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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“I seek your support and guidance, Mr Speaker, on how we can ensure that Ministers are reminded of the importance of providing proper information to this House so that we can carry out our task for citizens and taxpayers in scrutinising the Government’s business.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Public Accounts Committee has summoned witnesses from the Department for Communities and Local Government to come before it tomorrow to explain reports that the troubled families programme has not been achieving its aims. Since 5 October, my Committee has been asking the Department to release six evaluation reports on the scheme. After much delay, they were finally published on the Department’s website at 6 o’clock yesterday evening. The reports amount to 800 pages of evidence. I am very concerned that, with the tardy release of that important information, the Government are trying to obfuscate proper parliamentary scrutiny of an important Government flagship programme and the money spent on it.”
“Q2. The Public Accounts Committee and the Comptroller and Auditor General have both warned that the NHS budget is not sustainable. When will the Prime Minister’s Government wake up to the reality of growing demand, avoid the political rhetoric and set a sustainable NHS budget for this year and the future?”
“Think of the poor Chibok schoolgirls and the anguish their families are facing: there is a real risk that such things will continue to happen unless the root causes—poverty and terrorism—are tackled. I look forward to the Minister’s response.”
“We do not face the challenges that our female colleagues in Nigeria do. Although changing that would not have solved this issue, it is an important backdrop. The poorest communities need hope, infrastructure, education and jobs. Although the Nigerian Government are doing their best to tackle the rampant terror in the north and the activities of Boko Haram, they are still some way off resolving it. I suspect it will be years, if not decades, before that is challenged. Perhaps the Minister can give us an update. The terrorists exploit poverty and it is important that the international community fights poverty with the same vigour as it fights the military might. It is important that we unite to tackle Boko Haram.”
“Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby highlighted, the situation had a big impact on the Nigerian election and was one of a number of factors that influenced the outcome, unseating the People’s Democratic party for the first time since the re-establishment of democracy. Yet, as the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) said, women are still woefully under-represented in the Nigerian Parliament. From my visits, I know how much support is still needed to support democracy at all levels. Women politicians in Nigeria face challenges including open discrimination and physical attacks. While we in the UK are sensitive to this, particularly recently since the death of our colleague, the situation is nowhere near the same. We do not feel that same fear when we walk out of our doors.”
“Challenges such as the lack of infrastructure and corruption create difficulties for things such as exports, which would help to boost the economy. I do not want to digress too much, but that is certainly a big element of tackling poverty, and I refer hon. Members to previous reports of the all-party group. There is now a big north-south divide in Nigeria. The north is much poorer, less well educated and at greater risk from Boko Haram. It has a young population in great need of skills and training. Those girls who were at school to get the skills, training and education they needed to contribute and help to boost the north of Nigeria have still not been returned to their parents. I mentioned the impact of the Chibok girls on the attitudes of Nigerians. As my hon.”
“Will the Minister update us on any work that the UK is doing to support the Nigerian Government in managing those border challenges, as Boko Haram go in and out of the country causing havoc? There is huge poverty in Nigeria. Most Nigerians live on less than $1.50 a day. There is a lack of investment in infrastructure because, sadly, so much corruption still exists. In fact, when I was in Minna with my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, she bartered to buy some juicy mangoes. We worked out that they cost less than 20p each, but by the time people got them in Nigeria—if, for example, sellers got them to Lagos through various police checks by paying bribes—they would cost too much to make it worth the while to transport them. A mango costs about £1 in Ridley Road market in Hackney and about £1.50 in Sainsbury’s.”
“Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), I heard that perpetrators of sexual offences against young girls were getting off with a fine less than the price of a UK parking ticket because the shame on the family of having a prosecution and evidence that their daughter had been sexually molested was too great. That is some of the backdrop to the attitude and challenges for women in Nigeria, and they are big challenges. There are other complications, such as security. Nigeria has a large and porous border. I have had security briefings and it is mind-boggling to imagine. It is not just that Nigeria is a huge and populous nation, but that the border with Chad and other countries to the north is long, porous and challenging to police.”
