The below Parliamentary question was asked by Karen Buck on 2014-05-07.
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, when he expects to reply to Question 191523, on homeless households, tabled by the hon. Member for Westminster North on 11 March 2014.
Kris Hopkins
Question 191523 has been answered today.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Karen Buck on 2014-05-07.
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, when he expects to reply to Questions 191722, 191723, 191726, 191727, 191728, 191729, 191730 and 191731, on homeless households, tabled by the hon. Member for Westminster North on 12 March 2014.
Kris Hopkins
Questions 191722, 191723, 191726, 191727, 191728, 191729, 191730 and 191731 were answered today.
The speech made by Karen Buck, the Labour MP for Westminster North, in the House of Commons on 5 July 2022.
This has been a short debate, but a very valuable one. As always, I pay tribute to the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), for framing it for us. In all the contributions, we have heard similar themes.
Notwithstanding the emergency cost of living payments in the Social Security (Additional Payments) Bill, which we debated a couple of weeks ago, and other help, we have to see the situation in the context that it has been 12 years in the making. We are now deep into a cost of living crisis that is fast eroding standards of living for almost everyone in the country, but as always, it is those with the least who are most seriously affected.
Several hon. Members have referred to research that has been brought to our attention over weeks and months. Only yesterday, new analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that poverty among lone parents, who are always most at risk of poverty, has risen spectacularly since 2010, reaching 49%—almost half of lone parent families are in poverty. Some 1.5 million children are being left behind their peers. Two out of three lone parents report skipping meals and going hungry. Even though parents will do anything to protect their children, including from the knowledge of the struggles that the family are going through, the children know. Children see, children understand and children are damaged by that experience. It is no wonder that the experience of living on an inadequate income, coupled as it so often is with all the shame, fear and anxiety of debt and arrears, contributes to poor mental health as well as to physical ill health and educational underachievement.
Poverty places a strain elsewhere on public services. It adds to the homelessness budget, it adds to the pressures on local authorities, it adds to the pressures on schools and it adds to the pressures on the national health service. It is also true, with a bitter irony, that it is almost invariably low-income households that are exposed to the additional costs of living in poverty.
It bears saying once more that none of these struggles is visited only on people who are not in work. Of course, people who are out of work—people who are too sick to work, people who have caring responsibilities, people who have disabilities, pensioners—deserve the support and dignity that society can offer them, but in-work poverty has soared to record levels. Despite the rhetoric, being in work is no guarantee of being out of poverty.
The Government’s response to the cost of living shock of 2022—the one-off payments that we have been debating—cannot be entirely separated from what came before. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) made that point very well. One-off payments in response to the current inflationary shock simply will not undo the erosion of benefits that has taken place as a matter of deliberate Government policy over the past 12 years.
Child benefit has been left to wither since 2010. The local housing allowance, which was designed to support people with the actual cost of housing, has been allowed to fall away from real-world rents since 2011; it was briefly restored to its normal value in response to the pandemic and has now been frozen again by the Government. More than half of households who need to turn to the Government for help with rent are above the maximum level of local housing allowance support, with an average shortfall of £100 a month. Several hon. Members have mentioned the impact of deductions arising from the five-week wait and from other sources, but the shortfall in rent is one of the principal ways in which people are driven below the minimum level on which families are meant to be able to live.
Most working-age benefits were frozen from 2016 to 2020. The four-year benefit freeze was a permanent real-terms reduction in the value of benefits, offset only temporarily by the pandemic universal credit uplift, which of course did not apply to legacy benefits. Benefits lost 7% of their real-terms value in those four years alone, and those losses have not been made good. Inflation matters all the time—not just now, when there is a sudden surge.
What does the stop-start history of benefit uprating tell us about the Government’s priorities? It tells us that they have no settled policy on social security and that they regard maintaining the real-terms value of benefits as an optional extra. It tells us that it takes an emergency—a pandemic or a cost of living crisis—before the Government will make any attempt to do what previous Governments have done as a matter of course: take account of inflation in social security policy.
