Debate on the Address

Debate between Meg Hillier and John Redwood

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Does the hon. Member not understand that this Gracious Speech is all about levelling up and giving people more opportunity, and that there needs to be a surge of private investment into these places, with better-paid jobs, better skills training and better education? That is the whole point of it. Will she support that?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

Well, if that is the whole point of it, forgive me, but I cannot see that. I have the privilege of chairing the Public Accounts Committee, in which we have looked at the towns fund and the levelling-up approach, and it is a chaotic policy. It is a headline without proper detail and analysis of how to deliver it. Outside London, only the Bristol area has seen economic growth. This has been a challenge for every Government over many decades now, but the idea that headlines saying it is going to happen mean it will actually be delivered is just for the birds.

We see the huge increase in private renters, yet there is no real support for them. Where is the security if people cannot afford to buy their own home and cannot qualify for social rented housing? In my constituency, that is in massively short supply in any case, with hundreds—thousands—of families living in massively overcrowded conditions. We have all been on the doorsteps a lot in the last week and it is always a privilege to meet constituents, but when I keep meeting constituents who I knew when their children were toddlers, and whose children, who are now young adults, are still sharing the bedroom—two or three of them—while their parents live in the living room, it is not good enough.

There is no hope for those people, because the Government’s proposed Bills will do nothing to enable councils to build that important social rented housing, to give better rights to renters or to provide a proper stepladder for people to purchase their own home. Every policy so far has fuelled the equity of those who already own their home, rather than giving a real leg-up to wannabe first-time buyers in constituencies such as mine, where—I have said this repeatedly in this House, but I repeat it again—a modern two-bedroom flat will be on the market for about £750,000. That is just for a two-bedroom leasehold flat.

As of June last year, the median house price in my constituency was £600,000, but in many parts of it I would struggle to find a property for that price. That is a huge increase—9.1% over the past five years. A house in Hackney costs more than 16 times the average Hackney salary. Hackney has a range of salaries, but there are a lot of people at the poorer end. One in 35 people in my constituency are officially recorded as being homeless or in temporary accommodation. That does not include those who are overcrowded because there is no space for them, or those with no recourse to public funds who cannot possibly afford to rent privately even though they are working. They could certainly never buy a property and, as we know, rents are very high. We need much better support, and there is no real solution in the Queen’s Speech.

Crucially, we need real support for a lost generation. Many people have been badly affected by covid, but I worry particularly about our children who have lost out on two years of education. Hats off to the teachers and schools that kept educating them, but for many children, however well the school did, if they did not have the technology at home and were clustered around one computer and a mobile phone with poor data, that would never be the same as a classroom experience. Schools did the best they could, and many did a very good job, but there is a challenge for children who lost out on education, and who, under the Government’s proposals, will go through the system without catching up.

I look forward to seeing what is in the Government’s Bill, but I have been talking to schools in my constituency about the cost of their energy bills, which is just one recent crisis. The cost increase on their energy bills means a choice between heating the school and keeping a teacher. It is either having our children freeze in a classroom but being taught by a teacher, or a warm school where children can concentrate on learning but they lose that crucial classroom teacher. That is the stark reality. I am happy to share with anybody in government the figures from schools that have provided them to me, and perhaps we could work together for a solution. It is vital that we pay the cost of catch-up. It is taxpayers’ money well spent to invest in the generation that will be the engine and the entrepreneurs of our future. My constituency may be poor, but there is no poverty of aspiration, and unless we give those children a leg-up and catch-up now, they will not get the advantages they should have.

We have seen the complete failure of the tutoring scheme, which the cross-party Public Accounts Committee highlighted as a concern early on. We said, “Where are these tutors who will go in and tutor?”, and of course that contract has been axed. We still need a lot of support. According to teachers in my constituency, children in years 7 and 8 are having to be taught how to do decent handwriting because they missed those crucial years at primary school. In some areas, pupils in years 7 and 8 are losing out because the qualified teachers are focused on the exam years. We all want our children to succeed, and the Government need to ensure that school funding is properly resolved. That funding has fallen in real terms per pupil by 1.2% for the most deprived fifth of schools, but has increased by nearly 3% for the least deprived fifth of schools. Is that levelling up? It does not look like it to me. The Prime Minister purports to be an intelligent man, and I am sure he can do the maths and work out that that means an awful lot of children are losing out.

