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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“I therefore remain hopeful that—perhaps not in this Session and perhaps not even in the form of a Bill sponsored by me—a Bill of the kind that I have brought forward to extend freedom of information in the way that I have indicated will be achieved, and in the very near future. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered extending the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to housing associations and public contractors.”
“I have noticed that there have been three private Members’ Bills in the past two years that would not perhaps have been expected to receive Government support: the Homelessness Reduction Act 2018; the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, which was put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck); and the equal civil partnerships Bill, which I believe is shortly to be enacted, once it has completed its stages in the House. Indeed, there are more recent examples of the Government taking over the Bills on upskirting and female genital mutilation. I am sure that that must be happening in so many cases because of the Government’s generosity and not because of their lack of a majority.”
“Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) and the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard, for their comments and associate myself with them. The Minister, in her usual gracious way, put the Government’s argument as best she could, but it is wearing a little thin on these issues, as she conceded when saying, in response to my request for a fuller review, that there was the Burns commission. She quoted the matters relating to private contractors’ rights, but on the whole the Burns commission was sympathetic to the points that we are putting forward today. I hope that, when the response to the Information Commissioner’s report comes through, we may at last see some movement. I remain hopeful, as always.”
“I am grateful to all those who have attended and taken part in this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) used some very good examples from his constituency, but he also exhibited his encyclopaedic knowledge of this subject and his long track record of pushing for freedom of information. I think that he and I feel that we may be getting somewhere at last. I also thank the shadow Housing Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), for attending the first part of the debate. He did not speak because of his elevated status, but I know he has a particular interest in housing association issues and particularly the issues around Grenfell. I am grateful to him for his support. I also thank the two Opposition Front-Bench spokespersons, my hon.”
“I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and on championing this cause. I apologise: I will not be here for the whole debate. I am double-booked. There have been steps forward on this issue, such as the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, which was recently taken through Parliament by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck). However, are conditions not getting worse for a lot of people? My experience is that there are two principal causes—the failure to build social housing, and the benefit cap—that force people into substandard accommodation in the private rented sector. Given the hon. Gentleman’s party’s special influence over the Government, could he persuade them to change those two egregious policies, which cause so much human misery?”
“Hammersmith is one of the sites that is now closed. When will PrEP be made freely available? Here we have a drug that has almost 100% effectiveness and that will save money for the NHS through HIV protection. When will we see it available to anyone who needs it?”
“I do not disagree with the point the hon. Gentleman is making. Would he like to comment on the opinion of the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government that the Mayor of London should build fewer affordable homes and more luxury homes, as he said yesterday?”
“Again, I cannot fault what the hon. Gentleman is saying about social housing. It is what all the homelessness charities are urging on us. I just hope that he can have some influence on the Government whom he supports. But perhaps he can explain, then, why rough sleeping fell by 75% in the last 10 years of the Labour Government and has gone up by 165% in less than 10 years of his own party’s Government.”
“To say to the Mayor, “You should concentrate more on building market housing and less on building social and affordable housing in London”—I mean, come and look at the problems in London of trying to get anybody housed, given the sort of conditions that people are living in and the length of time that people are waiting for a permanent home; it can be 10 or 15 years. Only by putting ideology to one side and saying that social housing is an absolutely key part of the housing market in this country will we ensure that these problems are not temporarily dealt with in a sticking-plaster way, but resolved for good.”
“It is good if there is going to be a cross-party consensus on that, but there needs to be a sea change in Government policy, not tweaking at the edges. It requires investment of billions of pounds, year on year, to turn things around. We are starting from a very low base, with a very low level of house building. It is not just about identifying the land, reforming the planning system or bringing developers to heel regarding what they want to build. Frankly, the comment that was made to ITV—I think it was made yesterday—by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, who I normally have a lot of time for, was a disgrace.”
“Every day they provide a hot meal for about 1,500 people, but they have also gone on to provide an employment service and—particularly for ex-offenders—a service that teaches people to drive. That is a very good skill to help people to get into employment. Nobody asked those people to do that. It is not a state enterprise; this is people simply seeing a problem and trying to resolve it. The good will is there and the expertise is there. However, with all due respect to the Minister, I do not feel as though there is yet sufficient will to challenge the immediate problems of rough sleeping or to address the issue of housing policy. It is gratifying that I am now hearing Conservative MPs talk about that issue, and I try not to intervene every time a Conservative MP tries to teach me about the benefits of social housing.”
