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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“10, so let me say—to manage the difficult health situation we are all suffering at the moment?”
“It is important that local authorities are funded to be proactive and ahead of the curve. It is Blackburn with Darwen today, with other areas that have been locked down in the north-east and Merseyside and so on. However, as the Mayor of London is highlighting and as those of us in London know, it is likely to hit London soon and other areas of the country are there. Local authorities and local public health teams are able and willing to be proactive: not sitting at their desks waiting for a trace call, but able to be proactive, out there in the community to try and pre-empt things and be ahead of that curve. Are the Government putting any thought into how we can use that huge, useful and talented local resource to make sure that, together, we work—if I dare say “to beat this virus” I echo No.”
“Overall, I am confused, as are many residents and constituents, about the messaging that we are getting from the Government. Six hundred people can meet and mix in a school. It is quite right that our children should be back at school, which is something I fully support. Sixty people can be in a pub, but there is the rule of six. Of course, there are different rules altogether in Blackburn with Darwen. I do not think it is down to the Minister, but how will the Government, for whom he speaks—his boss, the Prime Minister, at No. 10—finally start getting some clarity out on this issue? The rule of six sounded so simple, but it has raised as many questions as it was supposed to resolve. I did not criticise it in the first few days because I felt that at least it sounded clear, but the more you delve into it, the less clear it becomes.”
“For many months or even years to come, that becomes a huge issue. Only a few weeks ago, the Business and Planning Act 2020 was passed. It encouraged off-sales from licensed premises for the same hours as the licences on those premises, yet we now see in Blackburn with Darwen, and elsewhere in the country, a curfew—a closure of such premises from 10 pm to 5 am. I would be grateful if the Minister outlined the rationale. What happens after 10 o’clock that makes the virus more likely to spread? There are many other environments where people are able to meet and will be doing so. What is the particular rationale for that? If they are to open at all, why not later? If they are not safe, why are they opening at all? Maybe I am being too black and white about it, but it would be helpful to hear what the Minister has to say.”
“They are the people who can talk to a neighbour and persuade them to do the right thing—perhaps those people are scared or unable to communicate as clearly about it. The key issue is that a lot of people will be having to make the right choice but will be suffering in hardship. It is a welcome step that the Government have finally announced that they will increase benefits to £500 for the isolation period. It would be helpful to know whether that is 10 days or a fortnight, and whether the Government are considering any support for people who are giving up jobs and will not get paid. It is easy to say that people will get £500, but they have to get through the benefit claims. In the meantime, they can end up with quite significant bills. For people on low incomes, £100, £200 or £300 is an insurmountable object.”
“There is a cost to a local authority in providing information in the right languages; sometimes that is orally, not on paper, because of the literacy levels of residents. What extra funding and support is being provided to the council to ensure that this can be funded, and that it is not having to make a choice about what other services it cuts to do that? There is also a cost to enforcing the regulations and, crucially, pre-empting them. I completely concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting that we need to ensure that councils are seen as partners in the process, because they have tentacles that run deep into the community: into faith groups, community groups, tenant groups and those individuals—we all know them in our constituencies—who are like gold dust.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting says, we support the extension of the regulations. It is absolutely vital in a period of a public health pandemic that we put lives and people’s safety first. The rates are very high in Blackburn with Darwen, and I want to be clear about what support the Government are providing to the local authority to communicate with its residents. The Minister talked about putting information on gov.uk. Although I can reassure him that I find that a useful resource, it is not useful for everybody. It assumes a level of digital connectivity, which is not the case for lots of people, whose access, even if they have a mobile phone, is data limited. For many people, there will be language issues with access.”
“Noting the questions that I asked, does the Minister have any comment to make about the curfew—the 10 o’clock finish for licenced premises? It would be helpful to hear the Government’s view.”
“Although many groups are affected, I want to highlight those people on repeated short-term contracts. They do not fit into any category, but they have tax records. Surely, with a bit of imagination, people with a long-standing tax record could be helped.”
“As you might expect, Mr Speaker, the Public Accounts Committee is already beginning the reckoning of costs, and there is a cost to the Exchequer from all those people who were self-employed, or employed on short-term contracts, and who received no support. Ultimately, the state still has to support those people, and no tax comes in from them. Will the Chancellor go back to the drawing board and consider the long-term issue of the cost to our country of not supporting people who have a good track record with HMRC and who could be supported? They have lived on fresh air for all these months.”
