Oral Answers to Questions

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jim McMahon]

Local councils are central to delivering on this Government’s missions, and to changing this country for the better, but we know that many of them are on a cliff edge financially, and many of them will be fearful for their budget going forward. We will work in partnership with my hon. Friend. The Department’s door is always open to local authorities that need to have conversations.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North) (Lab)]

Council funding in Birmingham is inadequate because of a set of sadistic directions based on speculative estimates of equal pay liabilities. No one believes those estimates, not even the lead commissioner, so will the Minister revisit those directions quickly and meet with Birmingham MPs to help us to get them right?

[Jim McMahon]

First, we need to reset the relationship between the Westminster Government and local authorities. I have seen far too many examples where the Secretary of State and Ministers have, at this Dispatch Box, hung individual councils out to dry. That is not a relationship of equals at all. I thank the leadership of Birmingham for taking the tough decisions and actions that are needed. This Government will work in partnership with them in a constructive way, as equals, going forward.

Teesworks Joint Venture

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Gentleman said “the C-word”. That is inferring corruption, which has been absolutely comprehensively disproven in this report. The hon. Gentleman then went on to talk about value for money and the financial position, which is important. It is vital we put on record that the liability of this site—a massive site, which had liabilities in the hundreds of millions of pounds, if not more, and was costing the best part of £20 million a year just to keep in its dirty state prior to any clean-up—was falling on the taxpayer in the main.

The only reason these changes and the joint venture have been brought forward is to transform the area for the good of the area in the long term. I note, once again, what happens when Labour Members do not like a report that they called for—when it does not have the conclusions that they asked for and does not get to the place they wanted it to. What do they do? They just call for another one.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am glad to hear that nothing illegal has happened, but sometimes in this world it is what is legal that really shocks us. Like me, the Minister probably remembers that when the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities came before the Business and Trade Committee, he said that this freeport was a flagship for the policy. Yet paragraph 1.7 of the report concludes:

“a number of decisions taken by the bodies involved do not meet the standards expected when managing public funds.”

The firm was allowed to buy 100 acres of land at £1 an acre; it was given rights to sell scrap metal of £50 million; it then went on to sell the lease it had for, I think, about £93 million; and it has booked £124 million of profit in the course of two years. Surely there are lessons to be drawn about how we absolutely maximise value for money in what is still a novel and important policy. It is for that reason that it would benefit all of us in this House if the NAO was allowed to get to the bottom of the question of how we ensure that profits like these are not just extracted from the taxpayer.

[Lee Rowley]

The right hon. Gentleman has clearly read some of the report. I just want to draw his attention to some other elements of it. Paragraph 12.7 states:

“The project is described as the largest regeneration project undertaken in the UK covering thousands of acres of land. The project is complex and the JV between the public and private sectors brings the inevitable cultural tensions between the desire to move at pace unencumbered by bureaucracy as opposed to the expectations of accountability and transparency”.

The report itself says that there was a debate to be weighed up on that, but it also states in paragraph 6.14, on the very point about the involvement of business and regeneration, that there was “no obvious viable commercial” proposition for regenerating part of the land, and that the joint venture

“was critical to being able to reach agreement with the Thai Banks”

to start it in the first place. It was necessary, it has been done, and it will be transformative for the people of Tees Valley.

Birmingham City Council

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I love Blackpool and I love trees, but £174,000 for six trees is £29,000 a tree. Some trees they must have in Blackpool.

More seriously, the local authority faces challenges, but Blackpool’s two Members have been very successful in securing additional central Government expenditure to help to regenerate the centre of Blackpool and to secure new investment. Whatever views one might take of Blackpool Council—and it does seem as if it is paying slightly more for its trees than it could have paid in most garden centres—central Government have nevertheless shown how partnership and levelling up can secure real change.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for the offer to work together, and that offer has been welcomed by Councillor John Cotton this afternoon.

Can the Secretary of State tell us whether we can find a way to have a conversation about fair funding? He is a student of Tory leadership campaigns and, like us, he probably winced when he heard the Prime Minister say to one campaign meeting:

“we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas…that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”

The truth is that richer councils have taken cuts of about £44 per head since 2010, whereas Birmingham City Council has taken cuts of 14 times that amount. There is a conversation to be had about funding, and I am grateful that the Secretary of State is considering one way to fix it, by creating a levelling-up zone and investment zones in east Birmingham, on land between the two High Speed 2 stations.

Can the Secretary of State confirm that those plans will still go ahead? Has he considered creating a development corporation in east Birmingham, for which I have argued for a long time, to lever in significantly larger amounts of money? Can we have a conversation about how we support the combined authority, too? As he will know, Andy Street’s budget faces a gap of £29 million next year, rising to £50 million in a couple of years’ time, and currently there is a £1.1 billion black hole between the investment programme and the funds available to pay for it.

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his very thoughtful question. Although we might disagree politically and have different reflections on what may have been said in the past, he is absolutely right that we need to explore a development corporation and that east Birmingham, in particular, needs additional investment. He is also right that we need to work with the West Midlands Combined Authority. The recent trailblazer devolution deal gave significant additional support to the West Midlands Combined Authority and the Mayor, but we keep what is required under constant review.

