Covid-19: Faith Groups

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab) [V]]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting this debate. I hope that it will draw attention to the extraordinary scale and value of faith groups’ contributions in response to the pandemic, and that we will consider how to make more of the potential of faith-based groups working alongside local and national Government.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group on faith and society, established in 2012. Our aim is to support faith-based contributions to communities, to help make those contributions better known and, where we can, to help remove hurdles to realising their full potential. When we started, we held a series of meetings with faith-based groups contributing to welfare to work, to health and wellbeing and to work with young people—recognising that most youth work in Britain now is undertaken by faith groups—and groups working on international aid.

It quickly became clear from those discussions that the groups often had a problem with their local council. Councils suspected that the groups were only really interested in trying to convert people, or that any service they provided would be biased in favour of their own members. In any case, from the perspective of a hard-pressed council officer, faith groups are difficult: if they work with one of them, will they offend the others? After all, these are rather odd people; they believe in God—far simpler not to get involved with any of them.

As a result, however, communities miss out on really valuable contributions that the groups could be making, so we came up with the idea, which was suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), of a faith covenant. The covenant sets out ground rules for co-operation between faith groups and local councils to make clear what each should expect of the other, to try to build up confidence on both sides and support them to work together.

The first council to draw faith groups in its area together to sign up to the covenant was Birmingham City Council. It happened at Birmingham central library in December 2014, and it was a good start; Birmingham is the biggest local authority in Europe. Another dozen councils have signed up since then, covering between them about 10% of the UK population. FaithAction, the APPG’s secretariat, is increasingly drawing those councils together to network and learn from one another, together with faith groups in their areas.

However, in the last year, things have moved on to a different level. It came home to me that something unusual was happening on the morning of Good Friday last year. While sitting at home going through emails, I found two from constituents saying, “I don’t have any food. What should I do?” We have all become familiar with referring people to food banks over the past 10 years, but I knew that they would all be shut over the Easter weekend, so I did not know how to answer those constituents. But then I found an email from the Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz, saying, “If you come across people without food over the holiday weekend, you should email the vicar of Ascension Church, Royal Docks, before 10 in the morning for a food parcel to be delivered later in the day.” I did not have any better ideas, so I gave it a try, and both my constituents received their food parcels.

My local council has never worked in partnership with faith groups before; something unusual was going on. In my constituency, Bonny Downs Baptist Church, Highway Vineyard Church, Ibrahim Mosque, Manor Park Christian Fellowship and City Chapel have all done a superb job, supported by Newham Council. Similar reports started to come in from elsewhere; the Bishop of Durham told me that a lot of the covid emergency response in his diocese was from faith groups.

Over the summer, with support from the Sir Halley Stewart Trust, the Trussell Trust and the Good Faith partnership, the all-party group commissioned the Faiths and Civil Society Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London to research those council-faith group partnerships. Questionnaires were sent to all 408 UK local authorities and 48% of them filled them in and returned them. Fifty-five in-depth interviews with council leaders and faith-based projects were conducted across 10 local authority areas. Our report, “Keeping the Faith” was published in November, and I thank Professors Chris Baker and Adam Dinham of Goldsmiths and Greg Smith and the research team for all their work. They found a big increase in the number and the depth of partnerships between local authorities and faith groups. More than two thirds of the councils surveyed reported an increase in partnership working with faith groups and 91% described their experience with faith groups as “very positive” or “positive”. It has become clear that what anecdotally appeared to us to be happening when the pandemic began is a reality across the country.

Faith groups and faith-based organisations have been integral to the civil society response to the pandemic, opening up buildings and food banks, running networks, sharing information, befriending, collecting, cooking and delivering food and providing volunteers. Across the UK, nearly 60% of councils have been working with church-based food banks during the pandemic; 24% have been working with mosque-based food banks; 11% have worked with food banks in Gurdwaras, and 10% with food banks in Hindu temples. Suddenly what our all-party group had been promoting had come about.

It has been a very positive experience for councils. One council officer told the researchers:

“My personal admiration for faith groups has gone through the roof, just in terms of their commitment there. We as a local authority didn’t know what we were getting into. And they have got involved with smiles on their faces and they’ve done it professionally.”