Of course the emergency cost of living payments are welcome—anything that helps to offset this crisis is welcome—but coming after 12 years in which inflation was allowed to erode benefits, they cannot be seen as a comprehensive solution. The Government’s adamant refusal to bring forward next year’s benefit uprating to deal with this year’s cost of living crisis means that benefits face yet another real-terms cut in 2022-23. The Government are having to rely too much on one-off payments, which should be part of the solution but not the whole solution.
We have talked about working-age benefits, but pensioners have also taken a real-terms cut—the biggest in about half a century. There are 2 million pensioners in poverty, and the number is rising. Ministers have been promoting pension credit uprating, which is good, but that momentum needs to be maintained and expanded. With approximately 850,000 pensioners not claiming pension credit, a huge number are set to miss out. Failing to do more to increase pension credit uptake could mean that more than two thirds of the poorest pensioners will not get the additional means-tested benefit.
We need to be clear about the limitations of one-off payments. As we have heard, they do not reflect family size, so families with more than one child will get exactly the same as a single-person household. Entitlement depends on receipt of one of the means-tested benefits in the month leading up to one of the qualifying days, meaning that people’s circumstances in just two months of the year are taken into account. The problem is that people’s circumstances change all the time. The Government simply do not recognise that families and households move on and off benefits all the time. A one-off payment tied to just two dates in the year is inevitably a crude approach to matching funding to need. I am particularly concerned about how people with fluctuating incomes will fare. It seems inevitable that a large number of employed and self-employed people with low and irregular incomes will be arbitrarily denied help under the policy.
Had the Government acted earlier and brought forward next year’s benefit uprating, as the Opposition and so many others called for, they would have been less reliant on one-off payments. Had the Government not deliberately eroded the value of benefits for much of the past 12 years, we would have been in a much better position to weather this year’s inflation surge. The emergency package is welcome—any contribution to relieving the widespread hardship experienced by households across the country will be welcome—but it is deeply regrettable that the Government could not see their way to a more comprehensive, sustainable solution to the crisis of poverty that is now gripping us.
The speech made by Karen Buck, the Labour MP for Westminster North, in the House of Commons on 16 June 2022.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken). As the Member for the other part of the borough of Westminster, I apologise for covering some of the same ground in respect of locality.
Having set up the all-party parliamentary group on the short lets sector, I am conscious that the issues that the hon. Member describes are having an increasing impact on cities, coastal communities and popular tourist areas across the country. Although it is always deeply unedifying to stand up in Parliament and say “I told you so,” I have to say that we told the Government so. During the passage of the Deregulation Act 2015, we warned that the changes allowing the 90-day limit in London would be likely to lead to an explosion in short lets and a very detrimental impact on communities—and that is exactly what has happened.
I remember saying in debates on the Deregulation Bill and on two subsequent ten-minute rule Bills—the Short and Holiday-Let Accommodation (Notification of Local Authorities) Bill and the Short and Holiday-Let Accommodation (Registration) Bill—that residential communities are being turned into unlicensed and unmanaged branches of the hospitality industry. The hon. Member has made many of the same points; I will not repeat them, but let me very briefly reinforce them.
As the hon. Member says, nobody is proposing any kind of ban. The sharing economy concept is a strong one. It is a smart and popular idea for people to let out a spare room or let out their home for a couple of weeks when they go on holiday or work abroad: it generates money in communities, generates money for the people who let the properties, and is clearly popular with the people who rent them. The digital economy has created enormous opportunities, and that is one of them.
However, the implementation has changed fundamentally since the original concept: it is now a highly commercial enterprise, as the figures show. A report in 2020—I have cited it previously, but I cite it again—found that just one sixth of the revenue of Airbnb, which is a major player in the field, came from the kind of home-sharing let that was its original concept. As the hon. Member says, we can track the huge shift to whole-property rentals, which has been very significant in London and across the whole country. Research by Tom Simcock of Edge Hill University has found a 423% increase in lettings by “multi-hosts”, owners of multiple properties. That gives an indication of how deeply and increasingly commercialised the sector is.
The impact is felt in the loss of residential property; the hon. Member made that point, and I endorse it. The clear indication is that it is financially advantageous to landlords to move out of the lettings market and into the short-let market, where they can make substantially more income and enjoy significant tax advantages in doing so. All over our borough of Westminster, properties where people could once live are being used just for the holiday industry. That has all kinds of impacts on people in housing need, and on communities.
