local authorities, such as the one I still serve on, need to be strongly encouraged—required, even—finally to provide the proper sites that the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community need. I would be very interested to hear the views of my hon. Friend the Minister on this. Those sites need to be near amenities and services for education, transport and so on. Those need to be provided because if they are not, the situations that I experienced as a member of that planning committee, and that the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton experienced, will reoccur, and the two communities will be in a continual state of conflict, which is bad for everybody.
Finally, let us listen to the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community and do things in accordance with their needs. Let us not just do things to them—almost as if they were people who can just be dumped in particular sites because of the inconvenience of providing them with proper facilities and places to live—but treat them with dignity. Let us also listen to the settled community, whose needs and views are important as well, and do everything we can to bring communities together. But that simply will not be possible until local authorities, backed—I hope—by the Government, provide pitches and places where the GRT community can live with dignity and as equals within the communities that we, as Members, represent.
Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dame Siobhain. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) for securing this important debate. We need a planning system that respects the rights of the Traveller community but also provides local authorities with the power to support good development, while being able to enforce their planning policy. When I served as a district councillor for 10 years and leader of a district council for five years, I saw the difficulties in securing adequate sites and integrating Traveller communities in areas where they were looking to settle.
I welcome the steps the previous Government took to strengthen the planning system, including passing the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, which extended the period during which enforcement action can be taken against unauthorised development to 10 years in all cases. I also commend the last Government for bringing in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which strengthens powers available to the police to tackle unauthorised encampments that cause damage, destruction or distress.
As my hon. Friend outlined, there are many examples across the country where the careful balance between Travellers, local communities and the environment appears to be incorrect. As a Member of Parliament, I do not intend to comment on routine planning applications as they are a matter for Bromsgrove district council. However, there is an ongoing case in my constituency that perfectly highlights many of the challenges associated with planning applications for Traveller sites. Travellers bought land and moved on to a rural greenfield site that had long been designated as amenity land, then retrospectively applied for planning permission. The local community are against the proposal and nearby parish councils have raised serious concerns about the suitability of the site, including poor and dangerous road access, loss of biodiversity, and a significant impact on a long-standing public right of way that runs through the land, where local residents are being harassed with antisocial behaviour and are unable to follow their usual route.
More importantly, and to the considerable worry of my constituents, in recent months there has been a large upswing in rural crime. That started in a minor fashion with the theft of chickens from a farm and we have seen theft of items from gardens, a massive surge in general antisocial behaviour and abuse of local residents, as well as the emergence of some much more significant elements of crime. As a result, I have engaged with local police and residents to try to tackle that specific issue, but of course the nub of the issue comes back to the fact that a piece of land was bought and a change of use application submitted, and residents are concerned that the system and public agencies often pass the buck.
This case has been stuck in the planning process for many months now, and the delay in any decision is causing significant further uncertainty and the emergence of community tension. It is clear to me that the system as it currently stands is not working for any of the parties involved, but that is in this specific case. I want to put on the record that I know there are thousands of Traveller communities across the country who are law abiding; they want to identify plots of land that they can occupy with their families and wider communities and where they want to integrate into the areas they are looking to settle.
I was elected on a mandate to protect the green belt across Bromsgrove, and my constituency was formerly 89% green belt. I am deeply concerned about the prospect of losing that green belt, which gives Bromsgrove its rural identity, including in greenfield sites of the kind I have already described. I fail to see how permitting unplanned Traveller sites on the green belt will do anything to protect the identity and cohesion of the rural communities that exist there. It has already been noted by hon. Members that the sites are often far away from local services, become car-dependent settlements, and suffer from a lack of footways and nearby schools. One important topic, which I saw during my tenure as leader of Wychavon district council, is that many of the Traveller families have children that need to go to school and they want their children to be able to go to school, but there is often a lack of local provision already, which puts an unsustainable strain on services and local amenities across our communities.
Those problems isolate communities, which are already remote from the services they access and may have a different social or economic identity relative to the areas they are looking to settle. That is all exacerbated by the broken planning system, which needs to work better with local police and other services to allow for a coherent public response, rather than having, as it seems to residents and as I have already mentioned, different public agencies passing the buck between each other, with no one able to get clear answers on where the responsibility lies for tackling the pressures that arise from the emergence of Traveller sites. Those sites are often outside of the conventional planning process where sites are identified, and problems emerge when new sites are bought and a retrospective planning application is put in.
The current regulations around the sites do not seem to support a culture in which permission is sought. Instead, quite often the culture appears to be one in which an action is taken and the sentiment is more of forgiveness being sought, rather than going through the usual process that the vast majority of law-abiding citizens follow—one in which we do our due diligence, put in a planning application, allow for communities and those affected to submit their comments in the usual way and go through the proper planning process. That is what frustrates my constituents the most. They go about their lives in a law-abiding fashion: if they want to put an extension on their property, they will apply for planning permission in the usual way, if it is not subject to permitted development already. There is a general feeling that a small number of Traveller communities—I stress “small number”—appear to ride roughshod over the system. That is not just to the detriment of affected communities: it really undermines the integrity of the planning system as a whole.
The planning system needs to work better across the board and with public agencies. We need to have a much more joined-up response to how we tackle this issue, particularly the impact of antisocial behaviour and rural crime. Residents and developers must work carefully within green-belt policy in the same way that Traveller communities must. We must get away from this perception that, whether it is because of a retrospective application, just a general disregard for planning policy or even, more broadly, a disregard for the law, people are able to queue jump while providing some of the worst forms of development. I sincerely hope that as the Government review planning policy over the coming months, they will look closely at all these issues and ensure we have a system that promotes good development in the interests of not just existing communities, but those Traveller communities looking to integrate and settle into our existing and quite often rural communities.