“I hope he will release the correspondence between Deloitte and the Department of Health and Social Care so that we can see exactly what has happened.”
“The Secretary of State is in danger of believing the global figures without looking at the reality on the ground. In my borough, which has been working hard with the Government to keep an outbreak down, we have two walk-in test centres, which have been advertised as such to reach the digitally divided and make sure that people can get tests quickly. Over the weekend, staff from Deloitte—a private company running this public service—told people that they could no longer walk in. That was not communicated to the local authority, so the service was still being advertised as walk-in, and more than 90 people were turned away from one test centre alone. This is a fiasco of the Government’s making, and the Secretary of State could intervene now to make sure that, at the very least, there is communication.”
“There is a real will to deliver it, but what country will trust us now if we pass this Bill, which says that we will legislate our way out of any international deal? In short, this Government are not competent. They have been cavalier, they are undermining the Union, and they are damaging the UK’s international reputation irrevocably.”
“We have seen it with the breaking of lockdown rules for some favoured few. Shockingly, we see it now with the breaking of international law. The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) says that, if we break international law, it should not be done casually. Well, this seems rushed and casual to me. Less than a week ago, none of us knew that this was coming—perhaps not even the Prime Minister—but it has huge long-term impacts. This afternoon, I chaired the Public Accounts Committee. We were looking seriously at the Government’s proposals around export strategy; the Government have a target to boost exports, which we would all expect. We were challenging the Department about how it was going to achieve that.”
“Then we had the “oven-ready deal”—the deal that was then delivered by the current Prime Minister but is now being undermined by his very own Bill. It threw up squarely and clearly the problems between Brexit and the hard-fought Good Friday agreement, and it is now being ripped up and is causing huge problems, playing fast and loose with devolution. The impact on the independent decision making of the Welsh Government, the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive is frankly shocking, especially for a party that describes itself as the Conservative and Unionist party, but that is not entirely surprising. This is a Government who think that the law can be applied differentially. We saw it with the shutting down of Parliament illegally before the last general election.”
“It has been a pleasure to hear the erudite legal arguments tonight from Members including the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright) and the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). I am not an erudite international lawyer, so I see this as it is, and perhaps I will put it in simpler terms. It is an utter shambles. It is chaotic. We have a history of cheap slogans that are now coming home to roost. When people boil down major international issues into three-word slogans and believe that they are true, this is what happens. We had “Take back control”, when we already decided the vast majority of our laws. We had “Get Brexit done”, when it is not as simple as that at all, as we can see from our being here today discussing it.”
“The Home Secretary said in her statement: “If we find a problem, I will fix it.” Let me commend to her the work of my constituent Chrisann Jarrett and We Belong, young people who came to this country, some when they were as young as two. They are now on the long road to citizenship—10 years—and every three years have to pay over £2,500 in fees. These are young people who will become British citizens, but every hurdle is being put in their way. They are passionate about this country and are not going to live anywhere else. The Home Secretary could save herself resources and staff time, and support those young people, if she were to look at this. I am sure that Chrisann and We Belong would be willing to engage with her Department.”
“Of course, if a local area decides that it works, it is at liberty to grant a licence in a particular area or a particular part of that area, but this freedom in licensing must not continue just because we have had it during a pandemic—it has to be down to local authorities that know their area, know their residents and know and support their businesses. The decision should never be taken away and made subject to a blanket permission from central Government. I welcome the intervention from their Lordships and I thank the Minister for accepting the amendments, so that we can move quickly on to support our businesses while ameliorating the impact on our residents.”
“In fact, the businesses in my area that have been there for a long time, living in most cases pretty harmoniously with residents, want to have that long-term relationship, so they were not all in favour of the original proposals. That could have been ameliorated if hon. Members had been involved at an earlier stage. I particularly welcome and pay tribute to my colleagues in the other place on the limit on off-sales to 11 pm—I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), who was the first to raise that issue in this House—and the limits on extensions to that. Off-sales cannot be a permanent free-for-all.”