There is also an impact on the management of antisocial behaviour and nuisance, ranging from noise to rubbish. If people were staying in hotels or in registered hospitality, there would be commercial arrangements for waste collection and they would be making a contribution. None of that applies in this instance.
This morning, entirely by coincidence, I received an email from a constituent on Harrow Road—not the heart of the west end, but the very north of my constituency, at the poorer end. I was told that five identified properties were now being let as short lets; people were coming and going with their luggage all through the day and night, and it was causing concerns about security. It is not necessarily that people choose to behave badly, or that they are acting in an especially antisocial way, but when people are on holiday they act differently. They do not have the same constraints as residents on the hours they keep or the way they act, and they certainly do not have the same sense of responsibility for security. It causes a great deal of anxiety.
It has been said, and I will repeat, that local authorities have their hands tied behind their back when it comes to enforcing against short lettings. Finding properties that are legally let under the short let arrangements but have to be acted on when they breach the 90-day rule is asking local authorities—cash-strapped local authorities—to do the almost impossible. They do not know who is letting. They would have to monitor everything to find that out and then be able to prove that the letting exceeded the 90-day limit. It is completely unreasonable to ask them to do that.
Landlords, particularly the commercial landlords that see the advantages of short let arrangements, are driving a coach and horses through the legislation. This is leading to enormous strains in local communities and a great deal of anger among neighbours, who turn to the local authority to help with enforcement but find that the local authority does not have the capacity to do so. Also, not unreasonably, the hospitality industry, which has had a terrible couple of years with covid, feels that there is not a level playing field, given its members’ responsibilities in terms of health and safety and taxation. They are being undercut, not by individuals letting out a spare room, but by major players in the corporate hospitality sector exploiting a loophole.
It is essential that the Government wake up to this problem. It is spreading across the country and the implications are profound. The Government can act very quickly, without excessive regulation, just to make sure that people who let out these properties are licensed to do so and that we know who they are. If we know who they are, we are in a better position to act when they breach the rules. We have been asking for this for seven years. It is a cross-party issue—cross-party in the local authority, Westminster, and cross-party in Parliament. The Minister must wake up and act to protect communities and to protect us against the loss of valuable residential property before it is too late.
The speech made by Karen Buck, the Labour MP for Westminster North, in the House of Commons on 16 June 2022.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) on securing this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), whose constituency includes the area of Grenfell Tower. Of course, for 13 years I represented the constituency of Regent’s Park and Kensington North, including Grenfell Tower, and I knew it and the people living in it well. When the phone calls began in the middle of that fateful night five years ago, it was a personal horror to me as well.
The inferno engulfed Grenfell Tower just days after the 2017 general election. Parliament had not reconvened, but Ministers and MPs gathered in Westminster Hall for a special meeting, for which an official parliamentary record could not be provided. The newly elected Member for Kensington in 2017, Emma Dent Coad, was plunged into probably the most challenging set of circumstances that almost any newly elected Member of Parliament has had to face outside of wartime. She went on to make the case over the following two years, and she continues to do so outside this House. We should commend her for coping so well with that extraordinary challenge.
Sarah Jones
I believe that Emma Dent Coad is with us today, watching from the Public Gallery. I also came to Parliament in 2017, and this has absolutely been the defining issue of my entire five years. What happened was such a huge thing for those of us who were new, and I can only imagine how she managed to cope with the challenges she faced.
Ms Buck
I thank my hon. Friend and agree very strongly with her.
That gathering of parliamentarians, which is not on the parliamentary record, was very intense indeed. We pressed Ministers very hard for answers. In addition to the obvious shock that everybody was still feeling, there was an absolutely overwhelming demand for urgency not only in response to the catastrophe that happened in north Kensington but in relation to the wider lessons, which I will come to in a moment.
