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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“We are serving a company that is 90% foreign-owned, that is debt-laden and that, as far as can see, pays no tax other than the VAT it pays on the sales from shops— increasingly it is a business in that way. We have opposition from the airlines that are unwilling to pay the greatly enhanced landing charges that will be levied in order to pay for this white elephant project. Everybody seems to pay except the shareholders of Heathrow Airport Holdings. Yet at the same time we are being told that Gatwick is a better option, not only, as we have always known, in relation to congestion, noise and pollution, but in terms of financial effects, both locally and on the national economy. There is very little left to recommend Heathrow as an option. Once again, as has been set out, we are going through a farce of a consultation.”
“Why should Londoners have to pay financially, through their health and through the inconvenience in their daily lives for this white elephant project to go ahead? We are still talking about hub airports here, which to a large extent have had their day. There are alternatives. We are talking about London as if it was going to have a single airport, rather than a number of airports, each serving different areas, because of the size of the community in London and the south-east that they serve. It is no more than propaganda. It is out of date. We have heard today that the financial figures have been looked at again. Let us see who we are serving here.”
“Getting these glossy pamphlets through the door, as one does on a regular basis from Heathrow, sends the subliminal message, “This is a done deal. Get used to it. Get what you can out of it by way of mitigation.” It simply is not good enough. The point on mitigation is interesting. We hoped that campaigns such as the one the Mayor of London is fighting; the action he is taking to improve air quality; advancements in air transport, which can lead to noise reduction; and planned improvements—such as Crossrail and upgrading the Piccadilly line—to public transport in London, would improve quality of life and enable Londoners to go about their business better, but they will all be sacrificed to mitigating the additional burdens, inconveniences and health hazards that Heathrow intends to inflict on us. Why should that be the case?”
“Those are tactics that Heathrow has used for more than 30 years, and nothing really surprises me, but both the NPS consultations and the latest one are tarnished by that. Nothing in this consultation, as my constituency neighbour to the west, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), has just said, tells us about flight paths. That is the key point that people want to know. Without that, it becomes an almost vacuous exercise. Yet we are not to know the flight paths, we are told, until 2021, after all the major decisions are made. There is nothing in the consultation about who will pay—particularly, as has been mentioned, who will pay the estimated £18 billion for public transport.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. This consultation is really just the latest consultation for Heathrow—the fruit of the poisoned tree. The issue has been heavily politicised over a long time, under successive Governments, but things really went wrong during the period of the Airports Commission. Prior to 2010, David Cameron made promises, which he then decided he did not want to keep, and we had the protracted and rather embarrassing saga of the commission stringing out the process, using assumptions that were already out of date, and producing a report that in the end said what the Government then wanted it to say and allowed them to change tack.”
“I am so sorry; I will not give way, as there is a further speech to come. I will end on that, and I wait to hear what the Minister has to say.”
“Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Has the Secretary of State seen the investigation published at the weekend by The Sun into new allegations of misconduct by the west London coroner, including bullying, sexism and homophobic conduct towards staff? Despite previous findings of serious misconduct, three-year delays in issuing death certificates, secret inquests being held at night and important case papers being lost, he has been cleared by the Secretary of State to return to work. Will the Secretary of State meet west London MPs and council leaders to discuss this crisis?”
“How are local authorities or other landlords to know what steps to take to ensure that there is adequate fire protection when the relevant building regulations are 11 years old and no review of them has yet commenced?”
“One thing that the Bill was silent on, until it was amended by the Opposition in the other place, is cold calling. In the seven years since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, the Opposition have been pressing to have cold calling and spam texts outlawed. Is the Secretary of State going to say anything about that? Does she agree that there is no defence for having this blight on the lives of almost everyone in this country, and that it should not just be regulated but banned?”
“The Secretary of State is being extremely generous. I sense some puzzlement on both sides of the House that the Government are pulling their punches on cold calling. There is to be greater regulation; that is to be extended in some areas. Apart from the cold callers themselves, the consensus is that this should be banned. That includes claimant organisations such as the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers. Why will the Government not undertake now to ban spam texts and cold calls?”
