Temporary Accommodation
Debate between Meg Hillier and Rushanara Ali(2 months ago)
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Rushanara Ali
The hon. Member has highlighted some really important issues affecting the private housing sector—costs and supply—and the impacts that they have in different areas. I will come on to the action we have already started taking to make headway on those issues.
As we have heard, homelessness and rough sleeping have dramatically increased. In England, homelessness is now at record levels. In March this year, more than 117,000 households, including over 150,000 children, were living in temporary accommodation. In the hon. Member for Eastbourne’s constituency, on 31 March, 373 households and 419 children were living in temporary accommodation. It is shocking that children and families in this country in the 21st century are without a permanent place to call home, and have to live in horrific conditions where temporary accommodation is not of a decent standard. We all know of cases where that is deeply problematic.
Dame Meg Hillier
I am very pleased that my hon. Friend is in this post, because she understands the real issues. We have this ridiculous situation where families in my constituency in east London are being sent to other parts of the country, putting pressure on the housing markets and causing issues there. This vicious circle is costing the taxpayer—and households, our schools and our communities—dear. I am sure that she is moving on to what solutions may be available, and she has our support in finding those.
Rushanara Ali
I am incredibly grateful, and my correspondence box is piling up with the mix of issues that my hon. Friend points to. We need to work collectively to tackle these issues, because unless we deal with them in the round, one area’s issues will be transferred to another, which I know is not the answer. We need to address those issues, but it will take some time for us to gather the evidence and work with Members to tackle barriers.
Building Safety and Resilience
Debate between Meg Hillier and Rushanara Ali(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Rushanara Ali
I thank my hon. Friend for his work on this matter. I served on the Communities and Local Government Committee under his chairmanship many years ago and learned a great deal from his work. The Government have committed up to £400 million in grant funding for the removal of Grenfell-style cladding in the social sector, and social housing landlords can apply for the grant schemes in particular circumstances, but we are working with regulators and the sector to ensure that social landlords assess the progress of remediation work. There is much to do, and I look forward to working closely with him on that and the wider agenda.
Since 2017, some progress has been made, including the Building Safety Act 2022, which Labour supported. But what is clear is that the speed of work to fix unsafe cladding is not fast enough. The recent fires in Dagenham and Slough underlined the vulnerabilities that persist in our built environment. Since coming into office, we have met regulators and other industry partners to press for action to make buildings safe. We are contacting all metro mayors in England to ask for their support in driving forward local remediation acceleration plans, working in partnership with regulators.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on her appointment, which, in trying to put right these wrongs, is to one of the toughest jobs in Government. I wish her all the best.
One of the things that would help is to improve the skills throughput in the construction industry. In my constituency, only one large block has had its cladding completely removed, and that started five years ago—it has taken that long to deal with it—so those that have had no work started are way behind. One big brake on that is skills in the construction industry. What are the Government doing to improve and enhance skills in that sector?
Rushanara Ali
I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention on this really important agenda. I will say more about the remediation action plan and our response. The Prime Minister committed to making sure that we respond to the recommendations of phase 2 within six months, and we will certainly be looking at those recommendations. The point she makes, which is very important, has been raised with me over the past few months. I am also familiar with those concerns as I raised them myself when we were in opposition.
I turn to enforcement action. Our message to building owners is clear: those who fail to make their buildings safe will face enforcement action. The funding is there: the Government have committed £5.1 billion to remove dangerous cladding, and industry is providing the rest. All blocks of residential flats above 11 metres now have access to a scheme to fix unsafe cladding. Qualifying leaseholders are protected by law from crippling bills for historical safety defects.
As the Prime Minister made clear in his speech in the House last week, we will take the necessary steps to speed this up. We are willing to force freeholders to assess their buildings and enter remediation schemes within set timetables, with a legal requirement to force action if that is what it takes to tackle industry intransigence. As I mentioned, we will set out further steps on remediation this autumn.
Rushanara Ali
The evidence shows that the risks tend to be in the high rise, and that has been the focus, but there are arrangements to ensure that lower-rise buildings with safety issues are addressed. We need to look at these issues in the round. It is important that we do not miss anything, but in the Department’s work so far, the bigger risks have been in the higher rise. I take the hon. Member’s point, and where there are issues with lower-rise buildings, we are very much willing to look at how we provide support.
