Dame Meg Hillier
MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have huge respect for the Minister, but she has said that she will not take any interventions. She is a very good Minister, and I trust that she will answer in detail the points that have been raised in the House today; having discussions with her and the Government after the debate is too late…”
“My hon. Friend talks about who makes our laws, and she has talked in articles that she has written about the primacy of this place. If the Bill goes forward, is she willing to accept amendments?”
“I welcome my right hon. Friend to her place and thank her for that response, which demonstrates the complications of these schemes. I asked the National Audit Office to look into this, and yesterday the Public Accounts Committee published its report on compensation schemes, suggesting that a central body be established.”
“I am pleased by my right hon. Friend’s answer, but she is in a unique position across Government to ensure that we are protecting not only women, but those who are blind or have visual impairments, who really value this technology.”
“I welcome the Chancellor’s clampdown on speculation and leaks ahead of the Budget; it is certainly an important step he has taken. On the issue of certainty, the National Wealth Fund is a critical investor in crowding in private investment around the UK. I noted that he has changed the remit.”
“Further to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes), it is important that we talk here and that we have diplomacy, but what practical actions are the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence taking to ensure that there is a review of physical defence and security, so that we send a clear message to t…”
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“It is incredibly sad and disappointing that, throughout this pandemic, we have seen too little transparency from Government about every aspect of how taxpayers’ money is being spent. The Government keep saying to the House, “Well, it was terribly difficult in those first two months.” We are now a year on, and we are still uncovering more. Is the Minister really satisfied that a six-week inquiry, dragged out as an announcement by the Prime Minister yesterday, is enough to shine sunlight on the millions of taxpayers’ money that has been given to organisations such as Greensill, backed by Government and therefore a loss to the taxpayer when things go wrong? Is six weeks enough, and will he commit to far more transparency, including, if necessary, calling witnesses before this House?”
“These are working households, but the fees are out of reach of anyone on a low, average or even rather good wage, so I think it is time that the Home Office looked at this. The Government have made great play of leaving the European Union. They have made announcements recently about Britain’s place in the world and global Britain. They need now to follow up with actions and support these young world citizens who want to become British citizens; they are living in our communities now and are keen to contribute. I hope that the Minister will give us a full answer on the justification for these citizenship fees, and a hint that the Government are considering a change of direction.”
“They want to be full, contributing members of British society; in fact, they want to be British citizens, but they are priced out. At the same time as we are encouraging entrepreneurs and innovators to come in on cheaper visas to contribute to the wealth of our country, we have a wealth of talent already here that is keen, willing and able to contribute. For these children and young people, the UK is home. They are not going to go anywhere else and they want to contribute. As the Children’s Society recognises, about half of children with foreign-born parents live in poverty. These are not wealthy families necessarily; I will say clearly, though, that in my experience there is no poverty of ambition.”
“We are making them a second-class part of British society by putting these fee barriers in their path. For many families, if they have the choice between having the main breadwinner become a citizen, or the rest of the family, the choice will be straightforward. They make just one member of the family a citizen and the others do not qualify for it without paying the fees. For the young people I am talking about, they often do not realise until they are 18 and they would like to go to university—I pay tribute to We Belong, an organisation that is partly the brainchild of my constituent, Chrisann Jarrett. Suddenly, on top of those fees that they have not been able to pay, they are faced with international student fees.”
“I represent Shoreditch, so I know all about the tech visas and the entrepreneurial visas. For the global talent visa, for example, the application fee is £152 for the main applicant, though it can rise to £456 in certain circumstances. Even an extension of that is only £608. An innovator visa is just over £1,000 and a 10-year private family grounds visa is £1,033 per person for the main applicant or a dependant. The difference is extraordinary; it is tenfold. That makes it very unfair, because the people I am talking about have grown up in the UK, they have been educated in the UK and they want to stay in the UK. They have no other country that is home. They may have parents who come from another country and they may have been born in another country, but that is not their home. They feel part of British society.”
“I highlight the family of four figure, because I am talking particularly of people in my constituency who are affected, who arrived here as children and for whom this is the country they know, the country in which they have been to school and the country that they love. The Greater London Authority estimates that around 330,000 children and young people have precarious citizenship status. That does not mean that they are all on the route to citizenship. Relative to the Minister’s overall workload, only a small number of people are affected, if we look at just young people—because it will be a subset of that group—but it is a very significant group in terms of what they could deliver to the UK. We have had some recent announcements on the Government’s proposals on entrepreneurial visas.”
