Private Rented Sector

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Julian Huppert

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

I do not claim to be an expert on the situation in Leeds, but my hon. Friend makes a good point. They should be doing such things. In Cambridge we charged higher council tax for empty properties instead of giving a discount, as was previously the case. People paid less if they brought a property back into use. It is hard for people who are desperately looking for a house to know that there are empty properties around.

I will not go through everything I spoke about in my speech on Second Reading of my private Member’s Bill. I went into more detail about the need for an ombudsman and for accreditation schemes. I prefer accreditation schemes to a national register because they would be cheaper, more effective and less bureaucratic and would avoid problems with letting property on a more occasional basis. We are agreed that we need a better system, and accreditation could work.

The hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) spoke about houses in multiple occupation. There are some good examples of HMOs, but others are a serious problem and do not comply with basic health and safety regulations. They are an essential part of the housing mix in a place like Cambridge. We rely on them to house people, and they do a good job. Yet Labour councillors have proposed to cap the number of HMOs and change the definition to any house with three people from two unrelated groups. Driving younger people out of HMOs would simply slash the supply and make it even harder to house people in my constituency.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Like me, the hon. Gentleman represents a university city with a great number of HMOs. Does he share my concern that the definition of HMO—that it has to have at least five rooms and more than three storeys—means that many properties are not licensed? The standards in many of them are very poor, and that is precisely why councils such as Nottingham City council have introduced additional licensing schemes that cover a wider range of HMOs than those covered by the basic legislation.

[Dr Huppert]

I am happy to accept that some places should be looked at more, and I am about to talk about some of the safety issues. The question is whether the council should introduce some sort of accreditation scheme, as Cambridge has, to make sure that HMOs are safe, or ban them. I hope that the hon. Lady would not suggest capping the number of HMOs in her constituency because she knows as well as I do the problems that that would cause for people looking for somewhere to live.

We have problems with safety in the private rented sector. There are far too many unsafe properties. In particular, we have problems with electric fires. There are about 17,000 electric fires in the private rented sector and it seems bizarre that there are no requirements for them to be safety checked. We should introduce such a requirement; it is not excessive red tape, it is a simple safety measure.

We want a fair deal for tenants. One group that we also need to consider is people who rent from private landlords and pay their rent using the local housing allowance. This was touched on earlier. There have been shocking cases of people being told that they cannot rent because they are on benefits. That simply should not be tolerated. We should not let landlords exclude a large number of people who need to find housing.

We have a particular problem in Cambridge. The local housing allowance was introduced by the previous Government with broad rental market areas. One of the problems was that the rent levels for Cambridge were set by averaging places as far afield as Haverhill and Littleport, which are both much further out and have lower rents. It became impossible for anyone to find anything to rent in Cambridge on the LHA amount. My predecessor fought strongly against this when it was set up. It was highlighted by the Work and Pensions Committee, which emphasised the specific problems in Cambridge and Blackpool. Those problems were not fixed. The message that the Labour Government sent to people in Cambridge on benefits was, “You can’t afford to live in Cambridge. Go somewhere else.” They made Cambridge unaffordable and increased rents in places such as Littleport and Haverhill. It was a poor scheme and I am pleased that the Government have finally, after much effort, launched an independent review of the adequacy of LHA levels and increased the levels in Cambridge by 4%—well above inflation. That is a start.

There is agreement across the House that we should make it easier for people to have longer tenancies. The stability is worth while. Some time ago in our policy paper, we in the Liberal Democrats proposed mini-leases, with new fixed-term leases of at least three years after a probationary period.

Home Affairs

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Julian Huppert

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is correct on that point: it is true that the Conservative party had a commitment to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. I did not think that that was a good idea at the time. It is very hard to see how it can be implemented. Part of the problem is that the only way to implement it—the Select Committee on Home Affairs has criticised this specifically —is to adjust some of the measures until we see very disproportionate changes in some areas. He is right that the Conservatives have been consistent. We saw a larger number of Conservative Members signing amendments to try to stop Romanians and Bulgarians coming into the country than we saw Romanians and Bulgarians flooding into the country, which seems to be the wrong way around.

It is not just Conservatives. I was interested to see that even the National Union of Students specifically passed a motion that called on the Labour party to stop pandering to “anti-migrant politics.” That is something I hope the Labour party will live up to.

I was not planning to spend all my time talking about migration because I wanted to talk more broadly about the Queen’s Speech and where we are four years into this Government. The Government started in a difficult position. The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough was keen to say that the finances were not the fault of the last Government. We can have that interesting discussion, but there is no doubt that in 2010, this country was in a difficult situation. One pound in every £4 the Government spent had to be borrowed. Whether we accept the right hon. Gentleman’s case that everything was fantastic and it was just unfortunate, or whether we take the view that it was in some sense the fault of the Labour Government over 13 years, it was a difficult time. I would not have chosen the first opportunity for my party to be in government to be at a time when, as the former Chief Secretary said, there was no money left.

