Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (First sitting)

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q Martin, thank you for coming to give evidence to the Committee. I have two questions to start off with.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Excuse me, Chair. Is the loop system on? No? Can we arrange to have it on, please? [Interruption.] Oh, we cannot; I understand.

[Matthew Pennycook]

One of the aims of the Bill—certainly in the terms of reference handed to the Law Commission, whose recommendations frame a lot of parts 1 and 2—was to provide a better deal for leaseholders as consumers and increase transparency and fairness. In your view, to what extent does the Bill as a whole do that? Are there any specific clauses or elements of the Bill that we might seek to tighten up to further improve the experience for leaseholders as consumers? I am thinking of the fact that leaseholders are still liable to pay certain non-litigation costs and that right-to-manage companies are still liable when claims cease.

Mr Martin Boyd: As you may recall, when the Law Commission originally looked at this area of the law, it suggested to the Government that a consolidation Bill was warranted. However, there was not the budget at the time, so it was then given the three projects on right to manage, enfranchisement and commonhold to look at. The enfranchisement proposals and some of the right-to-manage proposals, but none of the commonhold proposals, have been brought forward in the Bill. The difficulty with the Bill is that there is an almost endless list of things that could be added. In removing the one-sided costs regime, the Bill does quite a lot to balance the system during the enfranchisement process. It also attempts to address the problem of the costs regime at the property tribunal. In the current system, the landlord is in a win-win position. Even if they lose the case, they are able to pass on some of their legal costs under most leases. The Bill tries to address some of those issues.

We still have a whole set of problems in the way that resident management companies and RTMs operate. They do not have a legitimate means of passing on their company costs within the service charge. There are still sites where they effectively have to cook the books to pass on the legitimate costs to the service charge payers. There are still many more things to add to the Bill. Clearly, we will continue to have problems with multi-block right-to-manage sites as well. They do not operate effectively anymore, and unfortunately the Bill does not address that element of the problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

Q Mr Boyd, it is good to see you. You have talked about commonhold. Would you mind just being quite succinct and clear on your view about commonhold? There are proposals from various groups who are active in the sector to make it mandatory to sell all new leasehold flats as commonhold. Would that be a good idea, and if not, why not?

Mr Martin Boyd: I am proud to say that it was LKP that restarted the whole commonhold project in 2014. At the time, we were told, “The market doesn’t want commonhold.” The market very clearly told us that it did want commonhold; it was just that the legislation had problems in 2002. One of our trustees, who is now unfortunately no longer with us, was part of a very big commonhold project in Milton Keynes that had to be converted back to leasehold when they found problems with the law.

I think the Government have been making it very clear for several years that they accept that leasehold’s time is really over. I do not see any reason why we cannot move to a mandatory commonhold system quite quickly. What the developers had always said to us—I think they are possibly right—is that they worry that the Government might get the legislation wrong again, and they would therefore want a bedding-in period where they could test the market to ensure that commonhold was working, and they would agree to a sunset clause. They had fundamentally opposed that in 2002, and we managed to get them in 2014 to agree that, if commonhold could be shown to work, they would agree to a sunset clause that would say, “You cannot build leasehold properties after x date in the future.” I think that that is a viable system.

[Ms Rimmer]

Q Good morning, Mr Boyd. How will the Bill impact on your work as an advisory service and the advice that you give to leaseholders?

Mr Martin Boyd: As some of you may know, I have been very critical in the past of the organisation that I now chair, because I thought that it was doing the wrong thing. The Government took what some might see as a brave decision in asking me to take on the role as chair. LEASE is going to become a much more proactive part of the system, and, as far as I see it, we now have several roles rather than one. While we are predominantly there to help advise consumers about the legislation and how to use it—and hopefully when not to use it—we will also have a role in helping to press Governments to make sure that they improve the legislation. That was not a remit that we had, but it will be very much part of our remit going forward.

[Ms Rimmer]

Q Thank you. Will the provisions of the Bill lead to many more leaseholders seeking advice, and, if so, do you feel adequately resourced to provide that service?

