Department for International Development

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Barry Sheerman

Monday 1st July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robertson]

If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will deal with this immediately. The bilateral aid of DFID was 62.6%, as against multilateral aid of 37.4%, and this has remained steady over the past few years. However, that is still a lot of money going on aid that we do not fully control. There are some good projects out there. The World Food Programme is an excellent example of multilateral aid that saves lives. The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) mentioned the money going to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and today we had the announcement of this being £467 million a year. As I understand it, that is multilateral aid, so there are some excellent projects we are involved in, but there are delays in reporting by the multilateral agencies, which impedes our ability to analyse the work they do.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman, an old friend, knows of my passion for cutting road deaths worldwide; this is the biggest killer, especially of children and young people, and mainly of poorer ones. He knows of my role as chair of the World Health Organisation’s Global Network for Road Safety Legislators. Does he agree that bilateral and multilateral approaches are both good in the right contexts and with the right partners? We are doing work in the real target countries, and in some countries this can be bilateral but often we are looking for a number of partners.

[Mr Robertson]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, to whom I pay tribute for all his work in that respect. I shall come back to that issue in a moment.

Let me turn to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which was set up by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It has identified some spending by, for example—this is only an example, and it is not the only one—the Newton Fund, which the commission said

“is not promoting the best use of ODA and some projects appear not to be within the ODA definition.”

That is of some concern. The commission lists some of the projects about which it is concerned. Sometimes when one looks into the projects and gets into the details, one finds they actually do help people who need help, but the headlines that they receive do not necessarily suggest that. Nevertheless, we have to be careful, because we all have constituents who want to see that their hard-earned money they pay in taxes goes to the right target.

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[Mr Robertson]

I totally agree with the hon. Lady. We have had campaigns in this country to get fair milk prices for our farmers, so it is certainly right that we should ensure that farmers and traders in other countries get fair trade as well as fair prices. It is very, very important indeed.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is being very kind in giving way. He will know the sterling work that my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) has done in this area. She, like all of us here, absolutely believes not only in tackling world poverty but in the absolute scrutiny and accountability that go with it. For all of us in this field, they are our watchwords, our doctrine. When the newspapers accuse us of being do-gooders who do not care, it is just not true. My hon. Friend is a champion of that sort of scrutiny.

[Mr Robertson]

It is right that we do scrutinise things and that we do demand transparency, but it is also right that we put things in perspective as well. I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman.

I want to try to draw my remarks to a close, because, presumably, lots of hon. and right hon. Members wish to speak. In summary, I want to see an increase in the amounts going to the least developed countries and an increase in transparency, certainly in non-DFID and multilateral spending. I also want us to have a bit more control over, and understanding of, where the multi- lateral aid actually goes. We need to be aware that when we leave the European Union—and I will say “when”—we will get something like 10% of our budget back. We then have to decide where that goes. I am sure that there is no shortage of places or projects for which we want to provide.

In conclusion, I am very proud of our aid budget and of the fact that we have saved and transformed so many lives. The suggestions that I have made and the queries that I have raised today in no way challenge my commitment to our aid budget, but I want to make sure that we help even more people even more effectively than we already are. Most people want to see the United Kingdom, one of the richest countries in the world, helping the poorest people in the world, but they do have a right to make sure that their hard-earned money—it is not our money, it is theirs—actually goes to the people who need it the most. Much of it already does, but I think that all of it needs to do so. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to speak in this debate.

Unhealthy Housing: Cost to the NHS

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Barry Sheerman

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good speech, and I am nervous about intervening again, but will he accept this point? He talks about the noise pollution from living over a railway, and we know that private rented accommodation is a real problem. On the other side of the equation, very modern and expensive housing that is totally hermetically sealed could be as dangerous, because it traps all the gases and pollutants within the home—not only carbon monoxide, but many other emissions.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Order. I ask hon. Members making interventions to address the Chair, and not somebody at the back of the room, not only so that I can hear but, more importantly, so that the Minister can hear.

[Mr Sheerman]

Will you forgive me, Mr Robertson?

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

I would not want to miss anything that the hon. Gentleman said; that is the point.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

What a pleasure it is to serve under the firm but fair chairmanship of your good self, Mr Robertson.

I will not be very political in my speech; I might make a couple of swipes at the Conservative Government about one little item that worries me. In 1963, the enlightened Conservative Government asked Sir Parker Morris to look at homes for then and for the future. He came up with a very good report that was accepted as guidance by that Government, but it was not until 1967 that a Labour Government made that guidance statutory in the Parker Morris standards for housing and homes. Those standards guided us well and provided a framework for the quality of our housing. People had to build according to those good standards—cavity wall insulation, the size of the living room, the size and accessibility of the toilet, and all the stuff we took for granted.