“All of us, and our constituents, owe a debt of gratitude to my hon. Friend for promoting this Bill and for her perseverance because it is not the first time she has done this. Legal aid is already severely restricted for disrepair. The Government notes to the Bill say that it contains no financial provision—that is probably why they support it—but should we not meet the remedy that the Bill provides with the funds to allow tenants to enforce it?”
“The hon. Members for Telford (Lucy Allan), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall), for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan), for Corby (Tom Pursglove), for Colchester (Will Quince) and for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), and indeed the Minister, have all seen the light in the past two years.”
“As the shadow Secretary of State said, this is not the first time such a Bill has been before the House. The predecessor Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill, which was also introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), was talked out in 2015. I suppose we should thank the usual suspects for staying away today to allow this Bill a fair wind. Two years ago, in January 2016, my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) moved a new clause to the Housing and Planning Bill with similar terms to create a duty on landlords to ensure that properties are fit for habitation when let, and remain fit for habitation during the tenancy. En passant, I note that all but one of the Conservative Members who have spoken today voted against that new clause, so we welcome their contributions today.”
“I am delighted to support a Bill that will make a real difference to serious problems affecting millions of people who rent in the public and private sectors. Housing is 45% of my casework, and the largest proportion relates to house conditions. Unfitness beats disrepair as the major concern. Put simply, this is the biggest single issue for many Members whose constituencies have a large private rented sector. I see damp, mouldy, draughty, infested and unsafe properties every week when I knock on doors in my constituency. It is utterly appalling and it affects the health, wellbeing and life chances of many of my constituents, and it has been getting steadily worse over the past few years, which is highly regrettable. I am delighted that, at last, there is a likelihood of getting this Bill on the statute book.”
“In fact, because the cuts are so substantial we often now have legal aid deserts as far as housing is concerned, and it simply is not possible, given how little is in scope, for private practitioners or law centres to offer the same degree of advice. That has to be looked at, and as part of that process we need to bring in the provisions of this Bill. I always watch the Conservative party conference with great enthusiasm, so I noted that the Secretary of State said in his speech there that he was thinking of introducing a housing court as part of a simplification of the process for resolving housing issues. I do not know whether the Minister has any more to say about that, but we need a simple and straightforward process.”
“I ask the Minister to address that point specifically when she comes to speak. In only two or three months’ time, we are due to have the long-awaited review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and I hope that part of it will look at whether legal aid can be extended to cover the provisions of this Bill. Indeed, I hope that we can go further than that, because, as has been established in review after review—in the Bach commission and the Low commission, and in what the Law Society, Shelter and Citizens Advice have said—the cuts in housing legal aid have been some of the most damaging. That applies to disrepair cases, where only “serious” disrepair is now eligible for legal aid.”
“Indeed. I would hate ever to be churlish in the Chamber, and I raise these matters only to rejoice at lost sheep who have been found. They have spoken so well today. I do not wish in any way to delay the passage of this Bill today, but I want to make one serious point. Paragraph 32 of the explanatory notes states: “The Bill will not entail additional public expenditure, local authorities already have strong enforcement powers to tackle poor property. The aim of this bill is to enable tenants to pursue their landlord without recourse to their local authority.” Many people have made the point that local authorities now lack the resources to do that, and that is part of the reason why we need to enable tenants themselves to do this, but these are often complex matters, legally and procedurally, to pursue.”
“Friend the Member for Westminster North. She has championed this cause and this Bill over many, many years, and it is right that Members from both sides of the House have paid tribute to her today. I hope that we can now proceed to see this Bill become law.”
“I could not agree more, although I do not want to be tempted too far away from today’s subject. Clearly the switch from investing capital sums in building decent properties, which happened under parties of all colours for many years, towards subsidising landlords—in many cases, bad landlords—has to be reversed at some point; that was a deliberate ideological step taken by Conservative Governments and it has served us very badly. That is a more endemic and chronic problem. This Bill resolves the immediate crisis that we have, particularly in the private rented sector. I look forward to the Minister at least saying what the Government are intending to do to enable tenants to pursue their remedy properly. Let me end, as so many other Members have, by saying that we would not be here at this point were it not for my hon.”
