Strengthening Standards in Public Life

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Commons Chamber

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that this latest inconsistency, along with the eastern leg of HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail, no rise in national insurance, no border down the Irish sea, oven-ready deals and the 0.7% commitment to overseas aid, shows that the Government must be wearing out their clutch and gearstick with the amount of U-turns they make—making us all dizzy?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. Let us make it straight from the beginning. This is quite a wide motion, but it is on a particular subject. This is not a free-for-all for general criticism on any matter. An awful lot of Members want to speak today, and I will insist that everybody speaks to the motion, that we do not have long interventions and that interventions must be to the point.

Preserving Heritage and Statues in Cities

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

It is not the first time.

[Dr Huq]

No, it is the latest of many for the hon. Gentleman. This shows that I do not come up in the draw very often. He makes a good point, and I would say that we should not remove such statues, but contextualise them. Busts and statues are maybe not what people would use to memorialise today. They do seem a bit so last century, or even the century before. I know that Mrs Thatcher, God rest her soul, did not like the statue out there, so they are not for everyone, but we should keep them because they are part of history and they need to be put in proper context.

Statues are perhaps less common now because, with the passage of time, we see what reputational damage can occur to individuals. Take Winnie Mandela or Cyril Smith or Prince Andrew or Jimmy Savile—we might have made statues of any of those individuals only for them to turn out to be not what they seemed.

I understand that the Bristolians resorted to direct action because all the official channels failed, even though they had been trying for years. The Minister will recognise that all local authorities have much more complex and overflowing “in-trays from hell” in their inboxes nowadays, so statue reappraisal is probably not top of the list of things for councils to do. For example, pandemic management is an unforeseeable that has occurred in the past 15 months, although many councils are now reassessing. The London Borough of Ealing is doing that. I say fine, so long as it is not a distraction from real reform. To be fair, demolishing racism is going to be a lot harder than deracinating statues.

It is kind of simplistic to divide the world into heroes and villains because all complex characters, such as Churchill, had good and bad sides. History needs to be taught warts and all. We should not be blinded by hagiography, so we should teach, “We will fight them on the beaches,” and “their finest hour”, but also the Bengal famine and Tonypandy, rather than abridge or airbrush out one side.

I tend to feel that, recently, an atmosphere of hysteria prevails instead. An MP from the other side of the House held a similar debate to this in March, and it started with the alarmist claim, “Britain is under attack.” That was all because the London Mayor launched a statues commission to reassess past and present, as well as future, effigies. It does sometimes feel—I hope the Minister will allay my fears and put my mind at rest—that a confected culture war is being waged. Other elements include BBC bashing, obsessing about the Union Jack and how big it is in a Zoom call, laying into Meghan Markle and laying into taking the knee. Sometimes some of these straw men or bogeymen or targets are imaginary, including the banning of “Rule Britannia” at the last night of the Proms, which apparently was never a consideration by the corporation.

The edict that the Union flag should fly from all official buildings feels a little bit un-British to me, because it is the kind of thing that we witness in less self-assured recent states, rather than in a mature democracy such as our own. There was an old claim that this country has lost an empire and was searching for a role, and I feel that if we are having to whip out the Union Jack at every moment, maybe that claim is coming true. There have been news stories of Tory MPs insisting that citizens must love the flag and the Queen or move to another country, and even besmirching the internationally revered “Auntie Beeb” because there are not enough flags in its annual report. This seems to be going down the road of totalitarian edicts. After all, Churchill did defeat European fascism.

The prominence that statues have assumed in this war on the woke is seen in the way that they got additional protections in January this year in the rushed legislation to necessitate planning consent for anyone who wants to mess with them. The parallel was drawn that the minimum sentence for rape in the UK is five years—it is double that in India—but someone can get 10 years for pulling down a statue. That implies that dead white men, mostly, in bronze and stone are valued more than living, breathing women. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill includes the word “women” zero times in its 295 pages, yet it contains more mentions of statues, memorials and monuments than you can shake a stick at. Shall we say that the optics of that are bad? It is no wonder that one female wag, following the tragic murder of Sarah Everard, tweeted that she would just dress as a statue, because that way someone might take her safety seriously.

