Sikhs: Contribution to the UK

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Colleen Fletcher (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) for securing this extremely important debate today. I want to start by putting on the record my sincere gratitude for all the support and good will that I have received from the Sikh community in Coventry. Their help and encouragement has been and will always be very much appreciated.

There are many gurdwaras in my constituency and across Coventry. They are not only places of worship, but important community hubs that bring people together and, as anyone who has visited a temple will know, are places of great benevolence, where everyone is welcome and food is shared with the rest of the community. The annual Vaisakhi celebration is firmly woven into our city’s cultural calendar. Thousands of people take part in the Nagar Kirtan—the parade—which starts at the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Parkash in my constituency, and is a joyous and inclusive celebration that is attended and enjoyed by Sikhs and non-Sikhs alike. The event contributes successfully to broadening our city’s cultural life.

Similarly, the Sikh community contributes tremendously to the success of the economy of both Coventry and this country. The Sikh community certainly punches above its weight in this area, with a deserved reputation for having a strong work ethic and being disproportionately successful in business. It is a similar story in our vital public services, where Sikhs make such an invaluable contribution to our armed forces, our NHS and our education sector.

As well as the cultural and economic contribution that the Sikh community makes to our city, there is a significant social contribution, not least to the health and wellbeing of our environment. Sikhs have a strong relationship with the environment, which is an integral part of their faith and identity. That connection with the natural world prompted Coventry’s Sikhs to commit to planting more than 550 trees across the city to mark the 550th anniversary of the birth of Shri Guru Nanak Dev Ji. That fantastic initiative will help to restore nature to our cities, parks and green spaces, and secure a healthy, resilient and sustainable environment that will benefit people and wildlife for generations to come.

That sense of social responsibility does not end with the natural environment. Public service is hugely important to Sikh identity, and helping others is part of their way of life. Sikhs constantly strive to do more and find new ways of contributing to their local community, whether that is through the time they give up or the money they donate to important local charities and projects. I admire and am grateful for their work throughout my city, and I thank the 16,000 Sikhs in Coventry for their social, cultural and economic contributions.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I echo the points that my hon. Friend is making so well. In my constituency, the Sikh community has done a huge job and been at the heart of our community, both commercially and through its public leadership. I place on the record my thanks to Mota Singh, who is standing down as a councillor after 40 years of public service. What a terrific record that has been.

[Colleen Fletcher]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Sikhs contribute so much each and every day across all walks of life, and their culture, diversity, enterprise and values of faith, family, and community help to make our city a more unique, integrated, tolerant and vibrant place to live in, work and visit.

Housing

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I think the hon. Gentleman is confusing two things. He is quite right that the standard assessment of housing need is meant to be a starting point from which councils assess, plus or minus, what they think they can address, subject to constraints and their other duties in the planning system. That, however, is separate from the Government’s housing deal. We are using the money available for those deals to stimulate ambition. Local authorities should deliver more than would otherwise be delivered in their plan and can justify the need for infrastructure on that basis. We have done successful deals, for example with Oxfordshire, and we are having a number of conversations. Critical to that is stimulating and encouraging every part of the country to play its part in building the homes the next generation needs by being ambitious about their targets.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

The Minister talks about being ambitious and setting targets. Does he accept the figure, published by the Shelter commission in January, that we need to build 155,000 social homes a year for the next 20 years?

[Kit Malthouse]

I accept that we need to build a hell of a lot more homes of all types and that is exactly what we are trying to do. We are in the process of creating a situation where everyone who wants to build can build and can seek assistance from the Government to do so, if they are willing to be ambitious—from the private sector to housing associations, councils or anybody who wants to build. We think that this problem is so acute that we cannot be partial about who gets to build the homes.

Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration

Matt Western Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Wera Hobhouse]

My home is heated through a community energy centre. That said, I am talking about how the gas is produced. I am saying that fracked gas is a fossil fuel but that there are renewable gas alternatives that we need to explore and invest in, and which the Government should be prioritising.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Lady for bringing this debate to the House. I appreciate the point the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) is trying to make, but we have been building an unprecedented number of houses in the last few years, and the 15,000 to 18,000 in my constituency will all have gas boilers. They did not have to. They could have been heated by air source heat pumps, for example.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I completely agree. Getting to carbon zero is a massive challenge and we must start today. We must think about how our new houses should be built, because the retrofitting of these properties will cost even more. All Departments need to put their minds to it.

These problems are not unique to Bath or the UK. We know from the United States that fracking operations can result in the contamination of the water table. The effect is wide-ranging. Sometimes people cannot even drink their own tap water because of the health risk. A report in 2016 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency demonstrated exactly how the hydraulic fracturing fluid used to split the bedrock can contaminate groundwater and release gases displaced by it. Communities across the USA have been forced to try to mitigate these problems. We should not even go there. Why should we risk water contamination?

Added to all this is the amount of industrial infrastructure that will scar our countryside if these proposals are pushed through. Giving permitted development rights to shale gas exploration would in effect remove the control that local authorities usually have over the planning process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies). For me, the context of this debate is quite simply the deeply worrying issue of climate change. We face a stark choice if we are to avoid extreme and potentially unstoppable change to the climate: do we continue to develop and exploit fossil fuels, or do we leave them in the ground? It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stop dangerous climate change if we do not leave fossil fuels, including gas, in the ground. We can and must take a more responsible and sustainable approach, and that is why we need to stop the exploitation of shale gas.

I also want to talk about the issue of local planning, which other Members have spoken about today. There have been test wells in eastern Berkshire and other parts of the south-east, as was mentioned earlier. Many residents in Reading, Woodley and the Thames valley have deep concerns about our local environment. In our area, there is a long history of concern about the effects of noise and pollution from major infrastructure projects such as the expansion of Heathrow and large-scale gravel extraction. The very last thing that residents in our part of England need is a major new environmental threat.

