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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“It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I will not repeat what my hon. Friend said, except to say that we are all grateful for the expertise and support that we get in trying to deal with these issues, for your involvement over time and for the Select Committee’s involvement now. It is probably right to say that the announcement of the new office was rather subdued. I think that it came at a weekend; we were all expecting an oral statement or at least some explanation of its role, but we have had to wait really till today to address that matter. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for initiating the debate and for her expertise on the matter. We know what needs to be done.”
“I have had contradictory answers from his Department and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. When will we get a verdict on that? Is it coming through the police inquiry or his Department? When will we know exactly which fault caused that fire? We know it is in a particular model of fridge freezer, but we need to know more, because if there is a further risk, it needs to be demonstrated and publicised.”
“We could well be back where we were, except for the fact that people have been lulled into a false sense of security in the belief that they now have safe goods in their home when they often do not. How does the Minister intend to approach the Whirlpool issue and learn from it? Will we have a proper registration process? Will we have a clear database of products that are at risk and are recalled? Will we insist on recall, rather than this rather botchy repair method? Will that be within the remit of the new office? Finally, we are coming up to the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, which we are dealing with on a daily basis. It was started by a particular type of fridge freezer. If the Minister cannot answer this question now, I would be grateful if he would write to me.”
“The concentration was initially on the slow speed at which they were repaired or replaced and then the fact that half of them were not identified at all. That threw up the lack of a registration or recall process. Whirlpool persistently resisted a recall or even giving the correct safety advice. That is bad enough, but through Which? and the BBC’s “Watchdog” programme—which has done an incredible job in exposing this negligent behaviour by Whirlpool and is now being broadcast weekly—we have discovered that that was not the only problem. The replacement and repaired machines were themselves faulty and large numbers of them are now catching fire.”
“I am grateful for that answer. Perhaps, because of the limited time, I will limit myself to making one point. Will the new office pass the Whirlpool test? Whirlpool is untypical in some ways, because one particular design fault has affected 5.5 million tumble dryers; I think it was estimated that one in six homes in the country are affected. That is not the only problem with Whirlpool. We have also had the issue that led to the Llanrwst inquest and the sad, tragic deaths there. The Whirlpool reaction has been extraordinarily unhelpful. If the office can deal with Whirlpool, it can probably deal with a number of other issues. I remind Members that over 12 years a number of different brands manufactured tumble dryers that were liable to catch fire and did in many hundreds, if not thousands, of cases.”
“The hon. Gentleman is making a good point. What alerted me to the issue in the first place was a serious tower block fire in Shepherd’s Bush, two years ago, when the victim was watching—she was in the same room as the fire and did everything right, including unplugging it. It still completely destroyed her flat, and Whirlpool would still not change their advice about using the machines, until they were threatened with legal action.”
“I think the Minister has said that one of the office’s duties will be to maintain a recall register. How is that progressing, and will manufacturers be under an obligation to ensure that the register is notified of all recalls?”
“The Secretary of State has talked about victims of abuse, but he seems to have forgotten that Leveson was set up because of the victims of press harassment and abuse in the first place. Many of those victims have written to Members on both sides of the House, rejecting the ridiculous IPSO scheme and asking for part 2 of Leveson to proceed. He has heard concerns from Members on both sides of the House today, so why will he not think again? What has changed his mind about those victims over the last three or four years?”
“Incidents of serious violence and cover-ups in G4S-run institutions such as Medway secure training centre go back at least 15 years. Indeed, G4S sold what it called its children’s services business, which seemed like an admission of failure on its part. Why, then, would the Government give the company an extra two-year contract? What other ideas did they consider? Did they think about taking the service back in-house, as they have done in previous cases of failure by private providers?”
“My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. The main losers in this are senior-level junior practitioners, who prepare and research complex cases. There is no fee for looking at prosecution disclosure, which means there is a greater chance of miscarriages of justice. Is this not completely misconceived in the way it has been put together? As he says, it will simply lead to cases either not being taken or not being prepared to the standard that they should be.”
“Minister, that is a silly thing to say, because the motion reflects the disquiet that has been expressed by the Bar. The hon. and learned Lady does not have the curiosity to ask barristers why they are unhappy; perhaps one reason is that the scheme was an alternative to a further 8.5% cut, which would have caused mayhem in the criminal courts. It is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Why does she not go back and ask the Bar who the losers are now, what the problems are and how they could be reformed, and why does she not take this away and look at it again?”
