Housing Association Tenants: Complaints Mechanisms

Debate between Matt Western and Iain Duncan Smith

Monday 23rd January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western]

The hon. Gentleman is right. The trouble is that there is almost a vacuum at present. I am sure that what I am pressing for would carry a great deal of weight throughout the House were it better populated at this time of night.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ own English Housing Survey reveals that 43% of tenants—just under half the total—choose not to make a complaint because of the hassle and time involved, and 63% are then unhappy with the response. I apologise to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for not having the statistics relating to Northern Ireland, but perhaps he can look into that and share them with me at some point.

Many of the cases that I want to highlight this evening stem from the deep dissatisfaction felt by many social tenants. They are all constituents of mine, but I have no doubt that the issues raised this evening will resonate with many beyond the borders of my constituency.

Last Friday I met a constituent from a development operated through Stonewater housing association who finds himself bearing the brunt of a completely inadequate complaints mechanism. Eight years after my constituent moved in, no work had been carried out to address several persistent structural issues in the property. Eventually, Stonewater carried out improvements which cost £330,000 and charged 24 properties in the building for the work, equating to just under £14,000 each. Stonewater has given each resident until the next financial year to pay the full amount, despite much of the work being substandard or unfinished. Disappointingly, Stonewater has not yet responded to complaints about its remedial work, and my constituent is left with a substandard set of repairs and an enormous, looming bill.

In another—particularly worrying—case, a 95-year-old constituent was living in a property managed by Orbit Housing Association. It was covered in damp. The walls were so wet that my constituent’s grandson claimed that the support bars she used to get on and off the toilet could have given way. Partly owing to significant damp arising from a leak upstairs, one evening the bathroom cabinet fell off the wall and narrowly missed hitting my constituent. Orbit had previously visited the property and added some new paint and sealant, but had not addressed the underlying problem of the damp.

When I visited the property myself, a month on, the issues remained. Seeing the nature of my constituent’s accommodation—including the bathroom in which this 95-year-old was having to survive—I was in a state of shock. Short of refitting the whole bathroom, the repairs were simply a sticking plaster, leaving my constituent in a home totally unfit for a frail 95-year-old woman.

I could go on, because the issues identified in those two developments are not strictly limited to social housing tenants. I have heard from residents in affordable housing, new-build developments and right-to-buy properties, all of whom are suffering similar problems with raising complaints.

Unfortunately, the issues I have just highlighted seem to represent yet more consequences of a failed housing market and permanent underinvestment. Over the past decade, money has been directed away from secure, affordable social homes to unaffordable homeownership products. Investment in social housing has dropped from £13.7 billion in 1979-80 to £5.1 billion last year, based on today’s prices, with 79% of spending up to 2020-21 reserved for the private sector. Is it any wonder, therefore, that housing developers are making record profits, with limited mechanisms to hold them to account?

I understand that the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill currently going through the House provides one potential avenue through which the social housing sector can be reformed. Many of the changes proposed in the Bill are broadly welcome, if not long overdue. I am pleased that the Government recognised the need for a professionalised social housing sector in their social housing White Paper in 2020. A professionalised housing sector, with managers undergoing continuous professional development, will likely improve services, allowing residents to be treated with the care and respect they deserve when lodging complaints. I also understand that in the Lords the Government tabled a new clause to the Bill on professional standards, and that they are considering further changes on Report.

If the Department is working on this, what specific steps is the Minister taking to improve the complaints mechanisms available to social housing tenants, either in further amendments to the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill or otherwise? Likewise, what progress, if any, has the Minister made on reversing the 63% dissatisfaction rate with the complaints process identified in her own Department’s English housing survey? Will the Minister meet me to discuss the difficulties that my constituents are facing and to allow them to feed in their suggestions for how the process can be improved?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate and am grateful to him for doing so, because I share his concerns. L&Q runs the development on the old dog track in my constituency of Chingford. The service charges are astronomical; they are higher than the costs faced by people who have managed to get the capital together for a mortgage. This is a good illustration of what the hon. Gentleman is saying. The housing association took three years to acknowledge people’s complaints about the terrible problems, including windows that did not fit the building and issues with heating, so they feel that they are not being represented. Councillor Catherine Saumarez has been raising this issue with me and the authorities for some time. Where do people go when they cannot get redress and are spending money without getting the sort of place or standards that they expected?

