Secure Tenancies (Victims of Domestic Abuse) Bill

Debate between Robert Syms and Toby Perkins

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins]

I welcome the audit, but the question is what happens afterwards. I would like this to be a statutory service with a responsibility on local authorities to provide it. Will there be any move by the Government towards that? Having the information is one thing, but the next thing is what the Government do with it.

On amendment 2, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) made an incredibly powerful point about the bedroom tax, describing the circumstances where domestic violence victims might lose their children and then find that they are moving into a small flat and are told by the family courts that they do not have appropriate accommodation to get their children back. I was not at all convinced by what the Minister said about why the amendment was not relevant. I urge my hon. Friend to press it to a vote, because we cannot talk about straining every sinew and still have a barrier of that kind in the way of domestic violence victims.

There is a broader need for us to recognise the threat to refuges that exists not only because of local authority funding cuts but because of proposed changes to housing benefit. We must look at the impact that that could have on refuge provision. I urge the Government, if they are serious about supporting domestic violence victims, to make every possible representation to the Department for Work and Pensions with regard to implementing those housing benefit changes. I support the Government on this important Bill. However, I urge Members to support all the amendments, particularly amendment 2, because they will add further powers to the Bill.

[Sir Robert Syms]

This is an important Bill. I think that we all heard the passion with which the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) spoke about this subject, which really underlined how important it is.

I have sat in this Parliament for a long time, and it has always struck me that short Bills, specifically to the point, are far more powerful in supporting people’s rights than the Bills that we sometimes see, with clause after clause. We know how complex housing issues are, and that is why guidance is the key. We put the right into primary legislation, and then we have the guidance to deal with the problems. Victims of domestic violence are often in a chaotic situation because of the nature of what is happening in the home. The best way of dealing with that is through guidance.

The Department consults very widely on guidance. A vast raft of housing charities and women’s rights charities can give their views, and then we have a Committee upstairs. I must admit that having Committees upstairs that simply note what has been discussed always seems slightly odd, but the consultation gives Members an opportunity to raise a lot of points. Indeed, if the Opposition want to pray against something, it sometimes comes to the Floor of the House for a vote. There are mechanisms for ensuring that the guidance is comprehensive and right and it was probably written by the same experts in the Department who were trying to deal with this difficult and complex problem under the Labour Government.

I have seen the passion that many Members have expressed on this subject, and I understand that because this is about people’s lives, but I also listened very carefully to the Minister. She talked about training; that is good. She talked about audit; that is good. She talked about various money pots; that is good. She talked about pilots, which means that the Department is open-minded about how we should go about solving some of these very important problems. Providing that the pilots and the audit are done properly, we can get a better service to those who face the real and great tragedy of domestic violence and the consequences that has for them, their children and the family.

I think that the Government are on the right track. I understand the passion that people feel about this. However, it is not about what is in the Bill; it is about what is in the guidance. There is a big debate to be had on that, but today we need to get on with supporting the Bill and getting it on to the statute book. I therefore support the Minister in resisting the amendments. Let us consult on the guidance, listen to what the experts want us to do, and have a listening Government who will try to ensure that we have a fit-for-purpose policy that will deal with people who are facing great misery at home because of this problem.

Living Standards

Debate between Robert Syms and Toby Perkins

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Syms]

Clearly, and another problem in the British economy is that there is a lot of private sector borrowing. We have a high level of indebtedness, both of government and of the private sector. In Italy, they save rather more than we do, and as a country we should try to encourage more of our citizens to save and not live on the never-never in the long term.

I support what the Chancellor did in the autumn statement. We are clearly in choppy weather, but that is no reason to change course. We cannot adjust the budget down or raise taxation painlessly. The living standards of most of the population will be squeezed. As the IFS and other organisations have said, living standards have fallen by about 7% over the past two to three years. The good news is that next year the projection is for things to be fairly flat, with some modest recovery after that. It may well be that when we get to 2015—the general election year—we have lower living standards than in 2010 as a consequence of the fact that we have inherited a major deficit, very difficult problems and a pretty rotten international environment. That is no reason for going off course, but it is a reason for sticking to a very sensible policy. Labour Members may think that we cannot do things without breaking eggs, but that is not so. We have to raise the tax burden and reduce spending, and I am afraid that that has consequences.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman said at the beginning that this would have happened under any Government. I congratulate him on his frankness, but the Chancellor is in complete denial about that—he wants to disown the fact that in 2007 and 2008 his policy was to follow Labour’s spending plans. The hon. Gentleman is right and his Chancellor is wrong, and I hope that he will try to get him to be a little more frank in future. No one disagrees about the need to reduce the deficit, but we are cutting more and more and yet the debt is going up way beyond what was predicted because the policy is not working.

[Mr Syms]

We have been in office for only 18 months. It will take six, seven or eight years to stabilise the debt and probably several more to start reducing debt as a proportion of GDP.

I have said some complimentary things about the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West. I rather suspect that had Labour won the general election in 2010 and Labour Members were sitting on the Treasury Bench, they would have a policy not dissimilar from that of the current Government. The seriousness of the problem is demonstrated by the fact that we are acting as a coalition Government. For all my political life, we fought the Liberal Democrats like ferrets in a sack, yet we have managed to find some degree of agreement because of the scale of the economic problems that we face.

The Government’s policy is sensible and measured in trying to do things gradually. That means that it will take a long time to implement, but we will ultimately get to a point where we have managed to reduce debt and get the economy into a much better state. In the short term, as I say, it is going to hurt, but I am afraid that that is a consequence of where we are. I see no other way around that. Tough decisions are necessary. I am glad that the Government—Conservative Ministers and even Liberal Democrat Ministers, to my surprise—have taken some pretty tough decisions. They are doing so for the national interest and for the interests of our children and our grandchildren.