“The Chairman of the Select Committee is making a very good case, but he does not seem to be persuaded by his own advocacy. If this scheme corrects some of the anomalies of the previous scheme, it does so only by reducing the brief fees overall to below a level that was already extremely low. The purpose of annulling the statutory instrument is to make the Government go back and renegotiate on that basis. Does the hon. Gentleman not accept the logic of that?”
“With his new authority, would the Secretary of State agree that it would give more certainty and speed up the process if he were to say that only non-combustible class A1 materials should be used for external construction, as is the case in the rest of Europe? I doubt that he would live in a building that was clad in combustible or partially combustible material, so why should my constituents do so?”
“In my surgery this morning, I saw a young asylum seeker who came to the UK nine years ago aged 15 and is still awaiting indefinite leave to remain. He has attempted suicide twice. I also saw a grandmother who came here from Barbados in 1970 aged 10, and who is still waiting and hoping for British citizenship. Does the Secretary of State accept that the Government’s failures on immigration policy go way beyond the Windrush scandal, and is he determined to tackle all aspects of discrimination and excessive delay by his Department?”
“We have a very robust electoral system in this country, and the Minister is insulting highly competent electoral registration officers by purporting to solve a problem that does not exist. The 38% turnout in the last local elections in Hammersmith ranged from 13% in deprived areas to 50% in prosperous areas. Why does she not do something to increase turnout, especially in deprived areas, rather than trying to suppress it?”
“What message has the Home Secretary for my constituent, Nikita Wiggins, whom I saw in my surgery this morning? She came to the UK from Barbados 35 years ago aged three, with an indefinite leave stamp in her passport. Even though she was recently made to take a habitual residency test by the Department for Work and Pensions, she cannot take up a very good new job because the Home Office no longer recognises passport stamps for these purposes. This situation goes way beyond the Windrush cases and into every corner of many people’s lives. It is a product of eight years of institutionalised bullying and discrimination by the Home Secretary’s Department and her Prime Minister.”
“May we have a debate on the “really hostile environment” the Prime Minister has created for migrants to the UK? Almost half of my constituents were born outside the UK. Many face harassment by the Home Office, and 40% of my EU citizens report negative experiences following the Brexit vote. It is not only the Windrush generation but more recent migrants who are suffering victimisation and discrimination by this Government.”
“It is good to see my hon. Friend back in his place. He rightly highlighted the contribution that the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill, promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), can make to tackling the really appalling conditions in the private sector. The Government are supporting the Bill—at the third time of asking—but it is still not being allowed into Committee. Will he use his and his Committee’s considerable weight to ensure that the Bill does indeed pass, because we absolutely need its powers?”
“The Minister will realise that those affected by the contaminated blood scandal have very low levels of trust in the Government and other authorities, not least because they have been literally short-changed over so many years. Today’s announcement is good, but will the Minister say whether the Government will make funds available going forward, particularly to fulfil any recommendations made by the inquiry?”
“As the Government have plenty of time and no legislation, may we have a full day’s debate in the Chamber on the response to the Grenfell Tower fire? This week we learned that 95 families from blocks around Grenfell are all still in emergency and temporary accommodation and that dangerous cladding has been removed from only seven of 160 social housing blocks around the country. That is an appalling record for which the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government is responsible. He needs to come here and give an account of himself.”
“I increasingly get families with autistic children in my surgeries complaining about bad housing conditions in the private rented sector, with overcrowding, really appalling conditions, infestations, noise and so on, but there is also a problem with temporary accommodation and families being moved on. This creates particular stress for autistic children. Does my hon. Friend agree that those making housing assessments should take more account of autism?”
“I am listening with rapt attention to my hon. Friend’s speech. I draw her attention to the fact that Sarah Chambers is also the chair of the Shepherd’s Bush Families Project and Children’s Centre, which is a fantastic organisation in my constituency that has been helping poor families for 30 years. That alone would recommend her to the board.”
“There is already a lot of international co-operation, but one of the main purposes of the joint venture is to allow continued access to vital European funding. We welcome attempts to mitigate the effects of Brexit, but when we talk about Brexit it always seems to be about how we can achieve a second-best position. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who eloquently expressed the variety of damage that Brexit will do to the healthcare sector, I find it difficult to see any positives. Yes, it is possible to see mitigation, but very difficult to see how we are going to be any better off in any capacity as a result of Brexit.”