It is not just the lives immortalised by statues that are contested in this struggle. The crusaders who feel under threat, and who play to some imagined gallery of statue lovers who wrap themselves up in the Union Jack, are also promising a purge on progressives on boards. We know that the BBC has an ex-Tory candidate at the helm, but it seems a bit sinister that he is saying that he wants to silence contributors from having opinions on social media. We also know that the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport held a seminar in February for 25 organisations to set out the Government-approved version of Britain’s past. It was trailed in The Daily Telegraph, quoting the Secretary of State’s words that they must

“defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”.

Again, this sounds alarmist. Who does he mean? Chelsea fans? The meeting had a slight air of secrecy around it. The attendees, the agenda and the discussions were not published, and I know that certain people, including members of the Council for British Archaeology, the rank and file archaeologists, did not get an invite, so if it is repeated, it would be good to broaden the audience list.

It is a slightly unedifying spectacle when 50 MPs known as the Common Sense Group go on the offensive, maybe as Government outriders, attacking the National Trust and Leicester University’s Professor Corinne Fowler for their joint research uncovering the fact that nearly 100 National Trust properties had slave wealth behind them. That feels like an attack on academic freedom. It feels like the opposite of common sense.

Crucially, wider heritage assets also need protection, not from lynch mobs but from the developer’s bulldozer. Public buildings and land are increasingly being flogged off to the highest bidder by cash-strapped councils, meaning that we have vanishing community centres, libraries and playgrounds. Council houses that were sold off under the right to buy are now in the hands of private landlords who pocket housing benefit bills footed by local authorities, and the cycle of slum landlords that council houses were meant to end continues. It seems sad that what was founded for the public good is being turned into private profit.

When my office diaried in the Acton town hall opening for me, I had to explain to them that it is not a civic structure. We have this grand 1910-founded building where the Clash played, and it is being reborn as apartments behind the original facade. There were some add-on ones that did not quite work and some dodgy conversions, and I now get emails all the time about quite basic things like the waterworks not functioning. These are too big to be snagging. I marvelled at the refurb because it looked shiny, but at the same time I felt a twinge of sadness, really. So, if you are watching, OneHousing, sort it out!

Next on the hit list of lost municipal heritage in Ealing is a car park and an ’80s council office building set to be flattened and replaced by 477 mostly private sale flats in seven towers, the highest of which will be a most un-Ealing 26 storeys. We have an 1800s Gothic town hall, which is often used in shoots that pretend it is the House of Commons because it has got the same archy bits—the architecture is quite similar. Anyway, that will be overshadowed by this hideous thing.

There was a Times article at the weekend called “Our cities gained riches but lost their soul” on similar developments. It observed that there is always a statutory, separate affordable bit to such schemes, but it is “always begrudged” and

“bartered down by greedy developers”.

In this case, they are stretching the definition of “affordable”, because someone would have to be on £58,000 to get the three-bedroom, family-sized version, but those on £60,000 are ineligible. I hope that the Minister’s colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government will exercise their call-in powers before our skyline is ruined forever.

There are many examples of where local authorities have been forced to do this. That same Gothic town hall will be leased to a hotel chain, because it will foot the repair bill. I feel that is, to quote Macmillan,

“selling off the family silver”

to the highest bidder. The end product is often marketed to overseas buyers, while Ealing has a five-figure council waiting list of local families.

Notwithstanding post-Grenfell fears of tall buildings, perhaps surprisingly, of more than 500 high-rise buildings in London that were granted planning permission or that began construction last year, a whopping 215—nearly half—are in outer boroughs. The current planning system, which incentivises high densification development in proximity to rail hubs, needs rethinking in the light of people choosing accommodation over location, with white-collar homeworking the new norm—at least for part of the week—as a lasting post-covid effect. In the meantime—I keep quoting Tory Prime Ministers—John Major talked approvingly about “invincible green suburbs” alongside warm beer and dog walkers as epitomising Englishness, and I feel that is in danger of being lost, particularly in somewhere like Ealing, which has been long known as queen of the suburbs.

Moreover, the Government have decided that London is not on the Tory target list, so levelling up does not apply. It is exempt from the towns fund, overlooking the fact that the capital is where inequalities are starkest, deprivation is deepest and poverty is at its worst in the UK. Between London’s constituent bits, there is enormous diversity within.

A decade of decline in local infrastructure has left scarring effects such as youth stabbings, with closed youth clubs. Sadly, at times, it feels like the Government are hellbent on an anti-woke crusade of knee-jerk, populist bandwagoneering. It looks like pandering, with the square root being what they think will deflect from any mistakes and win them votes. We have seen it again today with the aid cuts. I know there is a Standing Order No. 24 debate tomorrow—there is no vote—yet the 0.7% commitment, which, after all, Conservatives created and not only pledged in their manifesto but said was safe as recently as September with the Department for International Development and Foreign and Commonwealth Office merger, is gone.