I am conscious of the time, but I just want to add my support for a range of other points that have been made today. In particular, I would like to support and endorse the concerns that have been expressed about the relative weakness of the planning system and about the Government’s policy on energy—particularly renewable energy—and their deeply mistaken policy of cutting the feed-in tariff and not investing in wind power, solar energy and other renewables such as the tidal power project in Swansea bay. These mistaken energy policies stand in stark contrast to the policies of many other Governments, including the last Labour Government.

[Matt Western]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Matt Rodda]

I am afraid I am running out of time.

We have just 12 years left to reduce carbon emissions dramatically. Local communities around the country have serious and substantial concerns about fracking. Given the climate crisis and the need for radical change in energy provision, and given the indisputable local concerns, shale gas exploitation has to stop, and it has to stop now.

Housing

Matt Western Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bacon]

Yes, I do, although I could easily get into a long discussion about viability that would consume the rest of this debate, which I cannot do. There are big problems with the whole concept of the way in which we calculate viability. However, I congratulate the Government on helping Cheltenham bring forward what sounds like a very important scheme.

The Right to Build Task Force has been going for two years. We have scraped together £300,000, courtesy of the Nationwide building society’s charitable foundation, the Nationwide Foundation. Over 50 organisations have been helped, of which 60% are local councils, with the rest being community groups, landowners and developers. There is a whole range of examples of its work. Aylesbury Woodlands in Buckinghamshire will have a project where 15% of all the new homes are custom and self-build. Cornwall has an ambition to bring forward up to 1,000 serviced plots across the county. I am looking around for my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann), who arranged the meeting we had with the Prime Minister on this very subject and who is a passionate believer in more serviced plots. North Northamptonshire has a plan whereby as many as 10% of homes could be custom and self-built across several different local authorities. There are rural areas such as Eden in Cumbria, which is looking at a range of opportunities for affordable homes for local people. King’s Lynn and North Norfolk, in my own county of Norfolk, has agreed an action plan to drive up delivery across the area with landowners and smaller builders. A lot is going on already, but the thing is that there could be very much more going on.

This is the fundamental point. It is a quote from Andrew Baddeley-Chappell, a former director of Nationwide building society, who is now the chief executive of NaCSBA, while still chairing the Bank of England residential property forum. He has said:

“Custom and Self-build can deliver more and better homes that more people aspire to live in and that communities are happier to see built.”

An exegesis of that would basically cover most of what I want to say.

If we want more homes, we have to build them in a way that people want. At the moment, the problem is that most local people feel they have no say or voice in what gets built, where it gets built, what it looks like, how it performs—its thermal performance and therefore what it costs to run—and, absolutely crucially, who gets the chance to live there. If we change all that, we change the conversation. As the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the former shadow Secretary of State said, we need to turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs. Prince Charles put it even better when His Royal Highness referred to BIMBYs—beauty in my backyard. We need to create an environment in which people actually welcome housing. We have reached the tipping point now in that more people want it than do not, because people have begun to realise how serious the crisis is.

As the Minister would expect, I have a small number of specific asks. The first is that we should have more Government support for the taskforce. We have already had some. I persuaded my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), when he was the Housing Secretary, to lend us a civil servant—a qualified planner and career civil servant. He would prefer me not to mention his name, but I will because we are so indebted to him. His name is Mario Wolf, and he directs the work of the taskforce. We are very grateful for the loan of Mario Wolf from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. He has done an enormous amount with very little in the way of resources. I mentioned some of the work earlier.

It is of course true that if we had more Government support, we could do more. The Help to Buy programme, which I will come on to in a moment, has so far spent £10.6 billion, and plans to have spent £22 billion by 2021. In other words, 35,000 times more is spent on subsidising demand than on a scheme to subsidise supply, albeit indirectly by helping to facilitate and increase choice for consumers—except, of course, that the Government are not actually paying for it; Nationwide building society is paying for it. I hope to have a discussion about that with the Minister at some point, because we are of course implementing Government policy. If hon. Members read the housing White Paper, they can see that we are implementing Government policy. If they read the Homes England strategy, it is very clear that the strategy calls for diversification of housing.

The second thing I would like the Minister to consider is a review of the planning guidance on custom and self-build housing—the guidance that supports the revised national planning policy framework—because at the moment it is outdated. Three things need urgent attention. On land allocation, many councils do not even know if they are allowed to allocate land specifically for custom and self-build housing, even though they are, and councils such as Bristol City Council are already doing so.

We also need clarity about what counts. Some local authorities are gaming the system, and in some cases local authorities are not clear what counts towards their legal obligations to provide permissioned plots of land. Some councils are allowing the conversion of holiday lets into private dwellings under the happy delusion that that counts towards meeting their legal obligations under the right to build legislation, and some of them may be in for a rude awakening at some point.

There is also the issue of viability. For as long as one has viability assessments, the Government need to look carefully at how they should work in relation to custom and self-build; they will not necessarily be the same as for market housing. I would be grateful if the Minister engaged with the taskforce on updating the guidance generally, so that it is more fit for purpose.

My third request is about the Planning Inspectorate. It is absolutely imperative that Government planning inspectors properly apply the current provisions of the legislation when they determine planning appeals and when they examine local plans. There is clear evidence that that is not happening as it should—mostly because planning inspectors are unfamiliar with the law in this area, which is still quite new. The obvious answer is to have training for inspectors. The Secretary of State has agreed with me at the Dispatch Box that we should do that, although it has not happened yet. I urge the Minister to pursue that and engage with the taskforce in identifying exactly what training is required.

We need something to help raise consumer awareness. Most people would like to commission a project of their own at some point in their lives; 1 million people would like to do that in the next 12 months, yet only 12,000 to 15,000 do. The reason is that it is very difficult to get a serviced plot of land. If getting one were as easy as it is to go into a Ford dealership and buy a Ford Fiesta, far more people would do it.

