Building Safety
Lee Anderson Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Robert Jenrick
The hon. Lady is wrong. Thousands of her constituents will directly benefit from today’s announcement. We have chosen rightly, on the basis of expert advice, to prioritise buildings of over 18 metres. That is where the greatest risk is. It would be quite wrong for us to direct public money—taxpayers’ money—to buildings where the risk is low or extremely remote, so we are targeting that money on the buildings that need it most. In those buildings, leaseholders can have certainty that they will not be paying for the remediation of unsafe cladding. It will be paid for either by the building owner—the developer—which is quite right, or by the taxpayer. We will use the levy and the new tax to recoup as much of that as we possibly can.
In other buildings where the risk is significantly lower, the new financing arrangement will give people real comfort that they never need to pay more than £50 a month. My expectation is that many of them will pay significantly less. I think most reasonable people would see that sum of money as truly affordable and manageable within the budget of most homeowners.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con) [V]
I thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for all his hard work on this, and I welcome what he has announced today. May I ask him what the Scottish and Welsh Governments are doing to improve building safety?
Robert Jenrick
I honestly do not know. The Scottish Government have, as far as I am aware, done nothing with the very significant sum of money that the Chancellor has given them through the Barnett consequentials process. I am not aware of what the Welsh Government are doing. I think those questions are better directed to the Scottish Government and the Welsh Labour Administration.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2021
Lee Anderson Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lee Anderson
As I sat in his kitchen, I noticed a picture of a young man in a British Army uniform. I asked him who it was and he said, “That’s me, aged 18, during world war two.” I asked him what he did during the war, and he told me that he was with the British Army and helped to liberate Bergen-Belsen. He told me that he could not believe the horrors that he saw, the smell, and what human beings could do to their fellow man. He said that he cried and he cried and he cried, and since that day he had never cried again, and he finished by saying, “I left all my tears at the gates of Belsen.” I will never forget those words.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lee Anderson Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Robert Jenrick
The hon. Gentleman needs to do his sums again, if he is fully abreast of what is happening. The EU structural funds will continue for the coming year at the level they would have been at had we remained a member. The Chancellor has chosen, in addition to that funding, to add £220 million more. The hon. Gentleman does not know the proportion of that going to Scotland, because we will publish that in the prospectus. The figure he quotes is the one set by the European Union, so his objection is to the way in which the European Union chooses to divide up its structural funds to support local communities, not to the way that this Government can. Fortunately, as a result of leaving the European Union we can make our own decisions in the weeks and months ahead.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con) [V]
Towns Fund
Lee Anderson Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Robert Jenrick
Once again, the hon. Gentleman seeks to sow discord where there is none. We followed a very clear and robust procedure. The permanent secretary of my Department made that very clear when he appeared before the Public Accounts Committee. Again, I think it is disappointing that the hon. Gentleman chooses to cast aspersions upon distinguished civil servants.
With respect to the accounting officer’s advice, such advice is not routinely published. That is a decision not for Ministers, but for civil servants. Once again, the hon. Gentleman is highly misleading in his remarks, because the accounting officer’s advice was shared in full with the National Audit Office when it produced its report for the PAC. The Chair of the PAC asked to see the report and, in line with usual practice, the permanent secretary wrote a comprehensive summary of the advice. I have asked him once again to check that advice, and he says that the summary was comprehensive and covered all the points. The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee has all the information at her fingertips, as I suspect she knows perfectly well, because she is a highly experienced Member of this House.
With respect to Newark, I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman shows such interest in my constituency. Perhaps he could come up and visit us, but he does not like to go north of the M25 very often. If he did, he would know that Newark was the 16th most highly ranked town in the east midlands to be a beneficiary of the fund, and we supported 19 places in the east midlands. There is absolutely no reason why a Minister should disadvantage their constituency. We are both Ministers and constituency MPs, which is one of the great virtues of our political system, but it is right that those decisions are not taken by that particular Minister and, in the usual way, the decision was taken by a colleague.
With respect to the hon. Gentleman’s question about why I had said on the campaign trail that the fund’s future would be in question if there were a Labour Government, I think he has made that point for us today. He does not support the towns fund. The 101 places that are benefiting from it would be poorer if they had been under a Labour Government.
The message from the Labour party is very clear today: while we want to level up, it wants to score pointless political points. The shadow Secretary of State cannot talk about local government because his own Labour council has gone bankrupt with debts of £1.5 billion. He cannot talk about communities, because the committee on antisemitism has called him out, along with the majority of the members of the community team on the Labour Front Bench, for antisemitic incidents—quite how he can stay in position after that, I do not know. He cannot talk about housing because he has said that his team has no housing policies, and it will be years before he produces any. He cannot talk about housing because we are building more homes than any Government have done for the past 30 years. We will keep on building homes, we will keep on levelling up, and we will keep on investing in the communities that need it.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con) [V]
The towns fund will help reverse the decline in places such as Ashfield and other ex-Labour strongholds in the midlands and the north, where, during decades of Labour MPs and Labour councils, the only thing on offer was more decline and more broken promises. The £1.5 million accelerated towns funding is already being put to good use in my area. Does my right hon. Friend agree that Labour should be supporting our plans to level up in the old industrial towns in the north, and will he meet me to discuss how I can get the town of Eastwood on my patch to be included in the next round of funding?
Robert Jenrick
I have to say that I do not recall my hon. Friend’s predecessor coming to me to lobby for investment in his community. What a refreshing difference it is to have a Conservative MP in Ashfield who is fighting for investment for that community. I would be delighted to meet him and discuss his plans to take Ashfield forward.
Criminal Law
Lee Anderson Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)
No one should feel unsafe walking the streets, but unfortunately some people do. For far too long decent people in this country have been victims of violent crime, and time and again we see those violent criminals given paltry sentences and released early, so that they are back on the streets to wreak havoc and create misery. Unfortunately, some people cannot live by the rules of our society. They must therefore be taken to a place that has different rules, and that place is prison.
In Ashfield, people are fed up with violent crime. They are fed up with seeing violent criminals get short sentences, and then leave prison halfway through their sentences. I will tell you who else is fed up. Our police are fed up. They have a difficult enough job as it is, apprehending the most violent criminals in our society. As my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell) said earlier, they must be really angry to see violent criminals released early and back out on the streets—and guess what? Our police are then having to waste time and resources catching those criminals and putting them back through the system.
It is not rocket science. If you lock up a serious offender for 10 years instead of five, that is five more years when they are no longer a threat or a risk to society. It gives them five more years to reflect on their crimes, and it gives us five more years to rehabilitate the most serious and violent offenders in this country. I welcome this statutory instrument. I also welcome the fact that we are recruiting 20,000 extra police officers and creating 10,000 more prison places, as well as locking up our most serious offenders for longer. That will not only make our streets safer but restore confidence in our justice system.