Construction Standards: New Build Homes

Sarah Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I want to talk about some of the new build housing in my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper)—a very able colleague—and I have had difficulties with the same set of developers, so I will hand over to him to talk about the difficulties we have had with the housing in Spen View and Astbury Park, which were dealt with by Stewart Milne Homes. I will also not be giving an honourable mention to the job that Vistry has done in Loachbrook Meadow in Congleton. It is trying to persuade my residents to take on a management company and take over management of the estate, despite the fact that it has not built the sewers or roads to adoptable standards. I can see nods around the room; it is clear to me that I am not the only one suffering with these difficulties.

Currently, however, the leading problem developer in my constituency is Zenith House Developments, which produced Scholars Place in Sandbach. Scholars Place, a mixed development of detached homes and social housing, looks absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, it was not finished with any sort of sewage pumping station, and that is as bad as one might imagine. At the moment, sewage from these homes simply goes into a well, which has a semi-piece of plasterboard covering it and is inadequately fenced, so it is totally accessible and a massive drowning hazard of excrement. It is incredibly dangerous, and it is about 200 metres, at most, from a local primary school. It is absolutely horrific. There are some real questions about whether we have sufficient legal powers in this country, given that that was ever allowed to happen. It is a public health hazard, causing sewage to back up into people’s homes and on to the streets. The road literally runs with poo.

The problems associated with this development and the Spen View development have an impact on social housing providers. In both cases, there were section 106 agreements and social housing was provided. When these enormous and expensive problems occur for residents, the social housing providers that part own the shared ownership homes on such sites become financially entangled in trying to deal with the matter. Because they part own the homes, it is of course appropriate that they should help their residents. However—I suspect this is a national problem—social housing providers, which need to provide social homes, effectively have to cross-subsidise the failings of the private sector in producing these houses. It is an absolutely shocking situation.

It is important to me that we implement section 42 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which would improve the situation around sewer adoption, and that we have an equivalent for highways adoption. The problem across every one of the developments that I have mentioned is that the sewers and roads have not been dealt with properly. People have bought their dream homes—they are so excited—and then they find they have an enormous financial liability. It is a widespread problem in my constituency, and it is destroying people’s lives. It is destroying their mental health; the level of distress among my constituents cannot be overstated.

While we are on the topic of new build homes, I will briefly touch on disability and accessibility in relation to construction standards. In London, category 4 disability access as a planning requirement has been the norm since 2004, but in the rest of the country that is not the case. Baseline category 1 only enables a household to be hypothetically visitable by a disabled person, and it does not guarantee ease of access for someone in a wheelchair. It seems to me to be a very basic minimum that homes that we are building now should be visitable by people who use wheelchairs.

We have an ageing population and lots of people who are waiting for accessible housing. As a Government, we are doing a large amount of affordable housing development, which I welcome. However, I want us to ensure as a minimum that that housing is accessible and adaptable, that a significant proportion of it is fully wheelchair adaptable and that more of it is fully wheelchair accessible.

I suggest we look at the planning frameworks from 2018, because they require local authorities to consider the impact of requiring accessible housing on the viability of their local plan. It is almost a requirement that housing should not be accessible if that will make it difficult to deliver the required number of homes. With the developers I have just described, of course the first thing that they say is that they cannot afford to provide accessible homes —but, of course, they can. They need to be producing good quality homes that everybody can access, in estates surrounded by safe and secure environments in which the roads and sewers are usable. That does not seem too much to ask in an advanced industrial society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robbie Moore]

I would politely push back on that. My understanding is that local authorities do have the powers available to them throughout the planning process to challenge the planning application put before them and to have a robust level of negotiation with the developer, resulting in a section 106 obligation being firmly and robustly constructed to deliver residents’ best interests. It is up to the local authority whether it chooses to utilise the powers awarded to it. In my case, I feel that Bradford council does not use any such powers in the first place.

