Sir Stephen Timms
MP for East Ham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If he would like to send me details of that particular case, I will happily look into it. On the subject of people with hearing impairments, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities and I will be meeting the British Sign Language Advisory Board this afternoon.”
“Better outcomes require early identification and support for girls and young women with special educational needs, including dyslexia. That is the aim of the SEND reforms and the development of national inclusion standards.”
“Autistic people and people with ADHD have been struggling to get the right support at the right time. Recommendations from Professor Karen Guldberg’s neurodivergence task and finish group directly informed the SEND reforms that were published earlier this year.”
“The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on public bodies to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage by accessibility challenges.”
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This benefit is there to contribute to the additional costs of disability. Too often, what has happened—my hon.”
“I think we can take the hon. Member’s question as a tacit recognition that in 14 years the previous Government should have done something to fix these problems. The steering group is clear that the provision of cash to meet the additional costs of disability is vital.”
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“Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s insistence on cloaking this project in secrecy, right from the start, has been one reason why it has gone so badly wrong?”
“The Secretary of State refers to the National Audit Office, which he will know at one stage characterised the universal credit project as having a “good news” culture in which staff were not allowed to acknowledge and draw attention to problems. Does he agree that that should not have prevailed? Will he reassure the House that that culture has been dealt with?”
“Taking the charitable view that the President of the United States does not know the character of the organisation whose vile utterances he has endorsed, will the Home Secretary assure the House that the Government will make him well aware of their view of the character of this organisation and its effects, so that he has the opportunity clearly to distance himself from any association with it before there can be any question of his visiting the United Kingdom?”
“My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) is right in his question to highlight the serious difficulties the country faces. I hope it is true that agreement has been reached on the costs of exit, so that the negotiations can move on to the next stage. Does the right hon. Lady agree that it is essential to the UK’s national interest that the European Council agrees at its meeting next month that enough progress has been made to move on to discussions about future trade?”
“I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. Does she agree that a basic step towards resolving the terrible tragedy that she describes would be the repeal of the 1982 citizenship law?”
“The Department has handed over some 850 pages, but the Minister has made it clear that some information has been withheld. If that additional material had also been handed over, how many pages would that have been? Would it be another couple of hundred, more or less, or has the information not actually been compiled?”
“The Secretary of State’s characterisation of the tax credits system is wrong, but I welcome the helpful steps he announced today to start clearing up the problems he inherited. Will he make available large-print versions of the documentation about these changes? Does he accept that, if someone who is paid weekly and has no savings loses their job, denying them any income at all for five weeks will cause a serious problem that offering a loan does not resolve?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for his kind reference to my amendment 151. Going back to the case brought by the now Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, does my hon. Friend agree that, if the Secretary of State had not been able to rely on article 8, the likelihood is that he would not have won his case and that the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) would have won for the Government? Does that not give the lie to the suggestion that the charter has no impact?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for addressing my amendment. Does he accept that it is essential that we avoid a declaration from the European Commission at some point in the future that data protection arrangements in the UK are not adequate, and we must therefore secure an adequacy determination? Does he also accept that not having article 8 somewhere on the UK statute book is an invitation to those elsewhere to find against us when that crunch decision comes?”
“She said: “exclusion of the charter is problematic for a number of reasons”, and I want to quote a couple of the points that she made. Dr O’Brien said that a large number of appeal cases in UK courts cited the charter. She added: “That is a lot of cases that have to be read differently and it is not clear how they are to be read differently.” One of the appeal cases under discussion—we have referred to it a number of times in the debate—involved my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson) and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), now the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.”
“Nevertheless, we face a serious potential problem: the edifice of data privacy law in the UK rests on article 8 of the charter of fundamental rights. Under clause 5(4) of this Bill, article 8 will not be part of domestic law after we have left the European Union. Will the omission of article 8 from our law make any practical difference to how the law works in the UK? There have been some suggestions that it will not, but the evidence is that, in fact, it will. In the exchange between the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) and my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), we heard about the evidence given by Dr Charlotte O’Brien, a senior lecturer at York Law School, to the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union.”