In the days that followed, including the day on which we gathered, it became immediately obvious that there was a failure of epic proportions on the part of the state, and particularly the local council in Kensington, and those of us who went to the Grenfell area to offer support in the immediate aftermath could see that. During that parliamentary debate, I asked what we were going to do, immediately and urgently, to deal with the homelessness crisis faced by hundreds of people. That quickly became a larger number, because over the following days there was an evacuation of residents from the Lancaster West estate surrounding Grenfell Tower. Having been the Member of Parliament for that area, I knew well the sheer scale of the homelessness diaspora resulting from Kensington council’s behaviour, and indeed of the wider homelessness problems in London.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, people were sleeping rough. How was that allowed to happen? We discussed the issue, yet it was allowed to happen. It is important that we remember that five years on, because the way in which the institutions of the state failed the survivors, the relatives and the wider community set a tone for the whole of the following five years. Understandably, that fed into a deep and profound sense that they could not rely on the institutions of the state to offer them support and justice. One of the things that we have to do today is recognise that epic failure and collectively apologise for it. I am ashamed. Anybody who went down to north Kensington over those following days could not believe their eyes in seeing a failure on that scale.
Homelessness was one of the first issues raised, but it took months—it took years—for the housing needs of Grenfell survivors, relatives and the community to be dealt with, even though they were recognised within hours of the fire. The second immediate issue raised in Parliament on that day was the need for justice—the need for those responsible to be held to account for what had happened. We did not immediately know exactly who was responsible—which components of the system, from building design and maintenance to the emergency response—but people knew that there was a need for justice.
I do not think anybody would now say that the passage of five years means that justice has been served. That is not in any way a criticism of the inquiry, which has been profoundly rigorous in going about its work, but justice delayed is justice denied. Five years is far too long for the community to wait for justice. Urgency was the prevailing tone in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but five years on, the promise of urgency and the commitment to urgency have been denied. The community has been let down profoundly as a consequence.
Building safety has been a dominant theme in Parliament in the intervening five years, but we need to reflect again on emergency planning. The fact that it failed so catastrophically in Kensington tells us something quite profound, which we continue to raise in other contexts: there is an institutional belief that these kinds of things cannot happen here. There is a complacency about risks that should have been shattered comprehensively, forever, by what happened five years ago, but it has not. Again and again, we see the expectation that we should drive towards a deregulatory approach to services and a de minimis public sector, even though the capacity of the public sector, which failed so badly on that day, is so essential to ensuring that such things cannot happen again.
Within days and weeks of Grenfell, it became quickly apparent that hundreds of thousands of people across the country were living in buildings where such things could happen again—in some cases, they still are. That possibility has dominated our discussions in this Chamber. Ten days after Grenfell, I had to attend a meeting of desperate and frightened residents of a six-block, 22-storey estate in north Westminster that overlooked Grenfell Tower and had been covered with the same form of cladding. In many ways, they have been the fortunate ones: they went through terminal upheaval as the cladding was removed over the following winter. However, 10,000 buildings continue to be covered with some form of cladding. The people in them live with that risk. In many cases, they also live with the reality that they face financial ruin and are trapped, unable to move.
I completely recognise that the Government have taken some steps in their legislative programme to implement proposals on fire safety and building safety, but so little has been done compared with what is needed.
Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. I have been in this place for only five years; the Grenfell fire and its aftermath have been a defining part of my term. A number of buildings in my constituency are still wrapped in unsafe cladding. Despite many years of promises that leaseholders would never have to foot the bill for fire safety and remediation work, and despite the Fire Safety Act and the Building Safety Act, leaseholders are still being burdened with thousands of pounds of debt to pay for all the fire safety and remediation work to be completed.
Ms Buck
I totally agree. So many people still live with the fear, the risk and the stress of having to contribute financially. As we have said again and again, so many of the people who bear the burden of cost and risk are the very last people in the chain of responsibility to have had anything to do with the circumstances in which they are trapped.
Five years on, as the inquiry continues its work, the Home Office’s decision not to implement the inquiry’s recommendation
“that the owner…of every high-rise residential building be required…to prepare personal emergency evacuation plans”
sends out the worst possible signal, particularly to survivors and to the north Kensington community, who are looking to the inquiry for answers on the long road to justice.
