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?”
The complete record
Every one of 7,200 lines we hold for Andy Slaughter, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 37 of 144.
“The hon. and learned Lady is coming to the end of her speech, but she is making a very strong point about the factors that are missing—the lacunae—in what the Government are proposing at the moment. Maintaining the height at 18 metres allows new buildings to be constructed that are already potentially dangerous. I have 20-storey buildings being constructed in my constituency that have a single staircase. We must get all these things right. As she correctly says, this is not just about cladding.”
“Resolved, That this House has considered reducing fire risk in high rise social housing.”
“Let us no longer have the Conservative party as the party that bashes social housing. If the Conservatives genuinely care about levelling up, they have to care about social housing. That means housing conditions, planned maintenance and housing development cannot be the victims here. It cannot be that they have to fail in order for fire safety to be addressed. That is vital for millions of our fellow citizens. I hope the Minister understands that; from the tone in which he has addressed the debate today, he appears to understand it, and I hope that is true of him and his colleagues. If so, we will not have wasted an hour and a half in Westminster Hall today—although in any case, Ms Rees, it has been a real pleasure to be here under your chairship. Question put and agreed to.”
“Secondly, we do not have, and neither has there been proposed, adequate law or enforcement of that law, whether we are talking about building safety or electrical safety. This is the opportunity to get those things right so that people can feel safe and secure in their homes. The most poignant thing that came out of the documentary on Sunday that we have all been talking about was people feeling that they were vulnerable in their own home, whether through extreme disrepair or lack of fire safety. Finally—I hope everybody would share this view, including those on the Government side, but I noted it particularly in the speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) and the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier)—we should really champion social housing.”
“Responsible landlords, which includes most social landlords, are looking at those and making no distinction in relation to them, and it is artificial for the Government to continue to make that distinction for no other reason than additional costs. The same is true for other defects. It is about not just cladding but, as we have heard, the way buildings are constructed, escape mechanisms, alarms, compartmentalisation, sprinkler systems and other things. There is a whole range of defects, and fixing those must be funded in some way. This is not even just about residential buildings; it is about schools, care homes, hotels and other places where people, for one reason or another, will find themselves vulnerable.”
“I genuinely thank everybody who has contributed today, including the Front-Bench spokespeople, for the thoughtful, measured way in which these issues have been addressed. We are not going to agree on everything, but I hope we can find some common ground. Perhaps, in the few minutes I have left to wind up, I will say, politely, where the areas are that still need some work and that are currently not being addressed by the Building Safety Bill, whose consideration is running in parallel with this debate. I will just mention three areas. First, we need a more holistic approach to building safety, very much as the SNP spokesperson, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) said. This is not just about cladding or about buildings over 18 metres; we must look at medium-rise buildings as well.”
“This morning, a family with a very sick child, one of 300 people placed in a quarantine hotel in Shepherd’s Bush, were told to get on a coach to Stockport, despite having lodged an application for housing assistance in Hammersmith. On Saturday, 90 Afghan evacuees arrived at a bridging hotel in Fulham with no money, the clothes they stood up in, and no information about what was happening to them. A local charity, West London Welcome, and our council are trying to help. If we try to get through to the Home Office, it does not answer emails or phone calls. Is this what the Minister means by Operation Warm Welcome?”
“The Minister is right to say that the virus is still with us. This morning, there were 91 people hospitalised in my local hospital trust compared with 25 on 1 June, and vaccination for 16-year-olds and above—double vaccination—remains stubbornly stuck at 50% in my local authority area. Apart from this measure, what does the Minister have in mind to address these serious issues?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate because several hundred of my constituents were equally affected by the floods she is describing. Thames Water candidly described its response to me as “bloody awful”. It said it was under new management with new shareholders, but it is always under new management and new shareholders. That is the problem. It was exactly the same 10 or 15 years ago, when the same properties were flooded for the same reasons and the schemes have either been cancelled or have not worked. Does she agree that, like the Thames tunnel and the Bazalgette sewers we rely on now, whoever ends up paying for and delivering this, it needs Government direction, because this is a serious matter that repeatedly affects our constituents?”