“That increased in October last year to £624 per person per year, or £470 for applicants under 18. That is £1,560 for an adult applying for two and a half years’ leave to remain. We have to remember that two and a half years’ leave to remain gets someone just two and a half years’ leave to remain. Before that ends, they have to be putting in the fees and the application for the next process. Barely has a household got over the cost of paying these fees than it has to start saving up for the next application. Over a 10-year period of qualifying residence, if the fees do not change, the overall cost would be, for a single adult, £10,372 and for a family of four, £38,408.”
“So there is a direct impact on the Government’s own policies. It is impossible to compare fees completely across countries, but I will give a couple of examples. In Ireland, the naturalisation fees for adults or children are €175, or roughly £150. Denmark has a standard naturalisation fee of 3,800 krone, or roughly £438—forgive me if my exchange rates are a few days out. In Canada, the fee for adult citizenship applications is roughly £306. We are looking at a very different scale, and that is alongside the hoops that people have to go through. Let me just do a little bit of maths for the Minister and add up some of the costs. Let us not forget that we have to add the immigration surcharge, now £400 per person per year. For an application for two and a half years’ leave to remain, that adds £1,000 on top.”
“For indefinite leave to remain for main applicants and children, in 2011 it was £972 for the main applicant—typically the head of the household—and in 2021 it is £2,389 for the main applicant and for dependants, too. Dependants used to be about half the price of a main applicant. When we look at the combined impact of the fees, we see it is incredibly expensive. It adds up typically to more than £10,000 for somebody to apply. It is important to touch on the implications for the Government vision for a global Britain as part of an international community where we attract talent. We know in the past we have had challenges attracting people to universities in this country. English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia advertised in other countries’ newspapers for people to apply to them, saying that their fees are cheaper.”
“I have been the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch for nearly 16 years, and when I was first elected somebody could apply for one leave to remain application that would last for five years, and after five years they could apply for citizenship, so they would pay two fees. It moved to applying for three years at a time, so two applications were needed to get to the five years. Now, people have to apply at least three times: that would get them to five years, but those on the 10-year route to citizenship must apply multiple times. The fees have also gone up individually. For a registration of a child as a British citizen, in April 2011—six years after I was elected—it was £540 and this year it is expected to be £1,012.”
“I am aware of the interest in the debate and know that colleagues from around the House and cross-party will have more specific issues to raise, so I will not take too much of their time. We have seen a pattern in the increase in fees and the route to citizenship that is having a detrimental effect on many of my constituents. It affects adults and young people who arrive in the UK and seek to become citizens. Whatever our politics or our party, I think we all agree that we should be proud that people want to become citizens of the United Kingdom and seek to get a British passport, but for young people in particular the route to citizenship is having a big impact and depriving them of fulfilling their full role in British society. Let me give a bit of history.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered immigration and nationality application fees. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I have an important issue to highlight today about an injustice that has long been a concern of mine in my constituency. I am pleased to see so many Members in attendance. Many more offered support for the debate, which I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting. This issue has a big impact on a relatively small number of people. There is a wider issue about the fees for immigration and citizenship, but I will focus in particular on young people who were not born in the UK but arrived as children and for whom this is their only home.”
“The Minister talked about prompt steps on the section 55 assessment, but what is his definition of “prompt” and when might we expect a result? Waivers are still very complex, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) highlighted, and the process needs a lot of legal support. Many people do not want to go through that regime for fear of failure and in case it jeopardises their wider applications. Is the Minister also looking at the whole approach to fee waivers?”
“Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). The Minister also talked about paying for the costs of other parts of the immigration system, so this does cross-subsidise, and I think we need to look very carefully at that principle. However, I appreciate the Minister’s tone. He has a ginger group of MPs here who would welcome working with him to change policy and practice to ensure that we can welcome people who wish to contribute and to become full citizens and that it is affordable for them to do so and they are not saddled with the debt that the current system leaves upon them. Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).”