“We all know the large organisations that we work with on this issue. As other Members have already mentioned, there are also a lot of small organisations in our own constituencies. I will mention one—I am a patron of it, so I am obviously biased towards it—called The Upper Room, which is in my constituency. It started in 1990 as a group of local people who were concerned about rough sleeping, both by British citizens and by a lot of European citizens, at that stage. The problem has not got any better, particularly with the increase in “no recourse to public funds”. Simply out of sheer compassion, those local people got together and raised funds; they are now raising about £350,000 a year from individual donations and charitable giving.”
“At that stage, I decided that I had another appointment and needed to move on. Nevertheless, there is a willingness among residents of such hostels and among people who are sleeping rough, as well as among the organisations that look after them, to resolve these problems. The resources to do that have to be available, however, and I am just not finding that to be the case at the moment. Immediate investment is what is lacking. I know that the Minister will talk about the Government’s rough sleeping initiative, which has the aim of reducing rough sleeping by half by 2022 and reducing it fully by 2027. Of course we will support the Government in that aim, but it means that in about five years’ time we will be in the position that we were 10 years ago. I find that a bit depressing, to be perfectly honest. I will try to be positive.”
“The Housing First model obviously has to go hand in hand with a lot of support, but that support is generally there. We are dealing with people who are used to dealing —in an extraordinarily compassionate way but also in a professional way—with people with complex problems every day. Two weeks ago, I was at one of the St Mungo’s hostels in my constituency. I go to those hostels often and we have hour-long sessions with their residents, and I get asked all sorts of questions. They are sophisticated, educated and intelligent people who happen to have fallen through the cracks and on hard times. I made my excuses and left when I started being asked why Gordon Brown sold the gold reserves and why Labour adopted private finance initiatives, which gives people an idea of where the debate was going.”
“We know what the solutions are, because we have a very sophisticated group of organisations—the big ones include St Mungo’s, Crisis and Shelter—which have huge reservoirs of knowledge about how to tackle the difficulties involved in homelessness. Homeless people are often very vulnerable people or people with complex problems, often related to addiction or mental health. I know that there is a move now towards the Housing First model and I do not disagree with that, because putting a roof over somebody’s head is—I think this is fairly self-evident—key to ending homelessness. That model did not find favour previously because those tenancies would often break down, because people who were not used to managing their own lives in that way were unable to sustain tenancies.”
“Social house building is very difficult because of land prices, and that is not just the case in London anymore; in other major cities and significant parts of the south of England, it is extremely difficult to achieve social house building. How on earth did we get ourselves in a situation where £24 billion can go, with no long-term benefits in housing terms, into landlords’ pockets? I am sure that there are good landlords who use some of that money to invest, and landlords with property portfolios who are prepared to take on difficult tenants or tenants who are reliant on benefits. Neither of those scenarios reflect the picture that I find in my constituency, nor is that how the system is designed to work. My second main point is that although the situation may be complicated, it is not a difficult one to resolve.”
“They said that about 4% of their tenants are in some form of arrears, but the figure is three or four times that for those who are on universal credit. People are being evicted simply because the universal credit system is letting them down. There is this fetish of relying on the private rented sector to solve problems that it simply is not designed to solve. The massive growth in the private rented sector and the decline in both owner-occupation and social housing, as a deliberate arm of Conservative Government policy, are at the root of these problems. The other key point that Shelter makes—Members on both sides of the Chamber have also made it—is that we must have a significant commitment to social house building, including in expensive areas of the country.”
“Landlords may be willing to evict tenants who complain about the conditions they are in, or those conditions may simply become too bad and the properties unfit for habitation. The problem is also related to restrictions on benefits. The cap on local housing allowance—one of the two key issues that Shelter identified in its briefing for this debate—makes it very difficult for anybody on who is on benefits to find housing in significant parts of the country, particularly in areas such as mine in inner London where housing costs are so high. Universal credit is causing extraordinary problems. I met representatives of the Shepherds Bush Housing Group, which is one of the big housing associations in my area.”
“I was struck by a figure from Crisis, which says that “there were more than 170,000 families and individuals experiencing the worst forms of homelessness…This includes people sleeping on our streets, sofa-surfing with strangers, living in hostels, and stuck in other dangerous situations.” That is an intolerable situation, but the trend in housing policy means that it has simply got worse over the years, because there has been huge growth in the use of temporary accommodation. The ability of local authorities to discharge their housing responsibility into the private sector permanently under the Localism Act 2011 is one factor in that growth. As I have suggested, it is also about housing conditions—the very poor quality of housing and the attitude of landlords.”
