Private Rented Sector

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the private rented sector.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I declare my interest as a landlady to private renters and I refer everyone here to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I know the whole House is focused on the coronavirus—rightfully so—and I think I speak on behalf of everyone here when I say that our thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones and those suffering the symptoms and having to self-isolate. I give a nod to everyone here, including our civil servants who have made the effort to come in. Things are quite scary, and I have just found out that my daughter’s nursery is closing, which is the scariest prospect for the children. I want to talk about how coronavirus will impact those who privately rent, especially those on a low income.

The crisis poses a serious threat to private renters. I wanted to bring this topic up because I do not want people to have to choose between whether they pay rent or self-isolate should they be faced with the symptoms in the months and weeks ahead. I am sure the Minister understands that we need to act now to protect tenants. A large number could be unfairly evicted, which could lead to homelessness if people start to fall behind in paying rent in one of the scariest and most dangerous periods of our history in this country. It is vital that we protect people in the private rented sector from homelessness and vital to insulate them financially to ensure that security of tenure is available to them if they feel they need to self-isolate and cannot go to work. I hope the Minister will seriously consider Labour’s Front Bench proposals on rent deferrals and a ban on evicting those who fall behind in their rent because of coronavirus.

A lot has been talked about coronavirus in terms of what happens if we get it, what we should do, and how we should self-isolate, but one thing missing, perhaps rightly, is what happens when we actually get the symptoms. The godmother of my children—Members need not worry; I have not been near her in weeks—got it and she told me the breath was taken away out of her. She was lying in bed and could not get up. She felt like a shadow of her former self. There was absolutely no way she could go to work, but she is in a situation where, even if she does not go to work, she will still get paid. She is one of the lucky ones because she can continue to live in her house, but that is not the case for all of us, which is why this debate is so important today.

It is not only working-age renters that coronavirus will impact. I have looked at the Office for National Statistics and found a few facts and figures that surprised me. The private rented sector is gradually becoming older as fewer families can afford to buy a home. According to Age UK, more than 700,000 over-60s privately rent in England, and the proportion of households headed by older renters has doubled in the past 15 years. In my constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, an estimated 937 over-60s are on housing benefit alone. Older renters are more likely than homeowners to have long-term health problems. I am sure other Members are aware from their advice surgeries that problems in the private rented sector are rife. We have probably all dealt with damp walls and other conditions that people live in. We have to ensure that older and more vulnerable renters are protected, which is why this debate is so important today.

We know that poorly maintained housing is rife in the private rented sector. As a democracy, as a Government and as a country, we need to start looking at it more and more, especially as we have been warned over and again that we are more likely to get the virus if we have an underlying health condition.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is making a passionate speech. The other day at the all-party group on housing and planning, it was pointed out that one in four adults in this country suffers from a diagnosable mental health condition, and one in five says that it is exacerbated by their housing. Does she agree that with this killer/death/invisible pandemic in our midst we should address mental health conditions, too, in the housing picture? Will she also pay tribute to our hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) and her Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, which the Government agreed to only after Grenfell?

[Tulip Siddiq]

I will pay tribute to our hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) shortly, but what my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) says is very important. I have not mentioned mental health in this speech, because it is already too long, as most people can see. However, every time I hold an advice surgery, 80% of my casework is based on housing. When I deal with housing casework, people say, “Well, I have asthma”, or this or that problem medically, and then, “As a result, I have had mental health problems,” so there is a clear link between the housing conditions that someone lives in and the mental health problems that they may develop. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and I hope that the Minister will address this topic.