“The fees are too high and the process is overly complex, but I take some comfort from the tone of the Minister and the fact that he is engaging with those in We Belong, who are the best advocates, particularly for young people, about looking at simplification of the process, and at how to deal with this, change the rules of settlement and try to do away with the need for the repeated involvement of lawyers, which we have not even discussed today, in terms of fees, because that adds a lot as well. I will just say, though, that the Minister let the cat out of the bag, rather, when he talked about the rationale behind the fees being the benefits likely to accrue to the applicant. I would say we should also think about the benefit of the applicant to the UK, which has been ably highlighted by, among others, my hon.”
“I thank you, Mr McCabe, for chairing the debate today and all hon. Members who have highlighted how key workers, NHS staff and young people in this country are caught in a trap not of their own making. I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor), who raised the issue of the fee waiver application cost and its complications, with people being pushed into debt; my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes); and the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), who highlighted issues in the context of Britain’s position in the world—global Britain—which is where the Government should be and where they say they are coming from.”
“I welcome that we are getting more clarity on some of the issues around defence spending, and particularly the Minister’s bold statement that he wants to see us “achieving real reform in how we procure.” It would be great if we saw some of that go down to our SMEs. However, as he knows, the National Audit Office concluded in its recent report on the defence equipment plan that the Department “continues to make over-optimistic and inconsistent judgements when forecasting costs.” That information comes from the Department’s own cost assurance and analysis service. Can the Minister tell the House and the country what precisely he is going to do differently to ensure that procurement and cost management in the equipment plan are managed better? What precise actions is he going to take?”
“We have heard a lot of words like “ambition” and “innovation”, so let me bring the Prime Minister a little bit back down to earth, and sea. We have an aircraft carrier strike group with not enough aircraft and not enough ships to support it. We have rotting nuclear submarines, not a single one of which has been decommissioned. We have living accommodation for single personnel and families that is woefully inadequate and needing investment. Quite simply, the maths does not add up. The gap in what is needed to just deliver what is in-plan now is huge, even with the additional investment, so perhaps the Prime Minister could level with the House, the country and our armed forces and tell us now what is going to be cut so that this can be afforded.”
“The hon. Gentleman has talked a lot about money going out into the private sector, but a lot of this contingency money has gone into the public sector. The key point is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) highlighted, that it is taxpayers’ money. Surely the hon. Gentleman agrees that we should have clear oversight and regular reporting of how taxpayers’ money is being spent.”
“It is in Government’s interests, the taxpayer’s interests and Parliament’s interests to agree to this new clause. I am disappointed—I am embarrassed really—that those on the Treasury Bench can come forward with a change at such short notice and not have a meaningful discussion about what is a reasonable new clause to allow this place greater scrutiny over what are unprecedented amounts of spending in the middle of a pandemic. At a time like this, we need more transparency, not less. This is actually a minor change. It is not about bureaucracy; it is about accountability and transparency, and taxpayers deserve better.”
“The National Audit Office has been much quoted, and I do not have the exact phrase in front of me—forgive me, Mr Evans, but for once I paraphrase, which I really try not to do—but the NAO has looked in detail, as other Members have commented, at the Government’s approach to procurement, and this is its clear message. All these allegations are out there, but part of the reason for that is the lack of transparency and the lack of information being published in real time on some of these issues. We have seen, heard and talked about in this place the many contracts that were not published on time, and that undermines public and parliamentary trust in the process. Whether or not anything has gone wrong, it is undermining trust, and people start asking questions and laying down allegations whether or not they are true.”
“We are in the middle of a pandemic, and spending eye-watering sums of money—hundreds of billions of pounds—with the public sector and the private sector. It does not matter where the money goes, in this sense; it is about scrutinising that expenditure and making sure that Treasury Ministers, whom I would have thought would be aligned with me completely on this issue, are clear that we are not allowing Departments to overspend willy-nilly. Although the Treasury has its checks, it is important and vital that Parliament has its checks too and that we have sunlight on these issues in real time. This is important, and I would say that the new clause is really pretty anodyne. It is saying that we want better reporting to the House of what the Contingencies Fund Bill already allows to the Government.”