I was pleased that the victims Bill is finally—finally!—perhaps going to appear. It has only been in three manifestos and four Queen’s Speeches. This is a crucial problem. My Committee has looked at the backlog in the criminal courts, and there are many factors behind that, some of which cannot be resolved through legislation. The sheer grind of day-to-day delivery and the governance of decent public services seems alien to the Prime Minister and his Front Bench. That aside, we need the victims Bill to support victims better. For example, a woman in my constituency was violently attacked by her partner in front of her seven-year-old daughter. She went to the police. The court case was set for two years after that violent attack, and it is no surprise that her partner has repeatedly broken his non-molestation order because he feels that he can get away with it scot-free. That is happening to victims of domestic abuse up and down the country. She has said to me, “I just want to move. I want shot of this. I don’t want to be reliving this, nor do I want my daughter to relive this over the next two years.” If the victims Bill is to mean anything on domestic violence, it needs decent options on alternative housing for victims, because so often that is the break that those people need, but they cannot get it. In my constituency, with such a shortage of housing, that is a huge and ongoing issue.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Meg Hillier and John Redwood

Monday 29th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[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.

Housing Supply

Debate between Meg Hillier and John Redwood

Thursday 13th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[John Redwood]

I entirely agree, and I mentioned security for families at the beginning. That is a point well made.

We need to ask what we can do. House prices in many parts of the country, most especially in London and the south-east, are extremely high, and it is very difficult even for someone on average earnings, let alone below-average earnings, to raise a sufficiently large deposit, meet the requirements to raise the loan and meet the interest payments on it. One driver of these very high house prices is undoubtedly the big imbalance between demand and supply in housing. I know the Government accept that and are trying to work on the supply side. If more houses can be produced, all other things beings equal, that should help ease the house price pressures.

There is also the question of demand. I think all of us wish to be generous to refugees and to invite in people of talent who can make a good contribution to our community. There is everything to be said for allowing companies investing here to bring in their executives and so forth, but Government Members feel there has to be some control on overall numbers. When we are being generous, as we should be, we have to take into account the strains being put on the housing market, which may mean that the people coming here cannot get the quality and price of housing that we would regard as important for the lifestyles we wish for all the people in our country.

We need to look at the number of people who need housing vis-à-vis migration, as well as supply. I know the Government are considering that and will be freer on it in due course, once we come to debate in the House of Commons a UK migration policy that meets demands for decency and labour mobility for business, but that also understands the stresses placed on housing and other services if we have very large numbers. Those stresses run the risk of us not being able to offer people the standards we think are appropriate for anyone settled here in our country.

The Government have attempted to tackle the housing problem by driving the construction of more homes and to tackle the issue of affordability by working particularly with first-time buyers on how to get the first deposit and raise sufficient money to buy what are expensive properties. I welcome the Government’s initiatives. They are all well-intended, and some have been doing good things. My main purpose today is to raise two questions. Can the initiatives that already exist be beefed up and better advertised, so that we get more people to use them? It is still slower than we would like. Secondly, are there new initiatives we should add to them, given the general imperative to get on with solving the housing scarcity problem in general and the shortage of affordable housing to buy in particular?

Through the help to buy ISA, the Government are offering a £3,000 top-up to someone who can save £12,000 for a deposit on a house. Although £15,000 is a lot of money for someone on a low income who is trying to save, it is not a lot of money for a house deposit. I wonder whether, through the Minister, the Chancellor might think a little more about those figures. The more help that can be offered, the faster someone can get a deposit and the better that is for their ability to access the housing market.

The Help to Buy equity loan scheme is admirable, but it is limited to new homes only, and I wonder why. Most people buy a second-hand home. By definition, the stock of those homes is massively bigger than the new supply in any given year. I know it would be a lot more expensive if we opened up the scheme to a wider range of houses, but it would also be a lot more useful, because many people buy a second-hand home as their first home. Indeed, for some, the pleasure of buying a first home is in buying a second-hand home that is not in great shape, so that they can put their stamp on it. It may be a way to have a more affordable home, because they may wish to spend their own time and effort on improving the house, rather than spending money to get others in to improve it for them. It might be worth looking at whether we can provide more of a bridge for people who want to buy second-hand homes.