[Matt Western]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his extremely valid and pertinent point, and I appreciate him highlighting to me that he wished to come in on it. The real challenge is that so many people feel completely disempowered by what were the friendly societies of yesteryear—they expect better from these housing associations. They believed that they would be easier to deal with than the private rental sector and that the service they received would be better protected, but the opposite seems to be the case.

I am driving at the fact that the Bill gives the Government an opportunity to legislate to ensure that developments and organisations such as L&Q put in place a structure such that tenants have recourse to come back on these issues. The scale of the problem, as I said in my opening remarks with the percentages I mentioned, is staggering, and people are living in absolute misery as a result.

It is not just housing association developments that suffer from a lack of clear dispute mechanisms. I want to give a particular example of a shared ownership development in Leamington. I will keep its name anonymous. Apartments were being offered, claiming to be built to the “highest standards”, but in reality, the tenants were faced with an absolute litany of issues. I was first contacted by residents who were concerned about the poor construction back in November 2020. I went there last November to see for myself some of the problems that they suffered, which are legion. Some of those residents have now had to move out and are being housed in alternative accommodation.

As those issues came to light, the residents complained. They wrote to Clarion, the housing association, which passed them on to the management company, now named HML, and the construction company, Engie. A great many of the tenants are really frustrated with those companies’ failure to provide a clear process for the owners to move through in order to progress a complaint. These are significant structural issues that they have been struggling with and have been let down by, with each company blaming the others, therefore making it so difficult for a layperson to understand who should be responsible and who is accountable for those problems. It has taken two years to get to this stage—really, tenants should not be required to engage their local MP in a two-year campaign in order to have their issues addressed. I hope that we are now beginning to make progress, but these people have been living in absolute misery. I cannot go into the details of some of the problems they have faced.

It is a cruel irony that the 4 million households in the social housing sector are comprised of those most in need of safe, good housing. Over half of all households in the social rented sector, 55%, had one or more household members with a long-term illness or disability—that is a striking statistic—and half of all social rented households, 50%, are within the lowest income quintile. Just today, Warwickshire County Council’s director of public health acknowledged the link between poor health and housing in the council’s annual report, recommending that its housing, planning and health leads work together to prevent ill health caused by poor housing and living conditions. If I may say so—it is a sad point to make—the 95-year-old whose property I went to visit died fairly soon afterwards.

The first step on the road to preventing ill health is to ensure that poor social housing conditions are eradicated by establishing open, accessible and simple avenues of complaint that have to be underwritten by legislation, and certainly by some form of regulator. There is no reason why the Government should not be in listening mode on this issue, and I hope the Minister is prepared to work constructively for the good of housing association tenants, ensuring that every person benefits from a secure, safe place to call home.

Russia’s Grand Strategy

Debate between Matt Western and Iain Duncan Smith

Thursday 19th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I will take your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker, because most of it has already been said—although that has never stopped us from repeating it in this place.

It is a real privilege to speak in this debate and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on obtaining it. I always feel slightly worried when the word “grand” is used of anything, because if we are not careful it covers a whole lot of more tactical aspects that we forget about. However, he is right that this is a debate about the grand strategy of what was once the Soviet Union, has since been broken up, and is now Russia.

To begin with, I want to dwell on a remarkable charity named Siobhan’s Trust that my hon. Friend—I call her my hon. Friend—the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) and I visited and worked with. Interestingly, although we are not supposed to say this, the man who set up and runs the charity, David Fox-Pitt, is sitting in the Gallery right now. He is the epitome of what is very best about this United Kingdom. When all the refugees were pouring across the border and lost in the middle of Ukraine, having been struck, the team upped sticks from where they were in Scotland, with their trucks, and headed straight for the border to try to provide food and sustenance to those people.

