Jeremy Corbyn
MP for Islington North · Your Party · United Kingdom
“In two minutes, I will do my best, Sir Desmond. I am proud to represent a very small urban area of Britain in which, over the years, we have managed to increase the number of parks and open spaces.”
“I grew up in a country area where we had a competition over who heard the first cuckoo in spring. It is that sort of change in understanding that we have to bring about if we are to win this debate on biodiversity and sustainability on our planet. The Government are pledged to the 30by30 target for the oceans.”
“We have to address the wider issue, which is the pollution emanating from our towns, cities and industries into our rivers and the water companies that do not deal with it. I have 13 seconds left, so I will simply say this: it is great that the House has come back to this issue and that so many Members want to speak today.”
“I congratulate the right hon. Member on becoming Prime Minister and on his stamina at taking questions for already even longer than the longest world cup match. He has said some helpful and useful things about housing, particularly on rough sleeping.”
“Surely the obvious answer is to bring in some kind of ceiling—a rent control of some sort—to the sector, and immediately look at not postponing the rise in the local housing allowance, but to bring real relief to people who are desperately up against it and subsidising their rent out of their benefits.”
“When the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) introduced the debate, he quite rightly drew attention to the huge work done by our constituency and parliamentary staff. It is right that we should thank them on this occasion and also thank all the parliamentary staff for what they do.”
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Every one of 8,612 lines we hold for Jeremy Corbyn, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 80 of 173.
“I want to thank all those who took part in an enormous democratic exercise in this country, which concluded with me being elected as leader of the Labour party and Leader of the Opposition. We can be very proud of the numbers of people who engaged and took part in all those debates. I have taken part in many events around the country and had conversations with many people about what they thought of this place, our Parliament, our democracy and our conduct within this place. Many told me that they thought Prime Minister’s question time was too theatrical, that Parliament was out of touch and too theatrical, and that they wanted things done differently, but above all they wanted their voice to be heard in Parliament. So I thought, in my first Prime Minister’s Question Time, I would do it in a slightly different way.”
“Down the line, that will mean worse conditions, worse maintenance, fewer people working there, and a greater problem for people living in those properties. Does the Prime Minister not think it is time to reconsider the question of the funding of the administration of housing, as well as, of course, the massive gap of 100,000 units a year between what is needed and what is being built?”
“I thank the Prime Minister for that answer, and I thank him for his commitment that we are going to try and do Prime Minister’s Question Time in a more adult way than we have done it in the past. The effects of Government policy on housing are obviously enormous, and the decision to cut, for example, 1% of the rent levels in councils and in housing associations without thinking about the funding issues that those authorities face is a serious one. I have a question from Steven, who works for a housing association. He says that the cut in rents will mean that the company that he works for will lose 150 jobs by next March because of the loss of funding for that housing association to carry on with its repairs.”
“I thank the Prime Minister for that, but it leads me neatly on to what happened yesterday, when the House sadly voted for proposals that will cost families who are affected by the change in tax credits £1,300 per year. That is absolutely shameful. I received more than 1,000 questions about tax credits. Paul, for example, asks this very heartfelt question: “Why is the government taking tax credits away from families? We need this money to survive and so our children don’t suffer. Paying rent and council tax on a low income doesn’t leave you much. Tax credits play a vital role and more is needed to stop us having to become reliant on food banks to survive.””
“The Institute for Fiscal Studies says there are 8 million people in paid work eligible for benefits or tax credits. They are on average being compensated for just 26% of their losses by the so-called national living wage that the Government have introduced. So I ask a question from Claire, who says this: “How is changing the thresholds of entitlement for tax credits going to help hard-working people or families? I work part-time; my husband works full-time earning £25,000”—they have five children—“This decrease in tax credits will see our income plummet.” They ask a simple question: how is this fair?”
“Many people do not have that choice; many people live in a very difficult situation and rely on the welfare state to survive. Surely all of us have a responsibility to make sure that people can live properly and decently in modern Britain; that is surely a decent, civil thing to do. I received over 1,000 questions on the situation facing our mental health services and people who suffer from mental health conditions. This is a very serious situation across the whole country and I want to put to the Prime Minister a question that was put to me very simply from Gail: “Do you think it is acceptable that the mental health services in this country are on their knees at the present time?””
