Andy Slaughter
MP for Hammersmith and Chiswick · Labour · United Kingdom
“I welcome the Bill, and thank the Government for introducing it and bringing it back to the House before the summer recess. It is the result of years of committed campaigning, led by the families of the victims and survivors of Hillsborough.”
“I know that case means a huge amount to the hon. Lady as a constituency MP, and I thank her for all the work she does on the Justice Committee. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface. This Bill will be a transforming piece of legislation. I will make one final comment.”
“This would be a new, independent public body that collated, analysed and followed up on the conclusions and recommendations made after official investigations into deaths and state failings, in order to improve oversight and implementation of them.”
“I think I have taken enough time, but I thank the Member for that intervention. This afternoon, the Justice Committee signed off a new major report on legal aid, which will be published on Friday. Those who are interested can read more there.”
“In the time that I have, I will focus my remarks on clauses 1 to 16, which create a new appeals body for immigration and asylum cases known as the independent immigration appeals authority.”
“From that visit, our diagnosis was that these are operational problems. There are two key questions for the House: will the IIAA fix the problems with the current system, and will it be truly independent from the Home Office?”
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“There have been seven deaths in Wormwood Scrubs prison as a result of self-harm in the past three years. The first of the inquests into those deaths—that of Luke Clarke—was concluded only last month. It found that inadequate care, fear and confusion contributed to Luke’s death. What is the Ministry of Justice doing to prevent the unacceptable level of self-inflicted and avoidable deaths in prison and what is it doing to speed up the inquest process? I am still waiting for the meeting into the inquest process that I was promised on 27 June by the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer).”
“I apologise, as I have not been present for the whole debate. May I mention one other clinic, 10 Hammersmith Broadway? I visited it recently and was hugely impressed by the staff and their partners in the community, such as the Terrence Higgins Trust. It is clear, however, that they are under increasing stress. The problem is that it only takes an emergency like the outbreak of mpox, or STIs going up, and routine services such as providing PrEP go on to the back foot. Will the Minister look at that, particularly in high-prevalence areas, because the limited cost is not worth the great risk involved?”
“Tomorrow, Thailand’s Parliament will vote for a second time to choose a Prime Minister, following the May election won by the Move Forward party, which is now leading an alliance of eight parties opposed to the military junta that seized power in 2014. It is likely that Move Forward’s leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, will again be blocked from taking office by the 250 senators in the upper House, all of whom were appointed by the junta. While the UK may not be best placed to advise on the role of unelected second Chambers, our country is a good friend of the Thai people. What representations has the Foreign Secretary made to the Thai authorities to let democracy take its course?”
“The former Lord Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), when told of the demise of his Bill of Rights, said: “All the wrong people will celebrate.” Was the Attorney General celebrating the defeat of that attack on our European convention rights? Will she now stand up to other of her Cabinet colleagues who repeatedly transgress international law? They did it with the Northern Ireland protocol, with the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020, with the Illegal Migration Bill and again this week with the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill. She is the Attorney General, so if she will not stand up for the rule of law, who will?”
“I heard everything the Secretary of State said about that; the rhetoric is all well and good, but the actuality is that tenants are living in poor conditions and people are in temporary accommodation —we have the highest levels ever—because no decent social housing is being built and maintained in this country. That is what tenants and leaseholders are looking for, not warm words and empty rhetoric.”
“Shepherds Bush Housing Group, a formerly well-respected local medium-sized housing association, has just had to be taken over by Guinness, a much larger association, because it simply cannot financially survive with all the pressures on it. There is an existential threat to the social housing market. Previous Conservative Governments decided to move from council housing to housing associations in a big way. The Government will have to rethink where they are on those issues because it is no longer sustainable for housing associations to go forward with the financial support that they have. When the Housing Minister winds up the debate, perhaps she will correct some of the errors that she made in that interview, and perhaps she will address a more listening ear to social landlords. They perform an extremely important function.”
“The answer is that they lost 60% of the social housing grant under the austerity Government. Due to rent controls and other matters, they are unable to come up with the resources they need. It is so bad that the smaller associations are going under or are having to merge into much larger associations. The whole sector is being distorted by the financial pressures. The big landlord group G15 says that out of the £6 billion it will need to pay for remedial work due to fire safety measures, it will have to find £4 billion itself. That means that its tenants and leaseholders will have to find that money, because there is no other readily available source.”