The right hon. Gentleman is also right that Birmingham’s economic health powers the whole west midlands and is vital to our overall success as a nation, which is why I want to make sure that we get back to strong leadership and effective governance in Birmingham.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I think that what unites us across the House is an ambition to avoid the postcode where someone is born defining their possibilities in life. I think that that is something we share, but it is the reality for too many of the people we represent. We now live in a country where it takes five generations for the heirs of someone born in the lowest income group to rise up and even earn national average wages. That is a complete scandal. Social mobility has broken down in this country, and this Bill should have stepped up to address our ambition.

I wish to say two things by way of my contribution. First, as a former Chief Secretary who drove through the Total Place initiative and someone who has spent 20 years working on devolution—as the Minister knows, there are centralisers and localisers on both sides of this House, and I am resolutely a localiser—I am convinced that the inequalities in this country will be impossible to eradicate unless we create the freedom for local regions to begin developing their own institutions. They should be robust enough to mobilise and co-ordinate the demand and supply sides of ideas and innovation, capital and investment and land, and crucially, to intervene in the labour market. We will continue to fail until local regions have the power to set up radical university enterprise zones, like the Fraunhofer, to translate innovation into the private sector; regional banks; regional land trusts; and local commissions on skills and enterprise. However, there are a few steps we could take now to drive this forward.

First, we have to take the 149 different local spending programmes which, together, have in them £65 billion, spread between eight different Departments, and put them into block grants for local areas. We have the most ridiculous centralisation at the moment as a result of having to bid against different criteria for 149 different programmes. We have to take a Total Place approach to pooling public sending—crucially, Department for Work and Pensions spending, as well as that of Department for Education and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. We should go further and create full-time regional Ministers in government and full-time regional Select Committees in this House. Crucially, we have to fix the gross imbalances in public spending that mean that spending per capita in London is 70 points higher than it is in the west midlands.

Secondly, as chair of the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Taskforce, I can say that East Birmingham is a city the size of Derby, that it is the land between the two high-speed stations, but that it is also the capital of Britain’s unemployment. The potential is enormous, because of the new jobs that will be created by High Speed 2, but we have to make sure that we are not the oasis of inequality in between that wealth. That is why Bridgid Jones, the Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, has today written to Andy Street, the Mayor of the West Midlands, to ask that we make East Birmingham the key focus of the west midlands trailblazer devolution deal. We have a number of asks. We want to see: multi-year whole place public funding—pooling budgets between the Department for Work and Pensions and others; a levelling-up zone that would give us tax increment financing, potentially for a new urban development corporation; net zero powers; support for early intervention and preventive work, particularly in health; an enhanced transport package that would allow us to see our metro built through East Birmingham; a lot more funding for schools and for skills; tailored employment support; and greater housing powers.

We would love the Minister to meet a delegation from Birmingham along with the east Birmingham MPs in order to discuss this devolution deal in more detail. I am confident that we will also have the support of the Mayor of the West Midlands, too.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing (Stuart Andrew)]

It is my pleasure to deliver the closing speech on Second Reading of the Government’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. I begin by thanking hon. and right hon. Members from all parts of the House for their thoughtful contributions to this afternoon’s debate. Before I address some of the points that have been raised, I should say that accompanying each of the 12 missions in our levelling up White Paper, enshrined in law by this Bill, is a clear commitment from this Government to work with all political parties, across all four nations and all tiers of government, to build a stronger, fairer and more united country after covid.

Despite the negativity we have heard from the Opposition Front Benchers, I am pleased to report that when I go around the country, I find that Mayors and leaders of all political persuasions are keen to work with us to deliver this mission. I believe that the Bill will help us to make this shared vision a reality by supporting local leaders to take back control of regeneration, end the blight of empty shops and deliver the quality homes that communities need. It is about giving them the tools that they need to deliver, along with the other major pieces of work that Government are doing in this area. I am grateful to hon. Members who continue to engage constructively with us on the provisions of this Bill so that it delivers the transformative change that we all want.

[Liam Byrne]

Could the Minister say a word about how he will use the missions to drive the reduction of inequalities in our country? One approach that the Labour Government tried was the use of floor targets in neighbourhood renewal funds. He may have a different approach, but that detail is terribly important.

[Stuart Andrew]

The right hon. Gentleman will have seen that, as the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) just reminded me, we have a whole annexe with the measures on that and we will be held to account by Parliament. That is the right thing to do. I cannot recall there ever being missions like this before Parliament so that every single Member of the House can challenge the Government on whether they have reached those objectives; it is a real opportunity for Parliament to hold the Government to account on those missions.

