Deaths of Homeless People

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 20th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I appreciate the situation in Northern Ireland and the support and accommodation available there. There are different pictures in different parts of our United Kingdom. Part of this is about ensuring we have a strong economy, creating jobs and growth and the prosperity agenda that sits behind all this, so we can and will look forward to the future positively. Equally, I come back to the point, particularly in relation to England and Wales, about longer tenancies and security in tenancies. That is why I am reflecting carefully on the consultation we carried out a few months back.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Last year, 597 homeless people died on our streets. Just imagine: that is nearly one dead homeless person for every seat in this Chamber. One cold dead homeless person where I sit, where the Minister sits and where you sit, Mr Speaker. It happens not just in big cities, however. Henryk Smolarz died on the streets in Plymouth. Does the Minister think not just about the big cities, but the small cities, towns and rural areas where the combination of street homelessness and people living in insecure accommodation is as much a problem as in the big cities?

[James Brokenshire]

I do. I can certainly assure the hon. Gentleman on that. I talked about the 83 priority areas. That is based on last year’s count. We are obviously looking at other data, too, to ensure that our focus and attention is very firmly on areas of need. Where there is good practice that can be shared, we will absolutely do that. I am desperately saddened to hear of the particular case in Plymouth that he highlights. We will be working not just in the big cities, but across the country to provide support where it is needed.

Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Committee Debate: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Wilson. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Westminster North, and I echo what others have said about her hard work, much of it behind the scenes.

I simply want to add how extraordinary it is that landlords have no legal obligations to their tenants to put or keep the property in a condition fit for habitation. Like every member of the Committee, I have, over my eight years as the Member for Brighton, Pavilion, seen literally hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of people living in the most awful conditions. In my experience, it is the most disadvantaged people who live in the worst and most dangerous rented housing. I want to put on record my pleasure at the progress of the Bill. I look forward to seeing it reach the statute book very soon.

Finally, I echo the words of the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne on the next challenge, which I agree is about controls on rent. I hope that one day we will get to that as well.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North for her dogged determination in introducing the Bill.

Some 43% of people in Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, live in the private rented sector. We are one of the areas in the south-west with the highest concentration of people in the private rented sector, and there are still far too many examples of really poor standards. In particular, people have been really scared about complaining. I wonder whether my hon. Friend, or perhaps the Minister, could briefly explain what education and empowerment can accompany the Bill, once it passes into law—assuming, as I hope, that it will—to help people who are living in substandard accommodation but do not complain about it for fear of being evicted.

Fire Safety and Cladding

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Streeter. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) for securing the debate.

Last June, the nation was horrified to see images of smoke billowing out from Grenfell Tower, with residents trapped inside. It felt as though what was a national tragedy would be met by a national response, to ensure that such circumstances would never happen again, in London, or in Devon. In Mount Wise, in Devonport in my constituency, we have three tower blocks with combustible cladding, housing both leaseholders and social renters and, eight months on, too little has been done by the Government to prevent a similar tragedy from unfolding.

The grime artist Stormzy made his views clear at last month’s Brits. I think he spoke for most of us here when he said, “Theresa May, where’s the money for Grenfell?” I have a similar question for the Minister. Where is the money that was promised to support local authorities and housing associations in the removal of combustible cladding and the re-cladding of tower blocks in Plymouth? The most outrageous thing about this injustice is that there is money to pay for it. We know that, because last week the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government gave £1.1 billion of the money in his budget that could have been spent on re-cladding back to the Treasury, as reported by HuffPost on 4 March. His decision was based on the idea that the money was no longer required. His memorandum for the 2017-18 financial year stated:

“The Department has surrendered £817 million of budget that is no longer required in 2017/18”.

I think that residents of Lynher House, Tavy House and Tamar House in Mount Wise would say that the money was urgently required and that it should have been spent on re-cladding tower blocks. I think that hon. Members right across the House will agree that the money was required and that it could have been used by Ministers.

Small housing associations, such as Plymouth Community Homes, have done a fantastic job of securing and making safe as much of the tower blocks as they can—we have 60-minute fire doors, sprinklers being installed and 24-hour fire marshals—but Plymouth cannot afford the £13 million to £20 million it will cost to re-clad the three tower blocks. Will the Minister confirm that his Department returned that money to the Treasury, and will he ask for the money back, so that it can be spent on re-cladding tower blocks, not only in Plymouth but right across the country, to ensure that people can live in safe homes?

In her statement on 22 June 2017, the Prime Minister said:

“We cannot and will not ask people to live in unsafe homes.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2017; Vol. 626, c. 169.]

However, that is precisely what will happen if money is not spent to take action. There is an opportunity here, as was mentioned earlier, for this to be a cross-party moment, with all parties uniting to ensure that everyone lives in a safe home. That opportunity has not yet been taken by politicians, but it is being taken by people in communities who are fighting to secure their homes. Minister, please get that money back and let us spend it on cladding.

Department for Transport

Luke Pollard Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 27th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) on securing the debate. It is a very timely one for the south-west, as I shall explain in a moment.

It is no secret that I think that transport links in the south-west are underfunded, as addressing that has been one of my main priorities since entering this place last June. It comes on the back of the need for the south-west to stop accepting the poor deal for transport that we have been given for so long. My transport campaigns in the south-west are about giving us a fair deal by reopening Plymouth airport, extending the M5 from Exeter to Plymouth, and funding our train line properly so that it is faster and more resilient in bad weather. As a region, we have been given—and, importantly, we have accepted—a poor deal for far too long.