“That paper pointed out that the UK accounts for 0.9% of the world’s population, 3.9% of the world’s GDP, and 11.5% of the world’s cross-border data flows, 75% of which is with other EU countries. This is an enormously important issue, particularly for the UK economy given its reliance on its digital aspects. The Government are absolutely right to argue that we must avoid restrictions on cross-border data flows because they would affect the UK more than almost any other country in the world. It is also right to point out that the UK has very strong personal data protection. That is currently being strengthened by the new Data Protection Bill being debated in the other place, which will bring our arrangements into line with the EU’s general data protection regulation, or GDPR, and the Government are absolutely right to make that point.”
“I rise to speak to amendment 151, which, at first sight, looks rather technical but actually references, as we have already established in this debate, a hugely important issue for the UK economy. I am very grateful to all those Members, from all parties across the House, who have signed the amendment, and to the Chairman of Ways and Means for selecting it for debate. The amendment deals with future electronic communication between the UK and the remaining member states of the European Union. The Government’s future partnership paper on this topic, published in August, was absolutely right to highlight just how important an issue this is for the UK economy.”
“It goes on to say that there needs to be an independent body in charge of all this. That is what article 8 says, word for word. My amendment says that that needs to be on the statute book in the UK. I do not think that those forms of words would cause great difficulty to the Government. We all agree that these are appropriate things, but they need to be explicitly set out in the law so that they can be drawn on in future, because they are not set out clearly elsewhere.”
“I simply make the point at this stage that a number of experts are saying that some of the rights—this is particularly the case with article 8—are not elsewhere. It will be interesting to see what that document says. It is worth reminding the Committee of what article 8 says. The first two of the three points within it state: “Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her…Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.” As has been mentioned in this debate, there is a right to be forgotten, and that is provided by the right to have data rectified.”
“Member for Haltemprice and Howden to rest on, the outcome of that case and of lots of others could well have been different. To quote Dr O’Brien again, she made the point that the gap that is created by no longer having the charter of fundamental rights in UK law is probably clearest in the case of data protection because of the charter “creating fairly specific, concrete rights that are not necessarily enunciated in exactly the same terms elsewhere.” I think that is the answer to the intervention I have just been responding to: actually, these rights are not readily available elsewhere. I was delighted to hear from the Minister that we will get a document—I think he said by 5 December—setting out all the rights in the charter of fundamental rights and where they can be found elsewhere in UK law. That will make very interesting reading.”
“The right hon. Gentleman gets right to the heart of the case. I believe that the answer to his question is no they would not, or at least we do not know what the outcome would be. I suggest that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden might well not have won his case against the Government if he had not been able to rest on article 8. The hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who intervened earlier, might have persuaded the court that the then Home Secretary, now the Prime Minister, was right in what she was doing and that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden was wrong. We do not know what that Appeal Court would have decided, but I put it to the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper)—I think he is rather implicitly accepting the point—that if article 8 had not been there for the right hon.”
“That rather bruising experience at the hands of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden may well be one reason why the Prime Minister wants to keep the charter out of UK law.”
“The European Court of Justice is particularly sensitive about UK bulk collection of personal data. That issue featured prominently in the Appeal Court case, which we have touched on several times in this debate, brought by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden. The Court considered whether the powers in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 went too far, allowing the state to breach personal data privacy, and concluded that the powers introduced by the then Home Secretary went too far. Article 8 of the charter, specifically, was the basis for that conclusion. If article 8 is no longer in UK law, it may make life easier for future Home Secretaries who wish to do the kind of thing that the previous Home Secretary tried to do, because they are much less likely to be found in breach.”
“The danger is not a theoretical one, as we see in the case of Canada. A very long-running series of negotiations has led to a pretty ambitious agreement between Canada and the EU, but Canada has only got a partial adequacy determination. If we ended up with only a partial adequacy determination on data, it would be extremely damaging for the UK economy. The US arrangements known as “safe harbour” were famously struck down as inadequate by the European Court of Justice in a case brought by an individual Austrian citizen in 2015. That caused an enormous upheaval and led to the very rapid introduction of new arrangements in US regulation called “privacy shield”, which I understand are being called into question in a new case at the European Court of Justice by the same Austrian citizen.”