“Will the Minister accept that we need an inquiry into why that did not happen and what can now be done to prevent exactly the same properties flooding on a regular basis?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to intrude. Thames Water has told me that the tideway tunnel, which is very welcome in preventing pollution going into the Thames, would not have helped in this situation. It would only have helped properties very near to the river, because this was high tide and therefore some water would have been let through. It would not have helped my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North or most of my properties that way. What would have helped is the Counters Creek flood alleviation scheme, the £300 million project which went down the middle of Kensington and Hammersmith and would have protected those two boroughs. That was cancelled by Thames Water and has not taken place.”
“Given that the Minister has just said that his Department’s policy is not to encourage or support economic and financial activity in settlements, will he at least say that, where public bodies decide that they do not wish to invest in settlements, following his Government’s advice, he will not stand in their way in doing so?”
“I second the Prime Minister’s support for our outstanding England team and players, but it is perhaps a pity that it did not come sooner from him and the Home Secretary. We all know the importance of double vaccination, especially against the delta or Johnson variant of the virus, but in Hammersmith and Fulham, despite the hard work of our local NHS, council and volunteers, only 36% of adults have been double-jabbed, so will the Prime Minister think again before recklessly removing all barriers to infection and transmission on 19 January? Will he keep the regulations on mask wearing and, like the Mayor of London, keep fighting the virus until it is beat?”
“Above all, there is an inequality of arms. What the Israelis have been able to do to the Palestinians over 53 years of military occupation, with 650,000 Israelis in illegal settlements, and many other things during this crisis, needs to be addressed. That is the real root of the problem that has to be dealt with. Yes, of course we need to see children in Israel and Palestine being educated so that they are brought together and not set apart, but let us not cherry-pick support. Let us take the best out of this and go forward.”
“What I see here is that yes, there are problems and issues, but there is a willingness to address them and it would be wrong and counterproductive to exaggerate them. We should be building bridges. There are faults on both sides. The issue of maps has been mentioned. In the same way as it is clearly wrong not to include Israel on maps in Palestinian textbooks, it is wrong for many in Israel to show the non-existence of the Palestinian state. Senior members of the Government, including the Prime Minister of Israel, do not appear to believe in that and view the west bank as Judea and Samaria. We do not know about Israeli textbooks, but we do know that textbooks in East Jerusalem have been doctored by the Israelis, including the removal of entire chapters on regional and Palestinian history, because they have control there.”
“The report generally comes to positive conclusions, saying that “the textbooks adhere to UNESCO standards and adopt criteria that are prominent in international education discourse, including a strong focus on human rights…they express a narrative of resistance within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and…they display an antagonism towards Israel.” It adds: “The Israeli opponent is portrayed as aggressive and hostile. The language is however, for the most part, objective in tone and avoids inflammatory expressions.” There are regrettable passages. The report notes that one textbook has antisemitic motifs, but that is one out of 156 examined and it has been addressed by the 2020 analysis. The Palestinian Minister for Education has said that any recommendations in the report will be implemented.”
“It is a pleasure to be under your chairship, Dame Angela. As the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) says, I am sure that everybody here wishes to see a two-state solution. We may have different routes to that. I would like to see immediate recognition of the Palestinian state, adherence to international law by all parties—Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—and, above all, the end to the occupation. The textbooks have an important role to play in that. They are part of educating the next generation.”
“I am slightly confused about what the hon. Lady is saying now and what she said in her opening speech. She relies on evidence within the report, but she seems to find the report on the whole unsatisfactory. Which is it? Does she accept the report or not?”