“They want to develop new stock—again, completely contrary to what the Housing Minister said in that interview, the number of social rented homes that this Government have created is appalling low, standing at 7,644 last year. She said in the same interview: “We’ve delivered more social rented homes in this government than under the last Labour government.” These facts are easily discoverable: the current Government have built less than half the number built by the previous Labour Government. That is only one aspect of the crisis in social housing. We have heard about damp, mould and disrepair, which need to be dealt with. Retrofitting needs to be dealt with—at a cost of about £23 billion—as well as building safety, which is what we are talking about today. Why are social housing landlords in such a plight?”
“This debate is partly about social housing more generally, but I am not sure we have time to go into all aspects of that. I would like to address the crossover between fire safety and social housing providers, and the pressures on their resources. I was prompted to do so after reading an extraordinary interview that the Housing Minister, the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), gave to Inside Housing a couple of days ago. It states: “When asked what housing associations should prioritise without additional funding from government, and facing pressure to build, retrofit stock and meet building safety and historic disrepair costs, Ms Maclean replied: ‘It’s up to them.’” That shows an absolute tin ear to the current pressures on social landlords.”
“Those do not have to be fire alarms that any resident can activate. In the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, the “stay put” policy increasingly does not work. I understand why it was maintained, and it works in many cases, but it does not work if residents—completely understandably—fear for their lives and evacuate the building. If a decision is made to evacuate a building, there has to be a way of telling people in that building. Alarm systems that are controllable at least by the fire service are an important part of that equation. I cannot for the life of me think why we are not retrofitting sprinklers into high-rise buildings. They will stop 99% of fires. Many, many tragedies could be avoided if that happened. My final point is the consequence.”
“Extraordinarily, hitherto, whereas non-residential buildings over 11 metres had to have a second staircase, a residential building can be as tall as you like. I know that because just overlooking my constituency in north Acton is a 50-plus-storey, newly constructed block that has one staircase in it. I am pleased to say that, due to the action of the Major of London, those seeking planning permission for blocks of flats over 30 metres are required to go back and put in a second staircase. A submission from RIBA, experts in this field, states that that should apply to any residential building over 18 metres. I would like the Government to adopt that. When refurbishing, it may be difficult to put in a second staircase. There, the ask is that evacuation lifts, sprinklers and centrally addressable fire alarm systems be put in.”
“It says: “the Grenfell Tower fire was a disaster foretold—the culmination of successive decades of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional failure to learn from the lessons of past multiple-fatality fires.” It is a very good read and I recommend it to the Secretary of State. It indicates that the crisis did not begin and certainly did not end with Grenfell, but has been going on a long time—the result of either deliberate Government policy or Government neglect to take care of the issues. The second issue is design. As is often the case, I am grateful to the Royal Institute of British Architects, which has been pushing the issues of design and remedial work to high-rise buildings. Its particular ask is the trigger point for a second staircase. I think that people are familiar with the issue of having at least two staircases.”
“The year before Grenfell, in a high-rise block of flats, Shepherd’s Court, on Shepherd’s Bush Green, a faulty tumble dryer caught fire and destroyed the flat. Hundreds of thousands of them were manufactured, mainly by a large company called Whirlpool under names such as Hotpoint and Indesit. They were cheaply made, cheap to buy and often sold second hand, and they are causing hundreds if not thousands of fires across the country. There is a lack of design prowess. Whether it is the crimp, quality control, the batteries, lack of regulation or lack of design, there is a crisis across the manufacturing and design sector. I commend to the Secretary of State a newly published book by Professor Shane Ewen of Leeds Beckett University, “Before Grenfell: Fire, Safety and Deregulation in Twentieth-Century Britain”.”
“If compartmentalisation works—the fire is kept in that flat because of the construction of the doors and walls—and the occupants of the flat escape, there may be no serious injuries, but if that does not happen and the fire spreads, as it quite easily can, it is almost impossible to contain. That is about a lack of regulation. Why are we allowing such kits to be sold? Why are we allowing people to use them in high-rise buildings in that way? As I said, probably once a month I go and view the site of a fire caused by exactly that somewhere in my constituency, and it is only a matter of time before there are more fatalities. There have been fatalities through lithium batteries in that way. The third issue on cause again comes from personal experience.”