Across nearly all areas of Government spending in the south-west, the far south-west, which I represent, has received below average spend. My Labour colleagues have talked about the gap in transport funding for some time. Based on the Treasury’s “Country and Regional Analysis” publication last year, we in the far south-west receive about £277 per head. In London, the figure is £973 per head, which means that London gets three and a half times what we get in the far south-west. I do not mind London getting another tube line, HS2 being built or a new runway at Heathrow so long as the far south-west gets its fair share—not more, just our fair share—but that is not happening at the moment.

That is why tomorrow is such an important day for the Government: we will see whether they will put their money where their mouth is. On 30 January, south-west Conservative MPs threatened to rebel on a vote against HS2, and the Transport Secretary wrote them a letter to quell their concerns. In it, he said that Dawlish—the part of the train line washed away by the storms in 2014—

“remains our number one national priority”.

I simply do not believe that Dawlish is the Government’s No. 1 national priority when it comes to rail. Looking at the blank faces around the Chamber, I see that no one else does either. The DFT also promised in its letter, which was sent only to Tory MPs and therefore, sadly, not to me or to my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), that work at Dawlish would begin “quickly”. We have heard that before—jam tomorrow.

What we are looking for tomorrow is a full statement and a plan that will adopt the Peninsula Rail Task Force recommendations, and that is lucky because the letter went on to say that

“the DfT will set out our strategy, following the PRTF report, by the end of February.”

That is tomorrow, so I invite the Minister to confirm that the DFT will publish a south-west rail strategy tomorrow, that it will adopt the recommendations of the Peninsula Rail Task Force and, importantly, that it will match Labour’s pledge of funding £2.5 billion for this rail action, which covers the first 10 years of spending set out by the Peninsula Rail Task Force. Failure to publish that strategy tomorrow will show the south-west that we have been let down yet again by this Government. We need action, words and funding to follow the agreed plan. That needs to be based on what can be delivered, not promises of jam tomorrow and vague promises of upgrades.

The far south-west has had too many promises since David Cameron came to the region in 2014 saying that money was no object in restoring our train line. The orange army did a great job in restoring Dawlish, but the investment has not flowed in since then, which means that our journeys are too slow and the service is not resilient enough. In the bad weather we are having at the moment, there is a risk that CrossCountry rail services will stop at Exeter and not continue to Penzance. That is because CrossCountry services cannot cope with the salt water of the waves washing over them at Dawlish, so they have to be cancelled. No other part of the country would accept that poor deal, and I say to the Minister that the south-west will no longer accept it. I ask him please to publish that strategy tomorrow—let us get on and fix our railway.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) for bringing the debate to the House. I also thank hon. Members for their contributions so far today. As we have heard, the theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is the power of words, and it is important to remember the context in which Nazism arose after the treaty of Versailles and the 1929 crash. A murderous regime was able to take hold of Germany during terrible economic conditions, and it then drove its ideology through Europe and tried to undertake the genocide of my people—the Jewish people.

Last autumn, I met Martin Kapel, who lives in Headingley in my constituency, at a Woodcraft Folk event. He was talking to boys and girls who were the same age as him when he was expelled from Germany by the Nazis. My boys, who are also Woodcraft Folkers, were the age he was when he was taken from his family. The realisation hit me hard when I saw my own boys with Martin and I had to think of him enduring the grim reality of the loss of his family.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that holocaust survivors such as Solly Irving are remembered, with their stories living on after they pass, so that we do not repeat the mistakes that have been made and instead create a better world for everyone?

[Alex Sobel]

That is one of the most important lessons of Holocaust Memorial Day and of our memories of the holocaust.

Many people’s only real insight into what the camps or the ghettos were like is through film. I have watched many of these films, including “Jakob the Liar”, “Schindler’s List” and “Sophie’s Choice”, but the most poignant for me is “Life Is Beautiful”, directed by the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni. The first half of the film is a romantic comedy about how Benigni’s character, a Jewish bookkeeper, falls in love with and marries an Italian woman in the 1930s. They then have a son, and Benigni’s character and his son get sent to a concentration camp. To protect his son, he pretends that the camp is a game and that the prize is winning a tank. I am unsure whether my children are quite ready to watch the film, but I would use it to introduce to them what the horror of the holocaust means, because it is the most human and poignant telling of the holocaust that I have seen.

The holocaust has deeply affected my family. My parents were born in 1946, and I remember sitting in my great-aunt’s kitchen in Tel Aviv as a young child, seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm and asking my father, “Why?” She was in the camps. She did not have her own children or grandchildren. I had no aunts or uncles or cousins to play with, because the Nazis experimented on her and she could not have children. This hollow shell cast a dark spectre over my family—all the relatives I never met or who never survived, and the children they never had.

That is my living memory of what happened, and it is seared into me when I make my own political judgments or when I make decisions about the genocide happening now to the Rohingya or the Yazidis, or elsewhere around the world. It also happens when I think about decisions more locally. We sit in a place of tolerance and pluralism. We call those on the other side of the House “hon. Members”, and they are our opponents, not our enemies. We should be grateful for our democracy and for how this place operates. We need that same political culture everywhere: in our parties, on the streets, in our schools, and in our workplaces.

Every day, I try to work with that memory of my family and the dark spectre of the holocaust. I try to take that into all my experiences and all my dealings with people. I try to be tolerant towards them, but when intolerance comes and they have a message of hate, I try to face it down and stand up to it by saying, “I do not accept what you have to say. You are wrong.” I first try to educate, but then I try to use the power of the state and the power we have to ensure that those people do not come forward. We sit beneath the plaque to Jo Cox and remember that she was struck down by these same people on the far right. It is our duty here in this place, and the duty of everyone in this country, to stand up for tolerance and pluralism and to act against intolerance and extremism.