“I have three of the five hospitals in Imperial Healthcare Trust: Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, Hammersmith, and Charing Cross. I also have, being built as we speak on a 23-acre site in White City, the major new campus for Imperial College. They are amazing institutions that this country is proud to have, and they are truly international in the staff who work there, their research and co-operation, and the funding that they receive. We cannot avoid the fact that they are grievously affected by the consequences of Brexit. They are resilient organisations and they will do what they can to mitigate the effects. Just a few weeks ago, Imperial College announced a joint venture with the National Centre for Scientific Research, one of the major French scientific research institutions.”
“Thank you for calling me relatively early in the debate, Mr Stringer. I apologise to hon. Members, particularly those on the Front Bench, because I will not be here for the closing speeches, but I will of course read them assiduously. I and some other MPs have a meeting with Imperial Healthcare Trust that has taken a long time to arrange. Given the pressures and crisis of funding in many parts of the NHS, I think I need to be there. It is not entirely irrelevant to the subject of the debate. I will, for the reasons I have given, try to be brief and confine my comments to the issues that affect my constituents. I am extraordinarily privileged to have some of the finest healthcare and medical research facilities not only in this country, but across Europe and the world, in Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush.”
“I have visited the Royal Brompton, and it has the most extraordinary paediatric cardiac surgery unit doing the most advanced and delicate operations on newly born babies. When I visited, all the surgeons who were operating were EU nationals, I think from five different countries. The Government may say, “Well, so what?”, but I do not imagine that they maintain, as has been said previously, that we can give a sudden opportunity to replace many doctors and nurses with home-grown doctors and nurses. That is not going to happen overnight. We know that the demand is such that we will continue to rely on clinicians from abroad for the indefinite future.”
“Yes, the system is fully integrated across EU countries, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Last November, the president of Imperial College, Alice Gast, revealed that some of the 2,000 staff at Imperial College who are EU nationals have already left. I will come on to why that should be the case, given what the Government have said on EU nationals. Half of them—1,000 people—have taken legal advice on their positions post Brexit. A quarter of the staff and a fifth of the students at Imperial are from the EU. In the healthcare sector across London there are 20,000 staff from the EU, which is about 15%. A good example is another of my local hospitals, the Royal Brompton, where 30% of the clinical staff are EU nationals.”
“There has been no clear message from the Government about what the future holds for EU citizens living in the UK… I’ve heard that many EU and other overseas citizens are feeling concerned about their futures in the UK. I’ve also seen the media reports of an increase in racist incidents following the referendum vote.” Eighteen months on, I wish I could say that those comments no longer applied. Sadly, they do. The fact that we are barely nearer certainty in the matter means that every day individuals are voting with their feet, feeling that they will be more welcome and their skills more valued in other countries. Frankly, the Government are not doing very much to address that point. I, too, read the debate and hear what the Minister says about that. I wonder what the Government can do, given the hole that they have dug themselves into.”
“I have now talked to and corresponded with not hundreds but thousands of them over the past two years, and they are extremely concerned. Let us be honest: they have transferrable skills and they can go to work in countries where they feel more welcome and valued than they do here. The Government have not done enough—indeed, the Government cannot do enough—to reassure those EU citizens. The message that Brexit sends is that they are at least not as welcome as they once were. I will end on this, which I came across when preparing for the debate. It is something that Imperial College Healthcare Trust put out shortly after the referendum, when it introduced #LoveOurEUStaff. The management wrote to the staff: “Our country is currently in a place of uncertainty.”
“There is no continuity of rights; settled status has to be applied for, there has to be a register and there might be identity cards. As often happens, certainly with people in medical research grades, they might leave the country for five years but want to come back, yet they would then no longer have settled status. The position in the transitional phase, we understand, will be different again. Even if some legal certainty is eventually given, there is still the climate or mood among EU citizens. I can speak confidently about this, because more than 20% of my residents in Hammersmith are EU citizens—it is one of the top three boroughs in the country for the percentage of EU residents—so I talk to them every week.”
“I agree with my hon. Friend. If Members are honest, that is the experience that many of us will have had. There are many questions about the health service, as I have indicated, and the situation is simply being exacerbated by removing one of the most compatible, professional and necessary parts of the health service: its staff from the EU27 countries. Why are we losing those staff? We hear protestations from the Government that those who are here now and until 29 March next year are welcome to stay, but that is not correct. First, there is uncertainty, because nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Secondly, the rights of EU staff will not be the same as they are now, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) indicated in her intervention.”