“I say to the Government that, even in a pandemic, a little more time could create even better legislation. Given that we were in the pandemic and businesses were thinking about this much earlier, a little more time—a week, even—would have been better than the three days we originally had to consider the Bill. We could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble, because there was agreement that we needed to support the hospitality industry, but there is also agreement across the House today—happily, we have seen some important changes—that we should support the residents, who will suffer if we do not get the balance right.”
“I want to put on record how proud I am of the entrepreneurs in Hackney who have contributed so much to developing our night-time economy—often quite young people who have come up with interesting ideas about how to develop their premises and contribute to our economy. However, it does cost Hackney Council £1.5 million a year in extra cleaning to manage the night-time economy that we have fostered. In its original form, the Bill would have contributed to some of the behaviour we have seen in recent weeks and months in my borough. I never like to stand up here and say bad things about the constituency I represent, but we have seen some appalling behaviour—I will not repeat what I said last time. The Minister talked about the thoughtfulness and involvement of hon. Members that has greatly improved the Bill.”
“Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that if we keep opening up all these other options and look at starting from first basics on new ones, we will simply delay the work, and the cost of doing that alone will be enormous?”
“We can compromise, as the past few weeks have shown. We have adapted very well. We need to be aware, as well, of the smoke and mirrors from No. 10 Downing Street’s suddenly announcing the suggestion of a move to York. I put the move to York for the House of Lords in the same category as the bridge to Northern Ireland or the estuary airport.”
“A lot of people are making a lot of money out of the taxpayer’s pockets—our constituents’ pockets—and we need to get on with this quickly. We need to be careful about the smoke and mirrors around whether there should be an exact replica of the Chamber in Richmond House. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant); I remember that there was a very loud cacophony of voices here saying, “We will not consider leaving this Chamber unless we have an exact replica.” I am not wedded to an exact replica. I can do my job pretty much anywhere. I do not need this Chamber. I love this Chamber; it is a great place to debate, it is very atmospheric and it provides a lot of opportunities for us to get our constituents’ points of view across. But we do not need to have it precisely like this.”
“Let us not kid ourselves that by avoiding doing it in one hit as a major project—actually, this building is a major project whichever way you cut it up—we will save money. That is a myth. Obviously, the full figures have to be worked up, but we would still be spending millions and millions. Let us take the risers with some of the electrical and other facilities in them. For work to be done to take asbestos out, all that has to be removed and rebuilt outside the building, while ensuring that the connections are not lost. Then the asbestos is removed in roughly half-hour slots by someone in asbestos gear. It takes more than a year and costs multi-millions of pounds to do each one. There are contractors rubbing their hands with glee as we keep dodging the decision about getting on with this.”
“One thing I have been trying to promote as a member of the Public Accounts Committee—I put the implication out there, although there is only one Minister present—is more looking at projects before they go wrong, ensuring that the assurances and the methodologies are in place. We need to ensure that the Sponsor Body is set up well to do its job and to hold the Delivery Authority to account for whatever is ultimately delivered. But how much longer? We have been waiting a long time for this. Some have talked about 2013, some about 2015, 2016 or 2018, but it is for 40 years, really, that we have been having to look at this. The amount of money and time spent on patching this place up is no longer justifiable. It is still taxpayers’ money; we just do not see the big tag.”
“Member for Gainsborough again on the point about the visitors who would come here if we did it in parts. I would not ask schoolchildren from Hackney to come to this building if we were ripping out asbestos and there were building works going on. I would not expect my staff or the staff of this House to come here. I hope that the Leader of the House is taking that very seriously. Has he been talking to the trade unions and staff representatives, whom I have had the privilege to meet on a number of issues, and who are very thoughtful and considerate? They love this place, but they want people to be safe, just as I hope we do. Value for money is absolutely vital, which is another reason we wrote in the role of the National Audit Office— to get it involved now, before any work is done.”
“On the idea that we should not spend money on a place that everybody who has spoken so far agrees is a huge fire risk and a huge health and safety risk, that money will not be available to spend on other things. Under UNESCO rules, as the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) highlighted, the Treasury is responsible within the Government for paying for this project.I have checked this out, and the Treasury is ultimately responsible for making sure that this place does not crumble and for maintaining it to UNESCO standards. It is vital that that work is done. As I say, fire is a real risk, and there is an important question here for the Leader of the House about who is ultimately responsible for the health and safety of all who work here and all who visit. I disagree with the right hon.”