“I say fires, but they are usually explosions. This is an extraordinary problem that the London Fire Brigade and, I am sure, fire brigades across the country are very much aware of. A couple of weeks ago, three people were taken to hospital after a fire broke out in a flat in West Kensington due to a converted e-bike catching fire. What happens is that people buy a bike and want to convert it into an e-bike, so they buy a kit and a battery. Many of these things are bought second hand and are cheap, with faults in manufacture, so they overheat and literally explode. Anyone who does not believe me should look at the London Fire Brigade’s Twitter feed, where they will see explosions that completely engulf a room of a flat—sometimes the whole flat—within seconds.”
“I will not go through all the technical details, but its short conclusion is: “A probable cause of the fire is a poor crimp connection…an overheated wire connector within the compressor relay compartment for the fridge freezer (Hotpoint Model FF175BP) from Flat 16.” It is as simple as that: a little component, costing a matter of pennies, which was either not fitted properly or not manufactured properly, caused a fire that led to the deaths of 72 people. Of course, there were many other issues of causation in Grenfell and elsewhere, but that draws attention to the lack of quality control in manufacturing processes. The second issue on cause, which I encounter every month—not a month goes by when I do not hear about this, usually in a social housing block of flats in my constituency—is fires caused by lithium batteries.”
“The cause of the Grenfell fire was what I am holding in my hand: a crimp, which is a small piece of wiring that costs a few pence. As I am sure people will guess, I am not an expert in these matters, so I am grateful to Richard Farthing, chairman of the Hammersmith Society, who has a background in electrical and electronic manufacturing. He sent me the expert report on the cause of the Grenfell fire.”
“It is to some extent easy to set new building standards for new buildings—well, it can be done—but we are lagging behind substantially in doing remedial work on existing buildings. Much of this comes down to finance. That is not just for individual leaseholders, who in certain circumstances will still have to pay out large sums of money, or where money is not forthcoming up front; it is also for social tenants, because social landlords are not getting the same degree of financial support as leaseholders, and social landlords have competing priorities as to what they spend their money on. Although I would like to, I will not take the time to deal with all those issues. I will deal with just three issues in detail. First, there is the causes of fires.”
“What seems to be happening is that, every year, there are more complex issues and while there has been some degree of resolution, more questions are raised and there are more problems to resolve about the causes and spread of fires. That, to a large extent, is to do with cladding, and not just ACM cladding. There are many other reasons why fire spreads through high rise buildings in particular. The families want to see a complete ban on ACM cladding on all buildings not only in this country but internationally. I hope that the Government will campaign for that to happen, because it is not only in the UK that tragic fires such as Grenfell have happened. There are huge issues with the design of new buildings. That is evolving all the time, as we see in the two-staircase issue, as well as in remediation.”
“I agree with the Secretary of State that we should have an annual Grenfell debate. It would be better to have it on, or as near as possible to, the anniversary date; it is somewhat disrespectful that we have waited nearly a month to have it this year. I am sure that the silent walks will continue. I have tried to attend them, at least on the anniversary, and I have noticed how, over the six years, the mood has changed from grief to frustration about the lack of progress from all sides—whether the Government or the inquiry—and now to real anger. The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), was also there, and I am sure that he agrees on that point. I therefore do not recognise much of what the Secretary of State said about what is happening.”
“I am slightly puzzled that the Foreign Secretary just told the Liberal Democrat spokesperson that foreign policy decisions can be passed to local authorities—I do not know what the Levelling Up Secretary would say about that. I am concerned very much by what the Foreign Secretary said a few moments ago in relation to my constituent Alireza Akbari who, as he knows, was executed earlier this year. The Foreign Secretary said he had not had any contact with the Iranian regime for two years, and I know that the family wanted him to do that. People such as Morad Tahbaz remain in custody in Tehran. Does he not think that he should be doing more to try to get them released, and that talking to the regime may be necessary?”
“The use of aerial bombardment and armoured assault by thousands of troops in a refugee camp, familiar to the people of Gaza, is now extended to the west bank. Alongside settlement expansion, it is part of the annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories by Israel’s far-right Government. Occupation is the cause and context of these latest war crimes. Will the Government acknowledge that and respond by recognising the state of Palestine?”
“The Chair of the Justice Committee is making an excellent critique of the system. There is something ironic about prisons being so undermaintained and needing £1 billion spent on them, such that their accommodation is not available, when some £4 billion is being spent on new prisons at the same time. It looks as if we are just forgetting the ones that we have, particularly the remand and the local prisons.”