We are spending a significant amount of public money on housing, but at the moment I am not convinced that we are not simply making the problem worse. Help to Buy will have spent £22 billion by 2021 on helping 360,000 households. If we divide one figure by the other, we get £61,111—that is per household. We should be spending that better. At the moment, we are propping up an oligopoly that performs well financially for itself, with some horrible results, while making itself unpopular with consumers who cannot afford its products.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Bacon]

I am sorry, but I will not give way—only because of the lack of time; I need to leave the Minister a couple of seconds.

What did Adam Smith say?

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The aim of public expenditure on housing should be to lower barriers to entry and increase choice, so that people can have the houses they want. If we get this right, we can engender a revolution in this country in how housing is done. If we get it wrong, we will pay a high price at the ballot box: almost nobody between the ages of 20 and 40 can easily, at a price a normal person can afford, dream of having their own place, even though 86% of people in this country want to. We need to design and redesign a system that allows them, and everyone else, to achieve their aspirations.

Rough Sleeping

Matt Western Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. On a personal level, it is good to see the Housing Minister back in her role. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) not only for securing the debate, but for the great work he has been doing with the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince) on the all-party parliamentary group. I have been pleased to attend one or two of its meetings.

Austerity has many faces, but none is more damning than the number of people who are having to live rough on our streets. Across not just our cities, but our towns, the scenes of people sitting on street corners or lying on sleeping bags and mattresses and in bivouacs are probably the most shameful visible manifestation of a Government who that just do not care. One does not have to go far to be made aware of the crisis. As we know, just 2 metres from the entrance to Parliament, we see people trying to survive against the odds. Here we are in Parliament, the supposedly powerful legislative body, and yet we are unable to persuade the Government that halving rough sleeping in five years or solving the issue by 2027 is an acceptable aim. The public believe that the situation is wrong, and the Opposition certainly agree. In fact, I think most of us in this room believe that the Government are showing neither urgency nor ambition in tackling the problem. Perhaps we can persuade them today.

In the past year, two people from the rough sleeping community within the Westminster tube station area have died. On each occasion when such things happen, outrage follows. The Secretary of State claims that it is one death too many, and that collectively we cannot allow it to happen again. However, the fact that people can die so close to this place suggests that there is too much easy rhetoric from Government and not enough real action dedicated to tackling this humanitarian disaster. To restate the oft-quoted fact, we are the sixth richest nation in the world. Let us be clear and honest: rough sleeping did not start with the coalition Government, but the crisis did. The two Governments since have done little to arrest the exponential increase in the numbers of people rough sleeping. Back in 2010, 1,768 people were recorded as rough sleeping. According to the 2018 count, which was published recently, the figure today stands at just under 4,700. That is a rise of 3,000, or 165%, since 2010.

Perhaps surprisingly, my constituency of Warwick and Leamington has had the highest number of rough sleepers per head of population across the west midlands. At present, 12 rough sleepers are officially recorded by the district council, although that figure is disputed by charity and voluntary workers. It would also be disputed by the public, who see so many more people on our streets every day. In 2017, the figure was 21.

One of the primary reasons why we find ourselves in this situation is simply the basic lack of social housing, as we have heard. I elevated that issue here through the parliamentary campaign for council housing, which has cross-party support. Since 1980, successive Governments have failed to deliver enough affordable housing, particularly social housing. To put that into focus, in the financial year 2017-18, the Government delivered just 6,463 social homes, while nearly 1.2 million people are on waiting lists. By way of example, in my constituency, the council has accepted housing developments that have under-delivered social and affordable housing. In the period from 2010 to 2017, only 28% of new homes built in major housing schemes in the area—against a policy of 40%—have been either social or affordable. The lack of housing stock results in the council having to take a harsher line because it is essentially rationing housing, leaving a lot of people in unsustainable situations.

However, the crisis is not just down to a lack of housing, although it is central to the problem, and I will return to that point shortly. Under the Government’s welfare policies, rates for local housing allowances have been frozen for five years from April 2016. The LHA now does not cover rents in more than 90% of areas in England. Then there is the added challenge of having to wait five weeks for universal credit, which has pushed so many people into arrears. Indeed, universal credit has a caused a significant rise in homelessness and rough sleeping.

For many who find themselves living on the streets, the lack of direct and immediate support to address their complex health and welfare needs perpetuates the crisis. In 2017-18, mental health needs were most often cited as the greatest need among people sleeping rough, with 50% of those assessed during the period having a need in that area. Alcohol-related support was the second most prevalent need, at 43%, while 40% of rough sleepers were assessed as having a support need relating to drug dependency. Those needs are compounded by the insecurity of the private rented sector. A significant number of the new rough sleepers—38% of them—recorded their last settled accommodation as private rented housing. Specifically, no-fault evictions are one of the leading causes of homelessness.

We all know of cases from our constituencies, and I hope Members will forgive me if I give just one illustration. A young man in my constituency approached me not so long ago. He has been homeless since October. He resides in a car and has previously had problems with drugs and alcohol, although in prison he received support for them. Since leaving prison, he has been reluctant to go into shared hostel accommodation, because he does not want to be exposed to similar behaviours again. The local council, however, will not allow him a single room in a hostel, because that is not in line with the policy, which is a progression from shared hostel room to single hostel room, to supported housing and then to independent residence. As a result, he continues to sleep rough, because he is adamant that he cannot go into a shared hostel.

A year ago, I called for a summit and brought together all the local agencies and authorities to pose the question of how we could address the issue. The ambition we set was to try to resolve and eliminate rough sleeping within a year. I am pleased to say that the council and other organisations seized on that ambition. Just a few months ago, the local council and its housing team opened William Wallsgrove House, a direct access hostel in Leamington. It provides around-the-clock accommodation, onsite support and referrals for 22 people, all year round.

Although that is positive, over recent years the Labour group on the council has been pressing for a change in the severe weather emergency protocol. Before, someone had to endure three consecutive nights of temperatures of 0 °C before they would be provided with accommodation. Now—many years later, after much pressing and on the insistence of that Labour group—that has been reduced to one night.