Where are we now? We see a growing economy with unemployment substantially reduced. In my constituency, unemployment has gone down by some 40%. I welcome that; more people in employment, and in full-time employment. That is a great success and there are successes in other areas, such as renewable energy. Relevant to home affairs, the main subject for today, crime is down consistently. I welcome that. Every year that we debate police funding there has been a suggestion that crime is about to start shooting upwards. Every year it continues to go down.

We have made some progress on something very dear to my heart: civil liberties. That was what got me involved in politics. Before I came here, I was on the national council of Liberty. We have dealt with the Government’s storing of the DNA of innocent people on central databases. We have got rid of authoritarian identity cards. It is a great pleasure to see the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims in his place. The first Bill from the Government passed by the House got rid of identity cards, which were expensive, intrusive and unnecessary. [Interruption.] We see that the Labour party continues to want to bring in identity cards at great expense. It is a shame, as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, that the only thing Labour has apologised for is their immigration policy and not many other measures.

We have got rid of control orders and the idea of internal exile without trial. Even yesterday, however, we heard the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) complaining that the Government have stopped people being exiled inside this country without having a trial. We have improved libel laws, provided same-sex marriage and ended child detention as a standard thing for immigration purposes, putting that into law recently. We have ended discrimination against illegitimate children who used not to be able to inherit their citizenship if they were unfortunate enough to have been born too early. We have done many things. But there is more still to do. I look forward to doing much of it.

The right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), in her address on the Gracious Speech, said that the Conservatives had been held back by their coalition partners. I am very proud that we have stopped many things where we have disagreed. There are a number of things that we have simply not allowed to happen: for-profit schools; firing at will; the removal of housing benefit from the under-25s. There are a number of things that we have stopped.

However, it is not just a question of the things the Conservatives have been prevented from doing. There are things we have done, and things we would like to do that we have been prevented from doing because of the Conservatives. These include the mansion tax, to make sure that the richer in society pay more towards our finances, electoral reform and House of Lords reform. They also include getting more housing built, and environmental measures have been blocked. On reviewing surveillance post-Snowden, we have seen very little movement from the Home Office; indeed, we have no idea what the status is of the data retention directive rules. We would like to go further: to strengthen the Information Commissioner’s office and extend freedom of information. We want to have more evidence-informed policy so that when the expert advisers to the Government say that something is inappropriate and disproportionate, we do not see the Conservative party interpreting that to mean that it should go ahead with it or, indeed, the Labour party backing it. There is much more that we would like to do.

But there is good stuff coming. There is very good stuff in the Queen’s Speech where we have been able to agree and show that coalitions can work, and that two very different parties can find areas on which we agree.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman’s flow as he sets out all the things that he thinks are so good. Perhaps he could say when the Government are going to do something about the fact that most people in poverty now are in work. Perhaps he will say something about people affected by the bedroom tax and by having to pay council tax for the very first time, or about the thousands and thousands of people who as a result of his Government’s policies are having to rely on food banks. How proud does he feel of those?

[Dr Huppert]

I do not in any sense think that the economy is in a perfect place. The hon. Lady did not mention the fact that the last Government tried to suppress people getting help from food banks. I am very pleased that there are food banks to help people. The problem is not people getting help from food banks; it is people who are unable to get help from food banks because they do not know about them or because there is not a food bank available for them. The hon. Lady should have a look at why it was that under the last Government, whom she presumably supported for 13 years, inequality increased. Why did the richest pay less of the share of taxation? This Government have changed that. Why did unemployment go up under the last Government? I have a lot of sympathy for many of the stated aims of the Labour party on equality, but the problem is that they simply did not deliver it.

Let me return to the Queen’s Speech, which contained very good things. There was a shared agreement that we needed to do much more to help small businesses to thrive, something which we can agree will make a big difference. Small businesses make a huge difference to our economy, and will build our prosperity. I have been working hard on issues to do with local independent shops in particular, and this will be very helpful.

I am particularly pleased by the announcement on pub reform, which will make a big difference to people who have tied pubs across England and Wales. It is a great tribute to the fantastic work by a number of people who have campaigned. The statutory code and the independent adjudicator will make a big difference to keeping pubs open. My constituents have been able to open pubs again. We have been praised by everybody from the Campaign for Real Ale to the Labour shadow Minister for our work to try to save pubs. This will help us to do it.