“We always praise schools in Hackney and we know that lots of things have gone into that, but one factor is that we have a large west African population, who prize education and whose children strive to achieve with great parental support. That is no different in a village in Minna than on an estate in Hackney. I also had had the opportunity to visit some of the human rights policing work. Small scale but important activities are going on with the support of the Department for International Development. I turn to inequality and sexual exploitation. During a visit to Nigeria with the former Africa Minister, the hon.”
“Member for Glasgow North East highlighted, an educated woman—the first educator of her children—can deliver so many things, including knowledge of healthcare. On my last visit to Nigeria, I went to Minna, and saw parents taking control of the school in their area. They were helping to run the school, a bit like a super parent-teacher association, working with the headteacher to ensure that young women who might be hawkers on the roadside were scooped up, gathered up and put into education. I spoke to parents of three-year-olds who were keen for them to get an education. Let us not kid ourselves: education is a huge prize in Nigeria. Why do schools in my area do particularly well?”
“Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), and we were talking to them as women to women. We were quite shaken when the woman running the programme said to them, “Remember, when you go back to your village, be yourselves. Don’t try to be too ambitious.” Part of her role was to get them to go back and be teachers, and to stay doing that, but when we were talking to them we found that those young women had ambitions to go beyond teacher training and do other things. As two British female MPs who have worked hard, and had a good education and the opportunities that life in this country has presented to us, we understood but were shocked at the limits being put on women around the world, although in that case, perhaps, that was to give more women opportunities. As the hon.”
“There was a training programme there, funded by DFID and delivered partly with Save the Children, to get more girls trained to be teachers, because girls were not going to school in parts of the north of Nigeria as their parents were not keen for them to be taught by male teachers. The girls were in a compound with barbed wire—not particularly, in those days, because of the security threat from terrorism, but because their husbands and fathers would not have let them come to be trained as teachers if there was any risk to them in cultural terms. It was effectively a brutal chaperoning system—“brutal” in that there was barbed wire—to make sure that those girls were completely protected. They were ambitious young women. I was there with my hon.”
“Nigeria is a sovereign nation and it is important that we recognise that, but there is a resource issue and I would be interested to hear from the Minister what more is happening. I am very pleased that DFID has increased its spending in Nigeria, although my love for Nigeria means I am sad that that is still necessary. However, the decision was made following a needs-based assessment and it is great that DFID is helping to tackle poverty, disease and to improve education, particularly for girls. On one of my visits, I went to a school in the Kano area, in the days when it was easier for Members of Parliament to travel around the country.”
“In 2014, more than 2,000 people were abducted, so although the Chibok girls are the visible sign of that and rightly attracted international attention, let us not imagine that that is the beginning or the end. Even if they are happily returned to their families, we should not rest there. I think we would all agree that we need to keep vigilant. The key issue is how to tackle Boko Haram and stem the threat of extremism in Nigeria and the region. I welcome the UK Government’s support for military training and the commitment in December last year to increase that. Is the Minister able to give us an update? We know that it is a very challenging arena to work in and, of course, the issue is about collaboration and not about us going and telling the Nigerians what to do.”
“Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) rightly said, although this was the most terrible and awful action, it is not the only act of terror against children in Nigeria. Other schools have been attacked and pupils have been brutally murdered and abducted. That was forcibly brought home to me when I was working with a group who had come to London at the behest of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It was a cross-religious group of Muslims and Christians, working for a fortnight to develop skills to try and tackle extremism at its root cause. One of the members who had come over—her nephew had been brutally murdered in his school bed—brought home to us very firmly the human reality of what is going on in Nigeria.”
“Although that seems a bit distant from this tragic kidnapping—218 girls are still missing—it is related and I will go on to explain how. The hon. Member for Henley, with his vast knowledge and experience, highlighted the issue of companies from Britain seeking to invest in Nigeria. We have heard on a number of visits and in events here how British businesses are put off going out and working with Nigerians and putting their energy into boosting the Nigerian economy because of security and other issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby set out the detail of the terrible, large-scale kidnap that took place. As so many others have eloquently highlighted, that act rightly shocked the world, but as the hon.”