More and more people are growing old in substandard rented accommodation, and that shines a light on the fact that, as a country, we do not take private renting seriously. Five million people in the UK live in the private rented sector, which is an enormous number, up from 2.8 million in 2007. The proportion of renting households in London, where my hon. Friend and I are MPs, is expected to grow to 40% of the total in five years’ time. Again, these are staggering figures, yet I feel that too often as politicians, and as a Government, we see renting as nothing more than a stepping stone to home ownership. While the aspiration to own a home is common among us, including many of my constituents, the obscene cost of housing, especially in London, puts this dream well out of reach for the hundreds of thousands of private renters who are living on the breadline and the 63% who say that they have no savings at all. We have to do more to tackle the problem facing private renters. The economic and social crisis that we face as a result of coronavirus is shining a light on how many low-income private renters’ lives are fragile, and it lends greater urgency—and maybe provides an opportunity—to address this and provide them with the security and safety that they need.

I want to talk a bit about my constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, because we have one of the largest proportions of people who live in private rented houses in the country—30% of my constituency privately rents. The more than doubling of the private rented sector over the last 20 years has meant that in the Borough of Camden, which I live in, that type of tenure is now only slightly smaller than the owner-occupied sector. Ahead of this debate, I emailed my constituents to ask them for their experiences and thoughts about it. I was overwhelmed by the number of people who emailed to talk about their experience and how important this issue was to them. Many made the point that privately renting is not a short-term solution for them. They will have to do it for the rest of their lives, and therefore, they feel very passionately that we as politicians should tackle the problems that come with it.

The No. 1 thing that came up over and over again is how unaffordable renting in London is. That came out loud and clear and I am sure that my hon. Friend—a London Member—will recognise that. Renters in Camden face the fourth highest rents in the whole country. The median monthly rent for a two-bedroom flat is over £2,000. That reflects the dramatic growth in rents that we have seen in the last decade, far outstripping any rise in earnings that my constituents may have had.

Housing and Planning

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

It used to be said that an Englishman’s home is his castle, but our suburbs are now changing. We have mixed communities. The targets that local authorities are under and the deregulation of planning means that castles in the air are springing up round our way, literally changing the physical form. It might have been called high-rise hell in a different age. London’s highest building is not in the square mile. It has just been approved by the Ealing planning committee and will be 55 storeys in North Acton. Because our capital is girdled by green belt, literally the only way is up. The sky is the limit. Tall buildings raise a range of questions on space standards and air quality. Post-Grenfell we have all heard horror stories of cladding and fire safety. Of the 551 buildings approved last year in London, 450 were residential, with 24 in Ealing, but that is dwarfed by 64 in Greenwich. Groups such as Stop the Towers argue that the new buildings are changing the low-rise, low-density nature of suburban Ealing, and the new developments all seem to come with youth-oriented marketing. One wonders how many more vibrant quarters Ealing can take, particularly as we have an ageing population everywhere. Demographically we know that very soon a majority of the population will be over 60, and people in social housing who come to my surgery want rehousing to the ground floor because of mobility issues. People in their suburban semis, their huge piles, want to sit on those because the new developments are too small to have the grandchildren round.

At the other end of the age scale, in North Acton there is a thing called the Collective, which involves co-living. The Telegraph describes it as the future of renting. There are huge communal spaces, brunches, daily speakers and live music, but tiny accommodation designed for celibacy. [Laughter.] It is not cheap. One has to be in work and able to afford £1,000 a month. So what is my solution? I urge the Minister to take seriously my proposal to have a suburban taskforce. We have crumbling infrastructure and older housing stock alongside hideous towers. He could take a multi-dimensional approach. His predecessor was very warm towards this, but, alas, he has been shuffled off the ministerial coil. May I have a meeting with the Minister? A whole bunch of us, including Conservative Members, want to take this forward to save our suburbs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

There is no doubt about it; there is this bias towards owning a home, and time and again we hear MPs, particularly on the Government side, talking about that ambition. These days, however, many people, even well-paid researchers in Parliament with a second income, cannot afford to do that, so we have to address homes for rent as well.

Currently, it feels that we have piecemeal development, with half a dozen flats built here and a few houses built there. That will never address what we need, and so we have longer and longer housing waiting lists, and people are being priced out of the private sector, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) has just mentioned.