“That was true of Grenfell, and it was true of Shepherd’s Court in my constituency, where there was a serious tower block fire almost five years ago involving a cheap Whirlpool tumble dryer. Unless the Government are prepared to get a grip on this situation, to at least admit the scale and variety of the problems and to take the course that our Front Bench and the Select Committee have taken in providing a comprehensive solution, they will be only tinkering and playing at the edges. That is a huge disservice to my constituents in Sulgrave Gardens, to many other constituents of mine and to hundreds of thousands of people around the country.”
“The four largest social providers have already said that they will cut their programmes by 40%, and that is with only a fraction of the problems discovered, so could we have an answer to this as well? How is the already lamentably small social house building programme going to be assured as a consequence of this, or are the Government going to play divide and rule between leaseholders, tenants and social landlords, which is what they seem to be doing at the moment? There are other risks that social tenants have to suffer as well. Social housing has a disproportionate number of vulnerable people in it. Also, a large number of fires start accidentally in those premises. They often contain cheap and unsafe electrical products.”
“It has said that it will remove the cladding and that it will seek every way it can not to charge the leaseholders, whether that is done through the National House Building Council or the builder or the developer. Of course, it cannot apply for grants because the buildings are below 18 metres. However, if it fails in that, if the Government will not provide any money, and if it does not wish to charge its leaseholders—it does not wish to charge them, but it has not ruled it out—who will pay? The answer is that its tenants will pay. They will pay out of their general funds, and the consequence of that, as the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), has said, is that their development budgets, their repair budgets and their operational budgets will go through the floor.”
“How would he feel living, as some of my constituents are, on the fourth or fifth floor of blocks that are below 18 metres but clad in ACM cladding? They still live in terror every night. That rule has to go. We have quite rightly heard a lot about leaseholders who suffer the triple whammy of living in unsafe premises, having to pay up huge amounts of money and being unable to sell their properties and move on with their lives, but there is no guarantee that they will be compensated, even when they have responsible and identifiable landlords, let alone when they have freeholders who are offshore. This identifies a separate problem, which is true of Sulgrave, because the owner of Sulgrave is Octavia Housing, a well-known and long-established social landlord.”
“He went on: “Despite both blocks being over 18m high they fail the government requirement that the height of the floor of the top most habitable level be above 18m and so are not eligible for government funding. We have families living in terror and people’s lives put on hold due to unsaleable properties, the chaos this has created for residents of Sulgrave is immense.” For many people—not just owners, but tenants—the hope of a dream home has been sold short by the appalling standards in the building industry. It is not just about cladding or other materials; it is about construction, design, inspection, the competence of a whole industry and its negligence over a period of time. Perhaps the Minister will explain what the 18-metre rule is about.”
“I am going to talk about Sulgrave Gardens, a set of blocks of flats in my constituency, not because it is unique—if one goes round the country, one sees it is certainly not—but because it illustrates a range of perils that have not only emanated from Grenfell but ramified endlessly since then, beyond, I am afraid, the reach or competence of this Government. One of the leaseholders wrote to me just in the past week and said this: “Sulgrave Gardens, a modern purpose built eco-friendly development, the first large scale Passivehaus development in the UK. A modern day utopia where children can run and play, families live happily in a safe and secure setting, well it would have been had the developers and builders not…chosen to use the cheapest form of cladding, flammable ACM, they covered most of the development with it”.”
“My constituency is home to internationally-known theatre and music venues and exhibition centres. They tell me they are still waiting for promised Government funds, an insurance scheme that gives them certainty on reopening and, specifically, the publication of the events research programme report. One industry source told me today that failure to publish “is both creating confusion and eroding confidence across the events industry.” What should I tell them, their customers and their staff?”
“With the right approach from Government, both residents and developers may be willing to compromise, but the current proposals are a developers’ charter surrendering both town and countryside to those who, for their own gain, will ruin our collective past without benefiting our individual futures.”