The researchers put to the councils a list of characteristics and asked them to characterise their experience of their partnerships “to a great extent”, “to some extent”, “not very much”, “not at all” or “don’t know”. Positive characteristics scored very highly. On

“Adding value because of their longstanding presence in the local community”,

60% of councils said that was the case to a great extent. On

“Improving access to hard to reach groups”,

40% said that that was the case to a great extent and another 39% said that that was the case to some extent.

The researchers also asked about negative aspects that are said to characterise faith groups. Asked about:

“Expressing socially conservative views which sit uneasily with our equalities obligations”,

2% of councils said that that was the case to a great extent. On

“Causing us concern about the possibility of proselytization in the context of partnership working”,

only 1% felt that that was the case. Those old fears of the pitfalls of working with faith groups simply did not materialise last year. Almost all the councils want to build on those new partnerships in future.

The report recommended that the Government appoint a faiths commissioner, working across government, to help faith groups relate to government and to make the fullest contribution that they can. We would like Ministers to encourage nationwide adoption of our faith covenant and of a framework that reflects shared values to foster trust and promote effective collaboration. We would like support from the Minister’s Department to go to each UK local authority, with examples of good faith group partnerships, to build an understanding of what works well in practice. We have proposed a new faiths advisory council, chaired by the new faiths commissioner and attended by Ministers and senior civil servants to look strategically at how faith groups can best help in post-covid Britain.

I would like to thank the House of Commons digital engagement team led by Ben Pearson. Last Friday, it issued a call for evidence ahead of this debate. They had 235 responses reporting how churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and Baha’is have fostered community spirit, provided pastoral support and delivered key services. Canon Hilary Barber of Halifax wrote that the local authority has commissioned faith communities to run food banks and night shelters and is working jointly to promote protecting the NHS and uptake of the vaccine.

Amarjit Singh Atwal, in the east midlands, wrote:

“The community established a food bank”

for

“rough sleepers. Before the pandemic it was an average of 80 meals a week. During the pandemic this increased to 300 per week. The community also provided PPE to the local health trust.”

Nick, from Christians Against Poverty, wrote of supporting

“families with debt problems over the last year, albeit by telephone rather than face to face…working successfully to get families debt free.”

I pay tribute to John Kirkby, the remarkable founder of Christians Against Poverty, who announced yesterday that he is to step down after 25 years.

I hope the Minister will join me in thanking faith groups for their efforts in supporting communities during the pandemic. I welcome his responses on behalf of his Department to the recommendations in our report—appointing a faith commissioner, promoting the faith covenant, developing and distributing a toolkit, and establishing a faiths advisory council. There is still a widely held view that religious faith is on the way out, irrelevant, maybe harmful to community wellbeing. The reality is that in this decade, and as has become so clear in the past year, it has been the faith groups that, uniquely, have had both the motivation and the resources to step forward and help. Those have not been found anywhere else. We need to learn the lesson from that and enable faith groups and faith-based organisations to make their full contribution in the years ahead.

Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend and the leader of his local council, as would, I am sure, the Minister for Regional Growth and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall). I do not agree that the Isle of Wight has lacked the resources to respond to the pandemic; from what I have seen it has done a sterling job. The Isle of Wight has had significant amounts of additional support, and total covid-19 funding for the council so far has been £20.3 million. We have also provided support for the local business community amounting to £48 million, which has been brilliantly dispensed by my hon. Friend’s local council, supporting 4,500 small and medium-sized businesses on the Isle of Wight. I am pleased that my hon. Friend supports yesterday’s announcement on the local housing need question and that he will get on and build more homes on the Isle of Wight in the years ahead.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Will the additional funding that the Secretary of State has announced for homelessness ensure that councils can continue to put a roof over the heads of people with no recourse to public funds? The local authorities that gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee last week welcomed the Government’s winter support package for hard-pressed families, but it runs only until March. Does the Secretary of State have longer-term plans for how councils can support vulnerable households, so that councils can make their plans for the future?

[Robert Jenrick]

The right hon. Gentleman has a long-standing interest in this issue. It important that we set out long-term plans both to help the cohort of people who came in off the streets through Everybody In and to make further strides in our overall effort to reduce rough sleeping to the absolute minimum. In the summer we asked local councils, including the right hon. Gentleman’s, to draw up a plan for how they would assist those people who were in temporary accommodation into move-on accommodation, and then ultimately into either social housing or the private rental sector. We supported that with almost £100 million of funding.