One way in which we can show we are taking housing and planning seriously is by empowering local authorities to strengthen their planning departments. They really need more planning officers. I think that most planning officers now work in the private sector, popping up at all these appeals that are held across the country, and of course it is the developers who win out at the end of the day. However, councils do not just need resources; they also need the confidence and the guidance from Government in order to crack on with things.

[Dr Huq]

My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. Does he agree that conservation officers also seem to have been cut from every council, as well as design review panels, and that beauty is being sacrificed in this transactional way?

[Alex Cunningham]

It is not just happening in the planning sector; it is happening across local authorities. My own local authority in Stockton has lost more than half its budget since 2010, so there is a shortage of expertise across the piece in local government to hold developers and other organisations to account.

I back what the Royal Town Planning Institute has argued for, which is championing civic planning, and building strong and responsive local planning authorities. The RTPI has also recommended that central Government do more by providing grants for social housing, by providing stronger direction on suitable land for housing, and by sharing more of any land value uplift with the public and using that uplift in value to fund affordable housing. The ideas are there and the hon. Member for Harborough has helped the Minister immensely.

That said, I also value the hon. Gentleman’s contribution to the ongoing debate in Parliament about how we can move forward on housing in the best way possible, and I look forward to hearing more of what he has to say in the future. However, the bottom line, which is where I have just got to in my speech, is that it is up to the Government to be prepared to take the steps to make change happen.

Assisted Dying Law

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Christine Jardine]

I thank the hon. Lady for that point. That is something we would have to be aware of, but I believe it is up to us to address it. It is up to the lawmakers and the Government in this country to ensure that we increase our investment in palliative care as a choice. There is that word again: choice. Free will—the ability to choose.

Seven years ago, in another landmark, my belief in that was firmed up by a conversation following a newspaper article I had written. At the time, the late, irrepressible Margo MacDonald was guiding her second, ultimately unsuccessful bid to make assisted dying legal in Scotland through the Parliament at Holyrood. I originally met Margo while I was a young journalist, and her amazing personality and commitment had a huge impact on me. That did not have an impact on my politics, of course—we had very different views—but I recognised in her someone who lived their beliefs and their politics. I had spoken to her while I was writing the piece, and I visited her office afterwards. On this issue more than any other, she had a profound effect on me. It was several years ago now, but that conversation has stayed with me and made me determined to protect the right of the individual—my right; your right—to choose to have the dignity that we want in our final moments. Why should any of us, knowing that we are not going to survive, be forced to endure unnecessary pain?

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. I am pleased that she has not brought any legislation before us, because I found this issue very difficult when we last faced it, in 2015. I actively abstained by voting in both Lobbies, and I was told off by the then Speaker for doing so. I get her point that saying goodbye in an airport is not the best thing for people who choose to go to Switzerland, but at the same time I worry about safeguards. This could be exploited as a shortcut if NHS funds are not as we want. Does she agree, at least, that more research is needed? Nothing seems to have happened in Parliament since 2015. We need more evidence before we decide on this.

[Christine Jardine]

I take the hon. Lady’s point. That is the purpose of this debate. It is intended to get the ball rolling, look for the evidence, find out what people are afraid of, and consider the safeguards we need and how the law can be improved. We are not going to do that overnight. We certainly are not going to do it today, and I will not suggest any changes today, other than to say that we should look for the evidence and at what people want from the law.

Since this debate was publicised, I have been contacted—I am sure we all have—by a number of constituents. In some cases, they called for caution; in others, they expressed their opposition. However, in very many more, they expressed support. One in particular that I found moving came from a woman who was a palliative care nurse for more than 20 years, and who during that time witnessed numerous examples of the current assisted dying law failing dying people. One example she gave was of a gentleman with motor neurone disease who had a particularly undignified final few months of life. He was cared for at home at first before moving into a hospice, where he clearly expressed the wish that he wanted help to die. The staff had to explain to him and go over the reasons why they could not do that; it simply was not possible.