“My hon. Friend is right to highlight St Mungo’s, which used to be based in my constituency and has done a lot of projects there. It is under a continuing threat: because there is still an intention to rely on local authority grants to fund short-term housing, there is not only insecurity but hostels will have to close.”
“I am delighted that, as the Leader of the House said, the Government will tomorrow support the private Member’s Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) on the fitness of housing for human habitation, especially as it represents a damascene conversion from their previous stance. Will the Government also support my private Member’s Bill on the extension of the Freedom of Information Act to private sector companies that undertake public sector contracts? Such an extension might have alerted us sooner to the chaos at Carillion that both the company and the Government kept to themselves for too long.”
“I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The overnight announcement from the United States of the largest cut in aid for Palestinian refugees for 70 years follows the Israeli Government’s ban on 20 international organisations entering Israel, including three from the UK. Does that concern the Government, and what do they intend to do about it?”
“The Minister has talked about continuity, but in many cases the current service provided by Carillion is appalling. Two independent reports on Wormwood Scrubs prison last month—to which the Minister may have just alluded—describe indecent living conditions involving broken toilets, showers, and heating, electric and fire safety equipment. What confidence can we have that the performance of Carillion contracts will be not only maintained, but rectified where it is failing?”
“I do not know whether my hon. Friend has seen that an emergency consultant at Charing Cross Hospital has said that staff were practicing “battlefield medicine” there. By that, he meant that when a blue-light ambulance arrived, staff had to decide whether to take someone out of the resuscitation room to put the arrival in, or to leave the arrival in the corridor until a bed space was free. That same hospital faces losing all its emergency beds and its blue-light A&E. Does he agree that we have to rethink further reductions in beds and A&E capacity, given the crisis that we are in?”
“We cannot wait for the final Hackitt report before resolving the issue of the combustibility of cladding and insulation. Some blocks are passing the current test with limited combustibility materials. Some are failing, but the landlords are using other types of limited combustibility materials as a replacement. Will the Government just say that only non-combustible materials should be used for external cladding on high and medium blocks?”
“Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is also running a large deficit—it is not just King’s. The Government’s solution is to demolish Charing Cross hospital, when admissions have gone up 11% in the past two years. We are on our fourth chief executive in five years. The last one left to run NHS Improvement before he could even meet local MPs. When are the Government going to get a grip and fund the NHS properly, rather than blame everybody else for the problem?”
“Does the Minister agree that this is a sea change, not just another setback, because it removes America as an honest broker and changes the facts on the ground so that an independent Palestinian state is not really possible any more? That is the view of senior Palestinians such as Husam Zomlot and Saeb Erekat. What plans do the Government have to move matters forward in their discussions with the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and do they include at least a timetable for recognition?”
“When are we going to have a statement on the rights of EU nationals, particularly Irish citizens, many of whom have lived in this country for decades? Even if the Government cannot sort out anything else on EU withdrawal, please may we have a statement on this matter, which is causing anxiety to millions of people?”
“When the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) became Justice Secretary, we were promised a prisons revolution, but of course he did not stay around long enough to achieve that. It is odd to think that the right hon. Gentleman would be seen as the champion of the underdog in that way, but he was following the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), and a tip for anyone wants to have a good reputation is to follow him into a job. What will the Minister do to address the appalling conditions that are experienced every day in our prisons?”
“What that means in practice, when solicitors try to see their clients, is, to quote the report, that “prisoners are effectively being denied access to legal advice.” I ask the Minister to look at that, because it is not acceptable in any of our prisons, especially one that is 45% remand. The private community rehabilitation company is MTCNovo, which I remember telling the shadow Justice Minister was not a good appointment. The report says that it does not sufficiently engage with prisoners before their release, with far too many released without any accommodation to go to. Is it any wonder that reoffending rates are so high when that is the background? It is not an accident that we are talking about companies such as Care UK, Carillion and MTCNovo. The privatisation of prison services lies behind what has happened to a substantial extent.”
