Christmas Adjournment

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

As the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said, I often use this debate to talk about women’s health matters in a way that can make grown men wince. I have to say that he and other hon. Members on both sides of the House have been very generous in their support for the hysteroscopy campaign. I am very happy to report that, following a meeting this week with the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price)—it was a very good meeting—I really hope some progress can be made. I thank him and others for their support.

[Bob Stewart]

Is the progress that the hon. Lady mentions pain-free for ladies who have to undergo this treatment?

[Lyn Brown]

The woman Health Minister I met has read the women’s testimonies I presented to her, and she was horrified by them, as the House has been when I have read them out on previous occasions. She and I are very clear that this is about choice—informed choice—and about making sure that women get what they need, rather than what is cheapest. I do not want to put words in her mouth, but I think we are both on the same page, and it was a very happy meeting. I therefore have only three, not four, issues that I want to raise today.

First, NewVIc—Newham Sixth Form College—is a great further education institution that regularly sends more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to university, including to Russell Group universities and Oxbridge, than any other sixth-form college in England. Newham is a massively deprived area, and research tells us that 13 out of 20 children in Newham live in poverty, and that it is currently second worst of all local authorities in England for social mobility. The fact that our young people are doing massively well at our FE institution is therefore testimony to them, their teachers and their parents. However, NewVIc’s budget has been cut by £770 per student, and that includes £200 per student from the deprivation allocation. How on earth can that be justified?

I would be very grateful to the Minister if he liaised with the Department for Education on my behalf to secure a meeting about this with NewVIc and me so that we can help NewVIc to continue to be a much-needed engine of social mobility in my community and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms).

[The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Michael Ellis)]

indicated assent.

[Lyn Brown]

I have had a nod.

My second issue concerns a mental health condition called depersonalisation disorder. At least one of my constituents is a sufferer, and she has asked me to share her story with the House. Since she was 18, my constituent has lived for years in a continuous state of detachment. The world and her own life do not feel real. She lives in a dream, performing actions on autopilot, and she sometimes does not even recognise herself in the mirror. It is terrifying.

The disorder is under-researched and very poorly understood, and it can take eight to 12 years to get the right diagnosis. The consequences of a misdiagnosis can be dreadful, because anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety or antidepressant medications do not help and can make the condition markedly worse. As one sufferer, Sarah, has explained:

“Relationships…lose their essential quality… You know you love your family, but you know it academically—rather than feeling it in the normal way.”

I would genuinely find it very difficult to live if I had this disorder; I know I could not do so.

With swift diagnosis and specialist treatment, patients can have a real hope of remission, but existing NHS provision is woefully inadequate. There is only one specialist unit, based at the Maudsley Hospital, and many patients wait years for funding to attend it, while others are refused funding. The service is anyway only for adults, even though the condition typically begins in a person’s early teens. May I ask the Minister for a meeting with the Department of Health to discuss this further? Again, I would be very grateful to him if he helped that request on its way.

Finally, I wish to mention fixed odds betting terminals. As we have established in this debate, without any contradiction, Newham is a borough with high levels of deprivation, yet it also has one of the highest numbers of betting shops in any borough, with 81 in operation, and 12 on one street alone. Newham Council estimates that £20 million of residents’ money was lost to fixed odds betting terminals in just one year. I and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) have called for a reduction of the maximum stake to £2, and I welcome the Government’s consultation on that issue, which rightly suggests that a £2 limit will help to stop problem gambling. Such a limit would be a great, if belated, Christmas present to the children of Newham.

In conclusion, I thank the staff of the House for their unfailing kindness, professionalism, and service to us all. I know I will not be the only person in the Chamber today who is thinking of our Deputy Speaker and sending him our love and prayers. I am also thinking of the family of Jo Cox, Brendan and the children, and about the family of our own PC Keith Palmer, as they face their first Christmas without him. We all know that that will be massively hard.

I wish you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and all hon. Members, the happiest of Christmases, and the very best of new years.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Following what the hon. Lady has just said, the Chairman of Ways and Means is very grateful for all the messages that he has received. Hundreds of Members have sent him very kind messages, and he has found that a great support at this sad and tragic time. I will pass on to him, once again, the good wishes of the whole House.