Siobhan’s Trust got there weeks ahead of Oxfam and all the rest, and crossed the border because the team realised there were more refugees in Ukraine than were coming out. They raised the money themselves, got support from companies such as Dr. Oetker from Germany and Italian pizza companies, and got trucks with pizza ovens on. They now go to places as close as maybe a mile or so from the Russian border—in fact, quite recently they went into Kherson, just after it was liberated, and fed people there. That was where they came under shellfire, and I suspect that was because the Russians knew they were there and what they were doing.

As my hon. Friend said, the charity feeds 4,000 people who are dispossessed, living in freezing conditions, often with no heating or hot water, sometimes with no water at all and certainly with no electricity. The one high spot of their day will be the arrival of the trucks from Siobhan’s Trust, led by wonderfully eccentric British people dressed in Ukrainian kilts. The Ukrainians did not know they had a kilt until Siobhan’s Trust arrived in Ukraine, but now they have a national kilt, and I hope it will become something that is worn on the fashion catwalks of Europe to celebrate—[Interruption.] I know I am not a fashion icon, but nevertheless I would be prepared to wear it.

The beauty of this is all the work the charity does. We sometimes forget about this when we get into the grand strategy, but when we were over there, as my hon. Friend said, we realised what it really means when we talk about grand strategy. It means seeing the destroyed buildings, blocks of flats that had people living in them when the rockets hit; it means being with the soldiers when they have to clear up the dead bodies in villages that have been shelled and rocketed; it means never being able to come off a single-track path because the Russians have strewn anti-personnel mines all over the fields and houses in the hope that people will enter them. That is what it really means. It means that this barbaric, dictatorial, fascist crook called Putin has wrought devastation and damage on ordinary people whose lives were pretty poor in the first instance.

One of the Ukrainian guides said to us, “The thing you don’t understand is that we don’t have and have never had the kind of support and money that you have. When you look at our villages that are devastated, you see pretty low-standard villages, but what has happened is that the Russians have moved all the troops they have from the east of Russia, where the living standards are even lower by a long way. For them, this is Manhattan. They rob every single house and everything that’s in it, and that which they can’t rob, they rape. They use rape as a tool of war and a tool of suppression. That is why we evacuated so many of our women and children from these villages—because we knew what was going to happen to them if and when the Russians came.”

As the hon. Member for Bradford South said, we went on to visit the military hospital in Kharkiv, which was very sobering. The hospital gets rocketed at least two or three times a week. When it gets hit, the people who work there carry on, despite the explosions around them, with what they are doing. Interestingly, they said to me, “Please can you go back and tell your Government that we need armoured ambulances desperately, because we cannot get the wounded to the hospitals quickly enough? We need that more than almost anything else.” Secondly, they said, “We desperately need help in terms of paramedics, to stabilise people before they get into the ambulances. You cannot understand the difference it makes to whether or not we save their lives. We just don’t have enough. If only Britain could lead the west in providing people who can educate and train paramedics for us urgently, that would save more lives.”

Thirdly, they said, “The problem now is that so many of our soldiers are committing suicide because they cannot cope with the total devastation and the mental breakdown that comes from combat stress. The UK and America are the two countries that probably know the most about this, because of Afghanistan and Iraq. We desperately need some help from the UK to educate and train our mental health specialists in how to deal with this. It’s a huge problem.” It is a huge problem in America and here in the UK, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex has helped us get in touch with Combat Stress.

[Matt Western]

Given the right hon. Gentleman’s experience in politics, I am interested to know what he thinks the UK and other countries could provide beyond what he just described in terms of humanitarian and infrastructure support to the people of Ukraine.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

There is a huge amount that can be provided from what are essentially wealthy nations. We are wealthy nations, and when we compare ourselves with where Ukraine is, we are very wealthy. It is just the determination of what we want to do. In Ukraine, they desperately need arms; they need supplies of ammunition and weapons. There is no question about that, but they also need—and this is about humanity—help to survive in all these areas. The brave men and women who are fighting on the front deserve all the support they can get, but the bit that is missing when we debate this issue is the people behind who have been devastated and shelled and have no homes. We need to find a way to help them as well. I beg the Government to talk to their counterparts in Ukraine and find a way to get the rest of western Europe to supply the things that Ukraine requires that do not have a gun on them but will save many, many lives if they are provided.