What are the solutions? I stress that more social housing is critical. As other Members have mentioned, the evidence from Scandinavia—particularly in Finland, where there is an absence of rough sleepers—shows that the issue can be addressed by a housing-first approach. It is therefore critical that we end the benefits freeze, re-establish the link between housing benefit and local rents, and reform universal credit.

I will end by saying this: as we have heard, a further 600 people died from homelessness in 2017—up 24% since 2013. That is almost two people every day. At the current rates, many thousands of people will die before this Government are defeated. That cannot be acceptable.

Shale Gas Development

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mark Menzies]

I will touch on that further. The situation in Lancashire, particularly with Preston New Road, was slightly more nuanced than that. Officers recommended approval but councillors voted against. The issue is that we are kidding ourselves if we think that those decisions are being taken locally. Overwhelmingly, they are not. They end up being called in by the Planning Inspectorate, and for some of these sites, there is more than one planning inquiry that runs on at enormous expense and is incredibly complicated. The decision is then taken out of local people’s hands. The situation at the moment is fully flawed.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. That is the very heart of it. We have heard evidence in the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee about the arguments for addressing that, picking it up as a piece of national infrastructure and treating it the same, but are we not denuding our local democracy in that process? We try to respect our democracy here, and it is so important, particularly in the current climate, that people are heard locally.

[Mark Menzies]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

Tenant Fees Bill

Matt Western Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 5th September 2018 Commons Chamber

The Bill should therefore create a virtuous circle, higher standards, more trust, better redress, lower costs and, ultimately, better homes for vulnerable tenants, with rogue landlords and agents gradually weeded out and the strong ones not just surviving, but thriving. Those are good aims, but they need good implementation and good review and scrutiny to deliver effectively for my constituents in Gloucester and elsewhere. However, that is the next stage. Today, it is good that Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition are supporting the Bill, and I urge all Members to do likewise.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I rise not only to endorse the changes made by the Government, but to support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) and to welcome the Bill. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee heard wise evidence and counsel from various groups, including landlords’ organisations and local authorities, and it is quite clear that there has been a bit of a wild west for many years in certain parts of country. I am proud to say that I have some excellent, responsible agents in my constituency, but there are the less scrupulous exceptions for whom greater regulation is really needed, so the Bill is timely. I have lived and rented in France, where it was evident just how much tighter and more balanced the legislation was.

To echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby, this is really about rebalancing the relationship between landlord, agent and tenant to make it much more transparent and much fairer. For many years tenants have felt disempowered in that relationship, and over the past 20 years we have seen significant growth in the proportion of people renting privately. That proportion has doubled, and in some parts of the country, such as the north-east, it has increased by 200%. It is important that we get to grips with this, and the Bill moves us a long way in doing that.

In the past week I spoke to a student in my constituency who is facing tenant fees of £595 for one year. In some cases we are witnessing extortion, particularly in sectors with high churn, typically with one-year tenancies. We could have gone further, but I welcome the main part of the Bill.

As has been said in the Chamber, and also by organisations such as Shelter, Citizens Advice and Which?, the default fees could have been more clearly and more extensively defined. As the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, what is reasonable is open to interpretation. We have seen extreme cases involving replacement key costs, for example. I support amendment 3, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby, in those circumstances.

The level of the deposit cap was widely raised with the Select Committee by landlords and others. I would have preferred a four-week maximum, but I understand how we got to where we are. Deposit caps are a particular issue for high-churn tenancies. The idea of passporting, as proposed by the Minister, is a welcome move.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Does he agree with the observation, which has also been made by bodies such as Shelter, that an impact of high deposits is increased homelessness? Homelessness has tripled in my area of the south lakes in the past year, despite our building more council houses. A six-week limit would mean an average deposit of £1,100, which would make a rental property unaffordable for many people.

[Matt Western]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid and pertinent point. High deposits are very much part of the cause of homelessness in many areas, because people feel financially and socially excluded from the private rented sector. As I alluded to at the beginning of my speech, high deposits have made renting privately much more difficult. In the same period we have seen a 20% reduction in social rented properties, which are critical.

I will move on because of time. On the issue of compliance, the Select Committee heard how few authorities, whether it be because of less appetite or because they just do not have the enforcement officers, follow through on enforcement. As we have heard, 93% of authorities have not taken enforcement action against rogue landlords. Of course the shining exception is Newham, which, as the Select Committee heard, accounts for half those enforcement cases.

I urge the Minister to reconsider Labour amendments 1 and 2. If £30,000 is seen as too high a maximum, there should be flexibility for authorities to introduce a more appropriate figure, as my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby said—the hon. Member for Harrow East mentioned that £5,000 is a cost of doing business. That is how this was all done in the past, and we have to break that for the future because of the growth and importance of the private rental sector.

I support and welcome the Bill, but I would just ask for tighter regulation of default fees.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

In the few minutes available to me, I wish to raise a few issues on behalf of my constituents who are involved in this sector, particularly those working for letting agencies. I thank the Minister for seeing me in the Department yesterday, along with the Secretary of State; he has been unfailingly courteous and very well informed. I thank him for listening to me, as he has to others, about some of the concerns I have shared with him on behalf of my constituents.

I had wanted to propose an amendment to cap the fees that letting agents could charge to £300 rather than abolishing these fees entirely, because this proposal directly contradicts the Conservative party’s long-held ethos of being a pro-business, pro-free market party. If these are the measures we are supporting, are we truly a pro-business party? Mr Paul Wallace-Tarry from Belvoir, a letting agents in Shrewsbury, certainly believes we are letting him down by implementing the Bill.

As someone who has rented a property in London for the past 13 years, I am acutely aware of the job that estate agents and letting agents perform. They carry out things ranging from the right-to-rent checks to negotiating contract changes, and from safety checks to organising the tenant move-in. Many times as a tenant I have called upon the agent for help. I believe it is very important to keep the equilibrium correct between the tenant, the landlord and the letting agent, and this Bill may be slightly tipping the balance in favour of the tenant, rather than the landlord.