Mr Martin Boyd: As I said to the all-party parliamentary group yesterday, the organisation does not currently have the budget. The Government have said that they will give us the relevant budget. If they do not give us the budget, I will not be staying, so I am very hopeful that we do get the budget.

Some aspects of the Bill do quite a lot to reduce the amount of time that leaseholders would need to spend asking for help. If the enfranchisement process goes through and we get to an online calculator system, where you simply feed in your data and it produces the answer, that will make that whole system much easier. That will reduce not only the amount of work that comes to us, but the amount of work that goes to various solicitors and surveyors in that field.

[The Chair]

That is the end of our allotted time for this session; I think we got everybody in who wanted to ask questions. Thank you for coming to talk to us today.

Examination of Witnesses

Sebastian O’Kelly and Liam Spender gave evidence.

9.50 am

--- Later in debate ---

[Alistair Strathern (Mid Bedfordshire) (Lab)]

Q I could not agree more about the challenges you set out around people finding new ways to extort homeowners and the moves towards charging for the maintenance of public space. In my constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, many estates suffer from this issue. Mr Fuller will have similar ones on his estates in North East Bedfordshire. I completely agree that it feels shocking for lots of people that they are essentially paying twice for services: once for council tax and once for a charge that they have little control over and where there is often little guarantee of good services.

There are many estates in my patch where you can literally see where it becomes private because the condition of the road is shocking compared to 2 feet away, or the condition of the public space completely deteriorates. What measures would you like to see added to the Bill to help address that? Would you agree that ultimately we need mechanisms to ensure that a stated object can happen in a way that everyone can have confidence in?

Katie Kendrick: In an ideal world, the local authorities would be adopting these areas. I do not think there should be a private management at all. Local authorities used to, and they can charge the builders more for the land at the start.

Cath Williams: I agree.

Katie Kendrick: Adopt the lot.

[Ms Rimmer]

Q Katie, it seems to me that you and your team should be congratulated—you are the agony aunts. Believe you me, people look to these ladies and groups of people as their saviours rather than the Government. Already, leaseholders are saying, “Well, perhaps we can make this peppercorn. If we all go for this peppercorn, perhaps we can work then to get that peppercorn and get in there, and get shut of it that way.” Really, this is the opportunity. We should be listening to them—granted—and I genuinely believe there is listening going on with this Bill.

We have to tie it down and not let the situation become like the one we have seen with the post offices. It is an obstacle course. People have committed suicide. Managers have broken down. Homes have been lost. Jobs have been lost. The management charges are unbelievable, and I do not think people understand that. I have not seen it anywhere, but a leaseholder has to write if they want to change the carpet; they then get charged a couple of hundred pounds for that, they get charged for the answer, and they get charged when somebody comes to have a look at it. That is how it goes on. The management charges are as big a fear as the lease, because leaseholders do not know where they are going.

The Government simply have to step in. It is the biggest money-making racket in this country now—and it is a racket. It is said that people have sat down and designed this system, and we should not leave these people to do the fighting on their own. I genuinely believe that there is desire to do so from both the Minister and our shadow Minister. Please come forward with your thoughts; do not give up. I do not believe for one minute you will give up.

Katie Kendrick: I believe there is political will to do this from across the House; there is unanimous agreement and there is no dispute. If there is no dispute, we just need to get it done.

[The Chair]

Right, that is probably it then—[Laughter.] Thank you.

Examination of Witness

Amanda Gourlay gave evidence.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Second sitting)

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Mike Amesbury]

Q Have the Government spoken to you about why they have seemingly rowed back on the direction of travel on commonhold?

Professor Hopkins: Since we published our reports in 2020, we have been supporting the Government as they work through the reports and develop their legislative plans, but I cannot speak for what decisions they have made and what has led them to make those decisions on what is and is not in the Bill.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Q Good afternoon, professor. You have provided several recommendations to the Government on leasehold enfranchisement. Do you believe that the provisions in the Bill will make it easier and cheaper to buy a freehold or extend a lease?