I completely agree that Russia’s grand strategy is to expand. It has never got over losing the land that it held in the Soviet Union, and it wants it back; it has been absolutely clear about that. Strangely enough, countries in the west—Germany is a good example—have failed to recognise the real threat of becoming addicted to something that is supplied by a country as volatile and ill led as this. I come back to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. How in heaven’s name did the rest of Europe allow that to happen? How in heaven’s name did they allow Germany to bully them into believing it was none of their business? All of us—every country—takes a share of that. It should never have been allowed to be built, and I do not exclude my own country in that regard. It showed a sign to Russia that as addicted as we were, we would never do anything against Russia. That was as important as supplying them with weapons, because Russia then saw us and said, “You know what? They put money first and energy second, and that energy is from us. They will never come and stop us.”

In reality, this is our war—we cannot forget that. It is as much as if we were standing on the frontline with the Ukrainians. We have to be there with them in spirit, and we have to give them the weapons, because they must win this war. The thing that haunts me now more than anything else from that visit is the one phrase they use, which is, “Please don’t forget us.” They say, “We are fighting for our freedom and our lives, and we are worried that you are getting bored of what is going on over here. Please do not forget us.” All I simply say in the House today is that we must not forget them. We must be with them. This is our war; we must win it. Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Matt Western and Iain Duncan Smith

Report stage
Monday 13th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western]

My hon. Friend made some telling and constructive contributions in Committee, and I entirely agree with her. If we want the best from any system of higher education and its regulation, competencies must be at the heart of that.

Have a look through the job description for the director for freedom of speech, Madam Deputy Speaker. Four or five specified qualities are sought. It is worth a read, and indeed I am thinking of possibly putting in for the job. What is most surprising of all—this arose both in the Bill Committee and during our witness sessions, as my hon. Friend and others will doubtless recall—is that despite the overriding impression that, given the sensitivity and importance involved and given how delicate some of these cases will become, legal experience would be a necessity, there is no requirement for that legal expertise. We must make the process involved in any public appointment much more robust, but that applies particularly to the appointment to a position as sensitive and delicate as overseeing freedom of speech on our campuses.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman just came out with the throwaway line that he was thinking of applying for the job. Well, good luck to him, but do his own words not rule him out? If he is a member or supporter of any political party, he is by definition no longer impartial. I find that a ludicrous statement, by the way, as I would happily see members of the Labour party chair things because I would consider that they would be impartial, but the hon. Gentleman obviously does not.

[Matt Western]

Of course it was a throwaway line, but the job does pay £100,000. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman has a second job, but I do not, unlike so many on the Government Benches who may have second jobs. It goes without saying, in my book, that that person should resign if he or she is a member of a political party—that a person in such a sensitive role should be seen to be unalloyed by association, because perception is so important in this context. Of course I made that remark in jest, but it does seem to be a staggering amount of money that the Government are throwing at this post.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. Yes, there are issues out there, but that is about the scale of it. That is what has been uncovered in the surveys and analysis done by the Office for Students and by others. The scale is being exaggerated by the Government in order to make this legislation. It would be nonsensical to ignore shifting attitudes, and new clause 5 would allow for well-informed public policy guided by evidence rather than by Ministers’ latest lightning rod of choice.

Our amendments 19 and 20 would ensure that non-disclosure agreements or confidentiality agreements between those listed in the Bill and higher education providers did not inhibit freedom of speech, save where it was expressly agreed to between the parties to protect intellectual property. I will defer to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley, with whom I have tabled amendment 19, to explore that further. She is a tireless campaigner on the issue and I commend her work in bringing it to the House’s attention on Report. I hope that the Minister, who has previously stated her commitment to stamp out that practice, will take on board our suggestions.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to push the Minister on some of the finer points of the Government amendments. The illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia has rightly thrown a spotlight on the source of foreign investment and money in our public institutions. The misguided “golden era” ushered in by David Cameron and George Osborne in 2015, in which foreign nation states acquired substantial control over key parts of our national infrastructure, must come to an end.