I echo the sentiment of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State when he said in his opening remarks that we will continue to work closely with right hon. and hon. Members to further hone and refine the legislation before it is put on the statute book. We want to build on our £4.8 billion levelling-up fund which, as hon. Members know well, is supercharging connectivity by building the next generation of roads, bridges, cycle networks and digital infrastructure. Through the UK shared prosperity fund, more than £2.6 billion is being spent to help people in the most deprived parts of the country to access more opportunities and pursue better careers. With more than £2 billion pledged by my Department over the next three years, we are helping local authorities to redouble their efforts to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping, building on the incredible achievements in the pandemic.

I will turn to some of the issues that were raised today. One issue that hon. Members on both sides of the House spoke about, including my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) and for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton)—I understand that they are calling themselves “levelling-up central”—and the hon. Members for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) and for York Central (Rachael Maskell), and my hon. Friends the Members for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) and for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher), is the importance of breathing new life into our high streets, towns and city centres, all of which were especially hard hit by the covid pandemic and now require investment and support to adapt and thrive.

Many hon. Members spoke about the importance of entrusting councils, which know their areas best, to get on with the job and to green light regeneration schemes in their areas. We agree, which is why the Bill liberates councils to more easily redesign and regenerate their communities. The Bill allows local authorities to hold high street rental auctions so that landlords are encouraged to put empty buildings to good use. It makes the temporary freedoms around al fresco dining permanent, so that we can create more buzzing vibrant high streets. I have listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) and I will take her thoughts further—well, I would not be allowed not to do so.

Most importantly, the Bill makes it much easier for councils to issue compulsory purchase orders so that they can repurpose boarded-up shops and derelict sites. All those changes are accompanied by a series of common-sense reforms that will mean that no council has to pay over the odds in hope value to landowners when it issues compulsory purchase orders—a small change that will deliver big savings for the public purse. We will publish further details on how we intend to use those powers in the Bill. It should hopefully go without saying that we are more than willing to engage with hon. Members in the process.

One issue that is guaranteed to provoke lively debate in this place is planning reform, as we have seen today. I was going to list all the hon. Members who have raised planning concerns with me, but I suspect that I would run out of time. I am extremely grateful to all hon. Members who have engaged with the Government and with me on that issue over many months. We have listened intently to their feedback, and that is reflected in the fresh reforms that we have set out in the Bill.

Some may defend the status quo and question whether there is still a case for planning reform amid everything else that is going on, but let us look again at the facts. It currently takes on average seven years for councils to prepare a local plan, and, in some cases, five years before a spade even hits the ground. Response rates to a typical pre-planning consultation are around 3%, and that drops to less than 1% in local plan consultations. I say to hon. Members that we cannot deliver the homes that this country needs without planning reform, and we cannot level up communities without the improvements set out in the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) rightly pointed out, we need these homes. I commend him for his excellent report and the proposals he has made to help people to build their own homes.

This Bill will simplify the content of local plans and standardise the process in a much shorter time, with improved local engagement. With more local plans in place, there will be far less speculative development, giving communities transparency and a real voice to influence what is built in their area. Our digital reforms will also move us beyond the days of laminated notices on lamp posts to fully accessible planning applications that people can view on their iPads and smartphones at home.

I am, of course, still continuing to listen to hon. Members. On the issue of local housing need and the targets, I should make it clear that they are not targets. They are there to inform the development of a plan, but in reality we know from listening to colleagues that they have been treated rather stringently. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in his opening comments, we need a more sensible approach and we are looking at that at pace.

Oral Answers to Questions

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

As I said in a previous answer, it is for local authorities to determine the number of homes they need and to set those numbers accordingly. We want to make sure that where development takes place infrastructure is available to support it. That is why we have the HIF—housing infrastructure fund—to which I have referred and the new home building fund, with a significant amount of money for infrastructure. It is also why we want through our planning reforms to look carefully at how infrastructure funding can be provided, so that it is provided up front and new developments benefit from the schools and clinics and kids’ playgrounds that they need, and new communities get bang for their buck.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

11. What assessment he has made of the potential merits of the West Midlands Combined Authority’s proposals for a further devolution deal.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Neil O'Brien)]

We commend the West Midlands Combined Authority under the leadership of Andy Street for its ambition to secure further powers for the region and will be saying more about our plans to strengthen local leadership in the forthcoming White Paper.

[Liam Byrne]

The Mayor of the West Midlands and I disagree on much, but I think he buys into my argument that we should be the green workshop of the world, and I agree with him that delivering on that requires radical devolution of resources and powers in at least 12 different areas, from skills to energy regulation. Has the Minister read the submission from the combined authorities—the Mayor and the seven mighty authorities of the west midlands—and, crucially, when the levelling-up White Paper is delivered, will he deliver on it?

[Neil O'Brien]

I am glad to see this wonderful outbreak of consensus. I have read the exciting proposals put forward to us but I am afraid the right hon. Gentleman will have to wait until the White Paper; however, I will say that Andy Street has continued to bring forward very exciting and interesting ideas.

Budget Resolutions

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

We do not need to look into the crystal ball; we can just read the book. There are a number of Scottish National party MPs whose advocacy has ensured that they receive levelling-up funds in their constituencies. I congratulate the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) on securing £16 million for UK Government money for the Granton gasholder in her constituency. The hon. Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn)—and even the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford)—have managed to secure money from either the levelling-up fund or the community ownership fund in this Budget.

