John Bercow
Main Page: John Bercow (Speaker - Buckingham)
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
This is an emergency relief scheme for Tory council candidates, and it is a shambles, is it not? The Secretary of State spent 12 months telling us he wanted local schemes; he has now had to design a national one. Because councils are getting back only a fraction of the money that has been cut, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that it is not possible to design schemes that meet the criteria within the funding available. There is no clarity on whether councils will have to spend more money on consultation, and because the grant lasts for only a year, they will then have to design new schemes and consult on them again for 2014. Meanwhile, at the sharp end, the poorest people in the country are faced with bills that they cannot meet and the threat of being taken to court.
Mr Speaker
Order. Hyndburn has much to commend it, but it does not form part of a local authority area close to London. I call Karen Buck.
Ms Buck
With private rents in London in particular soaring and driving up homelessness, can the Minister tell us which of the following two statements is consistent with Government policy: the statement by the previous Housing Minister, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), that homeless households should not be uprooted from their local communities and moved hundreds of miles away, or what is actually happening in the seven west London local authorities, who in their homelessness strategy have talked of their aim to manage the movement of households out of London?