The settlement announced today provides further funding for the next financial year that is the same as or greater than the amount of money that was available in this financial year, and it will be £750 million in total. We have also secured £430 million for new move-on accommodation and asked every local council in the country to bid for that so that they can invest in accommodation to help to support the people they have taken in off the streets.

On no recourse to public funds, we have taken a number of steps this year. We extended the derogation, not just to London but to the whole country, so that local councils can support European economic area nationals. There is of course, a cohort of people who are not EEA nationals, and we have allowed councils the discretion to support them when there is a risk to life. Many councils have chosen to do that throughout the pandemic and I am sure will do so this winter.

Winter Homelessness Support

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mrs Miller. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) on securing the debate, and I agree with a great deal of what she had to say. Like her, I see what is happening around Westminster. I came in via the Embankment this morning and it is impossible to miss the tents under Hungerford bridge, where a growing number of people seem to be making their homes. It shames all of us that in this city so many are sleeping rough in that way.

The one policy that could deal with that effectively is a substantial programme of investment in social housing. I recognise that Ministers are sincere in wanting to end the scourge of rough sleeping, and I acknowledge the commitment that the Government have made. In reality, we are not going to end rough sleeping without a substantial programme of new social house building. I see no sign of that happening. Without it, we are not going to end rough sleeping.

I particularly want to pay tribute to the network of church-based homelessness night shelters in London that operate in winter. At least one has been set up in every London borough. Seven or 14 churches take it in turns to gather volunteers to provide a hot meal, a bed and some breakfast to rough sleepers, one night per week. In past years, for hundreds of people it has been the only alternative to sleeping rough. I pay tribute to Housing Justice, which supports their work and liaises between them and the Mayor of London.

I welcome the imaginative support that the Minister’s Department, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, has been providing to that network lately. This year the network are working on alternative covid-safe provision. Unavoidably, that means less capacity. I think the Department has provided about £2 million to support their work, to enable them to operate in a covid-safe way. I commend the Department and the night shelters. Last February, St Paul’s Cathedral hosted a service to celebrate their work and to thank the hundreds of volunteers who keep them going. Everybody there will have agreed with the Bishop of Edmonton, the chair of Housing Justice, who was the preacher, that volunteers should not have to do that work.

I want to refer to a point that the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster highlighted in her opening speech about people with leave to remain in the UK but no recourse to public funds. The Local Government Association brief for this debate highlights the large number seen by councils who, their work stopped because of the pandemic, are unable to claim benefits because of the no recourse to public funds condition, and who face homelessness and destitution. Expectations on councils to support people with NRPF have changed during the pandemic. Councils are obliged in law to support families and adults with care and support needs, but not others. Local welfare funds, provided through councils, are not available to those with NRPF.

The Minister’s Department rightly made it clear at the outset that councils should provide shelter for people sleeping rough, even if those people had no recourse to public funds. However, the legal unclarity has made matters harder, and sadly the enlightenment of the Minister’s Department has not been emulated by the Home Office. Government guidance has not been updated on what assistance can be accessed by people with no recourse to public funds. So, will the Minister press her colleagues in the Home Office to do what the Women and Equalities Committee—a Committee chaired by a former Home Office Minister, the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes)— recommended unanimously in its report published yesterday, and suspend the no recourse to public funds restriction for the duration of the pandemic?

Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Thirty-six years ago, I was a new Newham councillor. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Ms Brown), who is in her place, was elected a few years later, but at that time, 36 years ago, I was placed in a working party on the borough’s temporary accommodation crisis. We set a target that everybody should be in a permanent home by Christmas, and all 30 households were. It was a different world. In June this year 5,574 Newham households, including more than 7,000 children, were in temporary accommodation. It is shocking how far those problems have worsened even since I was elected a councillor. How is it that we have allowed things to become so bad?

It would be great to hear from the Minister some proposals for reducing those shocking numbers. I suspect that we will not hear those and the problems will carry on getting worse, but given that backdrop, I want to put two points to the Minister. First, will she consider a new national policy on standards and length of stay in temporary accommodation? Temporary accommodation is not covered by the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018. Landlords are largely unregulated. There is no limit on how long people can stay temporarily. Will the Minister take an initiative on that?