Dame Meg Hillier
My hon. Friend is being generous in giving way to Members across the House. As she said earlier in her remarks and just touched on again, sometimes recalcitrant developers are really reluctant to pay and do not engage with residents. There is a danger that those residents will be left at the bottom of the heap as they compete for skills, products and so on. I am sure she is mindful of that, but is she able to give those residents any comfort about the pressure the Government can put on those recalcitrant developers, to help get on with the work and make them pay later?
Rushanara Ali
Having dealt with such cases in my own constituency, I am very aware of the challenges. The Prime Minister made it clear that if further action is needed we will take it, but we will use the existing laws and the powers we have to take action now. I assure my hon. Friend that officials are working closely with Members of Parliament to support them and their constituents, to ensure that action is taken. I hope that I can meet colleagues regularly to support them, with officials, to ensure that those who are intransigent do the work that they are required to do. We will take action, and we will work with Members to ensure they get the support they need.
In response to the recent fires in Slough and Dagenham, the Government are supporting local teams to assist those affected. Firefighters also attended a fire in my own borough—a high-rise building in Blackwall. I am very grateful to emergency workers for their bravery and quick response to those and other incidents. Following the fire in Dagenham, at a roundtable of regulators and partners the Deputy Prime Minister made clear that fixing unsafe buildings must happen faster.
Members across the House will share our resolve in wanting the findings of the Grenfell inquiry to be a catalyst for change. I want to assure the House that we will hold a further debate on the Grenfell inquiry report in the autumn, which I know many Members will want to contribute to. It will be an opportunity for them to share their insights, to discuss the specific recommendations that have been made and to work with us to bring about the change that is urgently needed. In the meantime, we will support the Metropolitan police and the Crown Prosecution Service as they complete their investigations and bring prosecutions.
This is about delivering justice and accountability, but it is also about treating everyone, regardless of where they live, with respect. In that spirit, we are listening to those affected. We are engaging with residents, local authorities, housing associations and others in the fire safety community to ensure that our policies and actions reflect the concerns of those affected. We are setting an expectation of industry to ensure that residents are listened to, protected and have peace of mind that action to make their homes safe is a matter of priority and taken seriously. Looking to the future, we will ensure that the security, health and wellbeing of residents and their wider communities will drive our mission to build 1.5 million new homes over this Parliament.
We will never forget the Grenfell Tower tragedy on that night in June 2017. Over the past seven years, the bereaved, survivors and the immediate Grenfell community have campaigned relentlessly to protect their fellow citizens, despite their personal loss and pain. As the Prime Minister said, in the memory of Grenfell we will change our country and we will bring the full power of Government to bear on this task, because that is the responsibility of service and the duty we owe to the memory of every single one of the 72 lives lost.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Meg Hillier and Rushanara Ali(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Rushanara Ali
I know the hon. Gentleman did a great deal of work on this agenda in the last Parliament. This week, more than seven years after the Grenfell tragedy, the community will receive the public inquiry’s final report, and I hope its findings will help to provide the truth that the bereaved and survivors deserve. The Dagenham fire, to which the hon. Gentleman refers, must have had a traumatic impact on those people, as well as on the affected residents.
Today we have published a written ministerial statement setting out our actions in relation to the outstanding phase 1 recommendations of the Grenfell inquiry, and further work is under way to ensure that we can accelerate the work to make buildings safe. I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman on this agenda.
Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Hundreds of my constituents live in leasehold properties with problems. I should declare for the register that I live in a leasehold property, although my developer funded the full cost of cladding removal. There is still a very long wait for those who are not yet in the queue, and one brake on delivery is the lack of skilled people in the construction industry. What work is my hon. Friend doing with other Departments to make sure that we develop the skills we need? Seven years after Grenfell, we still see some buildings where work has not started, so we do need to put our foot on the accelerator.
Rushanara Ali
This is a very important area and we are absolutely committed to increasing the skills and competence within the sector. The industry has actively responded to Dame Judith Hackitt’s challenge, but there remains significant work to be done to upskill industry members and prepare for the new regime. The Department and the Building Safety Regulator will support industry as they identify skills and capacity gaps, provide relevant training and set up accredited competence schemes. I look forward to working with colleagues who will all have an interest in speeding up remediation work and improving capacity in the sector.