“I accept it is necessary, but I welcome new clause 1, because the mechanisms for oversight of this are very flimsy; they are reports on paper after the event. This is not about more bureaucracy. I see it as being about greater transparency. As Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, which has had an important constitutional position in this place for 160 years, I get passed information by Government—from Ministers and senior officials—about issues relating to the finances of Government, sometimes confidentially, and that is counted as the scrutiny of Parliament. I believe there is a very important role for the constitutional position of the Public Accounts Committee and thereby the Chair, a role I am privileged to occupy at the moment—it is not about me, it is about the position—but that is not enough scrutiny.”
“The way it works normally is that if a Department overspends on its budget as granted, albeit inadequately, by this House, the matter then comes to the Public Accounts Committee and we have to examine whether the excess is justifiable and reasonable. Pretty much our only weapon is the ability to call in the officials who have made a mistake and get them to explain the issue in public, but then a Government majority can certainly agree the excess vote regardless. In Ghana—Mr Evans, you might be interested to know this, and officials might be quaking as I say it—if an official overspends taxpayers’ money, they have to go to court, and if they take an appeal to court, they have to pay up front half of the money that has been wasted. Certainly, that would sharpen minds. The point is that it is right that we have a Contingencies Fund Bill.”
“They are about as old as the Public Accounts Committee, which I chair, and are an important mechanism for making sure that the Government cannot just routinely spend over budget. It is fair to say that in this House we are very bad at scrutinising Government spending. That is not down to individual Members or the official Opposition; it is because the structures of this place do not allow us properly to discuss estimates, excess votes and so on. In fact, some time ago the OECD said that as early as the 18th century our scrutiny of finances in this place was “reduced to hollow ritual.” The change in this legislation, which will allow the increase in contingency funding, has been rushed through. I do not deny that it is necessary to have additional contingency.”
“It gives me pleasure to rise to speak on the Bill and perhaps slay some of the mis-statements that I have already heard in the short while I have been in the Chamber. First, I should point out to the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) that value for money in respect of taxpayer spending is not a new-found interest for most of us on the Opposition Benches. I have spent 27 years being responsible for either spending taxpayers’ money wisely or scrutinising that spending. I am very aware, as are the shadow Chancellor and her team, that every pound of public money saved is a pound to spend on something else. We may disagree about what that something else might be, but scrutiny is really important. Contingencies Fund Bills are interesting pieces of legislation.”
“I hope the Minister can pick up those points and the others that have been raised.”
“Birth certificates may be easier, but it also applies to baptism certificates and so on, and trying to track those things down. Anything to do with churches can be challenging because there are changes of personnel. Records and sometimes church buildings can go; that applies similarly to registry offices. The public sector is often very good at keeping records, but there are things that can go astray. I am slightly worried about the challenge of eight days. It could be quite difficult. I represent a constituency that has many people who have come from across the world and who have had challenges in life. Often, finding the right document to prove something is one of the biggest barriers to their getting access to the public services they need. So it is more important than it may seem in one or two lines of the regulations.”
“I assume that that has not changed; I have not been able to find that in the complex legislative documents, which amend many other Acts. Can the Minister confirm that point? There is also an element of time to take into account. If a certificate is lost or destroyed, it looks as if there is an eight-day period for it to be replaced. If anyone has ever tried to get a copy of a registration document for birth, marriage and death, eight days is quite optimistic. As the hon. Gentleman highlighted, that could be done by volunteers. We may be dealing with something from some time before. It is not often that I have to produce my marriage certificate, but that is now nearly 25 years old—unbelievably—and my birth certificate is now, I fear, more than 50 years old.”
“Will the Minister advise whether he has had any conversations with the National Archives about a plan to make sure that the digital register will be accessible for the long term? For those who do not have physical registers—some will not, because of where they choose to get married—there will not be a record. The hon. Gentleman highlighted the issue about existing paper registers. It would be helpful to have that as well. The explanatory notes say that there has not been a formal consultation, but that the General Register Office has consulted the established churches across the UK and other religious groups. Could the Minister advise which other religious groups that applies to? Just to be clear, at the moment only certain churches—simply put, those with a hierarchy—allow their celebrants to be registrars.”
“Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, and I commend him for his work on this issue, but I am aware that in the corridors of Whitehall, trying to get legislation to change marriage and birth registration is quite difficult, because nobody else sees it as a priority. It is really great that we are today finally getting mothers on the register. I have a couple of quick questions about paper registers, which pick up on what the hon. Gentleman highlighted. The challenge of going digital is that, in terms of archiving, it can be very difficult. That recently came up when the Public Accounts Committee was looking at private finance initiatives, which are not that old. Some of the documents for those were on CD-ROMS. There are members of that Committee who do not know what a CD-ROM is.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. The Minister will be relieved to hear that the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham has raised a number of the issues that I wanted to raise, so he will be spared a long speech. The Minister covers the General Register Office, which is the same role I had 11 years ago when I was Minister. I was proud then to change the birth registration so that parents who are same-sex couples could be listed as parent/mother and parent on the register. Changing marriage registration is long overdue. I hear the frustration from the hon.”
“Is it possible for people to be provided with a paper document? Some people frame their marriage certificates; they are proud of the moment. Will that be prohibited?”
“The Minister talked just now about proving status to a bank or someone. There is a challenge here. Who has access to the register? What are the cyber-security issues around that and who gives permission for that? I am already married, but if I were to get married after 4 May, would that mean that the Minister could look up my marriage? Who in a bank would have the power to do that? Could it be done only with my permission? What are the data protection controls around this hugely important database, which could be used for all sorts of nefarious reasons, as well as benevolent ones?”
“Although this data is already out there, that is not in the same way as being in a parish register, rather than actually online. Recently, my local authority suffered a major cyber-security attack, and was very much helped by Whitehall to sort it out, but it will take a year to resolve some of the issues, and important data was stolen and put on the dark web. The issues are therefore very serious and pertinent. I hope that the Minister will address that before we pass the draft regulations.”
“Forgive me, but this is an important point. There is a difference with a physical register that someone can look at. The register has people’s addresses and the names of their parents, which are security questions when signing into a bank account. Who gives permission for the register to be checked? Is it completely open to the public, or is there some brake on that to ensure that it is not used inappropriately to mine IDs and to be used for nefarious reasons? That is absolutely fundamental. When we were looking at introducing identity cards, which of course were not introduced, there were huge debates and discussion of detailed legislation about the security of the data and who would give permission to access it.”
“Test and Trace has now been allocated £37 billion, but its head, Baroness Dido Harding, has told both the Public Accounts Committee and the Science and Technology Committee that the big struggle is to get people to isolate. So, although the Government have provided support for people to self-isolate, surely the Chief Secretary can go back and look again to ensure that what the Treasury is providing enables test, trace and isolate to be truly effective, or we are really not going to beat this pandemic?”
“It is either insouciance or incompetence that they were not published in the first place.”
“It feels a bit like groundhog day. Once again, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who has overall responsibility for procurement, is missing in action, and the Health Minister has come to the House to talk about how breathlessly urgent it all was at the beginning of the pandemic—I do not disagree with that, but it is not an excuse for not publishing these contracts in time. With contracts worth more than £10 billion awarded without tendering action between the beginning of the pandemic and July, seeing that paperwork urgently is more important, not less. If the paperwork is still not being published in time—and this goes back to the problems we discussed two weeks ago—can the Minister not just apologise and give a firm commitment that from now on, every contract will be published in time?”
“I welcome investment in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions to look at fraud and error. These are small amounts. But it was this very Government who pushed bounce back loans through, as the National Audit Office has said, with very little regard to risk. A slight delay of 24 or 48 hours would have put less risk on the taxpayer for the guarantee on those loans. With regard to some of the furlough schemes, at the early stages it was right to get this out the door, as my Committee has acknowledged, but later, more safety mechanisms could have been put in place. That money is good money chasing bad, in many respects. The risk appetite was high.”
“I will look in detail at the little bits of money announced today, as my Committee, the Public Accounts Committee, is examining issues relating to the green economy in a series of inquiries. I welcome the fact that there is finally a bit more support for some of the self-employed people in my constituency—we need to see the detail on that—but it is a whole year late. Like many Members, I have constituents who have lived for a year without a penny of income and did not qualify for universal credit, and sometimes they were in exactly the same position as somebody else who lost their job only a day later. Lives have been put on hold and future plans shredded, and there is no prospect of work for many people in many sectors for many months.”