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

May I associate myself with your comments, Madam Deputy Speaker, and those of the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)?

What a fantastic opportunity and innovation these debates are—seven minutes to talk about pretty much anything we would like. I am surprised that the Benches are not overflowing with colleagues, but that leaves more time for the rest of us, so I am pleased. I wish to say two or three things by way of a thank you, then express a concern, and hopefully end on a positive point.

[Lyn Brown]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words, but it is sad that not many people are here today. The information we had was that this debate was massively over-subscribed. I would like to go back to the old tradition where we had a proper Adjournment debate in which we could properly explore the issues that are important to our constituents, without having to contain that within a four, six or seven-minute speech. I thank the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to say that.

[Nigel Huddleston]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point that I am sure others were listening to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

This time last year, my single, a Band Aid cover named “National Living Rage”, rocketed up the Christmas charts, highlighting the plight of workers and the national scandal of low and unfair pay in Britain. There are many matters of sincere importance to be discussed before the forthcoming Adjournment, but this Christmas there are perhaps few as critical, heartbreaking and lamentable as the fact that 128,000 children will wake up homeless on Christmas morning. I cannot help but wonder how closely my two recent Christmas campaigns are linked, because more than half the homeless households in London are in work.

It would take a heart of stone to consider childhood homelessness on any scale to be acceptable. I was simply astonished to hear the Prime Minister seem to justify this crisis in Prime Minister’s questions yesterday by remarking that these children are not rough sleepers. Maybe not, but these children will wake up on Christmas morning in B&Bs, in hostels, or in the heart of a working industrial estate in my own constituency of Mitcham and Morden.

[Lyn Brown]

I have not seen children sleeping rough, but I have certainly seen children under the age of 12 in hostels that churches run to keep people off the street. For me, that is the lowest level “roof over head” that there is. It is not a big step away from sleeping on the street.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Consider Sarah’s family, who live in temporary accommodation in Mitcham. They will not have a Christmas dinner because they have no facilities to be able to cook one. They will not have a Christmas tree because their room does not fit anything other than the bed that the four of them share. They will not have any presents because every penny possible is being put aside so that one day they will have enough for the extortionate deposit that is the golden ticket needed to enter the private rented sector. In fact, I will be amazed if Father Christmas is even able to find Sarah’s family, because hers is one of the 22,000 families that have been moved out of their home borough, often without the receiving local authority being made aware of their arrival. When that happens, I am in no doubt that their safety cannot be guaranteed.

Recent freedom of information requests by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England have astonishingly discovered that almost a quarter of temporary accommodation is inspected by local authorities only once tenants have left. Worryingly, nearly two thirds of local authorities said that they did not even seek advice from their safeguarding service when they placed families in B&Bs or temporary accommodation. These are the realities faced by the 79,190 families in temporary accommodation in England today. Of course, those figures do not even account for the 9,000 rough sleepers on the streets of our constituencies, or for the 56% of 16 to 25-year-olds in the UK who say that they have family or friends who have sofa-surfed.

There can be no doubt about the responsibility for the country’s deplorable housing crisis. The report published yesterday by the Public Accounts Committee stated explicitly that the Department for Communities and Local Government has had an “unacceptably complacent” attitude to the reduction of homelessness. The Department’s current plans to tackle the issue were said to address only the tip of the iceberg, and there is an unacceptable shortage of realistic housing options for the homeless. Of course, most of us knew that already.

The last time that the Government target of building 300,000 new homes in one year in England was achieved was almost half a century ago, in 1969. The difference back then was that councils and housing associations were building new homes. But a solution is right here, in our hands: we must give councils the right to build as well as the right to buy. The private sector has never reached, and does not have the inclination to reach, the Government’s targets. For example, last year, only 121,000 permanent dwellings were completed by private companies; meanwhile, just 1,840 were completed by local authorities.

If the Government target of building 300,000 new homes is to be achieved, councils simply have to play their part, which is why I am calling on the Government to grant local authorities the right to build and the right to buy so that housing can be let to families on low incomes at social housing rents. A home to live in should appear on no child’s Christmas wish list. Father Christmas is simply not in a position to influence the budgets of local authorities, but the Government are, and on behalf of the 128,000 homeless children across the country, I sincerely hope that this will be their last Christmas morning without a place to call home.