“Since 2010, rough sleeping has, I think, tripled in London, while it has gone up by about 165% overall. Yes, there are a lot of emergency and temporary measures that can be taken, but in reality we will not resolve this problem unless we address the underlying causes. I think everyone agrees on that, and it is good that there is consensus across the Chamber. Some of those underlying causes are to do with the individual—I will come on to that in a moment—but a lot of them are to do with the housing system in this country, the instability of housing and the associated risk.”
“Members have mentioned the fact that some short-term solutions and immediate measures could be adopted to relieve the pressure of rough sleeping, as is often done at this time of year. I pay tribute to the Mayor of London for his initiatives and the specific action that he has recently taken in the cold weather to make sure that, on compassionate grounds alone, people who are forced to sleep outside on very cold nights have somewhere to go. That is good. Equally, I pay tribute to the fact that the Mayor of London has made the expansion of affordable social housing a priority in London for the first time in many years, because London is severely affected. As has been said, even as the high numbers of rough sleepers flatlined nationally last year, they went up by 13% in London.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Buck. I know you would be speaking on the issue if you were not chairing, and I congratulate you again on the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, which received Royal Assent recently. I will not take up too much time; I will deal with just two issues. Rough sleeping is the tip of the iceberg. I agree with the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince) that it is a complex issue, so I will say a bit about that. It is also a solvable issue, however, which was not entirely solved, but was largely reduced, by the application of skill and resources, so I will also say something about that and where we go with it. Many hon.”
“My hon. Friend, who opened the debate brilliantly, is summing it up brilliantly. I am afraid that I heard the Minister read out a prepared speech that just seemed to say that everything is going terribly well. It is complacency. We have heard very good speeches from hon. Members on both sides of the House advocating an immediate solution to the problem.”
“There is also a dysfunctionality in the courts now, particularly in areas such as the family courts, and we have to sit down seriously and address those issues.”
“May I ask the Lord Chancellor two things? First, will he use his considerable influence to get us a whole-day debate on these reviews? The Act took about a year to get through. We have had three reviews and an action plan—almost 500 pages today—and this review has taken two years. With the best will in the world, I do not think that this statement will do justice to that. Secondly, can we look at the overall cumulative effect on his Department of the 40% cuts that will take place in legal aid and the courts? Will he sit down with the profession and the judiciary to discuss that? I was the shadow legal aid Minister during the passage of the Act. We did warn about many of the consequences, but we probably underestimated the overall effect on the court system. This is very important to individuals who are seeking redress.”
“Before the Windrush scandal became the Windrush scandal, many cases took years to resolve and victims disappeared because they feared deportation. To avoid future injustice, will the Secretary of State guarantee that all Windrush-style cases, including those involving people not from the Caribbean or Commonwealth countries, will be dealt with in a similar fashion?”
“We had two debates in the Chamber last week on dangerous cladding, which shows the incompleteness of the Government’s response. Can we have a comprehensive strategy from the Government this year that deals with all types of building, all types of cladding and all types of landlord?”
“Obviously, we also have to look at disposals in the courts and what punishments are available, and at keeping weapons off the street by restricting the availability of knives. I might say more about that in a moment.”
“City Hall has thought very seriously about the issue, and it has come up with some money. Today’s announcement of an extra £85 million of new funding for violent crime and burglary in the capital is very welcome. That comes on top of £15 million to create the violent crime taskforce and £45 million for the Young Londoners fund, which is significant in this respect but in others, too. There will now be an additional £6.8 million for the violence reduction unit. It was useful to hear the deputy Mayor talk about that yesterday. All that is good. Obviously, just spending money is not an end in itself, but it is being spent thoughtfully. The approaches the Mayor has looked at include targeting law breakers, targeted stop and search and better detection.”
“That is perhaps only the beginning of a turnaround in the problem, but it is worth noting. I do not say it is not possible that serious knife crime will decline. Moped crime, which is often associated with violence, robbery and so on, and acid attacks have spiked but then declined in the past two or three years. It is possible that that will happen with knife crime, too, but I do not think the underlying problem will go away, because of the figures I have just cited. There will continue to be a climate of violence, which will manifest itself in one way or another. That is why the long-term approach that the Mayor of London and others have talked about is the right way forward. [Sir Graham Brady in the Chair ] I praise the Mayor for the initiatives he has taken.”
“It has become commonplace for people to carry a knife, for whatever reason or excuse that is given, yet doing so dramatically increases someone’s risk of injury; it is not a way of avoiding injury. About half of the stab victims seen at that hospital were injured by knives they took to the scene themselves; they either suffered self-inflicted wounds or had the knife taken off them and used against them. Those figures are staggering. However, in the short time I have, I would like to look at some of the positives and possibilities. As colleagues have said, a lot of work is going on. Office for National Statistics figures published today show that in London—not in the rest of the country, sadly—the increase in violent crime and violent crime with injury has slowed.”