“In 2014, I hosted an event on the issue of the Chibok schoolgirls; we had a representative from the Nigerian high commission and a lot of diaspora Nigerians present in the room, where there was palpable upset and anger. I will touch on this further, but this was really at the beginning of a rise in feeling from the Nigerians politically against some of the actions of their then Government. It is also worth highlighting Nigeria’s huge importance both to the UK and to the region, as Africa’s most populous nation. It is a key player in security and potentially in trade in that region. Our last Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), signed a concordat in 2011 with the then President Goodluck Jonathan to double bilateral trade between our countries.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate the International Development Committee, ably led by its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), on bringing this important issue to the House today. I want to touch on some of the wider issues, following the line of argument made by the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) on why what happened is a symptom of some of the other challenges in Nigeria. I have a very strong interest in Nigeria. I am proud to represent one of the largest diaspora groups in the UK. I am a former chair of the all-party group on Nigeria, which I chaired for five years, and I had the pleasure of visiting Nigeria on three separate occasions.”
“The Minister has talked a number of times about cleaning up Sellafield as “cost-effectively” as possible, yet it was only when the Public Accounts Committee in the last Parliament looked closely at the issue that the Government moved to remove Nuclear Management Partners, the American consortium that was running Sellafield. Will he now undertake, as the new Minister, not only to visit, but to make sure that, in all the complex engineering work on this very complex site—I think three of the top 10 engineering challenges internationally are at Sellafield—the difficulty does not overblow the challenge of benchmarking engineering projects in similar fields, so that we get good value for money for the taxpayer while carrying out the important clean-up?”
“I welcome the hon. Lady to her position, in which she is taking on the seemingly intractable problem of making sure that the Met police deal with DBS checks in good time. I have had 20 cases in the past 12 months, including of teachers and teaching assistants unable to get their checks in time to start work. The delays are causing havoc in people’s lives. I wish all power to her elbow in resolving this, but it has been going on for nearly a decade. What practical steps is she going to take?”
“A lack of workforce planning and weak financial management have led to staff shortages, which have been a major contributor to this dispute. The Department of Health accounts and NHS England accounts, which came out on 21 July, underlined that weakness in financial planning, with the Comptroller and Auditor General saying clearly that he had real concerns about the future sustainability of NHS funding. We have, however, heard the Secretary of State say again today that the £10 billion available is to solve the issue about the seven-day NHS, but we have also heard that money promised for many other things by the head of NHS England. Does the Secretary of State really have a plan for the financial sustainability of the NHS? If so, what is it?”
“I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend on her sterling work in raising this issue up the agenda. Does she agree that if the Government were to adopt this amendment, they would be setting a tone for other parts of the world? We have had a lot of interest from around Europe and elsewhere about the work being done in Parliament and by our Government, and adopting this would really set the example.”
“It is clear that the Minister has some sympathy with the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) and most of the Public Accounts Committee, along with many other Members in many parties. Rather than requiring my right hon. Friend to come back to the House, will he therefore commit the Government to looking at this matter unilaterally if multilateral agreement is not achieved? Or will he go even further today and agree to a sunrise clause to add to the proposals that my right hon. Friend and I, and others, have put forward, so that this can come into action if the multilateral agreement that he is hoping for does not come to fruition?”
“Perhaps I can help the Minister. On behalf of the Public Accounts Committee, I sent an open letter to the chairs of European finance and public accounts committees or their equivalents. The Minister might have picked up the fact that, to date, the letter has been signed by the chairs of parliamentary finance committees in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Norway and Slovakia, as well as by senior MPs in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. We also know that the French Finance Minister, Michel Sapin, is doing some interesting work in this area, as are many others. Does that help to push the Minister in the right direction and enable him to make us more of an offer today?”
“It also follows a theme pursued by the Public Accounts Committee, when she chaired it and currently, on registering the extent of beneficial ownership in tax havens. I do not need to add a great deal to what she amply amplified. She and I, other hon. Members, and, I think, the Minister agree that transparency—sunlight—on activities affects behaviour. Public trust on tax is at an all-time low. We do not have a level playing field. As she says, the Government have the power to act on this very swiftly. The Prime Minister has supported it and the Minister has supported it, so why not act now?”
