Meg Hillier
Main Page: Meg Hillier (Labour (Co-op) - Hackney South and Shoreditch)
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a shame that I have only eight minutes, because I could use all those eight minutes to rebut some of the views just espoused by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood).
If this was an “austerity is over” Budget, I invite the Chancellor to come to my constituency and see the challenges there, particularly with housing and homelessness, which I want to address. However, I must pause for a moment to touch on the views of the right hon. Member for Wokingham. The idea that we do not have to pay the £39 billion if we crash out of the EU is not the case. We have certain contractual obligations; I could go through them all in detail. In particular, there is the pension liability that we have for many of our own people who worked in Europe and have those pensions, and there are many other commitments that we have entered into. It was the Prime Minister— was it not?—who said that we are a country that pays what we owe, and we do owe money.
John Redwood
I do not think the hon. Lady understands. The bulk of the money is payments for another 21 months in the EU that we would not be making if we simply left.
Meg Hillier
It is about commitments that have already been made, and we have to pay our share of that as we were members at the time.
The Chancellor talked about this Budget being for strivers, grafters and carers, and he said that austerity was not driven by ideology. His own phrases demonstrate, as austerity has demonstrated every step of the way, a disconnect with the reality of people’s lives. He talked about 3.3 million more people being in jobs and the proportion of low-paid jobs being at its lowest. I wonder what measure that was based on, because very many of my constituents have low-paid and insecure jobs working on zero-hours contracts, which may have their place for certain people but not for those who are trying to pay the family bills and trying to pay the rent on time. In my constituency, we also have huge issues with housing, on which, as I say, I will go into in more detail.
The digital services tax is very interesting to me as the Member representing Shoreditch and all the tech businesses there, including some of the big players. This is only a consultation, of course. The big question, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) highlighted, is whether it will deliver a result. If it only levies up to £400 million, as I think the Chancellor said, it will not recover the tax that some of the big tech giants have avoided through their complex multinational tax arrangements. I will be watching this closely, not least to see whether those big players will cough up, but also to make sure that the growing start-up businesses in my constituency will be protected as the Chancellor has said. We need an ecosystem of tech businesses. We need those start-ups to start and grow in Britain so that they become the big employers and the responsible taxpayers of the future.
On local government funding, the £650 million in grant funding as a one-off is not good enough. We have had so much money taken out of local councils. Their real-terms spending on social care, for example, reduced by 5.3% between 2010 and 2017, while the number of over-85s rose by 28% between 2006 and 2016—a slightly longer period. The £20 billion for the NHS does not cover social care. It may make small contributions, but on its own it is not enough.
Since 2010-11, in my own borough, Hackney Council has had £130 million cut from its core grant funding from the Government. Dividing the £650 million by the number of local authorities in the country, Hackney will get a tiny amount, possibly for only one year, I think the Chancellor said—obviously, I have not had time to go through the Red Book. The cuts to Hackney so far are the equivalent of £471 per head—one of the largest cuts in England. In terms of spending power, Hackney will lose £1,425 per household between 2010 and 2020—the highest amount in the country—and we have £30 million more of cuts to find.
We are having big discussions about some budget cuts with Government, particularly for special educational needs, which Hackney Council has been cross-subsidising since 2011 from other parts of the budget. There is only so far that we can squeeze before the pips squeak, and the pips have been squeaking for some time now in Hackney.
I will not repeat what my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West said, but suffice it to say that the problems with universal credit were predicted, foreseeable and exacerbated by the £2 billion of cuts under the former Chancellor. The Public Accounts Committee has been looking at universal credit since 2012, and our voice was added to a chorus of concern. The Government just have to listen, but they are detached from the reality of people’s lives.
In the past, there has been broad cross-party consensus on universal credit. It is still not Labour policy to completely get rid of it; there would be a pause, a review and an assessment of what could be done to make it work, because it would be very difficult to unpick it now. If we want universal credit to work, we need a Government who are listening and understanding people’s needs. My hon. Friends have outlined the problems.