“This is not just a London problem; over the past three years in England and Wales, there have been increases of first 22% and then 16% in offences involving knives or sharp instruments, which numbered 40,147 in 2017-18. Looking at hospital admissions, the number of “finished consultant episodes” due to contact with a knife, sword or dagger more than doubled in three years, to 12,412 in 2017-18. The Royal London Hospital has done very good work on this subject. Its statistics show that 25% of knife crime victims were of school age, the average age of victims was 18, and it was common for victims to have between five and nine stab wounds. The number of stab wounds treated in its unit has doubled since 2012.”
“It is a pleasure and a privilege to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Buck—particularly about a subject on which you have done so much good work. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) for securing the debate and opening it so eruditely. Sadly, we have got used to seeing horrific murders, particularly of young people, that make headlines for a day or two before being replaced by other news or another tragedy. I hope we never become inured to that and never stop regarding each one as a terrible disaster, not just for the families concerned but for our communities. Last year, there were 139 murders in London, more than half as a result of stabbings. Equally tragically, that is the tip of the iceberg, below which there is a huge volume of crime, some of which is not reported in the same way.”
“We have huge expertise in how to deal with that, and we have dealt with street homelessness quite successfully before. What we do not have at the moment is the resources to do that. I say to the Minister that I am sure we will have a consensus today and that everybody here is sincere in wanting to see this scourge tackled, but it is going to take substantial resources. I hope we can hear something from the Government today about where those resources might be located and where they might be allocated.”
“Most serious injuries are caused by multiple stabbing. These are ideas that could be better explored and taken up. The expertise is there, but there are not sufficient resources. The Mayor of London is doing everything he can; he is squeezing every possible budget dry and increasing his precept, which I think is the right thing to do in this case, to fund the campaign against knife crime. As my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) said, there have been large cuts, with £850 million in cuts, I think, to the Met budget and another £263 million to come. Cuts of that order cannot be made without impacting on the ability to tackle these offences. I compare it to homelessness—another issue that is hugely affecting London and other big cities.”
“I have been corresponding with and meeting a retired circuit judge, Nic Madge, and with the chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland, John Crichton, who did a lot of work in Scotland, which has pioneered work on this. I have also talked to trauma surgeons about it. It is a combination of detection, policing—of course—and looking at the social background, but also taking practical steps. One issue is why there are these weapons lying around in every household, to go back to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms). Why do we need to have such a number—often a large number—of very dangerous weapons in any kitchen? Why are they pointed? Why do people need 10-inch pointed knives? Why is it not possible to sell knives that have rounded tips?”
“The most serious recent incident in my constituency, which got a lot of national publicity because 40 people were arrested, was a horrific gang attack in which someone was pursued and stabbed on a public street on new year’s eve. Fortunately, using CCTV, the alleged perpetrators were tracked to a party and everyone at the party was arrested. It transpired that the party venue was an Airbnb let. I am going to see Airbnb to talk about that. It tells me that it will ban that particular user and give advice to the host, but we need to go further and ensure that we do not create areas of lawlessness in the city where such things can be done. There are many steps that can be taken to control the problem, which would otherwise become out of control. The good news is that we have a lot of sound advice and help.”
“I do not disagree—some pretty horrific things are available, and they tend to make the headlines—but the most common weapons are kitchen knives, because they are so readily available. I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend about people getting around the rules online, but to be honest, carving knives, cleavers and so on are available in most kitchens. We need to think about that. The Mayor is taking forward a number of other initiatives—other Members have spoken about them and I do not want to take up too much time—to support victims, work with communities and educate young people. I hope we all support them, and obviously we hope they are all successful, but this is a very complicated issue. YouTube and certain types of music were mentioned.”
“My constituents have contributed £43 million to the stalled digitisation process, thanks to the closure and sale of Hammersmith magistrates and county courts. Their reward is to travel for an hour or more to courts at Clerkenwell or Hendon. The Minister says the courts system is running well; it is not: it is in freefall. Will she at least postpone any further closures until she can guarantee a working service?”
“My hon. Friend is making a strong point that—I am sure he will come on to this—applies as much to residential fires as to the case he is talking about. First, there is the issue of insurance, with people in these situations often underinsured or not insured. There is also the issue of who is liable. As he says, the case he is describing may be a criminal matter. At Shepherd’s Court in my constituency, there was an obvious cause—it was a tumble-drier fire—but the manufacturer denies liability and will not pay out. As a consequence of cases like that, people can lose everything and go for years and years without being able to replace their belongings.”