Unfortunately, in the 1980s another Conservative Administration abolished the Parker Morris standards. That was an age when a woman I knew very well—Margaret Thatcher—believed passionately in the private sector leading and delivering more effectively than the public sector. At that stage, when that was fashionable—I am not blaming anyone who is around today—the standards were abolished and we have suffered from that for many years.

I chair both the all-party parliamentary carbon monoxide group and Policy Connect. We have taken a strong interest in carbon monoxide, and it hits home hardest when one of your constituents is affected, especially if they die. A little 10-year-old boy, Dominic Rodgers, was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning by his mother when she went to wake him for school, in a little terraced house in the middle of Huddersfield. The poisoning was not from that home but from a faulty boiler in the house next door. The silent killer had seeped, as it does, across the passageway and killed the little boy. A few months later, a couple who ran a Chinese restaurant were sleeping over the premises and they too died from carbon monoxide poisoning—a cowboy builder had blocked the chimney. Like all good campaigns, the carbon monoxide one started at the constituency level, and I have been campaigning for many years with a very good all-party team to make people aware. The more research we do, the more we know that carbon monoxide issues are related to healthy homes.

As I said in my intervention on my very good friend, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—what a good debate he has initiated—the fact of the matter is that there are two worrying sectors. Huddersfield is the average, classic British town on all the criteria; what happens in Huddersfield is a symbol of what is happening in the greater United Kingdom. We have two problems in the town, one of which is old social housing. Over the years, that housing has been progressively upgraded and renewed. The situation has not been helped by some of the poor effects and unintended consequences of right to buy, but social housing has a much better record than private rented accommodation regarding healthy homes and intervention to ensure that people live in a healthy, safe environment.

The real problem, in Huddersfield and elsewhere, is private rented accommodation. It is a sad fact that the standard of private accommodation is very variable. Until recently, many of the students who came to university towns—certainly my four children—found themselves living in rented accommodation that was pretty awful. A parent would not want their children living in accommodation of that quality, and they were certainly not healthy environments: I am talking about accommodation in Cambridge, Bristol and Edinburgh. However, we have had a revolution in the private rented sector for students. At one stage, I teased the housing Minister, because in Huddersfield we had cranes, new blocks, and wonderful, posh, modern accommodation for students. I kept asking the various housing Ministers who came and went, “If we can do that for students, why can we not build those sorts of buildings—modern, high-quality accommodation—for elderly people in our constituencies and in our country?”

The fact of the matter is that private rented accommodation is difficult, and one aspect of that difficulty arises when we want to look at smart metering. We want to go into a house to fit smart meters, in order to bring down the cost of energy and the amount of money that people on low incomes spend on heating. Getting in for that purpose, or to check whether there is a carbon monoxide detector or a smoke alarm, is very difficult in private accommodation. A lot of people do not want us to know how many people are living in that accommodation; they want to be private, which makes it difficult. We know that a high percentage of gas appliances in those rented homes are very dangerous indeed. They have not been serviced every year, and they could very well kill the people living in that accommodation.

I do not want to concentrate just on carbon monoxide, so I will finish my remarks by saying that this morning, when I was getting up early in order to speak in this debate at 9.30, I was startled when I turned on the radio to listen to the “Today” programme and heard someone from the housing sector—I have to say, a rather complacent person—being interviewed. Mr Robertson, as a working politician like me, you probably shout at the radio sometimes, because you want John or one of the other interviewers to really push a particular question. This morning, I wanted that representative of the housing sector to answer this question: “What happened to the Help to Buy programme?” We know that that money did not flow into Northern Irish homes and housing, and it did not flow into homes and housing in my constituency: it flowed into the coffers of the big housing companies. We thought that those tens of millions of pounds were going to regenerate the market and provide homes for people who needed them, but it all went wrong. It is another bit of public policy that started with brave intentions and went awry. Those tens of millions of pounds could have been spent on investing in healthy homes, improving them and bringing them up to what was the Parker Morris standard.

That is the most political thing that I will say today. I have found that, across the House and in this very Chamber, there is a lot of consensus that there is a problem, and that the problem can be solved. However, we have to start focusing our energy and, for goodness’ sake, both parties need to show some real leadership in providing what people in this country deserve—great standards for homes and housing. The 1960s were pretty good for music; I think the Beatles’ first album came out in 1963. Some very good regulation and legislation also came out in the 1960s. I beg the Minister to listen to a bit more Beatles music, and to have a spring awakening to the fact that she has the ability and capacity to lead on this issue, providing healthy homes for all the people in this country who deserve them.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

I remind the Front-Bench speakers that I would like to leave two minutes at the end of the debate for Mr Shannon to respond.