This gentleman’s motor neurone disease had affected him in such a way that his legs were still working, but he was not able to use the top half of his body. One day, he tried to throw himself down the stairs as a way of ending his life. Despite him fully admitting that he was trying to end his life, some of the staff understandably claimed that he had probably fallen, and that it was an accident. Perhaps they did not want to admit or acknowledge what he had tried to do, because of the position in which the law put everyone, but that gentleman did not get to express his distress about the way he would die or have it addressed as he wanted. I understand he lived for another two months or so before he died in a hospice. I am grateful to my constituent for sharing that story because it highlights the invidious position in which the current law puts everyone.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Monday 13th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Hall]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. He raises a really important point about the need for councils and police forces to work together. I commend the work that his Conservative police and crime commissioner is doing, and I highlight the Government’s commitment to recruit 20,000 police officers across our country, with 6,000 police officers being recruited in the next year.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

7. What plans the Government have to bring forward legislative proposals to reform leasehold property.

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Robert Jenrick)]

We are committed to reforming the leasehold market so that it is fairer for consumers and the abuses that we have seen in recent years are addressed. To achieve this, we have a comprehensive programme of reform, and we are moving forward with legislation, beginning with the Bill set out in the Queen’s Speech banning new leasehold houses and reducing ground rents on future leases to zero.

[Dr Huq]

The Secretary of State says he is committed to reform. Since 2015, I have come across countless cases of people trapped on iniquitous terms in relation to ground rent, cladding—you name it—and unable to extend without paying through the nose. In that same time, however, the Government have had seven consultations, and there is no concrete legislation about anything they are actually going to do. Can he tell us when he will end this feudal hangover, which is unique to England, once and for all?

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Lady is incorrect. The Queen’s Speech made it clear that we will be bringing forward legislation. We intend to publish a draft Bill shortly, which will take the first steps that I have just described. We are also awaiting the next report of the Law Commission. We have just received one on enfranchisement. It is a very important issue, and I certainly want to take forward its recommendations to ensure a simpler and fairer system. The next report of the Law Commission will be on commonhold. Again, we will be paying close attention to that. At our encouragement, the Competition and Markets Authority is now looking into the mis-selling of leaseholds, which is another important issue. Be under no illusion: we will be taking forward leasehold reform, and soon.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I do agree, and I am well aware of the housing opportunities that are being taken up in and around my hon. Friend’s constituency and the work that is going on there. He has made a powerful point. If we ensure that all types and tenures of housing are being developed, that housing will be delivered more quickly, and that is where the focus lies.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

14. The average full-time salary among my constituents is above national norms at £37,500, but that is still way off the house price that the Government class as affordable, at £450,000, and it is half the cost of the average sale achieved in W5 in the first quarter of the year, which was £905,348. One flat even changed hands for £3.5 million. What are the Government doing to relieve the pressures on young people specifically in London, where salaries and speculation are forcing out everyone but the children of the super-rich?

[James Brokenshire]

About £9 billion is being spent on the affordable homes programme, and half of that is going to London. I hope that the hon. Lady will join me in encouraging the Mayor of London to focus on the delivery of housing of all types for all people, and to ensure that there is that bright prospect in London as well as the rest of the country.

Definition of Islamophobia

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I will be brief, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) for whom, as he knows, I have the highest regard; we have worked on many things over some time. I disagree with him today, however, and the nature of a relationship —indeed, I would like to say friendship—is that we can do so with integrity. I hope he will agree that my disagreement is based on good faith—those were the words that he used—rather than anything else, and it is informed by conversations that I have had with others, whom I shall quote in a moment.