Secondly, will the Minister act to safeguard children living in temporary accommodation, especially those in shared housing? At the moment they have fewer education rights than other children, and an article in The Lancet earlier this year pointed out that they are at high risk of

“immediate and long-term effects on growth…health, and brain development.”

Newham has the largest number and highest proportion of households in temporary accommodation and spends the most on it. The figure was more than £60 million in 2017-18. One problem is that the borough represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) is competing with my borough for accommodation, and that forces the price up. A lot of the housing used is in dreadful condition. Rooms are damp and mouldy, as my hon. Friend pointed out, and children develop breathing problems. Families move frequently. They change their GP every time, and sometimes their school, and they do not get any choice. And often they do not even dare to ask for repairs.

I pay tribute to the Magpie Project in our borough, set up by Jane Williams. It does superb and caring work among families in temporary accommodation. Many have been hit by the benefit cap. Three quarters have no recourse to public funds.

Will the Minister take forward the two specific things that I mentioned—regulation on standards and protections for children?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kelly Tolhurst]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about social housing, but we must also accept that within the realm of affordable housing there are different categories: social rented, shared ownership and affordable rent. I know that he accepts that when we are talking about a national problem and challenge, there are different needs and drivers in different parts of the country. It is important that in our drive to deliver on those numbers, local areas can have an impact to ensure we get their needs right and deliver the properties and accommodation that are required on the ground, which may not be the same in different parts of the country. We are committed to that.

We have launched the successor programme of £11.5 billion. I will not apologise for talking about money, because it is a key part of the delivery of our objectives and being able to build more homes. The £11.5 billion affordable homes programme will deliver up to 180,000 additional affordable homes, if economic conditions allow. At least 10% of that delivery will be used to increase the supply of much-needed specialist or supported housing.

[Stephen Timms]

I welcome the Minister’s agreement to look at the idea of a regulator. Will she consider the idea of setting standards for temporary accommodation for that regulator to monitor?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

As I have outlined, we have a lot of opportunities to look at how much further we can go and for further intervention. As I have said many times since I have been in this role, I am open-minded and I will look at ways in which we can tackle the issue that we face. However, I must emphasise that I do not recognise the characterisation that this Government are not moving forward. We are taking great steps in tackling those issues. We are announcing funding and talking about the biggest house building project in decades. I believe that we are taking our responsibilities incredibly seriously.

Covid-19: Funding for Local Authorities

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Local authorities all over the country are the frontline in this public health crisis. As a recent all-party parliamentary group on faith and society report shows, councils have set up imaginative partnerships with faith groups to provide food and care to struggling families. I support the call made recently by the hon. Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) in his report to the Prime Minister for a new deal for faith groups.

Covid-19 hit Newham, my very diverse borough, extremely hard. It is next door to Tower Hamlets, which we heard about from my hon. Friends the Members for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) and for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum). As elsewhere, the council has been imaginative and effective. It recruited volunteer health champions to disseminate key health messages and to obtain feedback from the community. It set up Newham Food Alliance with faith and community groups. Bonny Downs Baptist church, Highway Vineyard church, Manor Park Christian Centre, Ibrahim mosque and the Newham Community Project have all done extraordinary work in East Ham.

The council has increased support for temporarily accommodated homeless families and it has extended support to rough sleepers and families with no recourse to public funds. It has spent £25.3 million extra on the pandemic this financial year. It has lost £13.3 million in income and has been unable to deliver £7.4 million in planned service cuts. That is a £59.5 million hit, but Government funding has been £36.8 million.

Some 3 million extra people have had to claim universal credit this year, but hard-working families, who work legally but have no recourse to public funds due to their immigration status, do not have that safety net. They can get council help under section 17 of the Children Act 1989 if they have children, and under the Care Act 2014 if they need additional care.

In March, local authorities were told by the Minister to support single homeless adults without care needs. I very much applaud his initiative—I wish the Home Office had shown a similar degree of enlightenment—but there was no clear legal basis for that instruction, so provision has varied immensely.

Local welfare assistance and £500 track and trace payments are available for families with no recourse to public funds only by discretion. Andy Jolly of the University of Wolverhampton reports that many families were refused council help during the pandemic. We need new funding for basic council support for families with no recourse to public funds. Will the Minister commit to providing it?