“These proposals are not about challenging nimbys or helping young people with families on to the housing ladder but about an increasingly corrupt relationship between the Conservative party and the major developers and builders: cash for profits; donations for deregulation. I asked my local planning experts at the Hammersmith Society what they would like to see from reform. They pointed out that, on the one hand, public input without rights of appeal is already often brushed aside, while on the other, allowing third-party appeals could see development grind to a halt. A compromise might be for local planners to develop specific briefs for sites in consultation with design panels, setting out what is and is not acceptable, discouraging both the forlorn objection and the speculative application.”
“If the proposed reforms addressed these and other inequities, they would be welcome, but they do not; in fact, they make them worse. Developers will dominate a system of decision making that sidelines or eliminates public consultation and the role of local councils. In place of section 106 agreements, there will be an infrastructure levy that aims, at best, to fund the current pitiful number of social homes, but there is no explanation of how it will do even that. The free-for-all allowed by permitted development means that we are building the slums of the future—badly designed, cramped, ugly and not fit for habitation. Neighbourhood planning is to go; so too are planning committees. Objections will not be heard in “growth” or “renewal” areas.”
“If the Government’s contention is that the current planning system is flawed and needs reform, I can only agree. One problem is political interference. Last week, the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) persuaded the Secretary of State to call in a much needed development of 133 social and affordable homes that would benefit my constituents as much as his. Far too little social housing is being built. As Shelter points out, in the last five years, on average, there have been 6,500 social homes a year—a 10th of what is needed. It is not just the number of homes that is lacking; good design, energy efficiency and space standards do not get much of a look in either. There is an inequality of arms between short-staffed planning departments and local residents, on the one hand, and well-resourced developers on the other.”
“The Home Office’s treatment of asylum seekers is appalling. Will the Minister address the latest scandal: the failure to provide new prepayment Aspen cards, which has left many individuals and families without any money at all for several weeks? In my constituency, many asylum seekers are reliant on a local charity, West London Welcome, for food and necessities, because the Minister’s Department cannot or will not do its job.”
“Unless the Secretary of State starts to look critically at his Government’s record, he will be just another Tory Lord Chancellor who has presided over the further decline of a justice system that once was admired and copied around the world.”
“There is a lack of urgency and direction at the Ministry of Justice. The decision to spend £4 billion on new prison places while letting existing prisons decay, and the lack of facilities, of training and education, of proper healthcare and of basic living conditions in so many of our Victorian prisons are a disaster for inmates, for underpaid and overworked staff and for all of us. The failure to rehabilitate prisoners and to reintroduce them to society with housing and employment support is a recipe for recidivism. It is only possible in these debates, and with the time we have, to skim the surface of these issues, but the inquiries of the Select Committee and some of the APPGs, such as the all-party group on legal aid, show the depth and complexity of the challenges we face.”
“They rose again before the pandemic because of deliberate Government actions in closing courts and reducing sitting days. With the acceleration of the backlog in the past year, they lack the means to tackle it. Belatedly they introduced testing at court on a purely voluntary basis. They set up Nightingale courts, but perhaps a tenth of the number required, and a fraction of the number closed in the last decade. There are insufficient judges or lawyers to cope with the needs of the justice system because cuts in both legal aid and the CPS have left a skeleton service. Victims are waiting up to four years from offence to disposal. This is a question not just of quantity but of quality of justice. Memories fade, witnesses get cold feet, victims want to move on with their lives, trials collapse.”
“The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill undermines fundamental civil liberties, while the further review of judicial review looks like an obsession in avoiding scrutiny, as we have seen again today with the findings of the judicial review of the Cabinet Office Minister’s conduct and yesterday with the exposure of that same Minister’s secret “clearing house” for freedom of information requests: bad priorities, and the wrong priorities. We have heard about the backlog of cases in the Crown and magistrates courts and there are similar logjams in the civil court and tribunal systems although they are less well recorded. It is true that the Crown court backlog has been this high before, but then the court system was operating at a much higher volume and numbers of outstanding cases fell quickly.”