Energy Price Cap: Residential Buildings with Communal Heating Systems
Debate between Meg Hillier and Rushanara Ali(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Dame Meg Hillier
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. When I get to my asks of the Government, I shall be very clear, as the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Lady have highlighted, that the issue has been raised in the House before—indeed, it has been raised since 2018. I will get on to the timeline, and my question to the Government is this: we know about this, so why is it taking so long to resolve it?
The key issue is quite a simple definitional issue: the energy price cap sets a price limit on domestic supplies of electricity and gas, but not on domestic supplies of heat. So developments of the type that my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) referred to will often have wood-chip burners or an equivalent in the basement, or some other source of supply, and they provide heat to the home, but it is purchased for the building and then sold on to an individual. Ofgem, as we know, regulates the supply of gas and electricity but not, at present, the supply of heat. That means that while the supply of gas to a heat network is regulated, the supply of heat from the heat network to homes is not, because Ofgem classifies supplying heat to a heat network as a commercial arrangement, not domestic. But let us be clear: the end user of this is someone living in a home—a flat, an apartment—who benefits from the communal heating system, often arranged for good reason, sometimes in an attempt to provide green energy, but it has actually left individual residents, whether they are homeowners or tenants, in the lurch.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
I want to cite an example. There are many such cases in my constituency. A junior doctor who wrote to me said that her heating price went up by a staggering 400% and every day she has to pay an additional £7 a day. She wrote to me in the winter, in December, because of this policy, and up to half a million people are affected. This is not a difficult thing for the Government to address—to make sure that the regulator can encompass heating in this form so that they are protected—so I hope the Minister will address it and will have some good news for us today.
Dame Meg Hillier
My hon. Friend highlights another important point, which has been mentioned by other hon. Members—that of course the individual, the resident, gets a bill that is directly related to their property, to their energy use, so it is very personal, yet that is seen as a commercial supply and clearly it is not; it is about someone living in their home.
One of my constituents, based in the East Wick and Sweetwater development, has their heat supplied via a heating network from East London Energy. From April, this month, East London Energy is increasing its usage fee by 103%, and other Londoners on heat networks are reported to see price increases of over 700% in the worst cases.
The National Housing Federation, which has a lot of these properties in a portfolio of housing associations generally but represents housing associations at a national level, says that around 150,000 of the people affected are housing association residents. These are people on lower income, of course, but we also know that there is a strong correlation particularly between new tenants of social housing and the ability of a household to pay.
Peabody, a large landlord in my constituency—obviously it is also a housing association—has 172 operational heat networks across its whole portfolio, and it says that in general the price of energy has increased by over 300% since April 2021. Peabody has managed to mitigate up to a point by buying multi-year deals from its supplier. However, that is not universal and clearly it does not always help, because it depends at what point in the market the energy is bought. There are 32 of Peabody’s operational heat networks that cover over 100 homes each, so these are quite large scale. Someone could live in a development next door to a person in another development; one could benefit from the energy price cap while the other, by accident of housing allocation, bought a property with a communal heat network, not realising what the consequences would be. We would not have predicted that the energy prices would have increased so much. Nevertheless, that is the problem now.
What has been happening? In 2018 the Competition and Markets Authority conducted a study that concluded that the market should be regulated. Here we are in 2022, with energy bills having gone up in April and going up again in October—considerably. In December of last year the Government, as part of their response to the heat network’s market framework consultation, published proposals to regulate the heat network sector. It is a welcome move but it has taken a long while to get there. I am sure that the Minister is aware how pressingly urgent that is for people, particularly those on low incomes who are crippled by the extra costs they are having to pay.
The Government tell us that they are committed to introducing legislation in this Parliament, so it would be helpful if the Minister could indicate when that might be—he will get my wholehearted support if it is in the Queen’s Speech. He might get a quick win; he can sell it to the business managers in Government as something that he can get through quickly with little opposition, if he does it well. The Government also intend to appoint Ofgem as the heat network’s regulator, and they have already highlighted that Citizens Advice could be the consumer advocacy body. A lot of pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to come together, but we need to know when it is going to happen.