“Rather than detain the Committee, I draw Members’ attention to the Public Accounts Committee website, which has full details of the letter and information about how we went about it. My right hon. Friend’s amendment is a really important first step. I appreciate that the Minister is willing to look at a multinational agreement. Unfortunately, however, much to my disappointment and the huge disappointment of my constituency and borough, which had the second-largest vote in the country to remain, we voted to leave the EU last Thursday, and Britain is going it alone, so why not do this now? New clause 9, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), follows the same principle.”
“In May, I went out to the OECD on behalf of the Public Accounts Committee to lobby and speak to parliamentarians of other nations around the world. We had a very useful and important discussion about the need for greater disclosure for the public benefit, with our citizens pushing our Governments to act decisively. As I said, I subsequently wrote an open letter that I sent to European partners, urging Governments to support the measure that is summarised in the amendment. The letter was signed by the chairs of parliamentary finance committees in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Norway and Slovakia, as well as senior MPs in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.”
“We want to put powers in the hands of the citizen to enable them easily to see where the taxes paid by companies are put. The Minister spoke of the amendment being defective, but I do not believe that it is. It covers the same large-turnover companies that are covered by other Government reporting requirements. If it is defective, however, I again challenge him to bring back an improved version on Report. He has access to Government lawyers to do this. My right hon. Friend, though a very able woman, perhaps does not have at her fingertips the same expertise in legislative drafting. The power is in the hands of the Government on this issue. I want to highlight another aspect of our work that I mentioned to the Minister. It is not UK parliamentarians alone who support this measure.”
“I rise to speak briefly to amendment 1. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), many members of the Public Accounts Committee, and Members across the House who have signed this simple but important amendment, which, as others have highlighted, would require a clear public register of company activity. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), whose expertise on this issue in the Public Accounts Committee has been particularly useful. As he rightly said, this information is mostly public, but one would need to have his qualifications, and there are not many with those, in order to track it down internationally. We on the Public Accounts Committee want a register where it is readily available to the “citizen auditor”.”
“Many of my constituents are European citizens and they are fearful for their future. The Prime Minister has talked about a group of officials set up to determine what Brexit will mean. Can he give any comfort to these people? If not now, will he give a timetable for when they will know how they can apply to remain in the UK?”
“I hope that constructive discussions with the Mayor of London are ongoing, both behind the scenes and, soon, more openly, because if the situation continues, our city will be hollowed out and people will not be able to afford to live and work here, which will change the nature of our great London.”
“I also have a couple of suggestions, including giving back to the Mayor the land that NHS Property Services took away from London, such as St Leonard’s hospital in Shoreditch. The Mayor should be allowed to turn that land into homes, and to count how many homes he can build in total, and how many are affordable or for key workers. That will do more for our city. There might be a deal struck, so that some of the money goes back to the NHS—goodness knows, the NHS budget is under great stress—but those homes would be vital for our health workers, teachers and so many others. The Mayor should be allowed to develop a solution for London.”
“It is a building block for life, because with a stable home people can think about a job, getting their family sorted, making progress and contributing to the community and society in which they live. Without that, people are living in anxiety. In my constituency surgeries, I am seeing some of the worst housing cases that I have ever seen, and I have been elected for 22 years now. For the record, as we are in the middle of debate about the referendum, I have never once, in my 11 years as an MP, had an eastern European come to me about council housing—they all seem to live in the private rented sector, and certainly they have never come to me asking for council housing. The Government are seriously damaging our city, but they have an opportunity. I ask the Minister to tell us, seriously, how much he will work with the Mayor.”
“They are stuck at home with their parents, and are often overcrowded; even if they are not, they are pushing the rent levels up, because as a household, their marginal taxation rate can be immense. I spoke to Peabody the other day, and it has had examples of people who have been reluctant to take on promotions, because households that go over a certain level of income—a £40,000 household income sounds like a lot outside London, but it is not a great deal in London—are suddenly having to pay a high marginal rate of both income tax, potentially, and extra rent. I must also rail against the loss of secure tenancies. A stable home is a fundamental political principle for me.”
