Debate on the Address

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Tuesday 11th May 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Today we see a Queen’s Speech full of headlines. This Government are good at painting headlines, yet those headlines are often lacking when it comes to detail. I spend my time—privileged as I am to be Chair of the Public Accounts Committee—doing the maths. We have levelling up, but does that mean levelling down for cities such as mine, here in London, and an attack on the poorest there? We have promises of high-quality education in the Gracious Speech, while teachers are being laid off and children who are in touch with social services are more in need than ever before. Both those budgets are stretched to squeaking point.

We have a promise of more homes, but every housing programme that the Public Accounts Committee has looked at over the past six years or more has shown a lack of delivery, and a failure of that promise. The Gracious Speech mentions finances being returned to a sustainable path, but there is a sting in the tail because until we see the detail of how that will be paid for, none of the other promises can be guaranteed. I do the maths, and I will continue to do them. I will support bits of the Gracious Address. I will support any policy that benefits my constituents, but I will watch like a hawk the detail, the money and the delivery, because the delivery is what matters.

On fire safety, we need the new building safety regulator, and I welcome the fact that that is in the Gracious Address. However, as the Public Accounts Committee has highlighted, along with our sister Committee, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, we need skilled people to do the safety work. We are already four years on from the tragedy of Grenfell, yet there are not enough people to do the work, assess the need, and carry out remediation. The cost to leaseholders is extraordinary. It is damaging their futures, it is putting their lives on hold, and I concur completely with the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley): we must tackle this issue now. The Government need to step up, be more imaginative, and ensure that those homeowners who have sunk their life savings into their future and their homes are rescued. This is a generational failure in fire safety and regulation, and it must be tackled. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman and I are the beginnings of a campaign on that issue, so the Prime Minister had better watch out.

So we need more homes. Again, that is something I want to support, but will they be affordable? Rights for renters—yes, but that can come with a sting in the tail if not done well. It must be properly done. On homes and homelessness, in the past week alone I have been on the doorsteps of two women whose story I should tell. One is a victim of domestic violence, with the glass on her front door still broken. She is living in a one-bedroom flat, with her 13-year-old son still having to share her bed. Another woman, who I have met before said, “Now you are on my doorstep, see my big boys.” Her teenage sons came to the door. She lives in a one-bedroom flat with her two teenage sons and her husband. That is not unusual in my constituency.

It is a living tragedy that people go through their whole childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood, sometimes sharing a bed with a parent, and certainly living in severely overcrowded conditions. At any one time, we have more than 3,000 people in temporary accommodation—a number that has grown exponentially. The promise of new housing rings hollow to those people, and the Prime Minister needs to look at the reality of people’s lives, not just in some parts of the country but particularly in its expensive parts, such as the city where he was Mayor and where he believed that “affordable” housing was 80% of private rents—80% of £1,500 or more a month for a one-bedroom flat.

In my borough, a typical new two-bedroom property comes in at £750,000. If we take a generous view of house prices, the average house price is 17 times the average local salary. We must bear in mind that in my constituency there are some generous local salaries in the mix; the City workers will make that figure lower. The poorest—people in a good retail job or working as a nurse in a hospital—just cannot afford a new home. So renting is out of reach for many people; they need that good-quality, properly affordable housing in order to keep our city going. If levelling up means anything, it does not mean levelling down or keeping people in my constituency and in London squeezed into inappropriate and overcrowded accommodation, in order to build nice, identikit, three-bedroom houses with gardens elsewhere. Of course, I want everybody to have opportunity, but not at the expense of those in London.

I welcome some of the changes on leasehold reform. I declare an interest, in that I am a leaseholder and I live in a property with dangerous cladding—happily, my developer is removing it and paying for the whole thing, so I am one of the lucky ones. I welcome the ground rents reform, which is long overdue, but where is the wider leasehold reform? We need to see that. It is not mentioned in the Queen’s Speech, and I hope that is just because it is not in enough detail. I think I have made my point on unsafe cladding.

One of the great hopes, and a cross-party one, was that we would finally see some movement on social care, which we have been discussing for 30 years and more—we have seen multiple reports of that. Again, we see the headlines from the Government—the promise of something, at some time. It was a promise made in 2015 by a Conservative Prime Minister. It was a promise made by this Prime Minister in 2017, yet four years on and ticking, there is nothing to be seen. It is crucial that we start this now and that we reach across the Aisle and find cross-party consensus to tackle this, especially because of the shameful approach to social care and care homes in the pandemic, whereby people were exported from hospital with covid, spreading it rapidly through care homes. As the Public Accounts Committee said, they were thrown to the dogs. Let us also not forget domiciliary care; more of us will have care in the home than institutional care, and we need to make sure that is wrapped up in the mix as well. The PAC has a list of asks on this issue, which I commend to the Prime Minister.