It is fantastic that we have Scottish National party MPs petitioning my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to bypass the Scottish Government in order to spend UK Government money in their constituencies. [Hon. Members: “More! More!”] And indeed there will be more, because in the forthcoming community renewal fund allocations, more money will be going to constituencies represented by Scottish National party MPs. That is because, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer pointed out in his Budget speech, we are stronger, better and wealthier together. It is great that Scottish National party MPs are putting the UK Government’s money where the Scottish Government’s mouth isn’t.

Levelling up is about making opportunity more equal across our whole United Kingdom. It is a recognition, as the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have said, that while talent is spread equally across the United Kingdom, opportunity is not. If levelling up is to succeed, yes, we need funds such as the levelling up fund, but we also need a systemic approach to how the Government support local government, other institutions and the private sector in order to spread prosperity.

One of the challenges that we face when it comes to levelling up is that the difference between the more economically successful areas of the United Kingdom and those that are less successful involves a kind of “Anna Karenina” challenge. In the first line of that novel, Tolstoy points out that all happy families are happy in a similar way, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. We can apply that to communities that need more help. The challenges that Knowsley faces are different from the challenges that Grimsby faces. The challenges that Bury faces are different from those that Burnley faces. We need to recognise that while all the challenges faced in coastal towns, in satellite towns around our major cities and in rural areas have common features, they all deserve to be addressed in a unique way.

If we are going to improve economic productivity and wellbeing, we need to recognise—as the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien), has pointed out—that for levelling up to succeed, we need to ensure that local leadership improves and that we build on the success of, for example, combined authority Mayors such as Andy Street and Ben Houchen. We also need to improve living standards where they are lower, and to improve public services, particularly where opportunity has fallen behind. We also need to play a part in helping to restore pride in place, so that communities feel in a genuine sense that they have taken back control.

The Budget succeeded in addressing many of these challenges by ensuring that the funding was there to focus on each of the ingredients that require to be in place if we are to have levelling up. One of the first and most important areas in which the Budget made provision for change was in education, particularly in further education and in skills. An additional £3.8 billion is being spent over the course of the spending review period. That is a real-terms increase for those 16 to 19-year-olds who are in full-time education, and there is additional money to ensure that our groundbreaking T-levels are more available. There will be additional hours for those in further and technical education to ensure that they get the very best tuition, and there will be skills boot camps to ensure that we can accelerate the move of people into the labour market.

There will also be eight new institutes of technology—prestige further education institutions concentrated in the areas that most need levelling up. On top of that, the multiplier programme will provide more than £500 million to improve adult numeracy across the United Kingdom. All of this comes together in a package to recognise that, as well as building on the success of our education reform programme in schools, we also ensure that adult, technical and vocational education at last receives the focus, attention and funds that it deserves.

As well as investing in skills, we are going to invest better in small and medium-sized enterprises, which are of course the engine room of our economy. That is why the Chancellor outlined plans for the British Business Bank to expand in order to ensure that SME finance is more readily available. Regional funds are being extended across the northern powerhouse. The existing success of the BBB’s Cornwall operation is being extended to cover the whole of the south-west, and there will be new branches of the bank opening in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in order to build relationships with small businesses and to ensure that they have access to the debt and equity finance that they need.

Alongside that, there will be increased investment in research and development. An additional £20 billion will be spent over the spending review period, going up to hit our £22 billion target, and this research and development money will move outside the greater south-east, where so much research and development expenditure has been concentrated in the past, in order to ensure that, whether it is in Manchester or Newcastle, areas of university excellence that require additional investment to ensure the smarter diffusion of innovation into the economy are supported in the way that they should be.

On top of that, we have the global Britain investment fund: £1.4 billion that will ensure those sectors that are strong and growing in our economy get the additional inward investment they need to drive up economic growth. We know inward investment is often the route to higher productivity, and that is why there will be £1.4 billion specifically targeted on the automotive sector, on renewables and on life sciences.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

Can the Secretary of State just explain to the House why, if the global Britain fund is forecast to be so successful, the Office for Budget Responsibility has downgraded our trade forecast?

[Michael Gove]

I will say two things. It is great to see the right hon. Gentleman in his place. When he left as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he famously left a note saying that “there is no money” left; now, as he can see, there is significant money available to be allocated in all these areas. I recognise that he was speaking in jest and that those words should not be taken out of context.

More broadly, we face, as indeed every country faces, a global race for talent and a global appetite for additional investment. It is because of the global Britain investment fund, because of what we are doing in research and development and because of the way we are reforming UK Research and Innovation that we will be in a position to ensure that our economy is equipped to take advantage of the opportunities that Brexit brings, and the opportunities that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has outlined. I am confident that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) will see our exporting ability and the inward investment routes into this country grow in years to come.