“It is clear that something is going very wrong, and the Government need to fix the problem.”
“What necessitates much of that is an insufficient number of staff on the wings. Prisons need more staff, but they cannot hire more staff if their budget does not allow it. Prison officers are leaving the profession in their droves, and it is not hard to see why. It is a very dangerous job; prison officers are at very real risk of physical injury. It is also emotionally taxing seeing prisoners at some of the lowest points in their lives, and getting very little assistance by way of productive work, education and other support. The pay does not do the job justice, and is proof that the MOJ has insufficient regard for the profession. It wastes thousands of pounds training new prison officers who then leave within the first two years due to the conditions.”
“A couple of weeks ago at Justice questions, I also asked about the overcrowded conditions in prisons. That data is held and published by the Government, but I do not think it is an accurate representation of what is and is not an overcrowded prison. For example, when I visited Wormwood Scrubs, the governor told me that she had just been asked by the MOJ to increase operational capacity. How will we ever know if a prison is overcrowded if the MOJ keeps moving the goalposts of operational capacity? If the MOJ keeps asking prisons to increase operational capacity, overcrowding will become an even bigger problem, as well as something of a hidden one. Prisons are overcrowded, single cells are being used to house two people, and most time-out-of-cell regimes are oppressively restrictive.”
“I followed up to inquire about why the MOJ does not collect that data centrally, and I was provided yesterday with a response that said that the MOJ would need to record data for each prisoner individually, based on his or her movements each day, to understand time out of cell for each prison. If I may say so, that is a ridiculous response and the Minister has misunderstood the question—not intentionally, I hope. To get an understanding of each prison’s time-out-of-cell regime, the MOJ need only ask each prison to report that data to it. As the data is about the time out of cell rather than the individual schedules of prisoners, it will be much simpler to collect than the Ministry pretends. [ Interruption. ] The Minister is chuntering from a sedentary position. I am sure that he will, when he responds, deal with that point in more detail.”
“On my most recent visit, I saw that many of the men were sharing one-person cells with unshielded toilets, making their living conditions cramped and unpleasant with no privacy. In addition, the Scrubs, like many prisons, is still operating a 23-hour lock-up regime, in which some prisoners get only one hour a day outside their cells. Is it any wonder, then, that self-harm and poor mental health are at a high across the prison estate? I recently asked a series of written questions of the Minister’s Department, mainly on the topic of time out of cell. The MOJ responded that it does not hold those statistics centrally and that it was not practical for it to record the data. How does the MOJ hope to have an overview of the wellbeing of the prison population in its care if it does not know what each prison’s time-out-of-cell regime is?”
“It is a real pleasure to follow that forensic speech by the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). He took us through many of the problems, particularly those in the Prison Service. I will be rather more selective about the issues I speak about, but I will concentrate in particular on prison conditions. Three weeks ago, I visited Wormwood Scrubs prison in my constituency. It is a prison that I have visited on and off for the past 30 years as an MP, a councillor and a criminal barrister. Despite meeting many dedicated officers and determined governors, I have never changed my mind about it being an unsuitable institution in the 21st century, particularly for the rehabilitation, or indeed the punishment, of offenders.”
“That is a recipe for disaster not only for the individual but for society as a whole, and it is an indictment of the failure of the prison system under this Government.”
“I mentioned local and remand prisons. These are often the oldest, Victorian prisons and those in the worst condition. The Government boast—I am not sure why—that they are on this massive prison expansion programme and putting huge sums of money into new prisons. However, that is not to renew the prison estate, but because of the increase in population. I urge the Minister to look at the way that some of our older prisons are being run. They do a disservice not only to the people who work there and run them, as well as of course to the inmates, but to the wider community, because people are not being rehabilitated and are coming out of prison insufficiently supported and going back into prison very quickly.”
“Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), has offered to meet me and Inquest to discuss this, and I hope to hear from him soon. I realise that deaths in custody and deaths in prison are only one part of the equation, but they are an extremely important part. I want to finish by coming back to education in prisons, In my recent meeting with the governor at Wormwood Scrubs, she explained that individual prisons have little control over their education services. The MOJ employs education providers in the Prison Service, but the quality of these providers can vary greatly from prison to prison. The governor says that she is unable to change the provider, because it has a contract with the MOJ for a number of prisons. That is only one example, but I think it is typical of the disconnect and neglect that is apparent.”
