Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Meg Hillier

Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kevin Hollinrake)]

The UK, including Wimbledon, is one of the best places in the world to start a business, as evidenced by the OECD report. My hon. Friend is right to raise the issue of access to finance, particularly for diverse groups. The Start-Up Loans Company has provided £1 billion of loans to around 100,000 businesses, including £2 million of loans to businesses in his constituency, and 40% of those loans go to people from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

There is an inconsistency in how the public sector is required to report greenhouse gas emissions. That makes it difficult to keep a track on progress as we approach net zero, and difficult for citizens to hold the public sector to account on delivery. What is the Minister doing to rectify that so that we can keep a proper track on what is happening?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Meg Hillier

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank my hon. Friend for his recognition of the small businesses in his constituency. He is absolutely right: there is no greater force behind the supply side of the economy than small businesses, which are essential to prosperity and productivity. He is absolutely right to champion their cause, and we should all join him in that endeavour.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

There has been some talk about business rates. I appreciate what the Minister says about needing a proper plan. Businesses in my constituency tell me that business rates are their big bête noire and that reforming and replacing them would make their lives a lot easier and their survival more certain. Will he give some indication of the Government’s thinking, and of the timescale in which they might be looking at the matter? Labour is proposing a radical reform.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Well, Labour is proposing a radical reform, but we cannot quite work out whether it will scrap business rates or reform them. There have been mixed messages among Labour Front Benchers—indeed, among the shadow Chancellor and the Leader of the Opposition—so we are not quite sure what Labour’s policy will be. We are certainly not sure how it would replace the £25 billion to £30 billion of revenue. I would really like to understand that.

This is a thorny issue, because if we scrapped business rates the taxpayer would have to find that huge amount of money by some other means. The right thing to do right now is to see businesses through this very difficult time with the kind of concession that we have made, such as the £13.6 billion, rather than making irresponsible and in my view undeliverable promises to completely scrap business rates.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Meg Hillier

Wednesday 27th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and I hope the Chancellor does, too. I hope the Treasury is acknowledging the lessons that have been learned. We were very tolerant on the Public Accounts Committee, as we understood that spending in those early days would be challenging and money might be spent in the wrong way. The ventilator challenge, for example, means we now have ventilators that will not be used, but it was the right thing to do at the time because that is what the Government thought they needed, and any Minister in that position would have considered making such decisions.

Test and trace is one example where money kept following money without clear outcomes, without clear challenge and without a clear approach to spending taxpayers’ money. These are eyewatering sums. When we think of the NHS backlog, there have obviously been pre-announcements on NHS funding, but there is still so much work to be done to make sure that patients get the treatment they need. The money spent on test and trace could have been much better spent on the backlog.

Once again, we have heard very little about the detail of housing policy. The Government have promised to build 1 million homes over this Parliament, a statement that the Chancellor repeated. There had been a promise of 300,000 homes a year, so the figure is shifting. One hopes it means that the homes will be built eventually, but the Red Book confirms that, of the £11.5 billion that has already been allocated, £7 billion or so is owed from the spending review onward. That is enough to deliver 180,000 affordable homes, and we can add the 160,000 homes being built through mayoral combined authority and local authority funding. We are still getting very low figures.

The affordability of affordable housing, of course, depends on a person’s income. In my constituency, people in receipt of housing benefit, including housing benefit through universal credit, cannot rent a three or four-bedroom property because the rents are above the cap. That is just the market in Hackney South and Shoreditch and across the borough. It is impossible to buy. More people rent privately than own their own home, and more people rent social housing than both of those combined. Those in generation rent and those who cannot get on the waiting list for social housing are left in limbo. They are left out in the cold. Where is the levelling-up agenda for them?

The Father of the House mentioned the terrible issue of dangerous cladding on tower blocks, and this Budget only reconfirms the existing £5 billion set aside for remediation. This is the biggest consumer and regulatory failure in a generation, and many of my constituents, like many people across the country, are living in unsaleable homes. I should declare my interest, as I live in one, too, although my developer has shouldered the entire cost. As the Father of the House said, we need more developers to take that on.

The £5 billion is about a third of what is needed to sort it out. I am the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, so I do not want to see money given out willy-nilly, but if the remediation is not funded now, there will be no confidence in the sector to get started. Even as somebody who lives in a property surrounded by scaffolding right now, and as an early adopter because the developer paid, it will take many years before the remediation is delivered. For those who have not got to that point, we are talking about well over a decade before this problem will be solved. It is about certainty of funding from the Government. As the Father of the House said, there are ways of getting this money back from developers. We need to be more imaginative. I challenge the Chancellor to work with his Cabinet colleagues on that.

There was some mention of street homelessness in the Budget. Getting “Everybody In” was a covid success story; let us not squander that opportunity for the lack of a bit of funding now. The money to make sure that people get into the 6,000 new homes that are supposed to be provided for people who are sleeping rough on the streets needs to be delivered. If it is not and they go back on the streets, it will end up costing the taxpayer and the Exchequer considerably more. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—I hope I have got the new title right—has been slow to confirm the figures on progress, so it is right that the Treasury should keep an eye on how the money going into that Department is spent and on whether it will actually deliver those homes, which will, as I say, save the taxpayer money in the end.