“If we do not get a deal and an adequacy determination, it will be unlawful to send personal data from the European Union to the UK, and, at a stroke, there will be no lawful basis for the continued operation of a significant chunk of the UK economy. I hope we all agree that we must avoid that outcome at all costs. Already, we hear that hi-tech start-ups that need access to personal data are starting to look at Berlin in preference to London because of the possibility that that problem might, in due course, arise. The Government have argued that because we are fully implementing the GDPR, the Commission will be unable to find fault with UK arrangements even if we lose article 8. I have to say to Ministers that the UK technology sector does not agree, and my judgment is that it is absolutely right to be worried.”
“My hon. Friend, who is a lawyer specialising in these matters, is absolutely right. I understand that the European Parliament also has a role in all this, and so there is a political dimension to it as well. The position at the moment is that as an EU member state we can exchange personal data freely with others in the EU—Governments, businesses and individuals. The Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), told the Select Committee that the Government would seek to include data flows in the wider negotiated agreement for a future deep and special partnership between the UK and the remaining member states of the EU. I welcome that confirmation. However, as we keep on being reminded, we might not get a deal, so what then?”
“I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. My understanding is that the shortest period in which a data adequacy agreement has ever been achieved is 12 months, in the case of Japan. Very often, these things take a good deal longer. By exactly the same token, and precisely because it may be a source of satisfaction to Home Office Ministers, excluding article 8 will constitute an invitation to the European Commission and the European Parliament to find fault with UK data privacy regulation. The cases brought by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden and others would not have succeeded if they had not been able to rely on article 8. Those who look at these matters on behalf of the European Union will have no doubt in their minds, as far as I can see, that that is the case.”
“We will of course argue that our arrangements are adequate, but for data exchanges with EU countries, it will not be our call; it will be their call. They will make the decision: the call will be made by officials and politicians in the European Union and by the European Court of Justice. It is running too great a risk for our digital economy—at 10% of GDP, it is proportionately the biggest digital economy anywhere in the G20—and I urge the Committee not to run that risk or to play fast and loose with the UK economy, but to accept amendment 151.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is such an invitation, and it is a terrible risk to take. Frankly, I think it is playing fast and loose with a very important part of the UK economy. Let me finish by quoting the industry body representing this part of the UK economy, techUK, which is very deeply concerned about this issue and supports amendment 151. It makes the point that “the Government must do all it can to ensure that we are in the best possible position to secure adequacy, and this includes making clear, at every opportunity, that the UK’s data protection framework is equivalent to the one we have operated as an EU Member State.” Leaving article 8 off the statute book seriously imperils the future achievement of such an adequacy determination.”
“May I just challenge one point? If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the Data Protection Bill currently being debated in the other place, he will see that it does not say that everybody has the right to have their personal data protected. It does not set the right in the terms set out in the article. From a European perspective, and from an Appeal Court perspective, that is potentially a problem.”
“I agree: I do not think the Commission will be churlish or needlessly spiteful. But the problem is that if we do not have a clear right in law that everyone’s personal data will be protected—if article 8 is not there any longer, we will not—that is an invitation to the Commission to find against us. My point is that we should not be taking that risk.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the problems—it is certainly not the only one—although it is denied by Ministers, is the fact that the IT system for universal credit is not yet working properly?”
“I welcome Secretary of State’s commitment to “protect renters against poor practice”, and I put it to the Minister that the private landlord licensing scheme operating in my borough for the past five years has been extremely effective in tackling that.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered private landlord licensing. A couple of weeks ago, Tim Roache, general secretary of the GMB trade union, accompanied the Mayor of Newham and Metropolitan police officers on a series of raids on suspected exploitative landlords in my borough. He describes what he saw as “heartbreaking”. He reports families living in a single room with one toilet in the corner; bunk beds stacked six to a tiny room; floors lined with mattresses; and dozens of people using one kitchen that was clearly meant for two people. Bad practice of that kind is sadly not unknown in our part of London and it has a severe impact on the people who live in those conditions and on the wider neighbourhood.”