Leaseholders and Cladding

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I entirely accept the points made by my right hon. Friend. We will continue to work with the insurance sector on the insurance challenges that leaseholders face, with the financial services sector on the challenges with mortgage costs that leaseholders face, and with developers to make sure that remediation takes place swiftly and effectively, so that this problem is resolved.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Will the Minister set out much more clearly the criteria for the much-needed grant funding? Residents at Waterside Park in my constituency are worried that their management company wants to apply to the building safety fund, even though the development recently received a B1 rating so remediation is not required. Would such an application be appropriate?

[Christopher Pincher]

I point the right hon. Gentleman to the specific criteria in the building safety fund, which was published earlier this year. As I have said and will say again, we will work with Michael Wade to make sure that there are solutions to what is a very complicated issue. There may be more than one element to the package of solutions to resolve this challenge. I do not want to give a running commentary to the House on the progress of that work, but it is ongoing, and we hope that we can make some further and concrete announcement soon to give succour to the points made by the right hon. Gentleman and reassurance to others in the House.

Flammable Cladding Removal

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali]

I could not agree more.

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee found that the £1 billion building safety fund would pay for only 600 of the buildings, when actually we need billions to ensure that all buildings in the country that are in this unsafe state can be addressed.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent argument. Is it not particularly unsatisfactory that Ministers have signed up to the principle that leaseholders should not have to bear these costs, but have not provided the funds to make a reality of it?

[Rushanara Ali]

Absolutely.

We are finding that the small print requirements that housing associations and local authorities are having to pass is excluding them from accessing funding. They are then having to pass on the bill to the leaseholders, as hon. Members have said. Our leaseholder constituents cannot afford tens of thousands of pounds when right now their jobs are on the line, they are struggling to make ends meet and struggling to feed their kids. Middle-class families are having to rely on food banks in this crisis, and now they are worried about what will happen to their housing.

Private Rented Sector

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Tulip Siddiq]

I will pay tribute to our hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) shortly, but what my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) says is very important. I have not mentioned mental health in this speech, because it is already too long, as most people can see. However, every time I hold an advice surgery, 80% of my casework is based on housing. When I deal with housing casework, people say, “Well, I have asthma”, or this or that problem medically, and then, “As a result, I have had mental health problems,” so there is a clear link between the housing conditions that someone lives in and the mental health problems that they may develop. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and I hope that the Minister will address this topic.

More and more people are growing old in substandard rented accommodation, and that shines a light on the fact that, as a country, we do not take private renting seriously. Five million people in the UK live in the private rented sector, which is an enormous number, up from 2.8 million in 2007. The proportion of renting households in London, where my hon. Friend and I are MPs, is expected to grow to 40% of the total in five years’ time. Again, these are staggering figures, yet I feel that too often as politicians, and as a Government, we see renting as nothing more than a stepping stone to home ownership. While the aspiration to own a home is common among us, including many of my constituents, the obscene cost of housing, especially in London, puts this dream well out of reach for the hundreds of thousands of private renters who are living on the breadline and the 63% who say that they have no savings at all. We have to do more to tackle the problem facing private renters. The economic and social crisis that we face as a result of coronavirus is shining a light on how many low-income private renters’ lives are fragile, and it lends greater urgency—and maybe provides an opportunity—to address this and provide them with the security and safety that they need.

I want to talk a bit about my constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, because we have one of the largest proportions of people who live in private rented houses in the country—30% of my constituency privately rents. The more than doubling of the private rented sector over the last 20 years has meant that in the Borough of Camden, which I live in, that type of tenure is now only slightly smaller than the owner-occupied sector. Ahead of this debate, I emailed my constituents to ask them for their experiences and thoughts about it. I was overwhelmed by the number of people who emailed to talk about their experience and how important this issue was to them. Many made the point that privately renting is not a short-term solution for them. They will have to do it for the rest of their lives, and therefore, they feel very passionately that we as politicians should tackle the problems that come with it.

