Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab) [V]]

A year on from the global pandemic and we have lost so many of our fellow citizens; in Tower Hamlets, in my constituency and across the borough, we have lost more than 518 of our fellow citizens. This pandemic has shown and exacerbated the deep inequalities in our society, with those who face severe levels of overcrowding and who suffer from inequality and poverty being disproportionately affected. That is why it was so important in this Queen’s Speech for the Government to ensure an ambitious programme to protect our citizens, bounce back and recover from what has been the most unprecedented crisis since the second war and the most unprecedented economic hit on our country for hundreds of years—and why it is so deeply disappointing that the Government have not gone far enough to address the crisis in social and affordable housing in our communities.

In Tower Hamlets, we have more than 20,000 people on the housing waiting list. When the pandemic hit, the first thing that I said to the Chancellor when he came before the Treasury Committee was that in areas like mine, where the risk factors are higher because of high levels of health inequality, they are made even greater by the high levels of severe overcrowding, because if infection comes within a household, it is impossible to self-isolate. We have seen that over the past year not only in my constituency but across our city, and across communities where families live with severe overcrowding. That is why it is so important for the Government to introduce proper funding and support and empower local authorities with backing and finance to work with social housing organisations to build.

We need a building programme for genuinely affordable housing and for social housing, but we have not seen that, and the planning reforms will not help the process. We have a Government who are much happier in the pockets of developers, as we saw in the scandal last year about property deals and planning permission, as well as in more recent scandals that we have seen in the papers. We need a Government on the side of the public to build homes that are safe.

That point takes me on to the cladding crisis. At the forefront of any Government’s responsibilities should be the duty to protect their citizens from the likes of the Grenfell fire disaster. It was an absolute catastrophe for those who lived in that block. More recently, in Tower Hamlets, there was a fire in a block in New Providence Wharf, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum). The Sunday Times reported that it

“was ‘minutes’ away from being another Grenfell Tower.”

Yet tens of thousands of people, not only in my borough but across the country, have still not had their cladding removed or their homes made safe by this Government.

Once again, I call on this Government to get their act together. Four years have passed since the Grenfell disaster, yet we still have fires, we still have the risk and we nearly had another Grenfell disaster in Tower Hamlets. I call on the Government to set an urgent timeline and timetable to get rid of flammable cladding and other risks to people’s homes, and to support Labour’s amendment today.