“The stand-out figure in the Secretary of State’s statement was the 82 households in emergency accommodation. Some of those people are in my constituency, and I know the hotels they are in. They are budget hotels that might be great for one or two nights for two people staying in London, but it is absolutely intolerable for a family to be in those conditions for nine months, particularly if they are traumatised. The Secretary of State should go back to his office and immediately put in place steps to ensure that those families are moved into accommodation. It is not acceptable for him to say, “We are going at the pace the residents want.” Kensington and Chelsea is not up to this job. He has to intervene. The Government must be able to ensure that those 82 families are properly housed within days, not another nine months.”
“There is no mention at all of human rights in the Crown Prince’s modernisation programme, Vision 2030—perhaps not surprisingly, as more than 300 people have been executed since it was launched, including children and peaceful protesters. I was not sure whether the Minister said that the issue of executions, beheadings and crucifixions would be raised with the Crown Prince. May I ask that it is, and specifically the issue of the juveniles who have been on death row for many years—Ali al-Nimr, Dawoud al-Marhoon and Abdullah al-Zaher?”
“Not only is the Secretary of State’s fig-leaf excuse that the world has changed wrong, but it ignores the fact that the delay in part 2 was always built into the inquiry to allow police investigations to take place. The Sunday Times revelations show that evidence is there to be investigated. Does not his wilful refusal to allow the inquiry to proceed just make it look as though he and the media have something to hide?”
“It cannot be left to the industry alone or to us alone. We must have a solution.”
“Also, regarding the conflicts of interest at the BRE and the inadequacy of Approved Document B, some of us have known about them for many years and we have all known about them since Grenfell. As I understand it, although the Hackitt review is good as far as it goes, it does not look as if the final report—let alone the interim one—will give us clear guidance on these issues. It will say that the culture is wrong, but what it will not do is tell landlords—responsible landlords—what they should do. Has that review of Approved Document B got under way and, if it has, when is it due to report and when can we actually tell our landlords what should happen? I commend the all-party group on fire safety and rescue for the work that it has done on this issue. I have attended a number of seminars on it. However, the Government have to act on it.”
“Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), who secured this debate, I do not know why we allow combustible or limited combustibility cladding and insulation to be used any more. It is not used in other European countries, as has been said. That is why I am glad to see that public landlords have taken the advice not to use such cladding and instead are using mineral wool or other forms of cladding or insulation that are available. However, I am afraid that these issues have to be addressed, and addressed now, by the Government. As we have seen in the trade press recently, the idea that desktop studies will be extended, and will become the norm rather than just being used occasionally, is horrifying.”
“One is owned by Shepherd’s Bush Housing Group and is called Kelway House. After initially failing the Buildings Research Establishment test, it passed it. However, residents do not know whether those tests are robust or not and they are still concerned about them. The second block is Cranston Court in White City, which is owned by Notting Hill Housing, and it failed those tests. Notting Hill Housing is removing the cladding on Cranston Court and it has acted responsibly in doing so. It is putting up temporary cladding, so that it can remove fire wardens, but it does not know what to do next. It has now resolved that it will put up non-combustible solid aluminium panels. However, that is because there is no guidance; it is taking what it hopes is the safest option. There are some simple remedies. However, like my hon.”
“Someone living in a high-rise flat in Hammersmith or Shepherd’s Bush looks at Grenfell Tower every day; a year before the Grenfell Tower fire, they will also have seen the very serious tower block fire at Shepherd’s Court on Shepherd’s Bush Green. There has been a response from the local authority and from public landlords to what has happened. Shepherd’s Bush Housing Group told me today that it has spent almost £1 million so far on remedial works post-Grenfell. It will not charge its leaseholders for those works, but ultimately the money for them will come from its tenants. The Government should be responsible for funding this work, but they are showing a lack of leadership and of responsibility in this regard. Let me be specific and give the example of two blocks, both of which were built in the last 10 years.”
“Lest anyone think these major bursts and leaks are solely the product of the recent snow and ice, let me say that in the last week of January, two major mains burst in Hammersmith, flooding residential and business premises, cutting off thousands of people in west London and closing two major east-west routes—King Street and Goldhawk Road. The latter is still closed almost six weeks later. The problem is that private monopoly utilities such as Thames have neither the carrot nor the stick so that they undertake the necessary repair and replacement of their pipework. My constituents want the Government to force them to do that, but I have heard nothing about it. Is not the Minister just washing her hands?”
“For two years, the Secretary of State has failed to determine the future of the Earl’s Court development, one of the biggest in the UK. The choice is between demolishing 750 council homes and building luxury homes with only 10% so-called affordable and no new social housing, and letting the existing residents keep their homes and develop the rest of the site for new social homes. It should not be that difficult a choice, so could we have some action and not just words?”