“In extreme cases, the council can ban the worst landlords from operating altogether.”
“There certainly is some bad practice around, as the Secretary of State has acknowledged. The Newham scheme expires at the end of next month. The council applied in July to reauthorise it. I urge the Minister to permit the reauthorisation of the scheme and to do so soon—the Department’s guidance specifies eight weeks for making such decisions and we are now a good way past that—to ensure that the gap between the current and reauthorised schemes can be kept to a minimum. Under the Newham scheme, landlords are required to register the homes they rent with the council and to agree to conditions to ensure the homes are safe, of a good standard and properly managed. The scheme gives the council additional powers to enforce standards because failure to license or comply with the terms of a licence constitutes an offence.”
“They say that it has “assisted the police in dealing with crime, both operationally and through the utilisation of joint intelligence…if the Government is serious about having the tools to fight crime then it must allow Newham to continue its excellent work against criminal landlords.” The Minister has no interest in giving the green light to wrongdoers, so when crime is rising and the activities facilitated by rogue landlords are a significant part of the problem, it is not the time to block enforcement powers that the police have found so valuable.”
“The London Fire Brigade therefore supports the Newham application to continue licensing private rented properties, and we look forward to continuing our successful partnership.” The Minister is no doubt spending a great deal of time reflecting on the lessons of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. One of those lessons must be the need for effective local vigilance against fire risks in homes. The Metropolitan police work very closely with the housing team in the borough on enforcement work. In the five years of the scheme, officers have made 752 arrests through licensing operations for a whole range of criminal offences. In reflecting on that, the Metropolitan police have also formally supported the Newham scheme.”
“That and other joint work between the council and HMRC since then, which has been possible only because of the scheme, has led to the identification of significant previously undisclosed rental income. The fight against tax evasion requires the scheme to be reauthorised. There has been joint work with the Home Office. Immigration Enforcement said that the collaboration with the Newham scheme has been “an effective and productive workstream in terms of addresses that are being used by illegal migrants.” The Minister will not want that work to be undermined. There has also been excellent joint working with the London fire brigade, which says: “The property licensing scheme in Newham has saved lives and injury to people.”
“My hon. Friend is right and I share in her congratulations to Ashfield District Council. In five years, Newham has banned 28 landlords. With the great majority of landlords, everything is fine, but there are powers available to intervene when things go wrong. The Newham scheme is widely supported by local residents, the Mayor of London, the borough police and the fire service. A crucial aspect of the scheme is its support of important enforcement work by central Government agencies. For example, the council emailed all licensed landlords jointly with HMRC soon after introducing the scheme with advice about getting the landlords’ tax affairs up to date.”
“If the scheme is reauthorised, as I hope it will be, those who apply at the start will pay just £400—less than £7 per month over the five years of the licence’s validity. That fee is also tax-deductible as a legitimate business expense.”
“There is no question but that most landlords are responsible and law-abiding, and for such landlords the scheme is light-touch and not intrusive, apart from a modest fee. The Secretary of State is right to recognise that, in a minority of cases, poor practice is a serious problem; the Newham scheme has proved an effective response. Licence holders are required to prevent overcrowding, antisocial behaviour, rubbish in front gardens and noise nuisance—problems that occur in a small minority of cases but that disproportionately affect the vicinity. Landlords are also required to manage homes well and keep them safe and in good repair. I assure the Minister that the scheme is not a gratuitous tax on landlords. I understand that there may well be concerns about that, but the licence fee simply covers the scheme’s administrative costs.”
“The response depends on the nature of the disrepair. In some cases, the tenant will be advised by the council’s housing team on how to tackle whatever the problem is. In other cases, a letter will go to the landlord with a reminder of their responsibilities. For more serious cases, an improvement notice will be served. Only if all else has failed and the landlord fails to comply will prosecution of the landlord be considered. It is a very graduated response. The private rented sector in the London Borough of Newham, as in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss), has grown very rapidly: it contains 51,000 properties —46% of the total, a far higher proportion than 15 or 20 years ago.”