I should point out that at the beginning of my remarks, I said that the initially pessimistic view that was taken of our capacity to weather the covid storm has been gainsaid by the success of the Chancellor’s approach. Again, there is no need to look in the crystal ball; the right hon. Gentleman need only look at the book. The book and the record show the success of the Chancellor’s approach.

[Liam Byrne]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

I will try to make a little bit more progress.

It is also significant that, if we are to level up, we must ensure that we have appropriate investment not only in business itself, through the funds I have mentioned and the initiatives I have outlined, but in transport. We must ensure that the private sector is firing on all cylinders, and that means ensuring in particular that our great city regions have the transport networks required. That is why my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has devoted £5.7 billion over the course of the spending review period to supporting the ambitious plans put forward by metro Mayors and others to improve transport.

More than £1 billion has been allocated to the Mayor of the West Midlands Combined Authority, and more than £1 billion also to the Mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Andy Burnham. Mr Burnham said last week—a point he made on Twitter and on broadcast; he was happy to comment on the spending review, unlike the hon. Member for Croydon North—that this was a “very positive first step.” He said:

“This feels like a breakthrough today…this is a big down payment”

on the infrastructure we need.

Mr Burnham welcomed that investment, and of course alongside it we had £830 million for West Yorkshire, £570 million for South Yorkshire, £710 million to improve transport in the greater Liverpool region and £300 million for Teesside. All those investments will help the Mayor of Greater Manchester, as he rightly wants to, ensure a Transport for London-style approach to the delivery of transport in that great region.

On top of that, as the Chairman of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), pointed out, we have £4.8 billion going to local government over the spending review period. This is necessarily an injection of cash to help local government ensure it can play its part in levelling up, and to ensure that it is supported by thriving businesses. We have also reformed business rates and moved towards a three-year evaluation, relief on improvements, including improvements that will help to deal effectively with climate change, and a 50% reduction for small businesses in the most affected sectors.

All that comes alongside a commitment to additional spending from my Department to help those most in need. We also have £630 million a year allocated over the next three years—that is £1.9 billion in total revenue—to help to deal with homelessness and to eliminate rough sleeping. There is also additional capital investment specifically targeting those who have problems with drug use and those who have been in custody, to ensure that we can help them into the accommodation they need to deal with the challenges they face. Overall spending in this area is 75% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne]

I want to clarify that point, because it is potentially quite significant. The characteristic of a Lawson-esque tax system is, of course, that capital is taxed at the same rate as income. Is that what the hon. Gentleman is advocating?

[John Penrose]

I am indeed advocating that all income should be taxed equally. It is a Lawson-esque idea; the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The reason why it is so essential, and why Nigel Lawson had this right, is that the whole point of it is that it creates work incentives for everybody, because they know they are going to be treated fairly. It also means that we have a system that has legitimacy, because it does not matter who has the best lobbyists or the best campaigners; everybody knows we have a nice, simple, flat, straightforward tax system, and everybody knows where they stand. Nigel Lawson was right about this.

I hope that the Chancellor’s Budget speech last week was the first step in what I think will be a long and difficult but ultimately incredibly worthwhile journey in that respect. I hope that this is the beginning of something important, something exciting, and something that is ultimately fairer and more just but also economically far more literate, because it creates a situation where it always pays to work, it always pays to save and it always pays for people to try to get themselves out of benefits by taking extra hours if they possibly can. It creates a situation where those work incentives are always there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is shame that the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) is not in his place because he put his finger on the nub of the debate. A strategy for growth should have been at the Budget’s heart, yet the International Monetary Fund and Office for Budget Responsibility took one look at the Budget and downgraded our growth forecast. Our long-term growth is something like two thirds of what it used to be.

The IMF, which has looked out over the next four years, says that we in the UK, for all the Chancellor’s measures, will have the worst recovery from covid in the G7. It is not surprising. While other countries around the world invest in science-led growth, what did the Chancellor do last week? He chose that moment to defer science spending by two years.

While other countries around the world are going for trade, the OBR looked at the magnificent new global Britain fund that we have heard about and downgraded our trade forecast. The current account deficit, which has been about 3% to 3.5% for some years, is now forecast to be 4% to 5% or 5.5%. A red-tape Brexit has ensnared our traders in so much bureaucracy that exports to the EU will fall by 15%.

Because growth is bad, taxes are up—we have the largest tax rise since the 1950s. In a couple of years, the average family will pay £3,000 extra in tax, thanks to the Prime Minister. Taxes are going up, not fairly, but affecting ordinary working people and we therefore have flat living standards. This decade is now the worst for pay rises since the 1930s. Of course, because we have a Tory Government, the poorest will be hit hardest. What we have heard today about the universal credit taper cut making up for the removal of the £20 uplift is absolute nonsense. The poorest people in this country will be £280 worse off as a result of the Government’s decisions. That is the reality.

The net sum of the measures is a catastrophe for social mobility in this country. Once upon a time, the Conservative party boasted about its social mobility credentials; not any more. It now takes five generations for someone born in the poorest cohort in this country to rise up and make even average wages. The gap between private school and public school funding is now so big that it would take £55 billion to fix it. The Conservative party should never again be trusted on social mobility.