“The integration of our rail system has illustrated one of the big problems with delivering such projects. We can deliver the tracks, the trains and the signalling, but if they do not all work together at the same time, passengers do not get a benefit. That is the challenge, and that is why we set up the Sponsor Body, after a lot of work by a number of us. It is interesting how this House has divided today between those who have been very heavily involved in meetings, discussions and papers on this project and, hearteningly, a lot of new Members who have probably had less time to get into the subject. I hope that they have been listening carefully to those of us who have been very closely invested in this project. The project will cost money, but it is not an either/or.”
“It is the nation’s and the world’s: it is a UNESCO world heritage site. The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) talked about what makes big projects work. We know that there are many multiple projects within this big project—everything from how the masonry will be dealt with to the Education Centre, how the archives will be stored and the wood carvings, let alone all the mechanical and technical work that goes on. However, the challenge of a major project is to bring all those together and make sure that each is delivered in a time that means the others can carry on. We therefore see the need for integration, and I refer to the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) about the rail system.”
“It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but I do rail a little against his comment about groupthink. If I remember rightly, there was a groupthink that we must stay here come what may, until we had a vote— I remember it very well—on 31 January 2018, when the House decided that the best option was to work up one option in detail and move out. As the right hon. Gentleman said—he is an illustrious predecessor of mine as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, and I am delighted to be here today with the deputy Chair, the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown)—we do, all of us, value spending and watch how taxpayers’ money is spent. It is not our money that is being spent on this place, nor is it our place.”
“That means that the Leader of the House is sitting there and everyone is waiting for the musical chairs to stop, hoping that they will not be standing at the moment when a disaster happens in this House.”
“Or the garden bridge, indeed. Only £30 million of taxpayers’ money went through the Department for Transport to the garden bridge, so that was a relatively cheap proposal by the current Prime Minister. We need to be careful: it is very easy, and very much a tactic of the current incumbent at No. 10, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), to throw out a random thought and let everyone talk about that, and meanwhile we stop talking about the real issue: that this place needs to be sorted, and it needs to be sorted now. I turn to the Leader of the House again and ask him who is responsible if someone gets injured or hurt. Who would be responsible for asbestos poisoning in this place? I think it would end up being the Clerk of the House and the corporate body of the House of Commons.”
“I am a patient and reasonable woman, I think, but I am angry at the prospect that we could be one of the last generations of MPs to stand in this place and my schoolchildren from Hackney could be the last generation to come to visit, because if we keep dodging the issue, we will have a pile of ash and rubble, not a beautiful world heritage site. We have to avoid that. We have to protect the people who work here. We need to get on with it.”
“That means that we have to be responsible for the Clerk of the House’s sake as well, so he would not be left holding the problem if something were to go wrong. We had a fire only a few weeks ago. We need to decide and get on with it—we have decided; there is a statute in place—and we need to make sure that we get on with costing the preferences and let the Sponsor Body get on and do its work. We cannot keep adding options or we will just build the cost and build in delay. We cannot keep changing our mind.”
“I am delighted that the Secretary of State is so keen on data. My local clinical commissioning group tells me that it is still not getting the right data to GPs—it is quite clunky—and I think it is right in saying that GPs can see comorbidities, so it is particularly important that they get data about people who have been tested. We currently have an outbreak in the north of my borough and although we have the postcode data, we do not yet have the full address data, which is isolated to households. If we can get that very precise location, it will prevent a local lockdown. Surely the track-and-tracers are getting that data; can they get it to local authorities so that we can handle this situation locally?”
“My hon. Friend raises an important point about the paperwork needed. Even many residents who live in homes that are not as unsafe as some others find that without that form they are unable to sell. One of the things the Public Accounts Committee picked up on in our recent hearing was that being unable to get professional indemnity insurance is a major brake. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to step in on this issue?”
“I add, in my final few seconds, that the £1 billion to remediate cladding will be nowhere near enough, and we need clarity for the many homeowners in really difficult situations as to how they will be supported to live their lives and how councils will be supported to fund that.”
“This is an estimates day debate, not just a general debate, and we are looking at the budget and we want clear answers. We campaigned to get this discussion so that we could get answers in this way. We want to know about the timing of any financial settlement, but I appreciate that the Minister may not be able to announce the spending review. We need to know the split of funding on the issues that my hon. Friend has already raised and where there will be a shortfall on certain types of income, particularly around council tax. We need to know what the Government are planning for the loss of commercial income, because that can be devastating for some councils.”