I could speak at length about the cost-of-living issue but, given the time, I shall touch only on the main issue. Universal credit has been cut by £20. I welcome the offer to revise the taper, but it will affect only those who are in work and rather plays into a negative narrative that some people are scrounging off the state. People have lost their jobs during the covid pandemic. People have struggled to get back into work, despite the situation not being as bad as some had predicted. On top of that, we see fuel prices increasing, energy bills going through the roof and inflation. That £20 a week is still a real issue for people.

According to the Red Book there will be a 3% real-terms increase in local government funding over the spending review period, but that comes on the back of cuts of up to 40% or more in some boroughs over the past decade. Since 2019, we have seen an increase year-on-year, but 2019 is only two years ago; let us not forget the deep and swingeing cuts to local government, which has proved itself an effective deliverer of vital services during covid but cannot be squeezed further. We are still nowhere near to the previous levels of funding.

On school funding, there is another smoke-and-mirrors promise. Again, increases are talked about, but after years of cuts. Per-pupil funding is still way lower than it was in 2010 and we are only inching back up to that level. A Public Accounts Committee report showed that the per-pupil increase is lower for pupils in the most-deprived areas and much higher for those in the least-deprived areas, thereby widening the gap in funding. The gap in attainment between the least-deprived and the most-deprived was narrowing, but we now see it growing as a result of covid. This is not the time to cut funding, or to reduce funding even if it is not seen as a cut. It is clever how the Government try to present it, but let us be clear that in effect we are talking about a cut to the poorest, with money going to the wealthier pupils.

The Government have also promised a £30,000-a-year salary for teachers; as far as I can see, having read the Red Book quickly, there is not enough in the settlement for schools to pay for that even if, now that the pay freeze has been lifted, the basic pay increase is taken on board—and we do not yet know what that will be.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

The hon. Lady mentions having read the Red Book and says there is no new money for housing, but the Red Book announces

“an additional £1.8 billion for housing supply”

and for the regeneration of brownfield land; is that not new money?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

It is not clear to me that it is new money. I have acknowledged the figures for housing on brownfield sites and other housing, but let us be clear: the Government promised 1 million new homes over the Parliament, and they had said 300,000 a year, so they are already watering down the promise on the number of homes. Crucially, there is no figure for proper affordable housing that is actually affordable, so many of my constituents who are priced out of the private rented market and home ownership have no option. There is a real gap there and, as I have said, it is not levelling up for many of my constituents.

As I was saying, even if the pay review bodies come forward with an increase to the basic pay for teachers, as we expect they might, it will be very hard for schools. In effect, it will mean cuts to the number of teachers and to other school services to pay for that promised salary, because there is not enough money in the pot to be carved up all ways. Even the catch-up money will not cover that issue.

Let us look at the detail over the coming days and weeks. The flourish with which the Chancellor finished at the Dispatch Box will wither away as we see the reality that this Budget does not exactly deliver everything that he has promised.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Meg Hillier

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier]

I completely agree: it is absolutely urgent for the people living in those homes whose lives are on hold, but it is also important for the Exchequer. If the Chancellor’s announcements do fuel demand for buying housing, that is stymied by the fact that so many people are stuck in homes that are unsaleable and worth nothing, so they are mortgage prisoners. The whole supply system is not working and the demand system is being fuelled in the wrong direction. We have seen homes in my constituency that were being sold at just below the last threshold for this.

My Committee has looked at the Government’s housing policies over many years now. One million new homes in England were promised between 2015 and 2020 and 500,000 more by the end of 2022. Even taking into account the pandemic, we saw, for example, the starter homes project fail completely after nearly £200 million was spent on land remediation alone, with £2.3 billion in total set aside for that in the 2015 spending review. Yet this did not happen because the Government did not even manage to enact the secondary legislation necessary to get it off the ground. Five years later, they finally announced that it was the end of the starter homes project and introduced First Homes, a discount for first-time buyers, and now we are seeing a loan guarantee on 95% mortgages. It is a very muddled policy. I cannot yet see who will benefit, and we will be looking at this in detail.

On net zero and the environment, the Government are setting big targets, but our detailed work in the Public Accounts Committee raises many concerns. This is on top of failures on the green deal, the privatisation of the green investment bank, three competitions for carbon capture and storage—one more was recently announced, but so far the first three have failed—and real inertia on developing proper, long-term commitments to really tackling climate change.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

rose—

[Meg Hillier]

I will not give way as I have already taken two interventions.

It is easy to make announcements; it is much harder to get the system to deliver on them. There is a will in this House, I think, to deliver on this, but the Government have to stop making cheap headlines.

On jobs, only one in 100 young people aged 16 to 24 is benefiting from kickstart. Again, it is a nice headline, but unless it delivers for our constituents, it is not working. We need to act now on making sure that further education is properly funded so that it can plan ahead as, hopefully, we come out of lockdown and into more normal life, and make sure that people are able to be reskilled.

Finally, I welcome the movement—as far as I have read the detail, which is not in full yet—on visas for tech entrepreneurs. This has been a brake on progress in Shoreditch in my constituency. However, we have young people in this country who were brought up in the UK, for whom it is their home and the only country they know, and they are struggling to buy citizenship at over £1,000 apiece, because families cannot afford it. They may pay for citizenship for the main householder, but not for the family. This is something that I feel is viscerally unjust. We have these talented people in our communities, in our constituencies, in our country, who are essentially British but priced out of citizenship. So if we are going to have visas for tech entrepreneurs at an easy rate, why not do that for the young people already in our country who are willing, able and capable of contributing?