[Mrs Russell]

In terms of the ability to do those things, the many years of cuts to local authority budgets—amounting to about 30% of local authority budgets over the last 14 years—are highly relevant. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is also a question here about directors’ duties? If those organisations go insolvent, no matter how great a 106 agreement is, that money cannot be recovered because the organisation no longer exists to recover it from. It should never have been possible for such a level of disruption to have happened to those residents, or for the people behind it to just go off in their Range Rovers.

[Robbie Moore]

The hon. Lady raises two points. I will take the second point on the director’s responsibility first. I absolutely agree that it should not be possible for a housing developer to move away from a scheme, leaving it unfinished, as happened in Long Lee, where Accent Housing effectively did not deliver, causing huge nuisance to local residents. That should not be an acceptable situation.

On the section 106 negotiations, the question comes down to this: when is the trigger point kicking in, and is it in the best interests of those residents? If it is not, why? I would argue strongly that, in the scenarios I have seen with Bradford council, those trigger points are not negotiated in the best interests of my residents. That local authority, back in 2021, threw its statutory obligation to Government and said that it was in sound financial health. I do not think that resource or Government cuts are an issue in relation to how it anticipates those negotiations going on; it is just pure lack of willingness to do its job. I conclude my remarks on that point, because I know that there are many other speakers who want to contribute.

Temporary Accommodation

Sarah Russell Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde]

I could not agree more, and I will come to the costs of temporary accommodation later. The hon. Lady knows as well as I do that the National Audit Office described the situation as unsustainable. It needs a resolution, which is why today’s debate is so important.

On securing the debate, I called Kelly, shared the news, and she said in reply:

“What needs to be said is going to be said in the place it needs to be said to the person it needs to be said to. You are the right person to say it, Josh.”

It is therefore so humbling to welcome Kelly and her son Joseph to the Public Gallery. I hope that I am the right person, that I say what needs to be said, and that I do not let Kelly and families like hers down. With her blessing, I have shared some of Kelly’s story today. She is just one of the 117,450 families who are in temporary accommodation in this country right now. That is a 12% rise compared with last year. Heartbreakingly, more than 150,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, which is enough to fill 5,000 classrooms.

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I want to mention the plight of children missing from school. There is a massive problem with children going into temporary accommodation and simultaneously losing their school place because they have moved out of the area, or alternatively trying to retain their school place in the hope of being able to move back to the area, and then missing school for a sustained period. I wanted to draw attention to that particular difficulty. As far as I am aware, at the moment we do not measure educational outcomes for children who have been in temporary accommodation. Would the hon. Member encourage us to start doing that?

[Josh Babarinde]

I absolutely would encourage that. There needs to be more co-ordination between local authorities, educational settings and health and care settings. Many have advocated for a notification system in order to aid the knowledge of those situations, so that they can be addressed.

The circumstances are devastating, and we hear from hon. Members who have made interventions that that is the case in their patches too. Shelter estimates that more than two thirds of people in temporary accommodation have inadequate access to basic facilities—to cook, for example. Many food banks, including mine in Eastbourne, supply kettle packs, because many families in temporary accommodation are unable to cook or heat the food that they get from a food bank in any other way. Isolation is also a consequence, especially for those who are placed in temporary accommodation miles away from their support networks, or where the rules of their accommodation ban visitors. Most shockingly, according to the Shared Health Foundation analysis of the national childhood mortality database, temporary accommodation has been a contributing factor in the deaths of 42 infants since 2019. We cannot go on like this.

Not only is that unacceptable on a human level, but as I said earlier, the National Audit Office has been clear that the situation is unsustainable for local authorities—especially mine in Eastbourne. In my hometown, the number of families in temporary accommodation has doubled since 2019. That, combined with our food bank becoming the busiest Trussell Trust food bank in the country—it distributed more food parcels per head than any other in the UK—led to my campaign to declare a cost of living emergency in Eastbourne. It was the first place in the UK to do so, and that unlocked emergency support for those struggling most.