The Government’s own findings revealed that the mean fee paid by tenants upon moving into their accommodation was £223. However, a ban on tenant fees will lead to rents increasing by around £103 per annum, so industry experts say. For a three-year lease, the tenant would therefore end up paying £309 in total, which is £86 more than the tenant fee. It has also been found that rents could increase by around £82.9 million as a result of the Bill. Clearly the services that the letting agents put in place are being implemented by professionals, and they have to be paid for in some way. The fear is that this will just go on to rents, which are less transparent and accountable than a clear, specific fee.

ARLA Propertymark has found that 90% of letting agents believe that a ban will lead to a rise in rents. Some 60% think that it will lead to lower property quality, and 40% think it will lead to a fall in employment in the medium to long term. If estate agents have to choose between their working relationships with tenants or with landlords, they will side with the landlords, given that there is no financial responsibility or duty of care between them and the tenant. This is what I want to see protected; I want that relationship to be very evenly matched.

I end by simply saying that if the Conservative party understands anything, it is the need to support small business. I feel passionately about the role that small businesses play in our constituencies. I never had the courage to set up my own business. I always worked for large-scale, multinational corporations, knowing that my mortgage would be paid at the end of the month and not having the responsibility of employing people. Many of the people we are talking about today did have the courage to set up their own business. They are entrepreneurs and they are employing professional people, and this is very important. I hope that the Minister will acknowledge the extraordinary amount of care and professionalism that many of these letting agencies in Shrewsbury implement on behalf of their constituents. The Conservative party must understand the need to support small business, with less regulation, less red tape and less taxation in order to empower entrepreneurship and empower people to create the wealth we need to fund our public services. This ban is in direct opposition to that.

As I have said already to the shadow Minister, when ARLA Propertymark conducted a survey of all Members of Parliament, a newly elected Labour Member—I would get into a lot of trouble if I named him—told ARLA that he was not interested because he wanted the whole private sector banned, leaving only owner occupiers or social housing. That is the sort of prejudice that we have to deal with, and it is important that the private sector is respected and supported.

Local Government in Gloucestershire

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) on securing this important debate. I very much recognise and respect his long-standing personal views on the topic, no doubt informed by his many years of service at various tiers of local Government, which I am sure he draws on today. He will have heard me say before that, when requested, the Government are committed to consider locally led proposals for unitarisations and mergers between councils. He will also know that we recently legislated to create two new unitary councils in Dorset, as well as mergers of district councils in Somerset West and Taunton, East Suffolk and West Suffolk. In each of those cases, the councils developed their proposals locally, as is currently happening in Northamptonshire, where a public consultation is underway to help inform the councils’ proposals for the Secretary of State.

Turning to Gloucestershire, there is currently the county council and the six district and borough councils, and adjacent to the administrative county there is also the unitary council of South Gloucestershire. It is important to state for the record that the Department has received no proposals from the county council or any of the district councils for local government reorganisation in Gloucestershire. I am not aware of any other plans in development that are to be presented to me imminently. The Government’s stated policy is to consider any locally led proposals that are submitted.

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s first question, it might be helpful for me to talk a little about the processes for unitarisation. There are two legislative processes that can be used. First, the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 allows a process to proceed if at least one affected authority consents. This process was used recently for the creation of the two unitary councils in Dorset. Secondly, we can use the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, as we are currently doing for Northamptonshire. Regardless of the legislative process used, the Government have been clear on what our criteria for unitisation are and how the Secretary of State will assess any proposal.

I want to spend a moment outlining the three main criteria. First, the proposal has to be likely to improve local government in the area, by improving service delivery, giving greater value for money, yielding cost savings, providing stronger strategic and local leadership, delivering more sustainable structures and avoiding fragmentation of major services. Secondly, the proposed structure has to be for a credible geography, consisting of one or more existing local government areas, and the population of any unitary authority must be substantial.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

So many authorities are under significant financial pressure, as the Minister described. The majority of those named are smaller, more rural authorities. In that light, is it not appropriate to go through this exercise as a matter of course, to explore what sort of cost savings could be made? In Warwickshire that would enable us to understand what sort of savings and efficiency improvements in the services delivered could be made.

[Rishi Sunak]

We are here to talk about Gloucestershire today and not Warwickshire, but I will address the hon. Gentleman’s underlying question about the Government’s role in this process when I answer the second question from the hon. Member for Stroud.

The third criterion for judging a proposal is that it commands local support. In particular, the structure must be proposed by one or more existing councils in the area and there is evidence of a good deal of local support, including from business, the voluntary sector, public bodies and local communities.

[Matt Western]

To that end, rather than just getting anecdotal support from businesses and other organisations, would the Minister support going to the public with that at the time of an election or through a referendum?

[Rishi Sunak]

The hon. Gentleman anticipates what I was about to say, so let me elaborate on what the Government mean by a good deal of local support. The Government would like that to be assessed across the area from business, the voluntary sectors, public bodies and local communities. That does not mean unanimous agreement from all councils, stakeholders and residents, but it is vital that any proposals to change structures in local government are truly locally led. That is why we feel that a public consultation is so important.

That has been the experience of recent proposals, where the councils involved have used opinion services or consultants to engage extensively with the public through discourse, surveys and events, to ensure that they have captured the state of public opinion on the proposals they are due to submit to the Department. Having received those proposals, following an invitation, the Secretary of State must consult all affected local authorities that are not signed up to the proposal, and any other persons he considers appropriate, before reaching a decision, judged against the three criteria I outlined. The extent of any consultation would depend on the extent of the consultation that those making the proposal have already carried out.

It is essential that those making a proposal carry out an effective consultation before submitting their proposal, not least to provide evidence about the level of local support. The Secretary of State may then implement the proposal by order, with or without modification, or decide to take no action. Such an order is subject to the affirmative resolution procedure but does not require the consent of any council.