“The poorest get a welcome prop-up with the extension of the uplift to universal credit, but only to September. I am not sure that I can see—I am sure the Chancellor would agree that he does not have a crystal ball—what will suddenly change in September that will mean that people do not need the extra £20 a week. Structurally, there are real issues. A few figures have been announced today on green initiatives—I have not had a chance to go through the detail in the Red Book—but there is no clear plan. We have targets on net zero and other environmental targets, including on things such as electric or net zero cars, yet there are not enough milestones along the way to the targets, which are coming upon us really fast.”
“The bit that was missing from the Budget is the vision for a country that should be supporting people into decent, affordable homes; that should be properly tackling net zero, on which I will touch in more detail; and that should have a plan for social care, the sector that was abandoned in the early stages of covid. We should also be tackling the challenging issues in respect of different employment statuses that have caused so much difficulty for so many. In my constituency is represented everything from zero-hours contracts to IR35, self-employment, people employed for tax purposes and people on short-term contracts. Covid has had different impacts on different groups of people. The Chancellor said he will do whatever it takes but, structurally, the inequalities remain.”
“I welcome parts of this Budget because if it works, it will prop up the system for a bit longer, but I am worried that we have seen announcements about the extension of furlough, for example, at a point at which many workers will have already been hit by decisions taken by employers who were worried that such an announcement would not be made today. The country is crying out for change. It is in debt and there is an uncertain future for many individuals and businesses. Brexit, which I do not think I heard mentioned in the Chancellor’s speech, is hitting businesses and individual consumers very hard and proving costly to the economy, certainly in the short term.”
“The Chancellor seems to have got off the hook on leasehold issues for constituents of mine, and those around the country, who had dangerous cladding by taking the announcement from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government last week as though that is the matter closed.”
“I have hopes for some of the £100 million that HMRC has been given. In fact, having scanned the Red Book, I see that other money is being added to HMRC. As a Committee—as the right hon. Gentleman, a former Chair of the Committee, will know—we are very keen for HMRC to get money because with every £1 it gets for compliance it brings back a lot more to the Exchequer. We need to look closely at this because there is a challenge in the tax system—for example, as regards high street businesses versus online businesses. It is a complex matter and no one should imagine that there is a simple solution; I know he does not think it is simple. It is something we need to continue to engage with. On housing, once again we have seen a focus on fuelling demand, not increasing supply.”
“This is on top of failures on the green deal, the privatisation of the green investment bank, three competitions for carbon capture and storage—one more was recently announced, but so far the first three have failed—and real inertia on developing proper, long-term commitments to really tackling climate change.”
“Even taking into account the pandemic, we saw, for example, the starter homes project fail completely after nearly £200 million was spent on land remediation alone, with £2.3 billion in total set aside for that in the 2015 spending review. Yet this did not happen because the Government did not even manage to enact the secondary legislation necessary to get it off the ground. Five years later, they finally announced that it was the end of the starter homes project and introduced First Homes, a discount for first-time buyers, and now we are seeing a loan guarantee on 95% mortgages. It is a very muddled policy. I cannot yet see who will benefit, and we will be looking at this in detail. On net zero and the environment, the Government are setting big targets, but our detailed work in the Public Accounts Committee raises many concerns.”
“I completely agree: it is absolutely urgent for the people living in those homes whose lives are on hold, but it is also important for the Exchequer. If the Chancellor’s announcements do fuel demand for buying housing, that is stymied by the fact that so many people are stuck in homes that are unsaleable and worth nothing, so they are mortgage prisoners. The whole supply system is not working and the demand system is being fuelled in the wrong direction. We have seen homes in my constituency that were being sold at just below the last threshold for this. My Committee has looked at the Government’s housing policies over many years now. One million new homes in England were promised between 2015 and 2020 and 500,000 more by the end of 2022.”
“This has been a brake on progress in Shoreditch in my constituency. However, we have young people in this country who were brought up in the UK, for whom it is their home and the only country they know, and they are struggling to buy citizenship at over £1,000 apiece, because families cannot afford it. They may pay for citizenship for the main householder, but not for the family. This is something that I feel is viscerally unjust. We have these talented people in our communities, in our constituencies, in our country, who are essentially British but priced out of citizenship. So if we are going to have visas for tech entrepreneurs at an easy rate, why not do that for the young people already in our country who are willing, able and capable of contributing?”