Professor Hopkins: Yes, they certainly will, and I will draw attention to a number of provisions. First, those that deal with the price that leaseholders will pay will ensure that it is cheaper. For the first time, how that price is calculated is mandated, and it is designed to identify the value of the asset that the leaseholder is receiving. At the moment, the focus is on compensating the freeholder for the asset they are losing. The price will consist of two elements. There will be a sum of money representing the terms and buying out the ground rent, but that will be capped so that onerous ground rents are not taken into account in calculating that sum, and a price representing the reversion, which would be the value today of either a freehold or a 990-year lease that will come into effect at the end of the current lease. In calculating those elements of the price, the deferment and capitalisation rates will be prescribed, so that will remove the current disputes.

The price is mandated and the price is cheaper, and there are other things in the Bill that will help, such as the ability of leaseholders to require the landlord to take leasebacks of property when they are exercising a collective enfranchisement so that, for example, they do not have to pay for the expense of commercial units that they do not want responsibility for. There is a lot in there. There is reducing price and also reducing the ability for disputes to arise.

I will also refer to the provisions on costs that will generally ensure that parties pay their own costs in relation to a claim. Leaseholders will not be paying the costs of freeholders.

[Ms Rimmer]

Q Is it fair to say that you are content with the provisions that the Government have put in the Bill?

Professor Hopkins: It is fair to say that what the Bill does will be of substantial benefit to leaseholders.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

Q Thank you for all your work. Can you remind the Committee how many recommendations you made in total?

Professor Hopkins: Across enfranchisement, right to manage, and commonhold, we made around 350 recommendations.

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[The Chair]

Finally, we have two minutes left—Marie, please.

[Ms Rimmer]

We need to be careful on this. Councils are constantly picking up bills from other people, and these costs are the costs of poor developers. There are different ways of dealing with different aspects of this. One is safety development. To take a leaf out of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, you design, you develop, you construct—for use, maintenance and everything. Why not do the same for future housing developments, so that we do not have estates built without roads or pavements or these nice park features that would be lovely for children to play out on?

Nobody’s going to maintain them and they end up like a rubbish tip. People tip there, because nobody cleans it up. And what happens? More people tip there. No developer should be allowed to develop things that cannot be put right. They should pick up the costs on development, so people know what they have got. Then you have the old properties—I call them asset-rich and purse-poor. The properties are worth a fortune. They are beautiful big old houses—you would give your right arm for one of them—but when it comes to maintaining all this and their paths, the older people cannot do it. To bring that up to standard is a cost. It is not a cost for the council to pick up.

[The Chair]

Marie, is there a question?

[Ms Rimmer]

No, I was picking up on that point. The lady present understood it. She was saying that it is not that the councils are paying twice for something; everybody looks—

[The Chair]

Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the allotted time to ask this panel questions. Apologies, Marie. On behalf of the Committee. I thank all our witnesses for coming in.

Examination of Witnesses

Mr Andrew Bulmer and Angus Fanshawe gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Rimmer]

Q If there were to be amendments to the Bill on regulation of estate management and so on, what would be the most important thing to keep in mind to avoid any unintended consequences?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: First of all, let us be clear that we—

[Ms Rimmer]

Q Could you speak up a little, please?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: Sorry—yes. I am afraid that I do not have a voice that projects, but I will do my best.

We warmly welcome regulation of managed estates; it is an anomaly that the management of those estates is unregulated. I was in the room earlier and I heard some eloquent discourse around the fact that some of these estates exist at all as managed areas and that those common areas are not adopted. I have personal experience of managing estates where there are two grass strips, a couple of gullies and a little piece of road, for which you need to set up a limited company, find directors, get them insured, do a health and safety risk assessment and a whole load of other stuff—a whole load of on-costs—for what amounts to, as I say, two strips of grass and a couple of gullies. Clearly, for that kind of small estate, that is utterly disproportionate and I strongly recommend that those areas are adopted by the council. There has to be a way through it, through planning legislation, section 106 agreements, commuted sums and so forth. I would strongly make that point.

