Budget Resolutions

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

The communities of West Ham needed hope from this Budget, but it has delivered absolutely nothing but continued despair. The Government cannot grapple with the dire state of the economy, public services or housing, nor can they understand the depth of poverty that our people are living in. This Government are not capable of acknowledging the real need for change. Perhaps if they understood just a little, they might ask who is responsible, and they would have to reflect on their last 14 years.

Let me talk about West Ham and the change desperately needed there. Newham has the highest rate of homelessness in the country. According to Government statistics, one in every 20 Newham families are trapped in overcrowded, mouldy, insecure temporary housing. Nationally, homelessness in temporary accommodation is up 10% in a single year. People sleeping rough on our streets—the absolute worst of homelessness—is up 27% in just one year.

What about the kids whose lives are blighted by temporary accommodation? They lose their home every six months and have to move school. They have nowhere to do their homework and have to travel miles on buses because they want to keep the one stable thing in their life: their school place. That is up by 12% in a single year. In Newham alone, 8,596 children are without a safe and secure home. Temporary accommodation costs are rocketing for Newham Council and are set to increase by a whopping £17.5 million in the coming year because the council has the growing pressure of accommodating 30 to 40 new homeless families every single month. Long-term council assets are having to be sold to pay temporary accommodation bills. That is utterly unsustainable.

This Government refuse to face reality. The council services that my constituents rely on day to day, from street cleaning to libraries and public safety, are being degraded because this Government think it is right for the cost of spiralling homelessness to fall on my local residents. It ain’t just a local problem. It is caused by decades of Government failure to invest in social homes and to tackle poverty. Our councils are forced to sell off social homes and then are massively constrained on what they can do with the meagre receipts that they get back.

How did the Budget respond to this worsening crisis? It did so by ending the scheme that enabled councils to do the right thing and use more receipts from the sale of social homes to build replacements. At a stroke, this Government have cut £200 million from the funding for new social homes in this country, at a time when those homes are needed more desperately than ever. The horrifying scale of the housing crisis has grown ever larger, but the Budget shows, yet again, that the Government simply do not care. They are more interested in salting the earth after 14 years of destruction than they are in any kind of solution.

I have focused on homelessness today, but, as we know, the problems our communities face are far wider, and are being neglected or ignored by this Budget. Across the board, my constituents are paying higher taxes and getting worse and worse public services in return. Almost half of patients needing treatment locally are waiting more than 18 weeks, and 6% are waiting more than a year.

The Government have not even managed to repair the damage caused by the wrecking ball that was the former Prime Minister: mortgages are still through the roof; prices in the shops are still rising; and people simply cannot afford to pay their bills. The OBR expects this to be the only Parliament on record in which living standards fall over the full five years. That should be truly shocking, but our collective expectations of the Government have fallen so low that it is normal. We desperately need real change for Newham and for our country. The Budget does nothing to offer that change. Our one solitary hope is that it will prove a bitterly fitting end to 14 years of Tory failure, division and decline.