Let me turn to the question from the hon. Member for Stroud about the Government’s role. He will hopefully have seen as I have been outlining the process that our role is to receive proposals developed locally in a particular area; it is not to enforce or dictate from on high the organisation of any local area’s affairs. It is for local councils and local people to develop those proposals. However, as he said in alluding to the new Secretary of State’s remarks, the Government remain open and willing to engage with areas that want to embark on this journey and will willingly receive proposals and adjudicate on them in due course.

Council Housing

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

We are all agreed: the UK has a housing crisis. No matter which party is speaking, there is universal recognition of the desperate need to urgently increase the supply of housing. So there is no debate, then, is there? The global financial crash had a catastrophic impact on the house building industry in this country. Given that much of the credit crunch was down to bad debts, particularly those resulting from bad lending in the US domestic housing market, this was perhaps to be expected. In just two years, the number of homes built crashed by 30%, and with this the supply of housing just dried up. That economic shock forced the then Labour Government to drive for affordable house building as part of an economic stimulus programme to help the country through the deep recession.

By 2009, the foundations for a new era of affordable house building were laid, with a £4 billion annual affordable housing programme, backing for councils to receive grant funding and build new council housing, full localisation of council housing finance agreed with the Treasury to boost building still further, and a programme of progressively higher standards agreed with industry to make all new build homes zero carbon by 2016. It was a comprehensive programme.

Since the change of Government in 2010, public policy has been perceived as at best indifferent and at worst hostile to affordable housing. One of the first decisions made by Conservative Ministers after the 2010 election was to cut back new housing investment by more than 60%. As a result, the number of new Government-backed homes for social rent started each year has plummeted from almost 40,000 to fewer than 1,000 last year. The number of new low-cost ownership homes being built has halved. The plans that Labour left to get councils building 10,000 homes a year were undermined, dashing any hopes of councils being able to build at scale again.

At the same time as the number of new homes being built has fallen, there has been a huge loss of existing social homes. In 2012, right-to-buy discounts were hiked to a massive £100,000.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

On a point of information, is the hon. Gentleman aware that since 2010 more than three times as many council houses have been delivered than in the previous 13 years —the golden era of Labour government that he talks about?

[Matt Western]

Yes, the figures do show that, but if one drills down into the number, one will find that they were provided by Labour authorities, and that is despite the borrowing cap that has been placed on them. Without that cap, to which I shall refer, far greater supply would be available.

Despite a promise that there would be one-for-one replacements, in some areas only one in five homes sold under the right to buy has been replaced. A new kind of publicly funded housing was introduced. Ministers branded it “affordable rent”, with rent set at up to 80% of the market price and thereby directly linked to often unaffordable private market rents.

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

I feel sure that my hon. Friend is likely to come to this point, but does he agree that the term “affordable rent” is an offence to the English language, because affordable clearly does not mean affordable if it is 80% of market rent?

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for her informed intervention. My very next sentence was going to address that point. If something is already expensive, making it 80% of expensive is still expensive. That is where we find ourselves.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentioned right to buy. Some of the right-to-buy houses that were originally bought by their renters have now been sold on, often to landlords. Some of those properties are not in the best condition and on many estates they are the ones that really stick out, often because rogue landlords are not looking after them.

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for his timely intervention. He is of course absolutely correct. One issue we have had over recent decades is that so much of this property has fallen into the hands of landlords and others, the investment has not been made, and they are now charging extortionate rents. Had it been left to local authority provision, those renting would be able to afford the properties more readily.

Organisations that bid for Government grants were told to re-let homes for low-cost social rent at the new so-called “affordable rent”. It is now estimated that 150,000 homes for social rent have been lost in the past five years. More recently, the Government proposed to add to the sell-off by extending the right to buy to housing association tenants, funded by an extraordinary forced sell-off of council housing to the highest bidder.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I associate myself with my hon. Friend’s points and the genuine and deep concern that he shows for the needs of tenants throughout the country, many of whom are struggling with high housing costs, as indeed they are in my constituency. Does he agree that it was an outrageous mistake and serious error by the Conservative Government to stop many local authorities building council houses when they had fully costed schemes that were ready to go and, indeed, shovel-ready? Reading had a plan for 1,000 new council houses, but unfortunately it was stopped by George Osborne in 2015.

[Matt Western]

My hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely correct. There is a suppression of building low-cost rental properties by local authorities. Those local authorities know that there is a need, and we must allow them to have that responsibility. Preventing them from supplying that housing has had a huge social and economic cost in our communities.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Does my hon. Friend also agree that preventing councils from building housing means that it is unlikely that the Government will achieve their target of building 300,000 homes a year? The last time those figures were reached was in 1969 when both councils and housing associations were building, as was the private sector.

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend once again. Not only is she very well informed, but she is very experienced in this matter. She is absolutely right. The high levels of housing that we have needed over the decades have been delivered by a mix of providers. The crucial element that is now missing is the housing that is provided by local authorities. In its absence, we will never achieve the objective that has been set by the current Government. If we look through the decades, we can see how, in the post-war periods of the 20s and then the 50s and 60s, the local authorities were allowed to ensure a good supply of housing, which they recognised was needed because of the constraints in the private sector.

It is worth looking at this matter in the round. Over the past 10 years, the overall supply of new homes has seen an under-delivery of at least 80,000 to 100,000 homes a year. The result is that the UK faces a desperate shortage of at least 1 million homes. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors now forecasts that we will reach a shortage of 1.8 million low-cost rental properties—that is just low-cost rental properties—by 2022.

All areas of the UK need housing, both public and private, but there is particular and desperate need for low-cost housing for rent. In my constituency there are more than 2,400 people on the housing waiting list. Homes are being built, but not enough are under construction to satisfy this social need. Once again, it is the wrong mix of housing that is being delivered. So, what is the answer? Of course, opinions vary, and the solutions presented to the electorate in last year’s election showed clear blue water between the main parties.