On the regulation of those estates that either exist and cannot be adopted or alternatively perhaps are part of a much more complicated scheme and it is therefore inevitable that they will be managed areas, then, yes, absolutely bring them in. I would recommend that you align the regulations and the processes for reporting and service charge accounts, or charge accounts, as closely as you possibly can to the reformed leasehold regime so that there is consistency.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Bulmer, would it not be easier for your members to just pursue a claim in the county court, rather than go through the whole business of forfeiture in order to recover what are sometimes actually quite trivial sums?

Mr Andrew Bulmer: Would it be easier? I am not entirely sure. A substantive point was well made earlier. At the very minimum, there was a call for the equity that is left in a forfeited property to be returned to the leaseholder.

Oral Answers to Questions

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

We have a retail crime action plan. We have ensured that assaults against shop workers is an aggravating factor and we have made it clear to police forces across the country that we expect them to take action on neighbourhood crime like that and to pursue every reasonable line of inquiry. We are determined to drive down retail crime.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

17. What assessment he has made of the potential impact of the safer streets fund on the safety of women and girls.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Laura Farris)]

The objective of the safer streets fund and the safety of women at night fund is to enhance public safety in a direct and targeted way, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Since 2020 the Government have invested £150 million across the two funds and the evaluation of round 1 of the safer streets fund, published in January last year, showed that the investment was boosting trust in the police and making communities feel safer.

[Ms Rimmer]

Does the Minister justify the Government cut of 38% of the funding for projects to reduce violence against women and girls in Merseyside? They have cut £400,000, and one project will have to cease.

[Laura Farris]

What I can tell the hon. Lady is that under the safer streets fund, £3.9 million has been allocated to Merseyside, including for a project in St Helens town centre. Let me remind her very gently of what that is funding. It has gone towards lighting, signage and improvement to taxi ranks, and one of the most radical measures of all is that it provides women with a free taxi service home, where the safer streets fund will reimburse the taxi driver the money they would otherwise have received, so that a woman does not have to find herself standing at a windy bus stop or walking home.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Rwanda is not a safe country. This country is using the Bill as a distraction from the Government’s failure to sort out the immigration backlog. Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are being spent on hotels every day. Hundreds of millions have been spent on this fantasy Rwanda policy without a single person being sent there. That money would be better spent sorting out the backlog and getting people processed.

Immigration policies are already in place, but they are not being enforced. The Home Office is working too slowly, as it has previously with passports. Processing claims quicker is the best way to free up hotels. In the past decade, the backlog of asylum claims has risen four times faster than the number claiming asylum. This is ultimately a crisis of the Government’s own making, and it has been years in the making. The system is failing and it needs fixing.

This country needs a solution to the crisis, not a distraction. The Bill claims that Rwanda is a safe country, because the Bill says that is so. That is not the type of country that Britain is. We are not like that. We believe in the rule of law and obligations under international laws and treaties. The Rwandan Government have been involved in many questionable events across Africa, including the kidnapping and beating of dissidents abroad. The Rwanda policy is an attempt by the Government to look tough and to distract the country from the sorry state they have got us into. Even on the off-chance that flights to Rwanda take off, they will deal with less than 1% of asylum claims. It is a Tory vanity project. It will not solve any problem. As a country, we are better than this.

Labour’s plan to tackle the criminal gangs directly with a cross-border police unit and to clear the backlog is the only way to stop the small boats. Vanity projects for headlines are not befitting of such a serious issue. The Government should go back to the drawing board—I bet we will be here in a few months or a year.

