Coronation: Policing of Protests

Debate between Karen Buck and Chris Philp

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

With great respect, that is nonsense. Comparing the policing of the coronation with Putin’s Russia, where opposition figures are incarcerated and people such as Alexei Navalny are in prison and suffering the most appalling and inhumane treatment, is an insult to the appalling treatment they are suffering and not at all respectful to those being oppressed in Russia. Hundreds of people peacefully protested against the monarchy—they were a tiny minority, but they did protest—and the police only made arrests, 64 in total, where they had reasonable grounds to believe that a criminal offence had been committed or was in preparation. If anyone feels the arrest they experienced was not proper or appropriate, there are mechanisms they can use to complain and to seek redress.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I appreciate that this was an exceptionally challenging weekend for the police, but I am particularly concerned about the arrest and detention of members of the Westminster Night Stars team, volunteers out in central London helping to keep people safe. Communication between local authorities, the police and other agencies is critical. Can the Minister assure me that he will find out what went wrong in that communication to ensure that lessons are learned, so that volunteers who are out supporting the police in their work do not get arrested because of a breakdown in such communication?

[Chris Philp]

I agree that communication between local authorities and the police is important and that that join-up needs to happen. The question the hon. Lady asks is probably best directed via the police and crime commissioner for the Mayor of London, who I am sure will be happy to take up the query.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Karen Buck and Chris Philp

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

I make no apologies for returning to the issue of London, because that is where housing need is sharpest and where the affordability crisis is most severe.

I find myself in the rare position, for one night only, of being in some harmony with Westminster City Council—a rare thing indeed. Its policy and scrutiny committee’s report on the Bill is deeply fascinating. It makes it clear—in moderate tones, but its content is unmistakable—what it thinks about the Bill and how it will impact on housing supply. Following on from a point made by my hon. Friend the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, it says:

“The Bill is largely a framework”,

which I think is a euphemism for, “We have no idea how most of it is going to work.” That point of view was spelled out more sharply by the Public Accounts Committee—whose Chair is not in her place at the moment—which absolutely stripped away the pretence of the calculations on which high-value sales have been predicated. Westminster City Council itself, however, is clear that the Bill will have a severe impact on housing and that it will also have wider implications, which I will address in a moment.

We do not know what the redefinition of sales from “high value” to “higher value” will mean for local areas. When Shelter did its initial calculation, it found that Westminster was likely to have to sell off 76.3% of its council properties as they became vacant. That would mean a sale rate of 246 a year. We do not know—as we keep saying about this Bill—what the new calculation will mean. The Minister has offered no calculations. The council’s latest estimate, however, is that it will need to sell 200 high-value voids a year in order to fund the right-to-buy housing association properties and that that will be worth £100 million year.

Here is the rub: not only will that reduce the stock and have massive implications for meeting housing needs, but it will simply displace costs into other areas of public expenditure. Westminster City Council has said that that will result in additional costs of £1.5 million a year for temporary accommodation for homeless families. The local taxpayer already has to fund temporary accommodation to the tune of £4 million a year above what the Government pay. An extra £1.5 million will be needed to meet some of the costs of homelessness that will result from the fact that the council will not be able to place people with housing need in its council or housing association stock because it will have been sold off in order to fund the right to buy.

[Chris Philp]

Will the hon. Lady join me in welcoming the fact that in London, for every single high-value unit sold, there will be two replacements? Does she agree that, across London as a whole, that will ease the housing problems?

[Ms Buck]

No, I do not welcome that at all. As we heard in the superb speech from the Front Bench by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods), we do not know what tenure those homes will have or where they will go. We have no guarantees whatsoever that they will be local. Therefore, they will simply not provide an equivalent level of accommodation or meet need. I cannot remember who said this, but that could result in rental properties for low-income households in inner London being sold to subsidise homes for sale somewhere else, thereby meeting a totally different kind of need.

Westminster City Council also points out—this has not been brought up this evening—that, in order to deliver the two-for-one requirement, the increase in housing delivery would have to be dramatically increased from its current rate, but there is no indication of how that will be achieved. The council has a long list of asks as to how the high-value sales programme will be organised and how inner-London authorities, including itself, would be protected. The Minister has given no answers whatsoever.

The council has also provided further context and it is interesting, given some of our discussions about pay to stay. Government Members describe anybody with a household income of £40,000 as rich, and the council has pointed out that the Government are imposing a higher pay-to-stay requirement on such households while at the same time cutting rents. They are cutting rents for everybody, including working households. People are being asked to pay a higher rent if they have a household income of £40,000, but they get a 1% cut in their rent at the same time. I simply do not understand the logic of that.

In my local authority, the implications are a loss to the housing revenue account of £32 million over the next four years and £237 million over the next 30 years, which will mean, as the local authority says, major cuts to the quality of existing properties or plans for new affordable house building. Yet again, the Government are giving with one hand and taking away with the other—indeed, they are taking away with a third hand, in this case—the capacity to provide additional homes. All that can be fairly summarised as meaning that the council that gave us homes for votes in the 1980s—the biggest scandal in modern local government history—is saying, “Even we do not like this.”

The council does not like the Government’s proposed starter homes policy either. The consultant who advised the council on the Housing and Planning Bill pointed out that a starter home capped at £450,000 in inner London, where the average open market property is going for £2 million, lavishes a gain on a particular small cohort of first-time buyers. Westminster Council states that

“the potential tax-free capital gain, after eight years of occupation…is very considerable (depending on the number of bedrooms) and wholly to the benefit of a first-time buyer”.