Recognising the critical importance of the housing shortage in its 2017 manifesto, Labour committed to the creation of a new department for housing. Importantly, on house building, we promised at least 1 million new homes over the next Parliament, which, as we now know, can be a very short time, and a new target of 250,000 new homes a year being built by 2022. Of those, at least 100,000 per year, or 40% minimum, would be genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy per year, including the biggest council house building programme in more than 30 years. If I am honest, I would personally like to see a lot more.

Subsequently, at the autumn party conferences, much time and debate were given over to this challenge, and the Prime Minister announced that she was committed to delivering 300.000 new homes. Specifically, she stated that £2 billion would be committed to helping the delivery of affordable housing, but, of course, that equates to just 25,000 properties. Clearly, housing is rising up the political agenda, and it is now one of the biggest domestic issues that we face.

My contention is that we now face a social crisis that is without precedent in the past 50 years. We have thousands of families without their own homes, waiting desperately for accommodation. We have record numbers of people rough sleeping. In my constituency of Warwick and Leamington, we have the highest number in terms of people per 1,000 of the population in the whole of the west midlands. Over the decades, the overall supply of housing has not delivered. Now must be the time to change that.

I am convinced that council housing was, is and will be the answer to our housing crisis. The Government need to release local authorities from the bounds of their borrowing cap and allow them to use their pension funds to invest in their communities. The use of public land holds the key to unlocking the potential to deliver this. Simply selling public land to the highest bidder will not solve anything. Land is the fundamental denominator in the cost equation of UK housing, and the planning process surrounding it needs urgent, radical reform.

Building more council housing solves at least two key problems: first, the lack of genuinely affordable housing for those who cannot afford market rents; and secondly, the chronic under-supply of housing that is the root cause of our housing crisis. As I said, there is a lack of genuinely affordable housing, with historically high waiting lists of 1.16 million households nationally. The easiest way to help those in need is to provide council housing. If we fail to do this, the result will be increasing homelessness, which we have witnessed more than doubling nationally since 2010. Another, less frequently made, argument is that building more council housing is the key to boosting overall supply, thereby addressing the root cause of the UK’s housing crisis.

The Government’s own target is to build 300,000 new homes each year, but the number of additional homes delivered in 2016-17 was 217,000, falling well short of their target. Although last year was the first year since the financial crisis in which over 200,000 homes were added—and I do applaud that—it was not enough, and the wrong mix of homes is being built. It is now stated that 300,000 houses would just about keep up with demand. Even if the Government hit this target, it is unlikely to bring down house prices and rents significantly. Also, in order to deliver those 300,000 houses, we need all providers to be supplying into the process.

History provides important lessons. It is no coincidence that house building rates reached their post-war peak during the 1950s and ’60s, when successive Governments were committed both to private sector and public sector house building. At the time, housing was plentiful and house prices stayed low, so that many on low to average incomes could afford to rent or buy their own homes. The success of the ’50s and ’60s shows that prioritising council housing need not be a partisan issue. Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Housing Minister from 1951 to 1954, initiated some of the greatest council house building programmes in order to meet his target of building 300,000 homes a year. During those Macmillan years, local authority housing made up 87%, 84%, 77% and 69% of completed dwellings per year respectively. This compares with just 1% in each of the past four years under this Government—or about 20% each year if we include housing associations as well as councils. Importantly, as I have illustrated elsewhere—I want to give credit where it is due—post-war Conservatives recognised that the public sector must build the homes that the private sector will not build during a housing crisis, which is where we find ourselves.

So why will this Government not do that? I would like to believe that it is not simply ideology that says that the state is bad while the private sector is good and will solve all our problems, because this crisis is holding back our country socially and—I cannot stress this enough—economically. I believe that there is a duty on one-nation Conservatives to come forward and urge the Government to commit to a mass council house building programme if they are serious about solving our housing crisis. In this light, I have recently relaunched, with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Drew), the parliamentary campaign for council housing. I invite all MPs to get involved with this cross-party initiative that aims to see more council houses being built.

Central Government policy currently acts as a disincentive for councils to build more council homes: first, because, there is next to no funding from central Government for the provision of council housing; and secondly, because there has been just £5.9 billion gross investment in social housing in 2015-16 compared with £10 billion in 2009-10, and the vast majority of this will be directed to housing associations.

This compares with the £22 billion forecast to be spent on housing benefit in the 2017-18 financial year, which is a direct result of not building the housing we need. Is that not ironic? Surely the Government would rather not line the pockets of landlords in the private sector, but prefer to invest long term in the council housing that we need. Is that not pragmatic? The additional £2 billion investment announced by the Prime Minister at the conference was welcome, but it will only provide a few thousand homes by 2021, including the affordable homes that can be anything up to 80% of the market rent. The money is not ring-fenced for genuinely affordable social rents.

As I said earlier, the borrowing cap stifles a council’s ability to build where councils can currently only borrow up to a certain amount to invest in council housing. I welcome the announcement in the Budget that the Government will raise the cap by a total of £1 billion for areas under high affordability pressures, but more needs to be done. If the Government accept that the cap stifles building, why will they not lift it entirely for all areas, as has been done in Scotland?

[Matt Rodda]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a considerable need for greater house building in high-cost areas, and that there is actually a lot of available land in many of those areas? There certainly is in Reading. In our case, it is brownfield land from our light industrial past, and I assume that that may also be the case in Warwick and Leamington. Does he agree that urgent Government action is needed to free up that land in order to support the local economy in those areas and to support local public services? There is a particular pressure on local schools and the NHS in my constituency, as people move to lower-cost areas. Will he endorse my points?

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for his informed and relevant intervention. He is of course absolutely right that this essentially leads to what may be described as social cleansing. We may actually be creating ghettoes of particular types of community, when we should be striving for sustainable, balanced communities for our economic and social good. I totally endorse my hon. Friend’s points.

It is estimated that lifting the cap would allow £7 billion to be injected over five years, providing an additional 60,000 council homes. Even the Treasury Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), has called for this and stated:

“raising the cap would have no material impact on the national debt, but could result in a substantial increase in the supply of housing.”