The affordable housing fund was set up to generate more construction of affordable housing. Again, that is a great initiative. I would like the Minister to give us more up-to-date information on how many homes that scheme might achieve and what the approved build rate under it is. One issue with the affordable housing fund is the cost of building the properties and the quality of their construction. I am all in favour of really good-quality construction, and modern homes are built to a much higher standard in many ways than older homes. However, one way to match the need for higher quality and affordable cost may well be to build on the initiatives of the house building industry, by having more construction in the factory before things are brought to site. None of us wish to recreate the old prefabs. They were a necessary and welcome development in the immediate post-war crisis, when so much of our cities had been devastated by bombing, but they are not the kind of thing we want to build today. People want elegant, well-insulated homes that meet all modern standards.

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

The right hon. Gentleman talks about prefabs and the old style. In my constituency the Peabody housing trust developed as a millennium product pre-built buildings on Murray Grove. People are still living there now, and very happily so. There is a modern way of developing that could be cheaper. Does he think the Government should consider that?

[John Redwood]

I agree. There is not a public-private sector divide, in my view; it is something the private sector is beginning to adopt and needs to look at just as much as the public sector. If done well, it can improve the quality. Indeed, some of the most expensive properties that individuals can buy are modular German or Swedish houses, which are imported in kit form and put up in a week or two on a suitable piece of concrete, on a nice plot of land, at quite a high price, with extremely elegant finishes.

The reason we can both drive quality up and drive cost down is that in the factory environment we can engineer and produce the larger parts of the house to high specifications and low tolerances, so that they are very accurate. When the houses are then on site, they are in good order and we do not need all the site labour. We do not have problems when it rains, because it is all being done in a controlled environment, where dust and dirt can be controlled and there are not the wrong wet or dry conditions. We can have perfect conditions for manufacturing to a high quality. The more we can achieve in the factory, and the less we have to do on site, the more we speed up the build time. Months can be taken out of the build time, and if we take out time, we take out cost.

I hope that more can be done. Persimmon, for example, is producing very high-quality homes for private sector buyers. Its Space4 factory does quite a lot of prefabrication work for a number of homes in its range. I hope there will be more initiatives. I mention that to the Government because, through their affordable housing fund, they have the money and they are the customer, as well as the final customer for the property. They can therefore use that intelligently, as a buyer, to drive the process in the way I have suggested, so that we get quality up and cost down—a double benefit.

The Government have a rent to buy scheme. I would like to hear more about that and whether it can be made more generous. The idea is lower rent when someone takes on the tenancy, to give them more scope to save for a deposit. They then have the right to move in and switch from renting to buying. That is an excellent idea.

I think that the Government could do more on their own estate and on brownfields in general. That is partly a planning issue and partly an investment or encouragement issue. By Government, I mean local as well as national, because the two need to work in partnership, which often requires national Government to lead the way. A large number of properties, particularly in our towns and cities, are in use but are in decline, or the buildings may be empty because their use has terminated. Given the pace of change in retail, there will be redundant retail space, and given the pace of change in office employment and some industrial employment, there will be redundant older buildings. Older warehouses and industrial plants have been elegantly converted into homes, for example in docklands. When those buildings are down on their luck or become free, we must ensure that the public sector does all it can to make permits and proposals available so that people can transform them.

Perhaps the Government could look at a scheme to back individuals who want to transform a property of their own—a sort of modern homesteading scheme for which they can be given support if they want to take on a poor property—or if a group of people want to take on a larger property and convert it. We could have more action to deal with dereliction, which is often close to valuable real estate in some of our leading cities, but we need to back that with an initiative. It should not always be large companies that eventually get around to doing that and taking all the property; there may be an opportunity for individuals, smaller businesses, co-operative arrangements or whatever to take on property problems and turn them into opportunities.

On brownfield sites and in urban redevelopment there is generally scope for central and local government to have a bigger vision—some are good at that, but some are rather slow—and to use it to identify suitable sites for more affordable housing for sale.