Illegal Migration Bill: Economic Impact Assessment

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Not only is maintaining a system without taking robust further steps like the Rwanda policy likely to be extremely expensive—that is detailed in the impact assessment—but there are non-monetised costs as well, which are hard to calculate with certainty, such as the impact on scant social housing and housing more broadly, the cost to public services and the fact that many of these individuals come to the UK speaking poor English. Many require great support by the British state to help them to integrate and build successful lives in this country. That is a very challenging situation. We have to be honest with ourselves about that. We need to take action to stop the boats, so we can ensure that the finite resources we have as a country are not directed at young men who are in a place of safety such as France, but can go to the people who really need it most in and around conflict zones: families and those people we would want to resettle in the United Kingdom.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister claims he is ready to take tough financial decisions, such as not giving our NHS heroes a pay rise, leaving them struggling to pay ever-increasing mortgages and the cost of living caused by those on the Government Benches voting measures through and crashing our economy just a few months ago. The Rwanda scheme is set to cost even more billions than the already crashed asylum system, delivered by those on the Government Benches over there. So how can the Minister truly sit there and justify spending £169,000 to send one single asylum seeker to Rwanda? I accept that the Government are working with local authorities on housing in the private sector—deregulated housing in the private sector that cannot be given to any of our people. That is what he is doing. You cannot justify what is going on here. You’ve crashed it and you go on to—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. The hon. Lady is experienced enough to know that she does not address the Minister directly like that, but through the Chair.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 25th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I said earlier that London is now the preferred strike point for oligarchs in intimidating journalists. When the Foreign Policy Centre, whose work I must commend, surveyed investigative journalists, it found that three quarters of them had suffered some kind of legal attack to silence them. The UK legal system accounted for more of those legal actions than the United States and Europe put together. That is how bad this has now become. That is how rotten our system has now become. That is why it is so outrageous that the head of the Wagner Group was given the licences. Let us be clear about this guy. This is someone who has been running mercenary operations in Sudan, Mozambique, Syria, Central African Republic, Libya and Mali—and, of course, his forces have now been redeployed to the theatres in Ukraine.

It was in August 2020 that Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat began running a series of stories that exposed the barbarities of the Wagner Group in Africa, including offences such as the murder of CNN journalists. It took the British Government and the Foreign Office until 31 December 2020 to put sanctions on Prigozhin, even though, by the way, he had been sanctioned much earlier in the Unites States for the quiet sin of running troll farms intervening in the American presidential campaign. None the less, we got around to it at the back end of 2020. In the citation for sanctions, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office wrote that Prigozhin was providing

“a deniable military capability for the Russian state”.

That feels quite a big sin to me, running a deniable military capability for the Russian state. That sounds like a pretty good reason for sanctions. That sounds like a pretty good reason for not offering carve-outs to sanctions to undermine them in British courts.

When Mr Prigozhin found out about the sanctions he was not very happy, so he sought to undermine them by suing Bellingcat, or Eliot Higgins in an English court. He had a choice and in fact a debate: “Do we do it in a Russian court, a Dutch court or an English court?” The conclusion was to go for Eliot Higgins in an English court. To prosecute the case, he had to fly the lawyers out to St Petersburg, so the Treasury licensed £4,788.04 to help make that happen: over £3,500 for business class flights, £320 for accommodation at the Grand Hotel Europe Belmond, £150 for subsistence—that’ll buy a pretty good dinner—£200 for PCR testing and £400 for express visas. That is what servants of the Crown, under the supervision of Ministers of the Crown, signed off.

The discussions went a bit like this. “What are the objectives here, Mr Prigozhin? Well, we think that, rather than seeking damages, what we really need is to get Mr Higgins for defamation because that is how we undermine all those irritating articles” that led to the sanctions against Mr Prigozhin. Literally, we enabled the enablers. We enabled the cash flow of a Russian warlord to prosecute an English journalist in an English court. And that is why we have to act. No one in this House today thinks that this is okay. The Minister for Security does not think that it is okay. All of us here think it has to stop, but if it is to stop, we have to take aim at the original sin: the fact that it is courts in this country that are being used by oligarchs around the world to silence journalists.

Our new clause, which has drawn cross-party support today, is very simple. It would not stop all strategic legal actions against public participants, but it would stop anybody attempting to silence journalists who are trying to reveal economic crimes. It is within scope; I am grateful to the Clerks for their work helping to refine it and make it good. I know that the Minister will say, as he said in Committee, that this is not the right Bill for it, or that it would not solve all the problems, but that is an argument for making the perfect the enemy of the good.