I am not alone in asking for regulation: the Heat Trust has called for it to happen; the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, as part of a recent report on decarbonising energy, called for heat networks to be regulated; and crucially, it is in Ofgem’s forward programme for 2022-23. It could stretch out for quite a long time to come, but that is not fast enough for those residents who are sorely affected.
The Government need to make faster progress. In the meantime, there are a couple of things they might consider. I would be interested to know whether the Minister has considered these things, given that the Government have professed their desire to support households and insulate them against energy bills. The National Housing Federation has called on the Government to provide targeted financial support for housing associations—the 150,000 residents I mentioned earlier—that covers the expected rise in energy bills. We have had a rise in April, but there is an expected rise coming in October as well. It would be for those who are not protected by the energy price cap, to create a level playing field for residents of the same landlord who often have very different energy bills. It could be a dedicated hardship fund; there is precedent for that during the covid pandemic, when local authorities managed similar funds. Although the Public Accounts Committee has not looked into it in full, those funds had quite good assurance procedures to ensure that the money was targeted. I think some has even been returned to the Treasury—not for energy, but for other hardship. There are also existing schemes that could be extended.
All individuals have a bill that comes, so there is an easy way of attaching the cost to the household to the household’s name. There must be a creative way that the Government could look at as a stopgap while the more detailed work is done. That also highlights the constant need, which I want to reiterate again, for insulating and retrofitting homes, because some of those heat networks are in quite old buildings and it is a real issue.
All of those solutions we would like to see instantly, of course, but my simple ask for the Minister today is that some of the most vulnerable customers need support right now. Someone like me can manage. It is the people who really cannot, and who are going to have to choose between eating and heating—the extra £7 per day highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali)—that are the real concern. I hope the Minister can give us assurance not only that this is being looked at, but that we are going to get action sooner rather than later.
Flammable Cladding Removal
Debate between Meg Hillier and Rushanara Ali(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
It is beyond belief that it has been three years since that terrible night at Grenfell Tower. I want to begin by paying my respects to those who lost their lives, and we will remember them today in this debate. We are also incredibly grateful to their family members, their neighbours and the survivors for campaigning, despite all they went through, for the safety of properties that are clad with dangerous aluminium composite material and also of other properties that are a risk.
There are still an estimated 60,000 people living in homes with similar ACM cladding on the outside of their buildings, and many more living in buildings that are dangerous. According to the Fire Brigades Union, some 500,000 people are at risk from living in unsafe housing across the UK. Each night, they are going to bed, knowing that, if their building caught fire, it would spread quickly because of the flammable cladding, and they know, too, that their chances of survival are seriously lessened in that context. They know that progress to remove that cladding has been slow and has slowed further because of the pandemic. I have called for this debate because I think that it is vital that Ministers step up and make sure that the cladding and other dangerous materials on those blocks are removed as a matter of urgency.
It took a year for the Government to agree to fund the removal of ACM cladding in high-rise social housing blocks and then two years for private blocks and three years for others commitments to be made. That happened because of the actions of campaign groups such as Grenfell United, the UK Cladding Action Group and Inside Housing, as well as Members of Parliament and charities and housing organisations. It is not good enough that the Government have been forced kicking and screaming into doing these things, rather than taking responsibility, as was promised at the time of the fire. Although £1.6 billion of Government funding is welcome, they estimate themselves that between £3 billion and £3.5 billion is required to make all buildings safe.
Residents feel like prisoners in their homes. They cannot sell or remortgage their flats, and the external wall fire review and EWS1 form process is not sufficient, is costly and takes too long. They are trapped.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend raises an important point about the paperwork needed. Even many residents who live in homes that are not as unsafe as some others find that without that form they are unable to sell. One of the things the Public Accounts Committee picked up on in our recent hearing was that being unable to get professional indemnity insurance is a major brake. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to step in on this issue?
Rushanara Ali
Yes, absolutely, and I hope that the Minister will, along with his Treasury colleagues, look at this very quickly to resolve the matter, because it affects people who are trying to sell homes, as I have seen in my constituency.