“I recently spoke on a panel for a campaign launched by the charity Inquest, which is asking the Government to implement a national oversight mechanism. The mechanism would collate recommendations from inquests and prevention of future deaths reports, along with the public body response, in a database. It would then analyse these responses, and produce a report. Finally, the mechanism could allow a follow-up procedure to check on the progress of implementing changes arising from the original recommendations. This sounds like a sensible and not expensive approach, and one that could help to lower the number of preventable deaths, if recommendations became centralised and easy to follow up. I am grateful that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon.”
“We rightly talk a lot about the court backlog, but maybe not enough attention is paid to the coroner’s court backlog. According to coroner statistics for 2022, the average time from the date of death to the conclusion of an inquest is 30 weeks, but it is a postcode lottery; I think the worst case was at North Lincolnshire and Grimsby, where the wait was 72 weeks. One of the important outcomes of inquests is often the prevention of future deaths report. If an institution such as Wormwood Scrubs is waiting over three years for an inquest into the death of a prisoner and there is crucial learning that a coroner could uncover, how can that prison be expected to make the necessary changes? When the coroner does provide recommendations in their prevention of future deaths report, how do we know that public bodies will implement them?”
“I will come back to the issue of education in a moment, but I will briefly mention mental wellbeing in prisons. I recently met a lawyer who has been representing four bereaved families of prisoners from Wormwood Scrubs who took their own lives. Between April 2020 and February this year, there have been seven self-inflicted deaths at the Scrubs. The pain for the families must be unimaginable, and I am sure that other prisoners and the staff who found the deceased are also struggling. Any self-harm death in a prison is a potentially preventable one that deserves a rapid response to work out what went wrong and to implement learning for the future, but not one of those cases has yet made it to an inquest. An inquest for one of the families is scheduled for August this year, but that is over three years of waiting for answers.”
“I am very glad to have taken that intervention. I agree that prison chaplains, prison priests, prison vicars and prison imams—we have an excellent imam at the Scrubs—are in many ways unsung heroes, doing a fantastic job alongside the other staff. I am afraid that often the problem is the MOJ itself, which is seemingly always one of the first Government Departments to offer itself up as soon as the Chancellor of the day mentions cuts. I think its budget is now 12% lower than it was in 2010. If prisons do not have the staff to unlock the prison safely for a reasonable period of time, do not have the money to provide meaningful activities and do not have the resources to provide good-quality education, mental health declines, and that can have tragic consequences for prisoners and staff.”
“What effect will it have? On a day in which battlefield weapons are being used against civilian areas of the west bank for the first time in decades, we are talking about this scurrilous and performative Bill. The occupied territories have been occupied since 1967. Who will champion, as I wish this Government and this country would, their right to self-determination and their right to have their country recognised as a sovereign state, as we absolutely respect for the people of Israel? This Bill only hampers ambitions along those lines. For those reasons, I ask Members on both sides of the House to vote for the reasoned amendment and not to allow the Bill to pass from this House in its current form.”
“Whatever the Secretary of State says, the Bill is a clear attack on free speech, and it is quite Kafkaesque in how it denies people the ability to speak out against what is happening. By inflicting not only strong powers of search and seizure but unlimited fines and penalties on those who speak out, this really is appalling legislation. The Bill will have a chilling effect. We do not need to analyse the exact effect on every procurement and investment decision to see that pension funds are conservative bodies that will take decisions in ways that do not lay them open to this very woolly legislation. The consequence is that they will make bad decisions that go much further than the Secretary of State says he wishes to take the Bill. Finally, I speak up, as many Members do, for the Palestinian people. How does this Bill benefit them?”
“The FCDO guidance has already been quoted, and we have heard what Ministers have said as recently as last week in making distinctions between our policy towards Israel and our policy towards the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This point has been made a number of times already. By treating Israel exceptionally, the Bill does it no favours. By treating the Occupied Palestinian Territories alongside Israel, in a way that I have not seen before and that runs contrary to Government policy over many years under different Governments, the Bill makes a significant break and gives comfort to those who wish to see the Palestinian territories under permanent occupation, including many within the extremist Government in Israel.”