We are also helping people who have any sort of income to be able to spend money in those pubs, businesses or anywhere else by increasing the personal allowance to £10,500. That is 26.6 million people who have had their income tax cut, making them better off and allowing those on low incomes to pay no income tax at all. The hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) prompts me to point out that the last Government increased the tax on the very low-paid when they got rid of the 10p tax rate; they doubled the tax rate paid by some of the lowest earners. I am proud that we have reduced it instead. That is a much fairer and more progressive system, and I am proud that somebody on £10,000 a year will not pay anything. I am proud that we managed to persuade the Prime Minister, who originally opposed it, to go ahead with the proposal.

We are also making a difference on apprenticeships, something my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills is very proud of. We should aim—this is a shared aspiration—for 2 million apprentices by the end of the Parliament. In my constituency I am seeing the difference that that is making, with the fantastic Cambridge regional college now having something like 5,000 apprentices studying. I have gone to see many of them to see how much of a difference it makes to their lives. It is helping them to get on.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Julian Huppert

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

17. At a time when NHS budgets are under exceptional pressure, my constituents simply do not understand why the Government are so intent on pushing trusts to divert money away from patient care and into wasteful local pay bargaining. Is there not a risk that Nottingham’s excellent NHS hospitals and community services will be unable to recruit and retain the best staff if regional pay results in cuts to their salary scales? The Government are supportive of the idea, endorsed by the previous Government, that local pay flexibility allows additional rewards to be paid to staff in areas with workplace shortages, as my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) just made clear. The Government are supporting the unions, employers and employees, as the NHS Staff Council, in coming together to try to agree how we need to modify the “Agenda for Change” and other agreements to ensure that they remain fit for their purpose of protecting employees.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

13. What assessment his Department has made of the extent to which the cancer radiotherapy innovation fund will increase access to intensity-modulated radiotherapy.

Rail Fares

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Julian Huppert

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I join colleagues on both sides of the House in putting on the record my congratulations to the new Transport Secretary on his appointment. It is fitting that he should have made his debut in this debate. I know he is unable to be in the Chamber at the moment, but I am sure he will look carefully at all the arguments put forward by colleagues.

I listened very carefully to the Transport Secretary’s contribution, and was somewhat disappointed that he said very little about rail fare increases. Perhaps the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), will say more about them, or perhaps the Secretary of State will return to fare increases in the coming days or weeks as he finds his way in his new brief and tell us exactly what he will do to protect passengers, what he thinks about the flex system, and whether he will lobby the Chancellor to keep rail fare rises to RPI plus 1%, as the Opposition propose. The Transport Secretary has an opportunity to push for the reintroduction of a real cap on fare rises, and I very much hope he takes it.

This debate has been about the general and the particular. There is a general crisis in the cost of living. Household budgets are under enormous pressure as living costs climb ever higher. The Opposition have called today for the Government to take a particular action—a further U-turn that would be welcomed by the constituents of all hon. Members in the Chamber. The Government could reverse their decision to allow the dramatic rise in rail fares, which, for many people, have come at the worst possible time.

The Government could resist the growing burden on hard-pressed passengers. The Labour Government put in place a strict cap on rail fare rises of 1% above inflation. It is a cause of great regret, both in the House and more importantly in the country, that the current Government chose to give the rail companies free rein over regulated fares. The removal of the cap, coupled with the restoration of flex, will lead to fare rises of up to 11%. That is a real blow at a time of pay freezes in both the public and the private sectors, higher-than-expected inflation and a contracting economy. The Campaign for Better Transport has warned that the cost of season tickets will go up three times faster than salaries. Without economic growth, the pain will only increase in intensity.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who is not in her place, clearly explained how many people, particularly commuters, need to travel at particular times and cannot shop around for cheaper fares in the off-peak or super off-peak periods. They must simply pay up and see their disposable income hit. To give just one example, when one of my constituents needs to commute from Nottingham to Leicester to go to work, a season ticket currently costs £1,672 a year. Under the Government’s plans, it is estimated that that figure will rise to £1,937 by 2015, which would represent 7.38% of the average regional salary. Pity the commuter from Leeds to Hull whose season ticket will go up from £3,732 to £4,323, an eye-watering 16.5% of the average regional salary. In the most extreme cases, a season ticket could cost up to 25% of the average salary.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) noted—and the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) agreed—commuters in the south-east are routinely spending 15% or more of their salary simply on getting to work, and many will be priced out of work altogether. The example given by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) was helpful in that respect.

The issue is not just affecting commuters. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) said, this also hurts businesses in his constituency whose staff need to travel to London to sustain and grow future business. Meanwhile infrastructure spending is being scaled back and the Government seem set on using the McNulty report as cover to withdraw staff from stations, despite many passengers relying on them to find the cheapest fares, which—as many hon. Members have pointed out—cannot easily be done using automated ticket machines, never mind the other concerns about unstaffed stations.