The Culture Secretary vowed in his most recent interviews to have more statues erected to unspecified British heroes, blocking what he sees as a kind of Britain-hating, statue-toppling metropolitan bubble that controls cultural institutions. He wants to replace it with red wall voters in the latest “war on the woke”—or front, battle, cultural cleansing or whatever we call it. Again, it looks like Government interference in a traditionally independent sector motivated by electoral calculation. I think people are saying the same about today’s cricket controversy.

I have some asks for the Minister—it is a kind of top 10 —and she will be relieved to know that I will end after giving them. First, the expression “not set in stone” should apply in that we should not be afraid to revisit, reinterpret and re-evaluate what has been handed down by previous generations. Reputations have not proved foolproof, so it pays to future-proof. I feel that the London Mayor’s commission is a positive thing, because future monuments will be in sympathy with architectural surroundings and will not always be just creepy human forms. I understand that the holocaust memorial will be a geometric design. Sometimes the enormity of a situation outweighs one individual. On the other side of the river we have the covid memorial wall, and I know my hon. Friends the Members for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) and for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) are campaigning to make that permanent, which is a good plan—I make a plea to the Minister there.

The second point is that putting things in context, for example in museums with explanatory notes, is preferable to unthinking idolatry and the glorification of individuals. Thirdly, the public sector equality duty should be given due regard in planning decisions.

Fourthly, goodies versus baddies, London versus the red wall, and saints versus sinners is divisive and makes everything too binary. Richard III still has numerous statues everywhere, despite being a complete rotter with the princes in the tower. When his remains were found under a car park in Leicester, he received a lavish reburial, with the great and the good turning out, including Benedict Cumberbatch and people like that. That renewed Richard III’s memorialisation, and I would never protest against any of that. Heritage and history are crucially contested; there is not one version of the past. We need more emphasis on critical thinking in humanities and history, which of late seem to have been a bit disfavoured in the curriculum, in favour of numeracy and literacy.

Fifthly—I am halfway through—we need more flexibility, including a recognition that we do not have always to think of removal versus retention. There is also the option of relocation. Prague and Oslo have statue parks, so that people who like to look at such things can look at a whole load of them at once. Closer to home we have the fourth plinth, and such things are more adaptable than either “pull them down” or “stick them up”. Relocation and flexibility are other options.

My sixth point is to have fewer short-term reactive policies that are driven by the jingoistic stirring up of popular sentiment, and more cool-headed, longitudinal assessment. We need a recognition that London boroughs also need investment, and are not just places that are electorally useful for the current Government.

Point number seven is to reverse the wilful neglect of local government by Whitehall. Councils should not be forced into desperate measures. As I said, ministerial intervention on the planning issue that I flagged up would save Ealing’s municipal heart and legacy from being overrun by development. Forcing local authorities to be self-financing is unrealistic, given the range of services now at their door. The biggest of those is the social care bill, which is still missing the Prime Minister’s plan. We were promised that plan a long time ago, so if the Minister has any clues we would be grateful.

My penultimate point is that central Government leadership is needed on tall buildings to prohibit the over-densification of suburban locations, just as the green belt limited the overspill of cities into the countryside. Ealing, Brent, Croydon and Barnet have been the worst offenders of that “the sky’s the limit” attitude to tower building in recent years. Local communities should be genuinely involved in decision making. The Colston scenes were exciting to witness, and the episode was a catalyst, but better frameworks for public inquiry should exist to achieve that end result, including listing or delisting buildings.

Finally, we should never look at statues as being a substitute for tackling the real issues of inequality. That really would be levelling up, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Baby Leave for Members of Parliament

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

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

I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for giving way, and I wish you a happy birthday, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will not give you the bumps.

My right hon. and learned Friend talked about her own experiences, and she was very fortunate to have our hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) by her side. She also talked about pairing. In personal life, not everyone is paired. I speak as chair of the new all-party parliamentary group on single-parent families. Is she aware of the figures from Gingerbread that point out that single-parent families are an increasingly common family form? The figure is 51% in some London constituencies, and there are 3,649 in mine. These problems are exacerbated for single parents. Will she encourage people to join my APPG, which was registered only this week?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Before the right hon. and learned Lady responds to the intervention, I should add that I have no wish whatsoever to curtail this excellent debate on a very important subject. However, I draw to her attention that while she is absolutely correct to take lots of interventions, because there is much to be said about this, I have a note of a great many people who wish to speak, and we do not have a huge amount of time.

Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Thursday 16th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

The last word is left to Rupa Huq.

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

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am encouraged to hear that the new system will apply to all 4,000 workers who keep the parliamentary estate going, many of whom are my constituents. There is deep concern among the tour guides that sweeping changes to their terms and conditions, which they feel are being foisted upon them, will rationalise many of them out of existence. Will the Leader of the House assure me that none of those who are dedicated to this vital work of the House will lose their jobs? Will she also meet PCS, MAPSA and Unite to allay those concerns?

Criminal Finances Bill

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huq]

It would help if Members were listening to me. How many times have I given way? Numerous times—more than anyone else in our proceedings, which have been going on for many hours—so I would like to make some progress.

Even if, as has been mentioned, it is the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands that are prolific offenders—I think that the British Virgin Islands come up the greatest number of times in the Panama papers—it does not completely absolve the Crown dependencies. Several Members have tried to untangle the difference between Crown dependencies and overseas territories. The Isle of Man managed to rack up 8,000 entries in the Panama papers and is being singled out by the Canadian revenue authorities for investigation. Let us not forget that in October 2015, HMRC defeated the Isle of Man on a tax avoidance scheme that took place from 2001 to 2008 and left a hole in our finances of £200 million. That is a not insignificant sum, and it is money going from our Exchequer. How many hospitals and schools could we have built for that? I do not know the precise answer; it is a rhetorical question. In 2007, the tax havens of Guernsey and Jersey were investigated by our Serious Fraud Office in one of the biggest corruption investigations in African history. These things often join up; the money moves around.

The point is clear: the very structure of the laws pertaining to finance in these places, coupled with their deliberate adoption of complex and opaque institutional structures, is crying out for reform. Globally, these dependencies are at the heart of undermining the rule of law—something that we hold dear—in other countries due to the corruption that they facilitate. Their laws therefore clearly need to be changed, and there is undeniable scope for us to change them. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), who is sadly absent, has said, there is a moral case for us to act, even if there might not be an identical incident in which we have so acted. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley referred to polling that shows enormous public support for such an approach—some 80% of people in a recent poll.

The Bill Committee was told that public registers are not an international norm and that our Crown dependencies and overseas territories are somehow exemplars because they have adopted closed registers of beneficial ownership. Lamentably, that might look like a bit of an alternative fact—dare I say that. I have here a piece of paper—in fact, it is three sheets stapled together—with a list of 46 jurisdictions. Those countries are all dependencies of G20 nation states, so they are in a similar constitutional position to our overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and they all have centralised registers of beneficial ownership. Shall I read out all 46, or does the House want just a smattering? They are: the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, Christmas Island, the Cocos Keeling Islands, the Coral Sea Islands—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady is not going to read out all 46, is she? She has made her point most eloquently, so there is no need to list all 46. We do not read long lists in this Chamber, and the House has got the point she is making.

[Dr Huq]

I am most grateful for that clarification, Madam Deputy Speaker. Some of those on the list are the DOM-TOMs—the départements d’outre-mer and the territoires d’outre-mer—so there is a long list, including Guadeloupe and Martinique, but I shall move on.

It is a bit of a nonsense for the Conservative party to claim that the overseas territories and Crown dependencies are leading the world in financial transparency because of the creation of central registers if 46 other dependencies are doing that already. Not only have some been incredibly slow to catch up with the aforementioned countries, but some of our Crown dependencies and overseas territories are among the worst offenders and have not adopted centralised registers, let alone made them public. More accurately, they have adopted platforms.

The Government ask us to believe that the British Virgin Islands or the Cayman Islands will be able to police their own financial businesses by relying on those businesses, which facilitate crime. It is asking them to mark their own homework and to be judge and jury. Call me a cynic, but I doubt that that is a workable solution. Do we really believe that anonymous companies in the British Virgin Islands—which, for example, allowed the former wife of a Taiwanese President to illicitly purchase $1.6 million of property in Manhattan—would be capable of policing themselves?