It is, of course, axiomatic that prejudice and bigotry levelled at a particular group on the basis of their race, religion or origin is wholly unacceptable, and those who apologise or are apologists for that have no place in this House. The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) —he is another friend of mine, in the personal rather than the parliamentary sense—knows of my support for him when he, quite rightly, boldly and bravely, raised the issue of Windrush. The Government were undoubtedly in the wrong; he was in the right; and his star rose as a result. But he did not do it for that reason; he did it in the cause of justice, and once again I congratulate him on so doing.

Let me start with a quotation that will not be to the taste of all Members:

“Most Muslims in this country see the preoccupation with Islamophobia, which is increasingly peddled by guilt-ridden white liberals and self-appointed Muslim campaigners, as far from being in their interests, an initiative that is likely to separate, segregate and stigmatise them and their families.”

That quote comes from a Muslim scholar, Professor Mohammed Abdel-Haq, with whom I had breakfast this morning. He is an example of how a first-generation immigrant, a practising and devout Muslim and, like many Muslims, a proud British patriot—the hon. Member for Ilford North made that point emphatically in his opening remarks when speaking about his constituents—sees the risks associated with something that is, to speak candidly, undoubtedly well intentioned and well motivated.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir John Hayes]

I just want to get into my flow, which I am not quite in yet, and then I will happily give way to the hon. Lady.

Professor Abdel-Haq and others see the risks in separating out Muslims and doing more harm than good by, in the words of Trevor Phillips, “making life harder” for them. Defining Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism, as stated by the APPG, will distort the argument rather than clarify it.

[Dr Huq]

My name is also Huq, so I felt I should take issue with the Haq quoted by the right hon. Gentleman—he is no relation of mine, and my name is spelt differently because when people came to this country the names were transliterated. May I give an example of not a scholar, but a Muslim in my constituency who does great community work? Aizad Hussain from Outreach Ealing will meet me this evening—I do not know whether other right hon. and hon. Members have been invited to an Iftar, since we are in the season of Ramadan—and he will present me with a petition signed by 400 people who are calling for greater protection for places of worship such as mosques. We have heard the stories about pigs’ heads—sadly, they are true; they are not just stories. People feel vulnerable, and the Government should be providing protection. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the existing fund is insufficient, even if he does not agree with the definition of Islamophobia?

Oral Answers to Questions

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

These are exactly the kinds of things that the code of practice will cover, and I will be delighted to receive representations from the hon. Lady as the code is developed.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

13. What recent assessment he has made of the effect on low-income families of changes in local government funding.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

The Government regularly publish analysis of the impact of changes in funding on households of different income. Next year’s local government settlement sees a real-terms increase in funding and beyond that there is a range of council tax support schemes to assist those with low incomes.

[Dr Huq]

Up until now, Ealing Council has ring-fenced child and youth services, but seven of its 13 libraries and 11 children’s centres are on a hit list for community management, which many see as the slippery slope to closure. The council says that it has been forced to do that because it only has 36p in every pound that it used to have. Will the Minister help to match up social enterprise buyers with these services, which help so many low-income families? Better still, when will the Government properly fund local authorities, as the age of austerity is meant to be over?

[Rishi Sunak]

Not to rehash the fact that local government will receive a real-terms increase in funding next year, it did not escape my attention that at Ealing there are non-ring-fenced reserves sitting at the council of more than £100 million.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Monday 10th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

The hon. Lady will know that one of the key elements of our social housing Green Paper was to break stigma, and I challenge very firmly to ensure that people in social housing are treated fairly and appropriately. She highlights the issue of sprinklers and is right that in relation to new builds, we have put firm requirements in place. We have said that if local councils require flexibilities to be able to assist with that and the management of those buildings, we will certainly consider that fairly, because our priority is to ensure that people living in high-rise blocks are safe.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

15. Whether his Department has received representations on local authority funding from the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

We took the opportunity to share our work with the special rapporteur and are considering his specific findings as they relate to the policy responsibilities of this Department.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

The 14 million that the UN identified as in poverty in our country are not just in the Hovis adverts of the industrial heartlands, but in leafy west London. How would the Minister advise Ealing Council to resource the five extra adult social care cases a week that come across its desk and the rising number of child social services cases, when it has had a 64% cut in its budget since the Government came to power?