I want to touch briefly on identity checking for elections. I was the passport and identity card Minister in the last Labour Government. We concluded then—and the Act of Parliament that set up the ID cards was very clear—that having an ID card would never be required to access a public service. Yet we see this Government proposing what seems to be a plethora of alternative paperwork that is costly and out of reach for, as I recall, about 10% of the population: passports, which are more than £90 each; and driving licences, which people cannot have unless they can learn to drive and have a car, or have the money to do that. They will need those in order to vote—to access a public service.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

On that subject, we have had the rules in place for some time; we have had ID cards, which the Northern Ireland Assembly brought in, with a small charge of £2 to £3. So there are ways of doing this that are suitable for people’s pockets. It has worked in Northern Ireland, and we should take that as an example.

[Meg Hillier]

The hon. Gentleman and I could have a completely separate conversation about ID cards, but I absolutely agree with what he says; I used to use that as an example of how it can be done affordably and well. But we have a disconnect in government on this issue. We have discussions about vaccine passports and talk about ID, but not ID cards. We have talk about vaccine passports by an app, but without ID. If vaccine passports are ever going to work, we need some form of verifying ID card. So it seems to me that the Government are arguing, counter to their 2010 position, for abolishing not just ID cards but fingerprints in passports, which took us way below the international standards on identity verification. We need to see a proper, coherent approach to this, not an approach that just stops the poorest from voting and cuts people out of exercising their basic democratic right, when the percentage of in-person fraud is minuscule. Yes, we could do more to tackle postal fraud and the harvesting of votes, but not this.

I want to touch on some of the environmental issues that are touched on in the Bill, although we do not yet know the detail. I am pleased that the Environment Bill is being carried over, but let us hope that we see more detail and more meaningful steps towards action on this issue. The Public Accounts Committee has spent some time over the last year looking at environmental and climate change issues, and we have found the Government wanting. They have been promising the Earth with big broad-brush headlines, but potentially really damaging the Earth through their inaction. There is no planet B, so we have to get it right now. Ambitious projects such as stopping production of petrol and diesel cars within nine years make great headlines, but there is a lot to be done in the nine years between now and then, and very little detail. So it is vital that that is got right, and I think that there is, or should be, cross-party consensus across the aisle that we need to tackle this generational issue for our planet.

On green jobs, again the Government make promises, but I have been looking at this for at least a decade. With COP26 on the way, we can expect a flurry of stage-managed headlines, but the detailed plans to achieve all these things are not there. Over the last decade or so, we have seen the privatisation of the UK Green Investment Bank, and even the removal of its absolute requirement to deliver green investment; we have seen the failed green deal, which cost over £100,000 per loan; and we have seen a fourth contest launch for carbon capture and storage, which would help to tackle some of our energy intensive industries. The first three fell at the first hurdle.

I want to touch on immigration. I proudly represent a constituency that is the world in one borough. We hear tough talk from the Home Secretary on this, and then we hear talk about how she is going to support the Windrush victims. We should be proud of our record of accepting people from the old empire, from the Commonwealth and from across the world when they are fleeing persecution to come to this country. We need to continue to support those people to find sanctuary where they are fleeing challenge, but we also need to better support those who are legally here but are unable to fully participate as citizens because of the barriers that are put up.

The cost and complications of our immigration system have gone through the roof. When I was elected 16 years ago, people had to apply for indefinite leave to remain. They then got five years and they could then apply for citizenship. It then went down to three years, so they had to apply twice to reach their five years for citizenship. They now have to apply three times, each time paying a fee. The Prime Minister talks about making Britain great again and about Britain having a big place in the world, so why is it that when someone comes from outside Britain to contribute to our country, we put these barriers in their way and make life difficult for them and, worse still, for their children?

I am proud to be working with We Belong and with my constituent, Chrisann Jarrett. This organisation represents young people who arrived in this country as toddlers or young children and who have now found that, because they are unable to pay these fees and their citizenship fee, they are excluded from university and often from the workplace. They are legitimately here in most cases, but they are being priced out. That is a crying shame and a stain on our country.

This Queen’s Speech has bits in it that I want to support, but I want to see the detail and I want to see delivery. I want to see movement on social care, on housing and on green jobs, of course, but on the basis of the last 11 years, we have seen failure after failure, promises made and not delivered and—crucially, from a public accounts point of view—lessons not learned and mistakes repeatedly made. Cheap headlines over substance just let people down. I will back what is good for my constituents, but on the basis of this Government’s record, and despite the Prime Minister talking about hope, change and opportunity, I am not very hopeful.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Before I call the next speaker, can I just ask for some self-discipline on the length of contributions, because I would like to get through the debate without putting a time limit on contributions later on?