For my borough, housing and homelessness is the really big issue. In London as a whole, almost nine in 10 households believe that there is a housing crisis in the capital. In Hackney, a borough-wide survey in 2015 showed that housing affordability was the top concern for residents, and things have got worse since then. The average house price in Hackney South and Shoreditch is £530,000 as of March this year. Hackney now has 34,000 privately rented homes, which is around 30% of all homes in the borough—a proportion that has more than doubled in the past decade. Rents in the private sector are astronomically high and out of many people’s reach. Rising rents have meant that the average two-bedroom property now costs £1,820 a month in the private market, which is over £300 a month more than in 2011—and that is if people are lucky; many are more expensive than that.
The brutal reality is that, given the cap, housing benefit does not pay the rent on any three or four-bedroom property in my borough or in many boroughs. In London and the south-east in general, people will find it hard to pay their rent if they are relying on housing benefit. Let us be clear: the majority of people claiming housing benefit are in work, which puts the lie to what the Chancellor said about employment solving everything. Of course employment is important, but the jobs have to be decent enough to pay the wages.
A 2017 report by Shelter ranked Hackney 10th in a list of the 50 areas in the country with the highest levels of homelessness—something the Chancellor did not mention. According to that survey, one in 44 Hackney residents were either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation. This is a real issue. My surgeries are full of people who are desperate: women sent home from hospital with a baby and toddler to a hostel where they have been living for 18 months or two years. Four or five years ago, they were waiting only six months. Six months in a hostel was bad, but 18 months has a destroying effect on family life, the ability to work and the ability of children to study.
There has been a 300% rise in homelessness in Hackney since 2010, with 3,000 households now living in temporary accommodation. Hackney’s bill for temporary accommodation has gone up from £26 million in 2013-14 to £54.8 million—an increase of over 100%. That is money down the drain—money that is not helping people, but just keeping a vague, bare roof over their heads and nothing more.
My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West touched on education. It is important to highlight that we in Hackney have some of the best schools in the country. We heard that there will be a £400 million in-year bonus for some little extras—what a patronising way to provide money for our children’s education. That means £10,000 for a primary school and £50,000 for a secondary school on average, which is not even enough to pay for the teachers they are having to shed, not enough to make up the short weeks they are having to introduce and not enough to reintroduce the full curriculum that they have had to cut.
I have not even had a chance to get into the details of Brexit or the fact that policing is under such siege in our city and in my borough. Extraordinarily, for the first time in my 13 years as an MP and 25 years in elected office, I have had a stream of people coming to my surgeries saying that the police did not investigate something—not something they would normally come to an MP about. It is becoming a pattern, because we have lost a fifth of our officers in Hackney.
To finish on a positive point, I welcome the business rates relief, if the revaluation delivers what the Chancellor says it will. I have lobbied for that in the past. But on the rest, austerity is not over for my constituents—it is still biting hard—and the Government have got to get in tune with the lives of real people.
Sir David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)
I am delighted to participate in this debate and pleased to follow the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), although I do not share her take on the Budget.
The Treasury team have done a good job of putting together a Budget that is constructive, positive and forward looking. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has put forward an interesting Budget. It comes at an important time for our country, because on 29 March next year we will leave the European Union. We need him to be upbeat and confident about our future; I certainly am. I believe that Britain will thrive post Brexit. The dynamism and innovative people we have in our country should allow us a great future. I welcome the Chancellor’s upbeat analysis and believe passionately that the measures in the Budget will help us to make Britain a great country post Brexit. The Leader of the Opposition had nothing constructive to say, and nor did the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) for the Scottish nationalists, who gave us more of a rant than a policy discussion.
My constituents in Bexleyheath and Crayford are really keen that austerity should come to an end. It is coming to an end and they welcome the fact that—[Interruption.] It is no good those on the shadow Front Bench chuntering. They have no policies and no idea. They got us into this mess. If it was not for the mismanagement of the last Labour Government, we would not have had the years of austerity that we have had.
There has been careful fiscal management and the solid economic recovery proves that austerity is coming to an end. I welcome that. No one on the Opposition Benches has highlighted the fact that economic growth has been revised up, employment is up and growing all the time and wages are rising above inflation. That is positive economic news.
Meg Hillier
I cannot stay sat down when the right hon. Gentleman talks about wages rising, when rents are going up way higher than wage inflation, if it exists; it does not exist for many of my constituents.
Sir David Evennett
The hon. Lady did not listen. I said that incomes are going up ahead of inflation.