“The first question I want to ask is this: will the Bill help or hinder groups that are under threat around the world, such as the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, minorities in countries, or people in occupied territories—in Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Crimea, or the Palestinian territories? Will it help them in any way? The answer is, I think, a clear no. The Bill will run contrary to international law, it will run contrary to United Nations Security Council resolutions, particularly resolution 2334, and it will run contrary to the due diligence and fiduciary duties of local authorities and other public bodies and to legal principles.”
“Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), in the reasoned amendment, and I commend her for an excellent piece of drafting that really takes the Bill to pieces. I hope it will be approved tonight, because it would deny the Bill a Second Reading. If it does not succeed, some Members may vote against Second Reading, while others may abstain. I will abstain at that point, because I am reassured by the shadow Secretary of State’s assurance that if the Bill is not substantially reformed in the way in which the amendment suggests, it will be rejected. I hope it will be rejected by Members in all parts of the House on Third Reading, before it leaves this place. In the very limited time available to me, I want to headline my concerns.”
“Perhaps it is the revenge of the experts whom he trashed so publicly years ago. While it is good that the Bill is not being given a platform and is not acting in the way in which the Government would like it to act—the way in which all the other legislation they are introducing seems to act at the moment—that does not mean that it is not a dangerous Bill. It does not mean that there is no harm in its provisions: harm to civil society, the rule of law and freedom of speech, principles that the Secretary of State would doubtless say that he wishes to uphold. I am pleased to say that the nature and number of the risks in the Bill have been helpfully set out by the shadow Secretary of State, my hon.”
“We have benefited from some extremely good analysis, although I have not been able to read all the briefings on the Bill that we have received, not just from eminent KCs—it was, again, a shame to witness one of them being speared by the Secretary of State—but from some leading expert organisations in the field: from the Council for Arab-British Understanding, from our former colleague Richard Burden, from the Balfour Project, from many Jewish organisations including Yachad and the Union of Jewish Students, from many trade unions, and from environmental groups who believe they will be caught up in this as well. I do not think that is what the Secretary of State intended; I think he intended the Bill to appeal to a populist narrative; but I do not think that has happened.”
“It is a pleasure to follow another excellent speech dissecting what is wrong with this very faulty Bill. What a contrast it was with the Secretary of State’s opening speech, which was effectively a display of polemical and performative rhetoric, containing assertions that the Bill itself contradicts—and I think that was a shame.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate. She is describing something familiar to all of us in west London. In the post-covid period, there has been a rapid increase in antisocial behaviour, vehicle crime and drug-related crime. I have an active local authority that has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other in the country and which has employed 70 law enforcement officers of its own. What is missing is the neighbourhood policing that we used to have that reassured local communities and gathered intelligence. That really did make a contribution to both reassurance and keeping crime down, and that is what we need back.”
“I just want to give the Minister a quick reality check. If he is right that crime is massively down, why are my constituents telling me every day that there is a feeling of lawlessness on the streets that they have not experienced before? Offences include drug offences and cars being broken into and stolen. If he has replaced the 20,000 officers that the Government initially got rid of, why, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth has said, do my neighbourhood teams have only one or two officers per ward, rather than the six officers that they had before the Conservatives started running them down?”
“Today, not for the first time, most of my constituents have little or no water supply. Two years ago, not for the first time, hundreds of my constituents had their homes flooded with raw sewage. Year after year, Thames Water has failed its customers while obscenely rewarding its management and shareholders. No one will miss the asset strippers at Thames Water if it goes under. All we want is working infrastructure and good customer service at a reasonable cost. Is that too much to ask?”
“If the Secretary of State were doing a good job of returning foreign prisoners, we would expect to see overcrowding coming down, but on a recent visit to Wormwood Scrubs prison I found, increasingly, that two people were occupying a one-person cell without a shielded toilet, and that time out of cell was between one and two hours a day. If the Secretary of State is proud of his record, will he collect and publish those statistics? At the moment, his Department is refusing even to collect the time out of cell figures.”
“Today, Inquest and 40 other justice organisations launch a campaign for a national oversight mechanism to systematically learn the lessons of inquests, inquiries and investigations from Grenfell to deaths in custody. Do the Government support that initiative?”
“Q8. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust described the Government’s recent decision to delay the rebuilding of Charing Cross, Hammersmith and St Mary’s Hospitals as “hugely damaging for the health and healthcare of hundreds of thousands of people.” Will the Prime Minister keep the promise made to me by his predecessor one year ago from that Dispatch Box and guarantee completion of new hospitals on those sites by 2030?”