“I mentioned Lakanal House, where six people died 10 years ago, yesterday. There was combustible material involved, but it was not ACM cladding. Is it not extraordinary that the Government’s building safety programme is only tracking identification and remediation of residential buildings over 18 metres with ACM cladding? Should not the programme apply to all potentially combustible cladding?”
“My understanding, from responses to questions I asked before Christmas, is that the policy is likely to cover residential buildings, buildings over 18 metres and buildings with aluminium composite material cladding systems. That excludes a very large number of buildings that we know could have flammable cladding. I cannot understand the logic of the policy not being comprehensive, other than that the Government might not want to put in the resources or are phasing it in over a very long time.”
“The Government seem to rely, as if on a crutch, on the Dame Judith Hackitt report. It is a good report, but it approaches the matter in a certain way—she would like to see a “golden thread of information” through UK projects from “design and construction” to “operation”—and at the moment we do not have a clear picture of which buildings are at risk. Dame Judith can set out a preferred method of operation, but that does not resolve any of the many problems, or the conflicts of interest over time, set out by my hon. Friend, and nor does the report actually implement anything. Those are both matters for Government, and in those respects they are singularly failing. In clarification from the Minister, I want to hear in respect of existing buildings with all types of flammable cladding what the Government’s policy is likely to be.”
“In a block in my constituency—I am going to a residents’ meeting tomorrow night, the fourth on the removal of flammable cladding that I will have attended—the residents are fortunate in the sense that they have a housing association as a landlord, it has accepted liability and is removing the cladding at its own expense, and it is prepared to put up non-flammable cladding instead. The situation is still incredibly worrying: fire marshals have been in for periods, and there are concerns about the structure and other potential damage to the building, causing a huge amount of anxiety and of time taken up in negotiation. I feel very much for my constituents and those of other Members who do not have similar advantages, but that introductory point allows me to say that the problem is widespread and hugely complicated.”
“I am grateful for the time that has become available to make some brief remarks, although my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) set the case out fully and persuasively, covering many of the points. We all wait keenly to hear what the Minister has to say in his response. Notwithstanding his comment that we went through all this yesterday, rather than being bored by the subject or not interested in responding, he should seize the opportunity to give a fuller account of where the Government stand. As my hon. Friend set out, the Government’s inactivity and partial solutions mean that we are in a state of some confusion—certainly our constituents are—and severely worried about the risks that remain. That is not scaremongering; those are real concerns felt by our constituents.”
“No one is promoting the commercial interests of Rockwool—in my dealings with it, it has been perfectly clear about that. We are pointing out that its standards are higher than many others in terms of the combustibility of the cladding, the insulation and the combination of materials. That is the point. No Member on either side of the Chamber is standing up and saying, “Please buy this particular product”; we are asking the Government to listen to the voices saying that their limitations and expectations do not go far enough.”
“With respect to the Minister, he may be listening to what he wants to hear. He should listen to a wider range of voices. I will give an example. In yesterday’s urgent question, several Members—I was not one of them—mentioned the Rockwool company. I have quite a knowledge of this, because I have three very tall buildings—over 23 storeys—in my constituency that are just a few hundred metres from Grenfell Tower and which were fully clad by Rockwool. Following testing, the local authority was able to assure tenants that it was non-flammable cladding and that it met some of the highest standards. The Minister, with almost wilful misunderstanding, said yesterday that he was not there to listen to people promoting individual companies. That is not the point.”
“I find the Minister’s attitude astonishingly complacent. I am a member of the all-party group on fire safety rescue, which has done a lot of work on this, but it cannot possibly compete with the resources of the Government, so let us not be ridiculous about who should do the groundwork. I have taken part in a number of seminars with a number of experts. On those occasions I have heard a variety of views, but even now I still hear, from experts, manufacturers and others, special pleading for the acceptability of either leaving combustible materials—some of them more combustible than the materials used on Grenfell Tower—on blocks, or continuing to install them. That terrifies me, and I think that it ought to worry the Minister.”
“My hon. Friend has made a telling point. We will not find things that are wrong unless we go and look for them, and I do not feel that the Government are going to go and look for them.”
“They should look at the history—at the defects and malpractices that have grown up over the last 10 years or more—but they should also be very sceptical in future about some of the advice that they are getting. They should obtain the broadest possible range of advice.”