The No. 1 thing that came up over and over again is how unaffordable renting in London is. That came out loud and clear and I am sure that my hon. Friend—a London Member—will recognise that. Renters in Camden face the fourth highest rents in the whole country. The median monthly rent for a two-bedroom flat is over £2,000. That reflects the dramatic growth in rents that we have seen in the last decade, far outstripping any rise in earnings that my constituents may have had.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I very much agree with the points that my hon. Friend is making. Is not one of the problems the failure to keep the level of rents in track with the local housing allowance, which supports families on low incomes who rent privately? On the latest assessment, after the four-year freeze that we have had, and the tiny inflation rise this year across England, only in 2% of the country can people afford to rent a three-bedroom home within the local housing allowance.

[Tulip Siddiq]

I will come to the link between local housing allowance rents and rental growth later, but I thoroughly agree with my right hon. Friend that because the link has been broken, people are put at risk of eviction and eventually homelessness. He will know that more than ever, representing a London constituency, where there are serious problems with overcrowding—I know his constituency well.

We have seen a dramatic growth in rents in the last decade. The average private rent is an astonishing £4,500 more than it was in 2010. That is how much it has accelerated in the last 10 years and here are some of the results. Some 30% of tenants now struggle to pay rent; over a quarter of London renters spend more than half their wages on rent alone; one in three older renters lives in poverty after rent has been paid; and it is no wonder that 60% of renting families say they are just one pay cheque away from losing their home.

Planning for the Future

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Part of the answer is building more homes in the places where they are most in demand. That will be at the heart of the reforms we will bring forward, and my hon. Friend represents an area that is in great demand. Some of the freedoms that we are encouraging—to build upwards gently and to reimagine town centres and high streets—will ensure that more homes are built sensitively in places such as Guildford, but we are also bringing forward a fleet of policies to help home ownership. One of them is our First Homes policy, which will enable local first-time buyers in her area to get a 30% discount on their first home. We are also looking at long-term fixed-rate mortgages, so that it is much cheaper and more certain when you are taking out your first mortgage. Of course, the Help to Buy scheme and our existing home ownership schemes have helped more than 600,000 first-time buyers on to the housing ladder since 2010.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is right to acknowledge the anxiety for leaseholders living in blocks with unsafe cladding. Will he confirm that it is his intention that no leaseholder should have to pay for the replacement of cladding on their block? How long does he think it will take before all the unsafe cladding on residential buildings around the country above 18 metres has been replaced?

[Robert Jenrick]

We will publish shortly the exact details of the new scheme, but it is our intention that it will be available for both the private and social sectors and that this will encompass all unsafe materials above 18 metres for what are commonly considered high-rise buildings. I would like it to include those buildings that are just below 18 metres, because there are some buildings where there has been a gaming of the system by some developers, such as the building in Bolton, for example, that was 17.8 metres. There will be a small degree of flexibility to resolve that issue, and this should enable no leaseholder to be trapped in their building. The funding should be available for all who require it, and, as I say, in the social sector it will be available to the relatively small number, but an important number, of housing associations and councils that do not have the resources available to do the work themselves.

Rough Sleeping

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

It certainly will. As I said, there are many fantastic organisations across the country. It has been my pleasure to visit many of them in my brief tenure as Housing Secretary. I went with the Prime Minister this morning to visit the Connection by St Martin in the Fields, where I met staff and clients involved with the work there. I pay tribute to them and to other organisations across the country. We want to learn from them and ensure that we build on their work.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I welcome the ambition the Secretary of State has set out. As he knows, a service at St Paul’s cathedral two weeks ago, in which my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State took part, celebrated the work of the church-based homelessness night shelters in London. There is now at least one in every London borough, each involving seven or sometimes 14 places of worship. They spare thousands from sleeping rough in London during the winter. Will the right hon. Gentleman join me in commending the work of those many volunteers, but also agree with the preacher at that service, the Bishop of Edmonton, who said that volunteers should not really have to take this work on?

[Robert Jenrick]

I was sorry not to be able to join the right hon. Gentleman at that service. I intended to be there, but a commitment arose in the House. I absolutely pay tribute to volunteers across the country and the very important work done by churches and other faith organisations, which I think we all know about from our constituencies, but which is particularly prevalent in London. Of course there is a role for the state. I hope he can see from my commitment and that of the Prime Minister today that we intend to put in the resources, but this is also a moral issue for all of us as a country. I think we should see great organisations and volunteers, praise them, and encourage them to continue their good work.