“A terrible contractor called Carillion is responsible for maintenance, but the report says that beds were in poor condition, that toilets were broken, that cells were unheated, that staff worked in overcoats, and that there were no working urinals in parts of the prison. People are living in medieval conditions. As for the education services, attendance at classes in June was 24%, and the library was closed for several weeks because Carillion could not fix the alarm. The Koestler Trust, which does fantastic work in prisoner art, is based in the old governor’s house outside the prison, but there is no art teaching inside. These are truly terrible conditions. The prison has the worst record in London for accessing legal help.”
“The report says that “complaints made by prisoners are sometimes handled inappropriately, or passed to the staff member who is the subject of the complaint.” It says that the “lack of maintenance…means that prisoners are frequently subjected to conditions that are indecent and not suitable for them to live in.” Prisoners experience unacceptable delays in accessing medical treatment, and the report says that “Care UK is not always able to provide enough staff to deliver…triage and screening processes.” On the key issue of safety, the report says that 40 to 50 violent incidents occur in a typical month, 25% of which are gang-related. The prison has “the second highest number of prisoners moved by ‘Tornado teams’” and had four deaths in custody.”
“The difficulty is that the current problems are specifically connected to underfunding, poor services and low staff numbers, despite what we are told are efforts by the Government to increase staffing, having cut it back so dramatically under the coalition Government. There were still 57 members of staff out last year, and only 21 in.”
“I was initially heartened when I read the covering press release, which said that promising changes had been made in some areas, such as the introduction of more CCTV and a new system for prisoners to access their property—it is true that in July the Scrubs went from grade 1, the worst grade which only a handful of prisons are in at any one time, to grade 2—but that is probably where the good news stops. We have to be frank about this: there is nothing new about problems at the Scrubs. Many years ago, it had problems with violence against prisoners and poor management. An HMI report in only April last year talked about rat-infested and overcrowded conditions, with some prisoners too frightened to leave their cells.”
“Given the short time available, I hope that hon. Members will not mind if I restrict my comments to the conditions of my local prison, HMP Wormwood Scrubs, especially as this debate coincides with the publication of the independent monitoring board’s report last week. I start by paying tribute to Rob Foreman, the chairman of the board, and his predecessor, Chris Hammond. They have done an excellent job, as do the overwhelming majority of staff at the prison, who show dedication and professionalism.”
“I hear what the Minister is saying, but a lot of it sounds like firefighting. I quoted from a report on the Scrubs earlier, but tomorrow we have Her Majesty’s inspectorate’s report on the Scrubs—I do not know if he has seen it yet. I have not quoted from it because it is under embargo still, but it shows endemic, long-term problems that need powerful solutions, and I just do not hear that vision coming from the Government.”
“Was the hon. Gentleman surprised, as I was, to hear hon. Members comparing planning in this country with planning in what is an occupied country? The settler enterprise takes up 40% of the entire west bank, not the 2% or 3% that is often alleged.”
“When will we have a decision on the rights of EU nationals in the UK? The Secretary of State has yet again forgotten about them amidst the current chaos. More than 3 million people are in limbo with regard to their future rights, including many Irish citizens to whom we have a particular and long-standing duty.”
“The Minister said earlier that there would be a review of the viability assessments under the national planning policy framework. Will he admit that there is a problem, which the Mayor of London and London councils see, and that these viability assessments are abused by developers to stop local authorities and others developing affordable homes?”
“The hon. Gentleman is making an error by reading out the Minister’s speech from the LASPO Bill’s Committee stage five years ago. What he says is no truer now than it was then. He should be looking at the effects of legal aid cuts, not the incorrect predictions made at the time the legislation went through Parliament.”
“LASPO completely reverses that and says that one has to define exactly the very specific means by which legal aid is made available. The net result is not only that in many areas, particularly of social welfare law, legal aid has been withdrawn specifically, but that in reality it has been withdrawn entirely, because neither the voluntary sector nor private practice can continue it with what meagre fare there is to allow it to operate. Many areas of the country have become advice deserts.”
