Debate on the Address

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 27th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) who gave the first maiden speech of this Parliament. I look forward to working with him to tackle the scourge of poor broadband services. It is certainly a scourge in rural areas, as I am aware from my work on the Public Accounts Committee, but it happens in my area of Shoreditch too. I will not detain the House on a topic that I have spoken about many times before, but I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman to tackle that.

I also endorse the comments made by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), the right hon. and learned Members for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) and for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), and the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) about the Human Rights Act. They spoke very well and as they are four of the 12 Member majority, it is quite right that the Government are looking to rethink the question. It might be that a sensible alliance is already arising in the very first day of this Parliament that will ensure that sense is seen and that irrevocable steps are not taken in that direction.

I cast my mind back to the morning of 8 May at 4 am, when my result was declared in Hackney South and Shoreditch. Celebration was far from the minds of the people I represent in one of the poorest communities in Britain. For them, there is now and was then a sense of trepidation and fear about what the next five years might bring. I thank them for returning me, as I did in the early morning of 8 May, but I stand here with some fear and trepidation about what might affect them.

My constituency borders the Square Mile, where vast fortunes are made and millions are traded every second. In Shoreditch, we are also home, of course, to some of the fastest growing tech companies in Britain, the household names of tomorrow. That is the tech hub of Shoreditch and the Silicon roundabout. Hundreds of entrepreneurs and start-ups from around the world come to a borough bustling with ingenuity and innovation, radical thinking and a willingness to take risks. Amid all the buzz and excitement, however, there is a dark heart of poverty and social exclusion, with poor families struggling to make ends meet, poor pensioners shivering under blankets and poor young people without the connections to join that tech revolution on their doorstep. Hackney might be achingly hip but parts of it are also achingly poor.

The Prime Minister spoke earlier about his one nation vision for Britain, and I hope that when he next visits Tech City he will also take the time to visit the Wenlock Barn Estate or other estates in my constituency and see the face of poverty, so that he really means what he says about one nation. In Hackney, 47% of children live in poverty. One local housing association recently told me that it has more working tenants on benefits than tenants who are not working. In many of the excellent secondary schools in Hackney, which are doing a great job, headteachers have a supply of clothing because so many children cannot afford to replace school uniforms. Only recently, one headteacher told me how she had had to buy, after much cajoling, a pair of new shoes for a child which they had been promised but could not afford.

Let me share with the House the story of a local teenage boy who was missing school. He received detentions and when he was still repeatedly absent was excluded. Eventually, the school arranged for a home visit by the education welfare team, which discovered that mum was an alcoholic and that the young man and his brother had a single pair of school trousers to share between them. They shared the trousers and attended school on alternate days. If it sounds Dickensian, that is because it is. The young man overcame that and went on to university, which is a remarkable sign of resilience.

The people of Hackney are asking the Government: “What about us? How do we fit into the Government’s plans for the next five years?” How will Ministers help my constituents make their dreams come true and how will opportunity spread through society instead of being hoarded at the top? How will wealth, power and opportunity be enjoyed by all? We are asking the questions, but we will search in vain for answers as we consider this Queen’s Speech.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) spoke just now about the challenges of housing. Rather than repeating his points, I endorse what he said about the challenges he faces. There are many in Hackney too. More people rent social housing in Hackney than own or rent privately combined and more people rent privately than own their own home. Londoners are crying out for decent affordable housing. The average price of a home in Hackney is £606,000, but that masks the fact that a family house is now typically more than £1 million. House price inflation has sent prices rocketing and the effect is brutal. Young couples cannot afford to buy their first flat, let alone move up from the first flat to their first home. Unless they are millionaires, they might as well not bother.

In 2010, the Government proposed a constituency boundary review, which we note was not mentioned today in the Gracious Speech. According to the figures cited then, my constituency was one of the smallest in Britain. Today, it is one of the largest with a 40% rise since 2005 to 84,000 people on the electoral register. That is a sure sign that we need a radical house building programme to ease the pressure, particularly in London but also nationally.

The Government have done nothing to ease the pressure on the housing market. They have built a pitiful number of houses for affordable rent. The hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), who is not in his place at the moment, although I mentioned that I was going to say this, has sold the fire station in my area for £28 million, which can only mean luxury flats. That is a scandal and not only because the fire response time is now more than six minutes. If it had to be sold at all, why not for affordable local housing? The dividend for the taxpayer would have been much greater over time.

In Bishopsgate in Shoreditch, an area that has not had a single social housing unit built in 10 years, the part-time Mayor of London and part-time Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip is again on the drive for a 48-storey tower block with luxury flats. In contrast, Hackney council is one of the top councils in the country when it comes to building more affordable homes for rent. In its pipeline of 3,000 new homes, half will be for affordable rent—a laudable achievement—but not enough given the scale of the crisis. The word affordable has become meaningless. The new definition of 80% of local private rents has no connection with the money that shop workers, nurses or teachers earn. Without a strict definition of “affordable” based on real incomes and real prices, we cannot have a proper debate about how to put affordable roofs over people’s heads. We need urgent action, and I have not seen enough in this Queen’s Speech about how that will happen. Right to buy will not work in my area. Even if the discount meant that my constituents could afford a home—which would be unlikely because homes are so expensive—it would further denude the stock in London and reduce the opportunities for housing associations to develop.

The Gracious Speech also mentioned childcare. I welcome the move to provide 30 hours a week of childcare for three and four-year-olds free from 2017. It sounds good but the devil will be in the detail, because unless it is properly funded, it is unsustainable. I shall be watching that very closely.

The Gracious Speech mentioned job creation, and it is obvious to me that there is work to be done on that, both in helping young people reach the jobs on their doorstep and providing encouragement and support to the businesses that create those jobs. Although many of my constituents are poor, they have no poverty of ambition, but many of the jobs that the Government say they have been creating—the Prime Minister spoke today about creating 2 million more—have been in low-paid, part-time work. I think of Julie, in one of the local supermarkets. She came off jobseeker’s allowance and was very excited to get a job working 15 hours a week. She hoped that over time she would get more hours and work up to a full-time position. Two years on, she is seeing more part-time staff recruited in her supermarket—no chance of a full-time job for herself. She is just one of many people locally who have raised that issue with me—stuck having to claim in-work benefits but itching, desirous, to work more and earn more.

The Government have only unveiled around £6 billion-worth of cuts to welfare; they are pledged to make £12 billion. We need honesty very quickly from the Government about where that axe will fall, because my constituents are very scared. If they fall out of work, or cannot work as many hours as they want, what happens to them? We are seeing the rungs of the ladder of opportunity pulled away. For the poorest, opportunities to study are costing more, and many of them want to study and improve their skills. Parents, especially, who want to improve their life chances are frightened of getting into debt by taking out loans to go into further education.

This Gracious Speech is a missed opportunity for devolution of real powers from Whitehall. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) laid out a great manifesto. I hope that whoever becomes Mayor of London in May 2016 takes that up and challenges the Government to devolve to local level powers to make decisions on health matters, and the responsibilities for job creation that currently lie with the Department for Work and Pensions. Only that will really help my constituents, who are living in great need but have huge ambition to be part of the one nation that the Prime Minister has promised them. I will be challenging him not to let them down on his vision of a one nation Britain.