“The Select Committee on Justice, of which I am a member, is working on reports on court capacity, legal aid and the withering of access to justice, probation, recovery from the disastrous privatisation experiment, the long-unresolved failings of the coroner system, and our crumbling prison system, in particular its effect on women, young people and the mental health of those in custody. The Lord Chancellor’s priorities seem rather different: at the behest of a Prime Minister who has little respect for the rule of law, he is busy interfering with the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the independence of the courts—dangerous constitutional tinkering while the justice system grinds to a halt.”
“In its inquiry, the Justice Committee—a fine body of men and women—also found that the Act was working well. The Supreme Court has spoken very strongly in favour, saying that there is a strong public interest in the press and the general public having the right, subject to appropriate safeguards, to require public authorities to provide information about their activities. That is right, and it is particularly right that it applies to ARIA. I hope that, even at this late stage, the Government will think again about the rather misguided steps they are taking.”
“Breaching international treaties from time to time does not seem to bother this Government—I am not sure what other explanation there could be. It is in the public interest for freedom of information to be exercised where possible. In this instance it is certainly possible, and I hope I have given some reasons why it is entirely appropriate. It was a good action by the Labour Government at the time to bring the FOI Act into force. Since then, successive Governments and Ministers—not only Conservative Ministers—have railed against it, but there have been independent investigations. The Burns commission, which was widely perceived to be a case of the Conservative Government trying to do a hatchet job on the Act, found that the Act was working well.”
“As one would expect, its budget is considerably larger, yet it gets about 50 FOIA requests a year. Comparisons have been made with UK Research and Innovation—a much larger organisation that brings together many different bodies in the sector. It gets about 20 FOIA requests per calendar month. There is no expectation that ARIA will be swamped by FOIA requests. Where they are appropriate, such requests are telling and essential, and they can bring important facts to light. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot see how ARIA will not be subject to environmental information regulations, which are the parallel regime of discovery. It seems to me entirely anomalous that one should be in and one should be out, and it may be that we would be breaching our Aarhus convention obligations.”
“I would take an intervention from anyone who wants to explain what an internal drainage board is, but I think it would take us off the subject. This is just nonsense. The idea that ARIA will not have back-office functions and that its status at the cutting edge of a science superpower—I am not making those phrases up; the Minister has used them—will be hampered by making it subject to the Freedom of Information Act is fanciful. The Science and Technology Committee did indeed say that there was a danger of ARIA being stifled by bureaucracy, but it was referring not to freedom of information requests from the public and other interested parties, but to micromanagement by Government. That sounds far more likely and realistic. The US body, DARPA, is subject to FOI.”
“I believe that this is the right thing to do and in the interests of good research and the good use of public money. The excuses that are given are the usual sorts of excuses that are pulled out at this stage—that this is a small, cutting-edge body on which it will be too burdensome to impose freedom of information. Leaving aside whether a body given £800 million of public money is indeed a small body, we have heard from my Front-Bench colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), that parish councils are subject to freedom of information. So are dentists and internal drainage boards. I am not quite sure what an internal drainage board is—it sounds quite painful, actually—but I doubt that such bodies get £800 million of public money.”
“That has gained some currency recently with, as we have heard in this debate, the upsurge of cronyism, the scandals over test and trace and the employment of huge numbers of consultants on inflated salaries. The Bill is equally subject to some of the same concerns and rings the same alarm bells. We hear about high-risk, high-reward research and ARIA being allowed to fail, and there is nothing wrong with those as functions, but there has to be transparency, and, frankly, having that in the public eye, rather than hidden away, is more likely to lead to better decision making. The parallel body that we have heard about—DARPA in the USA—has had scandals and ethics violations that have been brought to light because it is subject to the equivalent Freedom of Information Act in that country.”
