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.