My final point is about the west midlands. The Mayor of the west midlands, my friend Andy Street, is down with covid at the moment. We wish him a speedy recovery. However, many of us were pretty sick when we looked at the settlement for the west midlands. The budgets for the levelling-up fund and the towns fund put together give us the fourth worst settlement in the country—£217 million behind the north-west. In the levelling-up fund announcement last week, £33 a head for the west midlands is the fifth worst settlement in the country. Our transport budget is a £1 billion less than we asked for—one of the worst per capita settlements in the country, as the West of England Mayor was quick to point out.

This was a Budget for anaemic growth, rising prices, rocketing taxes, record debt, red tape that ensnares our traders, flat living standards and increased poverty. After all the agony of loss that the country has been through, we deserve better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Whately]

I will make a bit more progress.

I heard some Opposition Members say that rich people are not paying in enough. Well, I ask them to look at the Government’s distribution analysis and the analysis of the Resolution Foundation. These analyses say that the Government’s policies boost incomes for those on the lowest incomes, while those with the broadest shoulders—the better off—are the ones who will be paying the most. I also ask Opposition Members to acknowledge, as so many Government Members did, how both the increase to the national living wage by 6.6% and the changes to the universal credit taper rate will help millions of households on the lowest incomes. For example, a single parent of two children who works full-time will be £1,200 better off next year thanks to these changes.

[Liam Byrne]

I only intervene because I am sure that the Minister does not want to lead the House astray. The Resolution Foundation is very clear in its analysis that three quarters of the 4.4 million people on universal credit will be negatively affected and the bottom fifth of people will be £280 a year worse off as a result of the £20 uplift being stripped away. I am sure that she would want the record to reflect that.

[Helen Whately]

I stand by what I said: the Government’s distribution analysis and the Resolution Foundation analysis say that this Budget and spending review boost the incomes of those on the lowest incomes, and that those who are better off are paying in the most. The crucial point about the changes to the taper rate for universal credit is that it is about ensuring that people keep more of what they earn, and get the benefits and rewards of their hard work. The effect that it has is a tax cut for those on the lowest incomes.

There were times when I wondered whether Opposition Members were scrutinising the same Budget as Government Members. At many points, it felt as though they had missed the point. It was clear that the Opposition have no alternative plan. It was not clear whether they felt that we were spending too much or too little; what they would cut; what they would change; or where they would raise funds from. We on the Conservative Benches know that we are making the hard, responsible decisions, and setting ourselves up for the future.

I come to a serious point I want to make. Colleagues rightly pointed out that public spending is relatively high, and I share colleagues’ concerns about the size of the state at the moment. In fact, the Chancellor himself spoke about this last week. We on the Conservative Benches know that government should have limits. We want people to keep more of the rewards of their efforts, and we have said that, by the end of this Parliament, we want taxes to be going up, rather than down.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab) [V]]

Let me add my thanks to everybody who has helped to sponsor and organise this debate. I, too, pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for helping to ensure that the debate is so well organised and so well informed. Seventy-six years on, we still do not look out on a world where we have banished genocide. We cannot yet look out on a world where we have banished antisemitism. Until that moment comes, we need debates like this to remember with contrition and humility, as well as determination, how much further we still have to go.

I want to offer two lessons today that I have reflected on in the run-up to this important day. One is a lesson not from Britain but from Denmark: it is the story of the Danish resistance. Those of us have been to Yad Vashem will know that in the Avenue of the Righteous there is only one memorial to an entire national movement, and that is the memorial to the Danish resistance. This movement came together in 1940 after Hitler invaded Denmark. Together, it organised the extraordinary evacuation of 7,200 Jews, along with 700 of their relatives, in October 1943 after Hitler had given the order to arrest the Jews, with extermination in mind.

This was an exercise in good people coming together—people like Sven Teisen, a member of the Danish resistance, who lost his life in the course of 1943, and Oliver Sandberg, who gave over their house next to the Øresund, over which Jews were ferried to safety in Sweden. Sven Teisen was the uncle that I never knew. Oliver Sandberg was his cousin. They were among thousands of ordinary Danes who came together inspired by one simple idea: that ordinary people can make a difference in standing up to hate.

I am so grateful that our schools are now teaching this lesson to our children. They are schools like Rockwood Academy in Alum Rock my constituency. This is a gold standard Holocaust Educational Trust school that has brought alive the testimony of Mady Gerrard. It has named its new building after Mady, and its lights now shine up like a light in the darkness to help light up the January skies here in Birmingham. I want our region to become a region of sanctuary for refugees in the years to come.

I want us to listen to the lessons of Sofia Darr, the headteacher, who I heard from this morning. She said that she has just seen the most extraordinary emotional journey of her children. She wants us to reflect on how we help them to connect at a human level, and on how we recognise their pledges by bringing them together and putting them on a national stage, giving our young people, through their leadership, the chance to genuinely spark a movement for change against hate.

Council Tax: Government’s Proposed Increase

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab) [V]]

Let me just start with a point that I think many of us will share: in these debates about numbers, statistics and finances, we must remember the lives that are at stake.