The Government’s new clause 2 is much preferable to new clause 1, tabled by Conservative Back Benchers, particularly on the risk-based approach of the Government’s suggestion, but I have some concerns about new clause 2’s practical effect. The Minister suggests that it is her stated aim to reduce the data burden in the higher education sector. It is for that reason that I am interested in ascertaining how the new clause will be both proportionate and balanced. For example, the threshold at which providers have to report foreign donations is set to be determined by the Secretary of State in regulations, so it is disappointing that once again the Minister seemingly chose to brief it to The Times that the threshold would be set at £75,000—as she mentioned earlier—rather than allow the House to have a meaningful debate on what is appropriate. This is not on the face of the Bill. Interestingly, when we contrast this to the reporting threshold in the United States, which is $250,000—just over the equivalent of £200,000—the Government seem at risk of disincentivising foreign investment by implementing additional bureaucratic burdens.

I am also concerned about the scope of new clause 2, and I would be grateful if the Minister could expand a bit more on what is meant by “constituent institutions.” How much direct control does a higher education provider need to have over a constituent institution for it to fall under the remit of the new clause? For example, would Cambridge University Press be covered? My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) referred to that earlier. Relatedly, some of the requirements in the new clause are quite technical and may require fine judgment. It is likely that the value of non-monetary benefits—human capital and access to data, for example—will be difficult to ascertain. Could the Minister therefore detail what steps she is taking to ensure that universities are supported in determining the value of the partnerships they sign?

The Government’s proposal hands the responsibility for the new clause to the director for freedom of speech, making the director’s appointment all the more important. This adds further justification to our new clause 4, and I hope that Conservative MPs will consider that when they go through the Lobby later. Given that the regulator has limited prior experience of dealing with research partnerships or commercial arrangements, what additional resources will be provided to the OfS to handle this new responsibility?

Labour has tabled some important amendments in the same manner and spirit as we did in Committee. Let us remember that we debated a staggering 80-plus amendments in Committee at that time—it is a 19-page report—and now we have these few. Such a number would seem to underline just what a big dog’s breakfast the legislation is, and I am sure that those in the other place will spend many an hour realising what poor quality red meat lies at the bottom of it.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to be called to speak so early, Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to focus my comments on new clause 3, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) and signed by myself and others. The issue that I wish to touch on is the behaviour of some universities with regard to funding from countries that have the exact opposite view from ours on how freedom of speech should work. It was suggested earlier that we should be very careful about trying to insert ourselves into the funding of universities, but I think to the contrary to some degree, and I shall raise a case relating to that. I believe that when money is accepted from countries whose purpose is to undermine the nature of how we live our lives—including in regards to freedom of speech—that helps to pervert the processes of the institutions and universities.

One important question is whether there is a weakness in the Bill in one particular area, and that is to do with the Confucius Institute. I do not apologise for naming that particular organisation, because countries such as Germany, the United States and others that are quite close to us have already decided that that institute is not based around learning and academia and that it is in fact set up for an ulterior purpose, which is essentially to bully Chinese students in particular, but even other students, and to report back on the behaviour of many Chinese students studying in British universities. This has been evidenced in a number of countries. I would therefore have liked to see the UK Government, in line with this amendment and national security, take the power to stop such organisations where there is clear and compelling evidence that their purpose is not the stated purpose of delivering Chinese language and cultural instruction but enabling the Chinese Government to understand who is saying the right things and who is saying the wrong things.

To that extent, the Confucius institutes have even inserted themselves into schools. Many Confucius institutes have developed strong ties with local schools, and their provision of language assistance is seen as a very high-value contribution. It starts early now, and it extends.