Housing Benefit
Debate between Kate Green and Anne Main(11 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs Main
No, I will not give way to the hon. Lady.
The Opposition should also address overcrowding. As yet, they have not done what Mr Tom Copley says that they should do and apologise for the fact that they never addressed the dire need to build more social housing to allow—
Mrs Main
No, the hon. Lady will have her time at the end.
Mr Copley said:
“As a Labour politician one of the things that really galls me is that there’s this statistic that more council homes were built in the last year of Thatcher’s government than were built in the 13 years of Labour government, and that’s something I think as a Labour Party we need to apologise for.”
The apology needs to be made because the dearth of social housing that we inherited was a direct result of Labour’s inability in the good times to deliver sufficient adequate social housing. The Labour party should be ashamed of itself and it should apologise.
I do not think that the Opposition has a coherent policy. They want to penalise people in the private rented sector. They are not making any commitment to redress the imbalance, yet they wish to have what they see as a core vote that might be deserting them in droves. We helped the aspirational working class during Thatcher’s era under the right to buy, but unlike us, they introduced a policy to penalise only the private sector. Labour is the party of inequality, not the party of equality. I congratulate the coalition Government on all their efforts to level the playing field for more people both in social and private rented housing.
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Debate between Kate Green and Anne Main
Kate Green
I entirely agree. There are many reasons why some couples may feel that the historical or religious connotations of marriage are not for them, but who none the less wish to make the public commitment to each other that gay and lesbian people already do through civil partnerships.
Sadly, Ministers have until now been reluctant to recognise that the position they have been taking—in effect, privileging marriage—has led to the situation we are in now. There are a number of concerns about moving forward to regularise opposite-sex civil partnerships, but there is a complete absence of analysis of, and evidence for, the concerns Ministers have raised. Yet we have been raising the issue of the genuine concerns about opposite-sex civil partnerships ever since the introduction of this Bill.
On the face of it, the anxieties highlighted by the Secretary of State today are not insignificant. On 14 May, her colleague the Pensions Minister, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), put a high potential price tag on the extension of civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples: the sum was between £3 billion and £4 billion. The Secretary of State has also suggested there may be international and devolution implications. The predicted costs involve some big and untested assumptions, however. We do not know how many opposite-sex civil partnerships will be formed. There is uncertainty about the number of public sector pension schemes that do not already allow a cohabiting partner to be a named recipient for survivor benefits. There is also uncertainty about the assertion that extending civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples will reopen the whole question of widowers’ pension entitlements. Following the Cockburn case, we might feel somewhat sceptical about that.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Given the hon. Lady’s principled support for the extension of civil partnerships to heterosexual couples, does she not have concerns that the proposal is a promise of jam tomorrow through a review, rather than a guarantee of the inclusion of heterosexual couples, which is what the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) said he wanted?
Kate Green
The hon. Lady is right about our concerns about unwarranted delay. That is why I tabled the manuscript amendment this morning. It enables us to move forward and reach a proper conclusion much more swiftly.
While we support the principle of opposite-sex civil partnerships, we agree with the Government that the issues should be properly reviewed before Parliament reaches a decision. Indeed, we say they should have been reviewed already.