Most of us will never forget the stories of love and loss that we have heard this year, stories such as those I heard from the family of Sarah Scully. Their mum, Sarah, went into hospital and said goodbye to her family at the hospital door. Sarah was pregnant. She had to be given a caesarean section, but was so ill she had to be put into an induced coma. Tragically, she died before she was ever able to hold her newborn baby in her arms. Or stories such as Monica’s. She had been married to her husband since she was a teenager. They both got covid, but went into different hospitals. She got the news from her husband that she had feared by text message: “Told just 24 to 48 hours to live.” Or stories such as Bishop Windsor’s, who buried so many people in his congregation that he did not know how that congregation would ever recover from their agony of loss. Now, after all that agony and pain, and after all the anxiety of the job losses, in Britain’s second city we are being handed a bill—a bill to make good on the underfunding of this Government.

Last May, we wrote a cross-party letter to the Minister to warn that the costs of covid in our city would total some £282 million. That included the £92 million extra for social care, to cover the costs of PPE that never arrived or to ensure that there was a safe social care system after the protective ring around care homes failed, and £95 million in lost income, as well as business rates going down and council tax support going up. It is true that the Secretary of State provided some grants to make good on that, but as of last year, we were still £100 million short because our council, led by Councillor Ian Ward, decided to step up and help protect the people of our city where there were shortcomings from the Government. Now, what was the result of that? A 4.99% increase in council tax—£72 a year for a band D home.

How on earth can it be right that council tax payers in places such as Surrey are being cushioned, when council tax payers in Birmingham and the west midlands are being punished? We took the Secretary of State at his word when he told us that he would ensure that there were the resources we needed to do the job. He has reneged on that. It is people—people who are going through hell on earth—who are now being asked to pick up a bill for Government underfunding. That is simply not right, and I, along with my colleagues, urge the Government to think again.

Homelessness

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

As I said, the figures for the past year suggest we are seeing a reduction in street homelessness—a modest reduction, I admit, of 2%, but a reduction none the less. We will not find out the official figures for the most recent count taken in November until next month, but having been to a number of local authorities across the country in recent weeks and spoken to them it seems to me that we will see a further, more significant fall in rough sleeping when we receive those figures. I have not for one moment suggested that that is an end in itself. We need to go much further and much faster. In my remarks, I will set out exactly what this new Conservative Government intend to do.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am glad the Secretary of State raised Housing First. I know he will join me in congratulating Councillor Yvonne Davies and Councillor Sharon Thompson, who had to take back control of delivering it to drive some of the reductions we have seen in the west midlands. The point really is this: for Housing First to work, we first need houses. The truth is that the number of social homes built in the west midlands has fallen by 17% in the past year and by 18% since 2010. Surely that must be turned around.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am very happy to praise anybody who has been involved in Housing First. As I said, a few days before Christmas I visited a Housing First pilot in Walsall and was tremendously impressed by the work there. I met a lady who had been taken off the streets in Walsall. She had been sleeping rough in a park for a long time, but was spending her first Christmas for a number of years in a home of her own and would shortly be having her children over for Christmas lunch, which she had not managed to enjoy, I think, for over decade. It is a tribute to the housing associations that are willing to participate in Housing First. I want more housing associations to do so. We will clearly need to provide both the funding and the certainty of that funding, because it is a significant endeavour for a housing association. That housing association, for example, is not only giving property and a home to that lady, but promising to provide wrap-around care, an individual to visit or phone that person, every day for up to three years. That is an incredibly sophisticated and bespoke level of care, but one that is working extremely well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I have a very different set of prescriptions for some of the problems set out by the hon. Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway).

Debates in this place are always political, but they sometimes touch on the personal, too. I am the adult son of an alcoholic. Since I lost my father to a lifelong struggle with alcohol five years ago, I have sought to campaign for those in my home city of Birmingham who are self-medicating trauma with drugs and with alcohol. The reality is that what we see on our streets is that the safety net in this country—the social insurance system of which we were once proud—has now so comprehensively collapsed and the holes in that safety net are so big that anyone now hit by a twist of fate without a family to help them will fall straight through and hit the pavement, where in my region, on average, they are now dying every 10 days. That is why I say to this House that the subject of this debate is a moral emergency, which is why the response we need from Her Majesty’s Government is an awful lot stronger than what we heard today.

In cities such as Birmingham, we may have planes in the sky but we have homeless people dying in the doorways. Having this in the second city of the fifth richest country on earth is not a morally acceptable situation. I could give the House a barrage of statistics—

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Liam Byrne]

I will come on to Walsall in a minute. I could give the House a barrage of statistics about how rough sleeping in my city is up by 1,000% since 2010; about how the number of homeless children has trebled; and about how we now have a crisis of overcrowding, with one in five homes in inner-city Birmingham and the Black Country now overcrowded. But I do not want to talk about statistics. I want to talk about a story. It is the story of a man I met in an underpass next to Birmingham New Street station when I was out on a Sunday morning last year with an amazing team of people called Outreach Angels. We saw a man lying on the floor in acute distress—a double amputee next to his wheelchair. This was in an underpass that stank of urine. He had been there for three days, and he was still dressed in his hospital gown with a hospital tag on his wrist. It took us nearly two hours to get that man an ambulance. How on earth have we come to this in this country?