This is the fifth anniversary of an avoidable tragedy of epic proportions—a tale of corporate malfeasance, incompetence, indifference and institutional inertia, even after the Lakanal House fire had given us all the signals that Government action was needed. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East, I pay tribute to Peter Apps and Inside Housing for years of painstaking work in following the inquiry, reporting on it and giving us the information that we need to follow what would otherwise be a very complex story.
The chains of reporting by Peter Apps make salutary reading for every Member of this House, because they lay so bare what has gone wrong. For example, contractors and developers knew that the cladding system would fail. As Peter Apps has reported:
“In an email exchange…designers of the tower’s cladding system wrote: ‘There is no point in “fire stopping”. As we all know; the ACM will be gone rather quickly in a fire!’”
It is worth reading the dozens of reports that have been put on record in the inquiry, which give us revelations of that kind.
Five years on, I pay tribute to the survivors, the relatives, their representatives, the mosques, the churches, the community and Grenfell United, who have done such extraordinary work, in the aftermath of this tragedy, to hold the community together and support people, their dignity and their campaign for justice. But five years on, there is not yet justice.
Below is the text of the speech made by Karen Buck, the Labour MP for Westminster North, in the House of Commons on 14 January 2019.
The result of the 2016 referendum left me absolutely devastated, but I hoped that we would be able to find a consensus for the way forward. It left me devastated because the whole backdrop to my adult life has been the positive internationalism that the European Union represented, for all its flaws. That stood in contrast to the history of depression and conflict that had scarred Europe for the first half of the last century. In a new era of instability characterised by the behaviour of Putin and Trump, that hopeful internationalism seems to be even more important than it has been in recent decades. I regard the freedoms of the European Union, including the freedom of movement, as a triumph of modern politics—something that we should celebrate rather than fear. I understand the frustration at messy compromises and sclerotic decision making within the EU, but I fear that future trade negotiations will be characterised by many of the same frustrations and compromises on sovereignty.
I represent a constituency that not only voted overwhelmingly to remain but is one of the most diverse, international and outward-looking communities not just in Britain but probably in the world, and which has one of the highest proportions of EU nationals. It is an area of arrival that has, over centuries, accommodated waves of new communities, done so with extraordinary success, and helped to build a capital city and a country of creativity, cultural openness and economic success. Westminster, like London and many other parts of the country, has drawn on the contribution of EU nationals who have started businesses, contributed, and staffed our public services.
When my constituents write to me, as they do in their thousands, the overwhelming majority frame their arguments in those terms, often doing so with movingly personal stories of their lives not as separate communities but as husbands and wives, sons and daughters, fellow employees and business partners of British nationals. There is disappointment, anxiety and pain expressed every day, and bafflement as to how we could choose to close down rather than open up our options and our freedoms, and complicate our relations with our closest and largest trading partner.
It is also worth saying, because so often the remain argument is presented as one of middle-class affluence posited against the poorer communities that voted leave, that my constituency is the 15th poorest in the country on working-age poverty. Of course, I hear, as a result, the voices of some leavers too—the minority but none the less there. I agreed on one thing with the Secretary of State, which is that we should not patronise leave voters by saying that they did not know what they voted for. People did know what they voted for, but none the less a range of destinations was expressed in the leave vote.
That is why it is so important that, as the Brexit debate unfolds and the options have become clearer, we give people a further choice to express their opinions. Just as the EU was not responsible for many of the grievances that drove leave voters, leaving the EU will not rectify those grievances. Above all, it will not do so if this country is made poorer as a result—and it would be the poorest communities and individuals who had to carry the consequences of that.
There is no point in speculating about whether a different Government could have bridged the gulf. We can only deal with the reality of what we have. There is no point in speculating about whether the Government could have brought about a different outcome with more imagination, openness and generosity than they have shown over the last two years. That did not happen. It may have been possible early on to negotiate a compromise built around the customs union and the single market, possibly with the Norway model, but that door has now shut.
We have only the deal in front of us, which is the start of an agonising process stretching as far as the eye can see. We have only a deal that is worse than membership of the EU and will leave us poorer, with reduced influence. I will not rule out any option to avoid the worst possible consequence, of crashing out with no deal, but I believe it is time to seek an extension of article 50 and put the decision back to the British people, so that we can hear their views.