[Rishi Sunak]

What I would say to Ealing Council is that it will shortly receive several million pounds extra to spend on its social care priorities. I would also point out that its reserves have increased in the last few years and are available for it to spend as it requires.

Grenfell Tower

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the commitments given by the Government that all survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 would be permanently rehoused within one year, that all other tower blocks with dangerous cladding would be made safe, that councils would get the funding needed to carry out remedial work and that there would be significant reform of the current system of building regulations; and calls on the Government to make good on those commitments, to lay a report before Parliament and to make an Oral Statement by 14 June 2018 setting out how it has met those commitments and discharged its wider duties in response to that national disaster.

I am conscious of the indication that you have given to the House, Mr Speaker.

Eleven months on from the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower, we remain shocked by those searing images on the night, by 72 lost lives, and by the charred black carcase of a building that still stands. Many Members in all parts of the House, Mr Speaker, were deeply moved again by the testimony of the survivors and families whom we met when you threw open Speaker’s House to Grenfell United last week. Our common commitments in the House remain absolute: to make certain that Grenfell residents have the help and the new homes that they need, to make certain that all who are culpable are held fully to account, and to make certain that any measures that are needed to ensure that such a disaster can never happen again are fully implemented.

This is a debate that we did not want to call and should not have had to call, but the House has to hear and debate what the Government are doing to honour those pledges to the Grenfell survivors and to residents in other high-rise blocks around the country. I welcome the £400 million that the Prime Minister announced during Question Time, moments before the start of the debate. Labour Members have argued for that from day one. Why on earth it has taken the Prime Minister 11 months to make such an important decision is beyond me, but I welcome it nevertheless. However, I defy anyone to say that they are satisfied when two in three of the Grenfell families are still living in hotels and temporary accommodation, when it has been confirmed that 304 other tower blocks across the country have the same suspect Grenfell-style cladding but only seven have had it removed and replaced, when more than 100 privately owned blocks have dangerous cladding and it is reported that none of it has been replaced so far, and when there may be other private blocks with suspect cladding that, 11 months on, have still not been tested.

The timing of this debate is therefore important. It is also important, in part, because we expect the Government’s Hackitt review of building regulations and fire safety to be published tomorrow. This is a chance for the Government to show their commitment to a complete overhaul of the failed system of building safety, and I will deal in a moment with the steps that Labour believes are necessary. Above all, however, it is a chance for the new Secretary of State to make good the other failings of his predecessor, and our motion calls on him to report to Parliament sometime before the anniversary of the fire on 14 June to explain exactly how the Government have done that.

Let me deal first with the rehousing of Grenfell residents. From day one, the Government backed Kensington and Chelsea Council to do the job. On 18 December last year, the then Secretary of State told the House:

“I am confident that the council is capable of that”.—[Official Report, 18 December 2017; Vol. 633, c. 773.]

The council promised residents:

“We are committed to rehousing you to permanent social housing within twelve months.”

However, 11 months on, only one in three of the families are living in a permanent new home. No one wants to bring up children in a hotel room, and residents tell us about the defects in the properties that they have been offered: properties with damp and leaks, properties without enough bedrooms, properties that are not properly furnished, and tenancy terms that are different from those that they had in the tower.

The Government could have stepped in—should have stepped in—at any point in the last 11 months, both to help to make the homes that were needed directly available and to send in commissioners to help to run the council when it was clearly failing. They could have acted at any point, but they did not. I hope that when the Secretary of State responds to the debate, he will not give the same answers that we have heard for 11 months, and I hope that he will act to accelerate the pace of help and rehousing for the Grenfell families.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

Constituents of mine observed that in the immediate aftermath, in the complete absence of any visible presence of representatives of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea or any sort of officialdom, it was people power—mosques, voluntary organisations and the like—that stepped into the void, along with, eventually, the London Borough of Ealing and SportActive, whose members you hosted in your rooms yesterday, Mr Speaker, and which runs the Westway sports and fitness centre. Does that not underline the need for better inter-agency and inter-borough partnerships should such a disaster ever befall us again?