Thank God across our region we now have a coalition of kindness that is fighting back, with extraordinary people and organisations, including Hope into Action: Black Country; Matt Lambert, who does great work in Wolverhampton; Nobby Clarke, the Coventry night shelter and Hope Coventry; Langar Aid and Khalsa Aid International; SIFA Fireside; the outreach teams across the west midlands, which are doing extraordinary work; and Councillors Yvonne Davies and Sharon Thompson, who do extraordinary work and who have taken back control of the Housing First programme in our region, because they understand that for Housing First to work we first need homes. Can we guess the grand total of the number of social homes built last year in the hon. Gentleman’s borough? It was zero. The number of social homes built in the west midlands last year fell by 17%, and is down by nearly 80% since 2010. So I will take his intervention, but will he at least agree that we cannot bring together a shared agenda to tackle this problem unless we start building council homes again?

[Eddie Hughes]

I am just disappointed that the right hon. Gentleman did not mention the excellent work of YMCA Birmingham, where I was assistant chief executive until I came to Parliament. That organisation has been given about £3.5 million over the past five years by this Government to provide accommodation for homeless people in Birmingham.

[Liam Byrne]

I would add to the hon. Gentleman’s list, because not only does the YMCA do an amazing job, but so do St Basils, with the work of Jean Templeton; Tabor House; the Good Shepherd Ministry in Wolverhampton, which the Secretary of State mentioned; Homeless One; and the Ummah Care Foundation, where I used to work in a soup kitchen on a Sunday night. This coalition of kindness is basically the last bastion of civility in our country. Thank God for them.

What we now need in our region is the biggest council house building programme since the second world war. What we need is a private sector, region-wide licensing scheme to stamp out bad practice. What we need are street teams delivering 24/7 addiction and mental health support. We need to radically expand the shelter that is available from places such as Tabor House and the Good Shepherd Ministry—places that provide not only shelter, but sanctuary, not just a house, but a home. But we need a Government who help, too.

We need the Government to start by abolishing the Vagrancy Act 1824. I cannot be the only person in this House who thinks that homeless people do not need handcuffs—they need a helping hand. We should replace that with Kane’s law. We should bring together the Department for Work and Pensions, the Prison Service, the health system and local government, and create an obligation on them to collaborate not only to remedy homelessness, but to prevent homelessness. I have met too many people fresh out of prison at 4 o’clock in the morning in Birmingham. I have met too many people who have been sanctioned on to the streets by the DWP. Let us end this injustice once and for all.

[Mr Betts]

My right hon. Friend is making a valid point. I am sure he recognises that we tried to amend the Homelessness Reduction Bill in Committee to place a responsibility on other public agencies to address homelessness. What we got was a duty on them to refer people to housing departments, not to address it themselves.

[Liam Byrne]

What we need is what I have called Kane’s law, in memory of Kane Walker, who lost his life on the streets of Birmingham last year: a duty on public agencies to collaborate to prevent homelessness from happening in the first place. Let us put alongside that the restoration of housing benefit for young people, who do not pay lower rents than anybody else; let us make sure that we take off the caps on housing benefit, which cover only two thirds of the average rent in a city like Birmingham; and let us end the shame of “no recourse to public funds”, which means that those who come to our country to seek sanctuary are ending up on the streets.

The great tragedy of this debate is that if we summoned the will, we could, together, make homelessness history. We on the Opposition Benches are determined either to find a way or to make a way. We want to know whether the Secretary of State is with us or against us.

Definition of Islamophobia

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree. I thank my hon. Friend for the work he does in supporting the all-party parliamentary group. I assure him that that kind of attack and that kind of prejudice is very much covered by our definition. If we cannot recognise what is under our very noses on the doorsteps of our own Parliament, how can we give Muslims up and down the country, or those who are perceived to be Muslim, the confidence that we are taking this seriously?

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I, too, commend my hon. Friend for the leadership that he has shown on this issue. Hate crime against Muslims has risen by almost 100% since the Brexit referendum. In my constituency, which has the biggest Muslim population of any constituency in Britain, nearly 90% of my constituents have experienced Islamophobia or know someone who has. That includes bottles thrown at them, alcohol thrown at them, and people screamed at for having the temerity to wear a hijab. Surely we need a better definition of Islamophobia if we are to prosecute Islamophobia and to clamp down on its enablers in the British media.

[Wes Streeting]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. He is respected in this place for his deep knowledge of extremism issues, which is why we invited him to give evidence to our inquiry. The law already covers discrimination based on race and religion, but what we are dealing with is not just a challenge of changing laws; it is a challenge of changing hearts and minds, changing the everyday lived experiences of people in our community, and helping people to recognise and understand the challenge.