“Were it not for the extraordinary discipline of the Liberal Democrats—this is possibly the only issue that all Members here will agree on—there would have been many more defeats, and we might have stopped some of these cuts going through. The Liberal Democrats turned out night after night to vote for legal aid cuts in the most stringent terms and ensure that those changes went through, with better discipline than the Tory peers, and we will continue to remind them about that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East said, that was a sea change. It was reversing the legal aid policies put forward by the Labour Government of 1945 to ’50. The Bill at that time made legal aid permissive. In other words, legal aid was available, except where the legislation said that it was not available.”
“It was pretty obvious then what the consequences were going to be, but we do not have to predict now; we have seen those consequences. That is why I was quite surprised to hear the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) repeating the shibboleths that we heard at that time: that this was just bringing us into line with what happens elsewhere, and that these were perfectly reasonable and affordable cuts. The figures we have seen show that the contrary is true. In the other place, I think there were 11 defeats and three tied votes, all of which unfortunately were substantially reversed in this House. That was a significant indication of the level of concern, even while the Bill was going through Parliament.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson, and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) and my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on legal aid. They have set out some of the facts and figures that show the astonishing decline in the availability of legal aid since the enactment of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and I will not repeat those. I had the pleasure—if that is the right word—of leading for the Opposition, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) and the noble Lord Bach, during the year-long Committee stage of the LASPO Bill.”
“Litigants in person are flooding the courts, and there are delays throughout the system. The compound effect of cuts in the legal aid system and the Courts Service over the past five years is that we can no longer say that we have a system of justice of which we can be proud, and I greatly regret that.”
“I hope that it looks across the board at what needs to be done—not just, as we have heard, at early advice and the restoration of legal aid, particularly in areas of social welfare law, but at the means test, at the system for contributions and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas) said, at the localisation of services, because nothing is really working at the moment. We need a root-and-branch review, and fresh legislation may well be required. Unless the Government are prepared to look at the matter with fresh eyes, instead of taking the blinkered approach that was taken with LASPO, it will be not only bad for my constituents and those of other hon. Members present, but bad for the system of justice in this country, because the courts are not functioning properly.”
“It is being done at the last possible moment, and possibly beyond the last possible moment, because if I remember correctly, the undertaking given during the passage of LASPO was that the review would begin within three to five years. I think that the end of the five years will be next April and that the review is not starting till the summer, so we really are squeezing it into the last minute. I hope that it will be a proper review and that it will look in particular at the Bach commission report, because that is an extremely thorough report by the people in this country who probably best understand the issue and the problems that arise.”
“I pay tribute not only to Members of the House who have taken an interest in the subject, but to the practitioners out there in the country. My law centre is watched over by Sue James, who was legal aid lawyer of the year after 25 years of practice and setting up other law centres in London. It is the dedication of people such as her, Carol Storer of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group and Nicola Mackintosh that has in effect, despite the Government’s best efforts, kept the legal aid system going in this country over this period. However, it is absolutely at breaking point. I therefore have something to ask of the Minister, who is an intelligent and fair man and knowledgeable in these areas, when he does the review, but let me just say this about the review.”
“These people have come, possibly as a first port of call, to Members of Parliament—research has shown that this is the case—simply because there is nowhere else to go. Let me use the example of my constituency. Many of our advice agencies—such as Threshold, which provides specialist housing advice, and the Shepherd’s Bush advice centre—and many of the specialist agencies dealing with specific communities have simply closed down. I am very lucky, in that I have an extremely supportive council. Labour took power again in 2014, and it is now rehousing and properly funding the Hammersmith law centre, which I have had the pleasure of being on the board of for some 30 years. Therefore, along with the citizens advice bureaux, some good provision remains in the area, but I suspect that it is the exception rather than the rule.”
“My hon. Friend knows that very well from his professional background. I entirely agree with him and will say in a moment what I think should be done to reverse what he describes, but while we are diagnosing the problem, I must point out that there has been an extraordinary effect on the advice sector and on the courts. Indeed, we can see it in our surgeries. I do not know about other hon. Members, but I now provide 20-minute appointments, and often that is not long enough to see constituents. I refrain, not having a practice specifically any more, from giving legal advice, but that is in effect what people are coming to ask for, whether in areas of family law, immigration, employment or housing. Those are not the sorts of complaint or issue that I remember dealing with 10 years ago.”