The surge in temporary accommodation led to the financial cost to the council jumping from £2.2 million in 2019 to the £5 million projected for this year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rushanara Ali]

I hope the hon. Member is reassured by the points I have made already, but going forward we need to look at how we can enable much more collaboration between councils and among regional government. The interconnectedness of these challenges means they have to be addressed collectively. That is why from the national Government perspective, we will soon initiate the inter-ministerial group, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister. It will be working with Ministers across Government to take action on homelessness, looking at temporary accommodation, rough sleeping and the wider agenda. We will be working with the other relevant Departments to look at such issues as health and the benefits system. Those Departments have an important role to play if we are to bring an end to homelessness once and for all.

In that context, we are committed to ensuring that local government and regional government play their part, working with us, along with the charitable sector and the community sector. I have heard powerful stories of the work that faith organisations do to support those who face challenges around housing and homelessness. Their insights and their contributions need to be included as we develop solutions to tackle this problem.

[Mrs Russell]

The Minister listed a wide variety of Departments, but the Department for Education was not among them. Will she assure me that that is one of the Departments that she intends to co-ordinate with? I am sure that it is.

[Rushanara Ali]

Absolutely. I was giving examples, not an exhaustive list. I have already met with colleagues, as has the Deputy Prime Minister; we work very closely with the Department for Education. There is a great deal of interest and enthusiasm at ministerial level, at official level and, we know, at local authority level and among colleagues across the House in working with us to develop a cross-departmental, cross-societal strategy that focuses on getting results. Of course, we need to deal with the immediate challenges, but we need a long- term strategy too.

I want to reiterate that we are absolutely committed to tackling the root causes. I hope that we can all take hope and heart from the extraordinary work that many organisations do in communities and constituencies up and down the country. We have seen the work done in local areas by local authorities and other agencies, with multi-agency approaches in healthcare and education, for example, and of course the work that many colleagues have done here in Parliament to campaign and raise awareness of the plight of those who face homelessness.

We have a real opportunity to get this agenda right, and in that spirit I welcome this debate. I really appreciate the turnout and the interest—Adjournment debates are normally attended by only a couple of people. It is crucial that we build alliances and use the insights of Members of Parliament, who—as I have found throughout my political career—are at the sharp end, trying to support their constituents. I hope that colleagues can see that there is a real openness in this Government to work together to tackle this challenge once and for all.

Question put and agreed to.

Employment Rights Bill

Sarah Russell Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 21st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my membership of the Employment Lawyers Association, the Industrial Law Society, Unite the Union, Community and the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers.

The treatment of women in Harvey Weinstein’s companies, UKFast, and plenty of other organisations across the UK is notoriously horrific. A significant number of women work in workplaces that are basically run like medieval fiefdoms. Corporate governance in the UK appears to largely serve to cover up sexual harassment, and to do very little to prevent it.

As someone who has negotiated settlement agreements for a lot of women who have suffered sexual harassment or maternity discrimination, I do not recognise the descriptions of UK employees that I hear from Conservative Members. They appear to regard employees as desperate to bring employment tribunals at any possible opportunity, but my experience of representing women in those situations is that they are desperate to avoid bringing employment tribunal claims. They think that if they talk about what has happened to them, it will cause them significant reputational damage—that they will be blamed for their experiences, and that they will never work again.

As such, they sign settlement agreements meaning that they cannot talk about what has happened to them. They do so knowingly, and often for really quite small sums of money, because they are terrified of the amount it will cost them in legal fees if they try to pursue a claim to tribunal. That is one of the reasons why I am proud to be a member of trade unions and to have given advice to trade union members, because that enables those women to get the support they need to assert their basic workplace rights.

A 2016 TUC report talked about the fact that young women in particular, as well as women on zero-hours contracts, seem to be reporting higher levels of sexual harassment at work than other, older women. In short, those of us who get to a certain age like to hope that things have got better because we stop personally experiencing sexual harassment at work. Unfortunately, the reality is that younger workers, who have less access to advice and support and are more economically vulnerable, continue to receive that harassment year after year. Things are not getting better. Employment rights are fantastic, and it is great that we are improving access to them through this Bill, but when Conservative Members oppose our moves to restrict the use of zero-hours contracts, they do not understand—so far as I can tell—that those contracts, which keep women in precarious employment, are one of the mechanisms by which sexual harassment occurs. As such, I commend the Bill to the House.