“I am a homeowner myself; indeed—forgive me, Sir David, I forgot to mention my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—I am a landlord in London, so I have no problem with people buying their own home, but not in a way that is taking homes away from other Londoners. That is the thing. The back-fill is coming from councils having to sell their important social housing. The Public Accounts Committee concluded that not only was there no maths done on the right to buy, but it was not sustainable in its current form, with so little detail about how it will work. This is an opportunity for the Minister to work with the Mayor of London to make the policy work better for London. There is also pay to stay. I have highlighted the multiple households in my constituency in which there are adult children who cannot move anywhere.”
“This should also include the number of affordable homes.” We have been told by civil servants that Ministers expressly said that they did not want the homes built on land disposed of by the Government counted. Let me repeat that, because it sounds unbelievable and people might think that I have misspoken: Ministers have expressly said that they do not want to count the number of homes built on public land disposed of for house building. It is more Sir Humphrey than Sir Humphrey, and it is time that the Minister gave us an answer. We also now have the right to buy for housing associations. I have no problem with people wanting to become homeowners.”
“What we discovered, unbelievably, is that the Government cannot tell us how much the land was sold for, how many homes have been built on the land, and whether it was value for money for the taxpayer. The figures even included some land released in the early stages of the previous Labour Government, so the numbers were criticised by auditors. Perhaps the Minister will respond to one of the Public Accounts Committee’s recommendations: “In taking forward its new target”, which the Government had announced, “to release land for up to 150,000 homes between 2015 and 2020, the Department must only count the number of homes built, or commenced, on land disposed of during the programme.”
“The Government are offering nothing at all, and they are even about to rip away from my constituency any social housing—if she could qualify for that, which, frankly, would be a miracle, even in her circumstances. What are the solutions? The Public Accounts Committee has been looking into the matter intensely, on a cross- party basis. In September, we published a report on the Government’s land disposals programme. The programme was announced at the beginning of the previous Parliament by the Housing Minister at the time, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), and was intended to dispose of enough land to build more than 100,000 homes—so far, so good.”
“Her ill health and her need for housing benefit mean that no agent is interested in looking at her. She managed to find one landlord who was willing to take her on, but that landlord would only accept her with some sort of rent guarantee, which the council, however, cannot offer on housing benefit before someone moves in, so the whole system is bust. She has looked not only in Hackney, but in the neighbouring five or six boroughs, and she can find nowhere affordable to live, even in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer). She is 46 years old, single and not working—temporarily—and she is unable to find anywhere to live. What is the solution for her?”
“The woman’s income—she has a private pension and a bit of state pension—is £800 a month. She is a proud woman who has never claimed a penny until she had to claim housing benefit, and she is embarrassed about doing that. She is in a desperate state and is in rent arrears. I am working with the council to see if we can find a solution for her, but she is only one of many. Another tenant, a younger woman of 46 years, works in one of our national museums, but she has been ill and unable to work. The rent was affordable, but the landlord decided to up sticks and move abroad; he contacted an agent, who said, “Hey, you’re not charging enough here, put the rent up,” which the landlord did. That put the tenant notionally into rent arrears, although her rent was enough for the landlord previously.”
“In my constituency, more people now rent privately than own their own home. Private sector tenants who have been suddenly cast out and have nowhere to go are coming to my surgery at an unprecedented level. Let me give an example. Only this Monday, a 68-year-old woman saw me at my surgery. She has lived at a property for 52 years, first with her grandmother and her uncle, who are now dead. The property, to use an old-fashioned description, was benevolent housing for the working poor when it was built towards the beginning of the previous century. It was, however, sold on, and the rent is now £382 a week. It is a three-bedroom property, so she has been told that her housing benefit entitlement is only £200 a week, because she is under-occupying, but bear in mind that it has been her home for 52 years.”
“Hackney Council has estimated that a person would need an income of about £71,000 to buy a starter home in the borough, although my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth highlighted a figure of £97,000. There are different figures, so perhaps the Minister will clarify that point. What is the rate for a starter home in London? My constituents want to know that, because anyone who might be interested in a starter home wants to know whether it is possible to get one. As for Help to Buy, I need say little about it, except that in my borough it has been fuelling house prices. Miraculously, newly built properties coming on to the market hit only a smidgen below the Help to Buy threshold. That initiative is not helping in areas such as mine. The private sector, too, is a real problem.”