We have heard the Lord Chancellor talking about his ambition to change the law, but we have also heard that he seeks to do so through the Bill of Rights. The dogs in the street know that the Bill of Rights Bill is dead. It is not coming back to this House any time soon, yet today—this week, next week, next month—journalists and indeed ex-Members of this House are in court, having to pay legal bills because we allow oligarchs to abuse our courts. Let us at least make progress now.

I say to the Minister: please do not be the Minister for mañana. Please be the Minister who did not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Please be the Minister who seeks to do what he can with what we have, where we are, today. We could use this Bill to make progress. Why do we not seize that opportunity with both hands?

I am very grateful for the concerted campaign by Members across this House. I will end by saluting the courage, fortitude and determination of so many good journalists in this country. Oliver Bullough, who wrote the brilliant books “Moneyland” and “Butler to the World”, makes an excellent argument in his openDemocracy article today. He says that journalists going into the business of tackling economic crime have an uphill struggle as it is, with a lot of barriers in their way. They have a pretty difficult job, and the knowledge that the British Government are on the side of the bad guys does not make that job any easier. It is time that we put the force of the state and the force of the Crown behind the good guys for once—and that means agreeing to our new clause today.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). I applaud his commitment and thoroughness in the work that he has done.

I rise to support new clauses 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 21. Economic crime is usually committed in the shadows, yet its impact is as clear as day: there are the American candy stores down Oxford Street, there are thousands of empty flats in London and—closer to my home—in Liverpool and Manchester, and we know how dirty money laundered here has financed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The crimes that the Bill aims to prevent are so often shrouded in secrecy. The Bill is necessary, as we can all agree, but the Government need to do it right. They need to accommodate sensible amendments—notably those investigated and researched by groups such as the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) has led tirelessly. Indeed, the Minister—the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake)—co-signed the manifesto on which many of today’s amendments are based, so I would expect him to support them. I urge him to do so.

New clauses 1 and 2 are crucial to getting a grip on the London laundromat. Journalists are the fourth estate in our society. They investigate and shed light on the secrecy that surrounds economic crime, yet only this week it was reported that journalist Eliot Higgins was hounded by a British law firm that was given permission by the Government to work on behalf of the murderous and barbaric Wagner Group. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill has clearly outlined what has come out today and what he has been researching.

Wealthy oligarchs cannot be allowed to use English courts to threaten journalists with huge legal costs. If these wealthy individuals are able to abuse their wealth and power, no light will be shed on the secret world of economic crime.

Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Children

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

We are putting in place a comprehensive plan to reduce the backlog of cases, and good progress is already being made. With regard to safe and legal routes, this country is a world leader on resettlement schemes. More people entered the United Kingdom last year for humanitarian purposes than in any year since the second world war—people from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Syria and Afghanistan. It is simply untrue to say that we do not take those responsibilities seriously. We think it is naive to believe that a safe and legal route would stop people crossing the channel, as no evidence supports that. We want a position based on deterrence, such as our proposed Rwanda scheme, which will come forward as soon as possible.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), raised concerns about safeguarding at the border, and the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration raised concerns about safeguarding in the hotels. Action has been taken but, frankly, it is insufficient to mitigate the risk to these children, who are being kidnapped to be used in crime—there is no doubt about that.

Local authorities do not have the resources or the social workers. My local authority is recruiting 20 social workers from South Africa, as it takes time to train social workers here. The police do not have the resources to give the necessary focus to this issue. It is important that we efficiently and effectively use the resources we have, and the only way to do that is to set up a taskforce that is accountable at local level. I do not doubt the Minister’s commitment to these people, but we are not using our resources efficiently or effectively.

[Robert Jenrick]

I respect the hon. Lady’s long experience in local government. I appreciate the challenges faced by local councils, which is why we brought forward this enhanced financial package. We will learn from whether it is having the desired effect, and I am very happy to speak to her about the experience in her constituency.

Child Sexual Exploitation by Organised Networks

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey.

Child sexual abuse is the greatest horror that exists in our country. For too long it has been ignored. There has been report after report, debate after debate—I think they are used for swatting flies, because nothing seems to happen.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), not only for securing this debate but for her tireless campaigning for years on this issue.