“I have been quite vocal in my concerns about the Business and Planning Bill, which frees up licensing so much that it will cost councils a lot of money both to manage the licences and to manage the resulting antisocial behaviour, and it will cause problems for the police. Those budgets will be stretched on top of this gap in funding, which represents a 40% cut over the past decade for my council. Local government is on the ground, it knows its communities, and it has been effective at delivery. It has been a crucial partner in delivering on covid responses, and yet councils are not getting the funding. Some estimates suggest that eight out of 10 councils have been looking at section 114 notices, and we know that several councils are technically bankrupt now. We need a clear answer from the Minister today.”
“That was under a Government of the same party as the Minister’s, albeit a long time ago, so I will forgive him that if he can get the money from the Treasury now. The concern is that such decisions will be irreversible. We are also seeing challenges to commercial funding, with Luton Borough Council being a bad example of a lot of money suddenly draining from a council budget because of Government policies that encouraged it to borrow more. The Public Accounts Committee has been looking at that and will be issuing a report next week. We have also seen new laws creating new burdens on local government.”
“There is no more accurate description of that than when money is taken out of local government, because that shoves the cost somewhere else. If local government is doing its job properly and doing it well, that will often prevent further expenditure down the line by preventing problems that cost society, communities and the taxpayer a lot in the long term. We know, given the current climate, that there is no long-term certainty over funding, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East said, and there is a gap of £1 billion on covid spending alone. There is real pressure right now. Budgets are being looked at and decisions are being made. A long time ago—25 years ago—I was a councillor making these very decisions about spending, and we would be looking now at cuts for the following year.”
“We have seen the Treasury first offer all the money, and then massively backtrack, so we have been playing this game of chase with the permanent secretary to get information about exactly and precisely which elements of spending will be refunded as a result of covid-19. I urge the Minister to look at the information that has been sent both jointly and separately to the two Committees and at what his permanent secretary has said to see whether he can push things a bit faster. We will be behind him in getting that detail from the Treasury, because we are very much on the same side on this. In my role as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, let me say that we often look at where money is supposedly saved and efficiencies made, but the cost is often actually shunted to another part of the public sector.”
“It comes to something when the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee joins forces with my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, to ask for more money. It is perhaps not a surprise that his Committee would do that, but it is not something that the Public Accounts Committee does. However, I echo everything my hon. Friend said. Given the time, I will not repeat it, but we know that local government is actually very efficient at spending money, so I reiterate what he said to the Minister about being on his side on this.”
“On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I know that I am not the only Member who has written to Ministers in the past few months about serious matters yet had responses from quite junior civil servants. Although I respect all civil servants, when I write to a senior Minister on a serious matter of policy—not an individual matter—I expect a response from the Minister. Are you, Mr Deputy Speaker, prepared to give me guidance on how we can make sure that this practice is nipped in the bud?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for securing this vital debate. Does she agree, further to the point made by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), that this is effectively a tax on education? Many parents will already have chosen schools and have their children in secondary schools or colleges on the basis of free travel. They will either be forced to pull out or have to pay for it. This is a really significant issue for our young people.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for being generous in giving way again. One of the benefits of this project when it was introduced was that it got whole generations of young people to realise that public transport was there and was useable. It got them in the habit. Does she not think there is another detrimental impact? It is a nice idea that everyone is going to hop on a bike instead of going by car, but it is not likely to happen.”
“The Minister quotes the Mayor of London. I wonder whether she can tell me the date on which he made that comment about children not travelling on buses?”
“In my constituency, sadly, we have a problem with gangs, and a parent has written to me saying that she does not want her son to be another statistic. She chose a school on a safe bus route to make sure he was safe. Switching to what the Minister describes as active travel, which I would normally support, is not as simple as she describes, and I hope she will recognise that.”
“Of course, one of the areas that local government has gone into more in order to fund its services is commercial investment. The package last week does not cover the shortfall in that, which is hitting some local authorities very hard. A number of them are looking at section 114 notices. Is the Minister prepared to see councils go bankrupt on his watch, or is there a package of support for those councils?”