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and to be fair to Ministers some of them, like me and other Members, were down in Kensington very soon after the fire, and were overwhelmed by the good will there and the response of the community and the volunteers who came from all parts of the country. But Ministers were also embarrassed, as they conceded, by how poor and slow Kensington and Chelsea was from day one. I pay tribute to other councils, particularly London borough councils, that have since sent in good people to help try to get that bad council to do the job properly.

Let me turn to other tower blocks, because there are 65 local authority areas around the country with at least one block that has failed the safety test, is non-compliant, is unsafe and is unlawful. Directly after the fire, on 17 June, the Prime Minister caught the mood of the country and promised:

“My Government will do whatever it takes to…keep our people safe.”

But 11 months on, when more than 300 other tower blocks have this same dangerous Grenfell-style cladding but just seven have had it removed and replaced, things are not working.

We have thousands of families living in homes with unsafe materials tacked to the side, thousands of people buying and renting homes in these tower blocks, and others trying to sell their flats and finding that they are worthless or that their landlord turns around to them as leaseholders and says, “You’ve got to pay all the costs.”

I say to the Secretary of State that when people’s lives are at risk, it is the Government’s clearcut duty to get all suspect buildings tested and all the work done to make them safe, but that is not happening. For 11 months Ministers have refused to ensure that private block owners, not residents or leaseholders, pay for the urgent work that must be done; they have refused to release the location, ownership, and safety testing status of other high-rise blocks so that residents know where they stand; they have refused to confirm what materials are safe, meaning that landlords who have taken off cladding do not know what to put back up; and they have refused—until today, under Labour pressure—to help fund vital safety work in social housing blocks. Even now they have refused to fund what we and fire chiefs say is necessary to ensure safety: the retrofitting of sprinklers in all high-risk high-rise blocks. Only Ministers can make that happen, and the new Secretary of State has the chance to act where his predecessor would not and make good on the Prime Minister’s pledge of 17 June.

Finally, let me turn to the Hackitt review of building regulations, which is due tomorrow and has already been briefed to many people, including the press it seems.

Building Safety

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

We have made it very clear that all local authorities, including Southwark Council, should determine for themselves the essential work required for fire safety—public safety is the No. 1 issue—and if they need financial flexibility to help them pay for it, that will not be turned down. We are in discussions with more than 40 local authorities, many in detail. We are working with them and I am not aware of us having turned down any discussions with a single local authority. We are happy to work with them all and make sure that they get the financial flexibility they need.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

As west London near neighbours, residents in the London borough of Ealing can see Grenfell—the charred coffin in the sky—from bits of my constituency. I passed by it yesterday. My constituent John Metcalfe attended the silent march last night and says that there were massive numbers and the sense of injustice was overwhelming. The Minister has repeatedly said that public safety is paramount. What is he doing to instil public confidence—I will not say “regain”, because I do not think it was ever there—in the inquiry and the aftermath?

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady is right to raise the issue of building more public confidence in the local community—not just the former residents of Grenfell Tower, but the immediate community. Much work has been done by the council, as well as by residents themselves, with Government support. For example, we have worked with and given support to Grenfell United, the group set up by victims of the tragedy. We will continue to do that, but I hope the hon. Lady will appreciate that it will take a long time—perhaps years—to build the right level of confidence. Part of that process is making sure that the community is listened to every step of the way and that it is treated respectfully. For example, I determined that it was very important that the bereaved were told last night the news that I have shared with the House today, so that they heard it in advance and did not hear about it first in Parliament. That is the way in which we continue to work with the community and help in every way we can.