The fare rises will also have a particularly serious impact on those on low incomes, including pensioners and young people, who are already feeling the squeeze as the cost of living rises. When I speak to young people in my constituency the cost of transport is one of the key concerns that they raise, and I think the high cost of train travel comes as a real shock to many of those leaving home for the first time to go to university. For pensioners, the fare rises are compounded by cuts to alternative modes of transport. Bus services have been cut back and the withdrawal of support for long-distance coach travel is hitting pensioners hard.

Before the last election, someone said:

“The fares issue will not go away. It will be the biggest inhibitor of train travel in the years to come.”—[Official Report, 25 February 2010; Vol. 506, c. 166WH.]

Those are not my words, but those of the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Lewes. In fact, we have heard many warm words on fares. Scores of coalition MPs have been telling their local papers that they opposed the rise in fares, despite voting for them in this House. They will be glad to have the opportunity to set the record straight, and I trust that all those hon. Members will join us in the Lobby today.

[Dr Huppert]

The shadow Secretary of State also suggested on several occasions that we had voted for RPI plus 3%, but I do not recall doing so. Can the hon. Lady point to the dates of the Divisions in which any hon. Member specifically voted for RPI plus 3%?

[Lilian Greenwood]

The hon. Gentleman will find that we have had previous debates on transport and the cost of living when he had an opportunity to vote for our proposals, which would have reduced the increase in fares.

[Dr Huppert]

Will the hon. Lady give way again?

[Lilian Greenwood]

Not at the moment.

We have heard many warm words on fares and coalition Members have been supportive of the Government’s position. We have been promised an end to “inflation busting fares” in a press release from the Department for Transport, and both Liberal Democrats and Conservatives promised “fair pricing for rail travel” in the coalition agreement. For all those fine words, what has been delivered? Fares will rise by 3% above inflation, flex will be reinstated, and there will be overall rises of up to 11%. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) likes to pretend that that is nothing to do with his party, but it is his Ministers, including the Under-Secretary, who are imposing these measures.

The new franchises also hand operators unprecedented license over the quantity and quality of the services that they run. Ministers must mind the gap between rhetoric and reality. For too many passengers the reality of rail travel is overcrowded carriages, repeated delays and needlessly complicated pricing structures. Instead of tackling the root causes of waste in the railways, the Government are merely handing the cost on to passengers. We are keen to see a more efficient rail industry, but passengers face unaffordable fare rises now. There have been enough empty pledges from this Government. Their words are cheap, but the fares are dear, and the rail companies count the profits. There has to be another way.

Less than a month ago, the former Transport Secretary, now Secretary of State for International Development, said that she wanted to find a means of bringing

“fares down to something affordable.”

This motion offers just such a means. I hope that the new Transport Secretary will be prepared to stand up against vested interests for the public good, and I hope that Members from all parties will support this motion to help ease the burden on rail passengers.

Rail Fares

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Julian Huppert

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

We have heard this afternoon exactly how the cost-of-living crisis is hitting households up and down the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) described the devastating circumstances faced by some of her constituents. This debate is not about point scoring. It is about the lives of the people whom we represent—the people who went back to work after the Christmas holidays and suddenly found that they had to pay almost 11% more to catch the train. As my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) noted, passengers travelling from Cardiff to London face increases of 9.7%. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) highlighted the frightening cost of fares to and from the south-west.

As usual, there were plenty of warm words from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), but I remind him that his party is part of this Government and their policy is to increase fares in this Parliament by RPI plus 3%.

[Dr Huppert]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lilian Greenwood]

I will not give way at the moment.

We have heard about shoppers finding that they have less to spend when they get to the shops or the market because bus fares have gone up, about small businesses struggling with the high cost of petrol, and about mums and dads having to find more money from the family budget to help teenage sons and daughters pay to travel to college because they have lost their education maintenance allowance and the fare concessions they used to get have been cut. Parents are having to get the car out to take their children to school, even if they cannot really afford to, because school transport has been cut. As has been said, that does nothing to contribute to the green agenda.

The cost of living crisis is hitting hardest those who are least able to withstand it and is made worse by the decisions that the Government have made, which show that they are out of touch with the concerns of ordinary families. When so many people are struggling to pay their bills and make ends meet, only a Government who are completely out of touch with these concerns would allow inflation-busting increases in rail fares, yet that is exactly what this Government have done. They were forced to back down on their original plan to increase rail fares by inflation plus 3% this year, but passengers will still face those rises in January 2013 and January 2014.

When passengers heard the Chancellor’s autumn statement, they understandably expected that the most they would have to pay this year was an extra 1% above inflation, but they soon found that they were wrong, because the Government gave private train companies the right to increase some tickets by an additional 5%, something that Labour banned in government precisely because we understood the pressures commuters face in tough economic times.