There are several other examples. Would Alcoa, the world’s third largest producer of aluminium, be capable of policing itself when it has used an anonymous company in the British Virgin Islands to transfer millions of dollars in bribes to Bahraini officials? Would the anonymous British Virgin Islands-based company used by Teodorin Obiang, the son of the President of Equatorial Guinea, really be capable of policing itself when it allowed him to squirrel away $38 million of state money to buy a private jet? It was thanks to the US Justice Department that he was caught. The Government’s protestation that we are working with the territories and dependencies, and that we are 90% of the way there, is at best highly questionable.

High Speed Rail (London – West Midlands) Bill

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is doing a brilliant job of representing her constituents, as she always does. Does she agree—I think this is the purpose of her new clauses—that it is often the businesses in urban areas that are the most fragile and therefore the worst affected, but the levels of compensation and concern shown to them is the worst on offer—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. We do not have time for long interventions.

[Dr Huq]

My hon. Friend puts it very well. He anticipates my new clause 32, which is about the fairness of the rural support zone. I know the constituency of the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) well, because she and I were on the same ballot paper in 2005. She represents a rural constituency, but the urban and suburban constituencies, such as mine and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), are not treated the same as rural support zones. I believe that needs to be looked at.

One house in my constituency has a zero valuation—you could not make this up. Someone wanted to re-mortgage a house in Wells House Road, and the mortgage valuer came up with zero. That would not happen elsewhere. For the sake of fairness, that should be looked at. There seems to be a wrong assumption—[Interruption.] Madam Deputy Speaker, I am aware that there is about to be a vote, so I will say my last sentence. We should not accept that suburban or urban dwellers should simply put up with it. I urge Members to support my two new clauses.

Riot Compensation Bill

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Friday 4th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. We cannot have conversations between Members. If the hon. Gentleman is intervening, that is absolutely fine, but we cannot have a running commentary between Members.

[Dr Huq]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will continue.

Now the place is half the size and split into two units, although the takings are thankfully back to normal. As my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North said, further follow-up financial support should be considered at local government level. I have not found any measure proposing that in the Bill, although perhaps I have not looked at it closely enough. Ealing council’s panel report said that larger sums were available in subsequent phases—£157,426 of allocations in total.

I accept that the problem with these sort of events is that they are unforeseeable. Nobody would have guessed on 7 August that this would have happened by 8 August: these things occur out of the blue. We are living in a time when local government budgets are being squeezed like never before, so I would be interested to hear how this Bill fits with local government provision. Ealing is losing £96 million in this parliamentary term.

Clause 8 sets the limits for damages at £1 million, as the hon. Member for Dudley South described. Disappointingly, however, subsection (2) states that the

“compensation must reflect only the loss directly resulting from the damage”

to the property and

“not…any consequential loss resulting from it.”

That is disappointingly short of what Ravi and others said would have made a real difference. Perhaps in extreme cases such as these, an agreement could be reached with the insurers for a limited amount more. It need not all come as a burden to the public purse, as some allowance could be made for special cases.

Tax Credits

Debate between Rupa Huq and Baroness Laing of Elderslie

Thursday 29th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huq]

What I am saying is relevant to the motion, because we need some context.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. If the hon. Lady was not speaking to the motion, I would stop her.

[Dr Huq]

We need to look at tax credits in a wider context. There is the four-year benefit freeze, and the reduction in the household benefit cap. New claimants are no longer entitled to the “family element” of tax credits and, controversially, there is the proposal that, after April 2017, families will not be able to claim for their third child. I cannot imagine that happening in any other policy area. Can Members imagine the Government saying that a third child could not go to school? If such a policy had been in place, my sister Connie would never have been educated.

A number of millionaire Tory lords voted on Monday to cut help for Britain’s poorest workers. Lord Lloyd Webber was even flown in from New York for the vote. It did seem as though the Government were throwing the kitchen sink at this whole issue. There is growing awareness of the consequences of such a measure. Etched into the consciousness of those on the Government Front Bench should be the words of that caller who phoned in to that programme before the election, or the words of the woman who cried on “Question Time” the other night. Through old and new media, we have all received hundreds of messages on this point so we await the next instalment, the autumn statement. I hope that kids have been saved the unseasonable tidings of the notices that would have been plopping onto doormats at Christmas.

At the very least, the Government should publish a full impact assessment of their cumulative cuts to tax credits and benefits in the so-called emergency Budget. The Prime Minister said at his own conference that it is not pounds and pence but people that fire him up. Those 6,500 children in Ealing Central and Acton are real people with real lives, not columns on a spreadsheet. Some 70% of the money that the Treasury will save will come from working mums, so I urge the Government to reconsider their proposals and protect those on the lowest incomes.