The Local Government Association agrees. In my view, we should lift the cap entirely and take borrowing to invest in council housing off the country’s balance sheet, as is standard in other European countries. Why not?

Returning to the use of land and its availability, there is clearly much land available, but it is questionable in terms of its efficient use. As my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East just alluded to, there is land—including public sector and brownfield land—but it is all about the planning process and how that land is brought into the equation in order to deliver affordable housing. The current planning policy framework makes it prohibitively expensive for this to happen. The whole process needs radical reform.

Councils are currently incentivised to sell off the overpriced land that they own to highest bidder, rather than to use it for the common good. This needs to be reconsidered urgently. I am calling for us to recognise this national crisis in housing by legislating for all unused local authority and public sector land to be used exclusively for council housing. That is the nature of the crisis we face.

The inflated land prices across the country are preventing local authorities from being able to assemble the land to build on. Land is currently priced at its potential future development value, rather than at its existing use value, as is done in other countries. This pushes up the cost of undeveloped land that would be suitable for housing development, making investment in council housing more expensive. Bizarrely, it also rewards landowners for housing and infrastructure developments to which they do not contribute.

The homelessness charity Shelter has argued that a few small reforms to the Land Compensation Act 1961 and associated legislation on compulsory purchase orders would enable local authorities to purchase land at a fair market value—one that reflects both the current value of the land and reasonable compensation, and allows for the delivery of high-quality, affordable developments. This is not rocket science; it is not complicated. That is what they do in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is just about changing the planning approach so that it favours the local authorities.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the current section 106 arrangements and the community investment levy have failed to deliver affordable housing for our local communities?

[Matt Western]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, as ever. This needs radical reform. The section 106 moneys are understood by few, and the provision of those moneys for housing is not being realised. This goes back to my point about how the planning process and the planning policy framework need urgently to be addressed.

Councils currently retain only one third of receipts from homes sold through right to buy, while the rest goes to Treasury coffers. Why should that be? Surely it should be in the gift of the local authorities. They are the ones that are adding the value to this process, not the Treasury and not the developer. That means that council housing is lost and never replaced, with 40% of that stock now in the hands of private landlords who, in some cases, are charging up to 50% more rent than is being charged for comparable local authority-owned housing.

It also acts as a disincentive for councils to build. Why risk building new council homes when they could be bought three years later, and two thirds of the receipts will then go to the Treasury? Right to buy in its current form must be scrapped, or at the very least radically reformed, if we want to build the new homes we need. At the very least, councils must be allowed to retain 100% of the receipts from the homes that they lose.

We urgently need to change the language around housing in this country. For 40 years, the sector has become dominated by talk of assets and investment, rather than provision for people’s essential needs for security, refuge and living. Housing also meets the needs of our society more widely and determines the communities in which we live. Housing is so simple, so fundamental and so basic. It provides a sense of place and connectedness in our communities. What is rarely discussed is the vital importance of low-rent council and social housing to the UK economy and how that has been ignored by recent Governments. High rents contribute to pressure on household budgets, lead to lower savings and lower consumption and may lead to poorer health.

The time has come to address this failing and the urgent need to restore much needed balance to the UK housing sector by allowing local authorities to build council housing on a scale not seen since the 1970s. That would mean 120,000 new council homes being delivered per year across the UK. Council housing was and is the answer to our housing crisis—I have absolutely no doubt about that. It is about time the Government recognised that and got on with the job of building it.

Secure Tenancies (Victims of Domestic Abuse) Bill [Lords]

Matt Western Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Robert Courts]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that interesting point, although I do not agree with him on it. Right to buy has been a great engine of social mobility. I believe the statistic is that more than 85% of people would like to buy and own their own home, and we ought to facilitate that in any way we can. We have to enable the building of more social and affordable housing, of all tenures—that is the way forward. In my area, West Oxfordshire District Council is being innovative in working with local landowners and providing some of its own money to help with affordability issues. That is the way forward to address that particular issue.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the best opportunities for local authorities to provide some of this housing is for them to use the assets in their portfolio—that is, their land—to start to build council housing and to prioritise social housing?

[Robert Courts]

Yes, that should certainly be encouraged if councils have assets and land in their portfolios and it is available for use. That can certainly happen in my area, where possible. Of course, the difficulties arise where councils do not have the land available. In somewhere like West Oxfordshire, land value and prices are at the heart of the affordability issue. If councils have the ability to do that, it should certainly be considered. Councils have a role, as do housing associations, in the provision of social and affordable housing of all tenures. Social housing is very much at the heart of this issue.

I very much welcome the Bill. The proposals before us are intended to help the most vulnerable at the time in their lives when they most need help. I very much welcome that intention and effect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I very much welcome the Bill and its variation to the Housing and Planning Act 2016. In particular, I welcome the fact that it will seek an exemption for survivors of domestic abuse, so that councils will be compelled to offer life-time tenancies to those victims being offered local authority housing. Clearly, this addresses the concern that, in being offered a less secure tenancy, it would be for the victim to take the difficult step of moving away from the home where the abuse is taking place. I am very much in support of this variation. In fact, I share the conviction that lifetime tenancies should be reinstated for all tenants, not just for those who are victims of domestic abuse.

However, my support for the Bill—I echo many of the comments that have been made in the Chamber—is diluted by the fact that it does not cover housing association tenants, and this appears to be a major flaw, an inconsistency in recognising the needs of such victims. As Lord Bourne and the hon. Members for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) said, comprehensive action is required.

On many occasions in recent weeks, we have debated the huge homelessness crisis facing this country. It is worth reminding the House that insecurity of tenure—fixed tenancies do not provide security—is a contributory factor in so many cases, but for women in particular and all victims for that matter, that leads to the plight of homelessness.

Although I welcome the Bill, I very much hope that the Minister will listen to my points, particularly those on social housing, and include them. None the less, I very much welcome the spirit of the Bill.