“In Newham, the register is open to the public. There are wider lessons to be learned from the impact of the scheme. My focus is to seek the Minister’s support for reauthorising the scheme rather than bringing it to an end on 31 December. The scheme has led to the recovery of £3.1 million of due council tax; the identification and stopping of £300,000 of housing benefit fraud; and the issuing of 61 rent repayment orders leading to a further £380,000 in reclaimed benefits. It is not surprising that there is such strong public support for the scheme. Some 89% of residents agree and 33% agree strongly that continuing the scheme will improve the conditions and the management of private rented sector properties. The scheme handles the problem of disrepair in the private rented sector in a fair, proportionate and effective way.”
“The scheme has been successful and effective in safeguarding renters in my constituency over the past five years. The Minister and I agree on the need for Government action to protect renters against the small minority of landlords whose practice is poor. I urge him to maintain, not weaken, the protection for renters in our part of London and to reauthorise the Newham private rented sector licensing scheme.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Licensing also supports good landlords by preventing them from being undercut by people who own properties but do not look after them properly or keep them safe. The levels of rent in my borough are exactly as she states. Selective licensing already exists for houses in multiple occupation, but unfortunately that is not enough. Problems in the private sector are not confined to HMOs; properties can move very quickly from single family occupancy to multiple occupancy, and the line between the two is often rather thin. The Newham scheme allows that to be monitored much more effectively, particularly as licensing requires landlords to provide copies of tenancy agreements and safety certificates.”
“I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. I am listening to his speech with a lot of interest and I am grateful to him for the points he has made to acknowledge the effectiveness of what has happened in Newham. However, does he accept that the licensing scheme in Newham provides the local authority with a lot of information that it otherwise would not have, and that that information enables it to focus attention—together with the police, the fire brigade and other agencies—on the minority of properties where there are potentially the most serious problems?”
“Is my hon. Friend as puzzled as I am that Ministers are unwilling to support the policy of the Prime Minister? The Prime Minister made her position very clear, when answering a question from the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), that the writ of the European Court of Justice would run during the transitional period, or at least at the start of it.”
“There are serious concerns about glitches with universal credit apparently arising because the IT does not yet work properly in some areas. The Child Poverty Action Group has reported instances of claims being made and then vanishing into the ether without trace. Will the Minister assure the House that glitches of that kind will be addressed and resolved, not simply denied?”
“May I ask the Secretary of State about arrangements during the implementation period of two years or so after March 2019? The Prime Minister has already told us that the writ of the European Court of Justice will continue to run. The Secretary of State told the Select Committee that he hoped that, subject to a positive Council conclusion in December, the arrangements for the implementation period would be agreed by March 2018. Michel Barnier said the same to the Select Committee last week. Does that not put huge pressure on everybody involved to achieve a successful outcome to the December Council?”
“Has my hon. Friend seen the recent forecast that a WTO-based Brexit would cost the UK economy 75,000 jobs in the financial services sector alone? Is he not absolutely right to talk about the grave dangers that that would pose to the British economy?”
“I am listening with great interest to my hon. Friend’s argument. Will he confirm whether I have understood him correctly? Would the way forward he is advocating require the UK to rejoin EFTA? Is that his proposition?”
“In the referendum, leave campaigners dismissed serious concerns about the economic consequences by describing them as “Project Fear”, but as we have heard in the debate, those fears are starting to be realised. The letter from business organisations said they needed certainty about the transition by the end of this calendar year, but they are not going to get that.”
“I was interested by a proposal made in a paper presented recently to the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise by Sebastian Remøy, who used to be an official in the EEA co-ordination unit in the EFTA Secretariat, suggesting that, alongside the EU pillar and the EFTA pillar in the EEA, there should be a third pillar—a UK pillar—which would allow greater flexibility and overcome the disadvantage of EFTA membership. It might also deal with some of the difficulties that Norway might raise about the UK joining EFTA and unbalancing the current structure and modestly sized secretariat. I just put that idea on the record—I do not know whether it is the right one, but it needs to be looked at, alongside membership of EFTA, as a way forward.”