The perpetrators of these crimes are evil, twisted and pathetic individuals working together in gangs. They target children with disabilities or children in care. Through no fault of their own, such children are more vulnerable, and the report sets out that these are the two indicators of heightened vulnerability to child sexual abuse. The Government should be doing all they can to support such children, not just to save them from the evil abuse discussed today but to give them better life chances.

In my constituency, we have a lot of children in care, not just local children. Many children have been relocated from other areas of the country, and they are sometimes as far as 200 miles away from their homes. These children from other areas often get placed in unregulated homes or exempted properties. It happens because of the cheaper housing available in the north, which is bought for this very purpose. Councils that are having their budgets consistently cut and areas with skyrocketing house prices see that there is no other choice but to place children out of borough, without support, often miles away. All too often, they are unsupported and exploited.

As the report shows, out-of-area persons are most at risk, with these children moved away from any support networks that were previously available to them. Evil perpetrators follow them to their new areas. The Government need to step in and resource the people with responsibility at local level. They need funding and quality accommodation to keep the children in their own locality, if that is the right place for them to be. Councils should always have the necessary funding to place these children in regulated, supported care.

One of the most shocking findings in this report is that a third of child sexual abuse cases involve disability. Predators select such children as their victims, some of whom do not have language skills so they cannot describe what is happening to them. It is calculated, twisted and evil. I support the recommendations in the report, but would go further and say that no child should be placed in unregulated, unsupported accommodation.

The Government need to step their act up on this, and treat the children with the respect and care they should be rightfully afforded. Yes, there are mistakes at local level, but there are not the resources to provide the accommodation that is needed.

Safe Streets for All

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones).

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and the wee donkey”

is one of many memorable quotes from Ted Hastings in “Line of Duty”. The TV show has gripped the nation and given the public an insight into how organised criminal groups operate. In the show, a young man with Down’s syndrome is taken advantage of—far-fetched to some viewers, yet that is the reality faced by our police forces. These criminal groups are exploiting young and vulnerable people. The men at the top are cowards who use children to do their dirty work. These men often target children in care, who they see as easy prey.

I am sure most Members know that these networks are referred to as county lines. They work across police and local authority boundaries. Drug networks are no longer just about big cities; they frequently operate in towns and villages. The National Crime Agency estimates that there are well over 700 county lines across England and Wales, but it admits that the true number is difficult to determine. St Helens is one of those towns. Many Members will have had briefings from their local police forces. I am personally aware of parents whose vulnerable children have been coerced into the drugs trade. The damage it does to families and communities is truly heartbreaking. Local authorities, police commissioners and forces are bound by boundaries, but criminal groups are not concerned with boundaries. They have one priority: drug pushing. These criminals are doing well from cross-boundary working, and they do not believe that the police and the Government can keep up. It is the duty of Government to prove them wrong. It is a national problem that requires a national commitment to resource and resolve.

I will now turn to the issue of children and vulnerable people caught up in this trade. Children—that is what they are and that is how they should be treated—are not hardened criminals. They are exploited children. The cowards who criminally exploit children are no better than the evil individuals who sexually exploit children. Both should face the same shame and punishment for the damage they have caused to our children and our society. These young and vulnerable people need help and support.

Often, it is children in care who are exploited. Children in care are the children of our nation. Collectively, we all have a duty to look out for them. It is the Government who are ultimately responsible for these children, yet we in the Chamber must hold the Government to account for that duty. Children in care face a deteriorating situation due to a lack of Government funding. It really is no surprise that criminal groups are managing to target these children with relative ease. Youth services have been cut to the bare bone over the past decade of austerity. Children are being left to the mercy of hardened criminals.

To stop county lines, a new national strategy will be necessary. Police can and have closed many lines down, yet they need help. Children should be valued. The Government must provide better funding for children in education, public health, and youth and social services. There is no denying that county lines represents a huge challenge for the Government and police. The criminal cowards have adapted, now the Government must do the same. The Government have the power to change and to answer these problems, and resolve the issue for these children and society as a whole.