“The rent levels on the remaining equity can be a real problem—it is sometimes as high as 4%—and there are issues of move-on for families who grow and need a larger property, but cannot afford to staircase up. One of the challenges is the narrow market, and the lack of mortgages available to people who are shared owners. That model is fast heading for bust; we need a rethink, and perhaps to use the money put into shared ownership for more sustainable forms of rented housing, or for better subsidies so that the right people can move into long-term affordable home ownership. At Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister told me that the solution to the problem in Hackney was starter homes. As my hon. Friends have highlighted, at about £400,000 for a starter home, who in my constituency can afford that?”
“I am pleased to say that it will meet tenants and residents in July to start the debate about what the best model is for providing sustainable, solid and secure housing for the key people we need to keep London operating. I wish it well in its endeavours, and I hope to be involved. I am also seeking a meeting with the Mayor of London to see whether we can shape this debate at a London level. Shared ownership is one of the other so-called solutions. In Hackney, we have seen the ludicrous situation of shared-ownership properties on the market for well over £1 million. The defence of the housing association concerned is that four sharers on £70,000 a year could buy a share of the property. That is not what I thought shared ownership was for.”
“Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) and other colleagues, I fought hard to preserve some former Crown Estate properties as key worker housing. They are now owned by the Peabody Trust. I met Peabody last week, because many tenants in those properties have raised concerns about the unaffordability of rents, which have been set at 60% of market rent; that is Peabody’s definition of a rent that is achievable by key workers, but given the market rents in Hackney that I have set out, that is beyond the reach of nurses, social workers and teachers. Even if that model is made to work, there is not enough of it. It is a very ill-defined part of the housing market. Peabody has, to a degree, acknowledged that there is a problem, and it is looking again at what the right rent should be.”
“We also had the concern that, as she highlighted, people on low incomes in the private sector are key workers, too: we need people to work in banks, to be chefs and to drive taxicabs. They need to be considered, too. The solutions that the Government have come up with are key worker housing, shared ownership, starter homes, Help to Buy and, of course, the private sector, but they do not work for Hackney and the expensive parts of London and the south-east. Key worker housing is usually defined by profession, and it is typically for the public sector. That is fine if people can access it, but there are issues with it. For a start, there are not many key worker housing schemes around, and there is also an issue about rent levels. Together with the right hon.”
“This is not new. Back in 2001, when I was a member of the London Assembly working with the then Mayor, Ken Livingstone—perhaps not so much working with him, as he was not in my party at the time—I produced a report and chaired a group on housing for key workers. We looked at nurses, bus drivers, teachers and police officers as a sub-section of that group, and concluded that there was a real crisis looming for middle management. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth highlighted clearly, that is sadly coming home to roost. I do not like to say that we were right then, but we were, and too little has been done since. As my hon. Friend said, that goes to the heart of London’s ability to function. We predicted that problem.”
“In the private sector—I will speak more about this in a moment—the rent for a typical two-bedroom property is about £400 a week, which equates to just over £20,000 a year. To afford that, someone would need an annual gross household salary of approximately £59,000. The stark reality for my constituents is that home ownership, renting and social housing are but dreams. Many of them are stuck living with their parents at home as adults. In my surgeries, I increasingly meet families that have people living in the living room, or parents and children living on the sofa—not even a sofa bed, because very often there is not space even for that. I say seriously to the Minister that I fear we are creating modern slums. I acknowledge that Governments over many years have not built enough homes, but now we have this wretched housing Act.”
“People often tell me that my constituency is achingly cool, but I remind them that it is also achingly poor—many people are on very low incomes and are struggling to get regular work. That is reflected in the fact that there are 11,000 people on the council’s housing register, which is frankly a bit of a joke. People think it is a waiting list, but given that 1,338 homes were allocated in 2014-15, the demand is certainly not being met through the available supply. In addition, Hackney Council could lose 700 homes through the forced sale of council homes to fund right to buy for housing association tenants. I really worry about where people on low incomes will be able to live in the future.”