“I wish to speak in support of amendments 14 and 8 in relation to bringing ARIA within the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. It seems extraordinary to me that there is an exclusion for a body of this kind, although, to be honest, I have a long-standing interest in freedom of information, and for Government Ministers—this is not exclusive to this Government—to look to exempt bodies from that piece of legislation for one spurious reason or another is not that unusual. I have worked closely with the Campaign for Freedom of Information. Three years ago I introduced, unsuccessfully, a Bill to bring the third of public sector expenditure that is carried out by private contractors within the scope of the Act.”
“What does the Prime Minister think when he hears Jenny McGee, the nurse who saved his life, say of NHS staff,“We’re not getting the respect and now pay that we deserve. I’m just sick of it. So I’ve handed in my resignation”?Surely even he must pause and think about what can be learned from the mistakes of the past year—what Jenny calls the “indecisiveness” and “mixed messages” of his Government. Will he think again about giving nurses more than an insulting 1% pay rise?”
“The Minister says he has a policy on evictions and demolitions in East Jerusalem and the west bank, on the attacks on al-Aqsa and the expansions of settlements, but the illegal settlement and occupation of Palestinian territories has been going on for more than five decades. What is the Minister actually going to do to tackle the causes of violence? What steps are his Government actually going to take?”
“Areas such as Hammersmith are in the bottom league for levelling-up funds, despite having some of the poorest communities in the country and having suffered the deepest austerity cuts in the past decade. There is nothing here to stop private companies such as the greedy US conglomerate Centene having free rein to buy up GP practices across England. These are examples of bias, self-interest and neglect at the heart of Government policy, but it is the trampling on civil liberties and constitutional rights that will make this otherwise forgettable Queen’s Speech notorious.”
“That is likely to be in breach of the 1951 refugee convention, but this is a Government who do not worry about obeying the law. The recent Faulks inquiry into judicial review saw little to criticise in the system of legal MOTs that has developed over decades, and which mature Governments see as a means of road testing their decisions and powers. The Lord Chancellor spurns the judgment of his own independent review and presses on with a far more aggressive attempt to clip the judges’ wings. He wants to change the law before he has even seen the outcome of his review of the review. There are shocking omissions here, too: no proposals for social care and no Bill to end no-fault evictions.”
“Three Bills in particular subjugate the individual to the state: the police Bill, the judicial review Bill and the borders Bill. We are familiar with the police Bill—the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Parts 3 and 4 are a sustained attack on civil rights, curtailing free assembly and free speech, and criminalising a way of life and the ethnic groups who pursue it. This weekend, The Times carried a provocative article that advocated ending both the requirement for local authorities to create Traveller sites and the ethnic minority status of Gypsies and Travellers. That just encapsulates the policy of this Home Secretary. The borders Bill seeks to create two tiers of asylum seekers, the lower of which—those with temporary protection status—will have fewer rights and harsher treatment than now.”
“This Queen’s Speech displays a hostility towards democracy and the rule of law, with a planning Bill that shifts power from elected local government to developers, which is a recipe for poorer-quality homes, the ruination of townscapes and fewer affordable homes; a voter registration Bill that aims to disenfranchise millions because, in the Conservative party’s opinion, they tend to vote the wrong way; a freedom of speech Bill that will curtail and proscribe the freedoms of universities; a proposal to hand the power to decide the date of the general election, for party advantage, to the Prime Minister; a renewed attempt to prevent public bodies considering human rights and international law in purchasing, procurement and investment decisions; and, four years after Grenfell Tower burned, a building safety Bill that does not begin to address the malpractices that tragedy exposed.”
“If the Foreign Secretary will take action on ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang, why not in Sheikh Jarrah? If the UK Government will impose sanctions for the occupation of Crimea, why do they allow trade with illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories? The Minister rightly condemns the killing of children in Gaza and Israel. Does he recognise that these war crimes spring from an unlawful occupation, and will he now give his full support to the investigation of the International Criminal Court?”
“They should be ashamed and embarrassed, but those are not words we associate with this Home Secretary; rather, there is a feeling that this is all as she intends.”