“The Secretary of State is not sounding any more convincing than he did in his statement on Thursday. Failure to proceed with part two of Leveson and section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 is a disgusting and cowardly betrayal of the victims of media harassment. It does not even leave those victims in the same position as before, because since Leveson the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 has hobbled the ability of claimants in privacy and defamation actions to access no-win, no-fee representation. Therefore, section 40 is now the only way to ensure access to justice, which is as helpful to small publishers as it is to citizens. Why does the Secretary of State not put their interests before those of big newspaper groups, instead of currying favour for himself and his weak Government?”
“My hon. Friend is making excellent work of exposing the Government on this point, but things go a stage further than this. Abandoning Leveson against the wishes of Lord Leveson is a constitutional provocation, because it puts party interest above due process. If that is going to happen with one inquiry, why will it not happen with Grenfell or contaminated blood? What will stop the Government doing things that are in their own interests, not those of victims?”
“Does the hon. Gentleman think that people such as the McCanns, Milly Dowler’s family and Christopher Jefferies should live with the consequences of being traduced and victimised by the press? Does he not feel that casting the press as the victims, when we know that they are actually controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy and irresponsible individuals, is putting things exactly upside down?”
“I hope that the public and sufficient numbers of Members on both sides of the House will remember the duty that we owe to those victims. These are modest amendments from the other place. The idea that this is in any way tying the hands of the press is pure hyperbole. We need to incorporate the amendments, and we need to fulfil Leveson 2, because otherwise we are failing terribly the victims of press harassment.”
“It is the same people running the same racket, with the same failure to address the issue. The hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin)—I do not often find myself on the same side of the argument as him—got it exactly right. This is a sham, and if we support it, we are going along with the sham. This is not about punishing and silencing the press, as though they are the weak vessel—it is about protecting the people to whom all parties and almost every Member who was in this House at the time made a promise: the victims of egregious press harassment who suffered terrible campaigns against them. We forget that at our peril. The Government have simply waited until they think that time has moved on and the heat has gone out of this. Well, I hope that the heat has not gone out of it.”
“Low-cost arbitration and the need to incentivise media groups to join that service—not, as the IPSO scheme would, allowing them to pick and choose—is essential to that. It is a low-cost way of doing it, but it works just as much for the press as for the individual litigant. Apart from the fact that a promise was made to the victims of press abuse, and the fact that this provides cost protection to newspapers and ensures that small and local newspaper groups are protected from powerful and wealthy litigants, cost shifting encourages the use of arbitration, which is quicker and cheaper for all sides and is increasingly a feature of all parts of our legal system. This poses no threat to the local press. The alternative is IPSO. I was incredulous to hear IPSO described as a move on from the Press Complaints Commission.”
“That protected the litigant both from their own costs and from the costs of the other side if they lost. It was no longer the case that if someone took the Daily Mail or The Sun to court, they risked everything because the newspaper group had been able to build up costs on the other side to discourage, in effect, even the most meritorious litigation. With the passing of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, that option went, and it is far, far more difficult to get any type of no win, no fee assistance, so we are not at that status quo; we have moved several steps backwards, and if section 40 and the amendments tabled in the other place are not passed, litigants will once again be at risk in this way.”
“The purpose of cost shifting is to enable an individual who—in the way suffered by the Dowler family, Christopher Jefferies and those in the other cases that we are all aware of—has been horrifically maligned and harassed by newspapers to go to court, to get justice, and, in this case, to go to arbitration without the risk of losing their house and savings, or of simply being unable to get into court at all. That risk was partly resolved—not deliberately; it came about through the way in which the law developed —by no win, no fee agreements, which meant that somebody who had been defamed or had their privacy threatened in this way could go to a lawyer and ask them to take their case. The lawyer would say, “Let’s see if it’s a good case or not,” and if it was a good case, they would agree to take it on a no win, no fee basis.”
“This ensures that members of the public affected by press illegality can either bring a claim under low-cost arbitration or have costs protection in court. Arbitration is cheaper and quicker for both sides. Newspapers also benefit from cost shifting, because they enjoy costs protection if they are in an independent regulator offering arbitration and a claimant rejects the arbitration service on offer. That is the key point. This is not there to punish newspapers but to protect impecunious claimants. It will also protect small, genuinely independent newspapers and small publishers. One hears that the whole local newspaper industry is against it, but 80% of that industry is owned by the big conglomerates, which have exactly the same interests—financial—as the major national newspaper chains.”