Public Services

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Lady remember that the last Labour Administration picked up the biggest ever debt from any previous Government? And that was a Conservative Government.

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady might like to recall the words of the last Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury. When we came into government, he wrote “there is no money.” That was the Labour party in government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

I would first like to commend my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes). I agree with all her speech, but in particular the part about dangerous driving. The family of Violet-Grace Youens, aged four, and the community of St Helens, will be deeply let down by the lack of action following the Lord Chancellor’s commitment relating to death by dangerous driving. We will not cease until the law is changed, and we want that to be done quickly.

I welcome the uplift in police funding, but it will barely begin to fix the damage caused in the UK by austerity and the symptoms that that has created. We must, could and should provide more. I applaud local police and the National Crime Agency for the UK’s biggest ever drugs operation recently, in which we saw countrywide dawn raids and arrests from London and Manchester to St Helens. They smashed the UK’s biggest ever drug-smuggling gang and seized the largest ever drugs haul. I commend those public services.

That leads me to what we can do in this House to make things better and how we can help to attack the rapid expansion of the complex issue of county lines drug gangs. The financial inability of public service departments to provide necessary early interventions to struggling families, prevention services and distracting and diversionary safeguards, such as youth activities, is another factor. Drug gangs are empowered by these underfunded public services, as they feed on families suffering from income poverty and its physical and mental strain. These strains on families and insufficient local resources have led to an expansion in the number of children who have been placed in supported living—an unregulated provision not monitored by Ofsted—and children being placed out of borough.

The resources available are not meeting the needs of children—as shown in the shortage of adoptive parents and fostering parents and the lack of resources for looked-after children and supported children—and that has driven up costs and led to a lack of specialist provision and the expansion of unregulated private children’s homes. A system that was designed to be flexible and used in extremes is now used to plug a hole in the system. Supported children are at serious risk of exploitation by drug smugglers, county lines operators and gangsters.

Management and staff are not trained to the level required to adequately support these children, who are going through the difficult transitional years from childhood to adulthood. There are no minimum standards set out in law for unregulated 16-plus provision. Compounding that issue is the fact that these children are classed as self-sufficient. They manage their health and finances and may leave accommodation as and when they please, as they are deemed autonomous. We are seeing more and more of these children being sent to north-western towns, where housing costs are well below the national average, with some hosting authorities having as many as 300 out-of-borough children. The corporate parenting responsibility is the home borough’s.

In St Helens alone, there are roughly 25 unregulated children’s homes, hosting up to 120 out-of-borough children. The management and staff of these homes do not have the authority or skills to prevent these vulnerable children from going out into the hazardous world, where gangsters target them and promise them status and money that they have never seen before trapping them in a world of intimidation and fear, where they get locked into criminal activity, trafficking drugs across county lines. Essentially, these are apprenticeships into organised crime.

I reiterate that we have vulnerable children who have been moved miles away from homes, families, friends and neighbours—essentially, any positive support structure that they might have had—to an area that they do not know, into an unregulated private accommodation system of inconsistent quality. Is it any wonder that we have seen the travesty of county lines drugs gangs expanding? It is completely unacceptable. We are failing these young people. We are responsible for their hope, safety and future. The system and procedures are not safeguarding these vulnerable children. We must safeguard them and stop exposing them to criminal exploitation by these 21st-century Fagins.

I implore this and any future Government to implement regulations and oversights for private children’s homes and supported children, as well as procedures for placing a child out of borough. We need to increase the resources for care, education and safeguarding activities. Basically, we need to invest in children.

I applaud St Helens and Whiston Hospitals, which are among the nine most outstanding hospitals, but they suffer from recruitment problems and nursing shortages for the very reasons my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton mentioned in her speech.

We must safeguard our children and invest in our public services—for children, adults and children in need of care—and in adult social care and health. We in St Helens have integrated adult social care and health, and it is superb, but we could do far more with just a little extra funding in social care. It needs to go there as well as health. It is superb. Please invest more in public services.