“She says this: “Beds are unobtainable with the result that people suffering serious mental health crises are either left without adequate care or alternatively admitted to facilities many miles away from their homes, relatives and family support systems. The situation is simply unacceptable.” What does the Prime Minister say to Angela and people like her who work so hard in the mental health services, or people going through a mental health crisis who may well be watching us today on Prime Minister’s Question Time and want to know that we take their conditions seriously, and take seriously their need for emergency beds and to be near their homes and support system, and that we as a society take seriously their plight and are going to help them and care for them? What does the Prime Minister say to Angela?”
“May I take the Prime Minister back to the situation of mental health in this country, which is very serious? I agree with him absolutely on parity of service, and I hope the spending commitments are brought forward, rather than delayed to the end of this Parliament, because the crisis is very serious. We know this from our constituents, we know this from people we meet, we know this from the devastation that many face—and indeed some have taken their own lives because of the devastation they face. I ask a question from Angela, who is a mental health professional, so she knows exactly what she is talking about.”
“Can the Prime Minister say anything about the welcome remarks made by the Foreign Secretary during his visit to Tehran, when he indicated that the new relationship with Iran meant that there was a possibility of wider political involvement in bringing about some degree of progress in and possibly even a solution to the desperate crisis facing Syria through a summit of all the nations of that region plus, of course, Britain, the USA and Russia?”
“At the Home and Interior Ministers summit next Monday, will Britain now sign up to be part of a Europe-wide response to assist refugees from all parts of the world and ensure that they have somewhere safe to go, so that Britain plays a much greater role than it does at present, including sorting out the misery and desperation of people living in the camps in Calais and other places? They are human beings, too, who need some help and support.”
“The guardianship system for women means that women’s rights are extremely restricted all over the country, yet we carry on as though everything were normal with Saudi Arabia.”
“The report continues: “There were significant changes in the justice sector. On 10 September, the Secretary of State for Justice…visited Saudi Arabia and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Saudi Arabian Minister of Justice…This should act as a mechanism for dialogue on human rights issues”. We need to know from the Minister how many times meetings have been held with the Saudi Government, what has been achieved through that dialogue, and what improvements have resulted in the human rights record of Saudi Arabia as a result. There are many disturbing reports, particularly about the plight of human rights defenders, who seem to have little protection in law. Often they are brutally silenced when they try to speak out about human rights abuses, particularly away from the big cities and in more remote parts of the country.”
“The Foreign Office human rights and democracy report of 2014 said: “Saudi Arabia continued to make incremental improvements on human rights in 2014, as the government carried on implementing its reform programme...but we continued to have concerns over the human rights situation, particularly in relation to the use of the death penalty, access to justice, women’s rights, and restrictions on freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion or belief. There was some progress in women’s rights and the death penalty, but significant institutional change in Saudi Arabia is needed to protect the human rights of its residents, especially with regards to the guardianship system and restrictions on freedom of religion or belief.” In fact, the number of executions has gone up, not down, in the past two years.”
“If not, will the Foreign Office find out exactly what weapons that would be illegal under international law have been used by Saudi Arabia? The question of arms supplies has troubled both Germany and Sweden, which have at times either suspended or restricted arms supplies to Saudi Arabia because of human rights abuses, and because of their concern about what they would be used for; but apparently that question has not restricted the British Government very much.”
“We need to ask about the link between substantial sales of British arms to Saudi Arabia and our apparent inability to criticise the human rights record there. Will the Minister confirm what controls are applied to the export of arms, how many arms licences have been refused, and how many of the weapons or items of equipment sent to Saudi Arabia have been used for internal repression, to suppress demonstrations or to control prisons? Saudi Arabia’s activities in Yemen are extremely well known, and it is not a secret that it has been occupying quite large parts of that country to restore the original Government to power. There are also disturbing reports that it has been using illegal cluster bombs during the bombardment of Yemen. I would be grateful if the Minister would confirm whether that is so.”
“I apologise to the House, Mr Chope, for missing the first few minutes of this morning’s debate. The case of Raif Badawi highlights just how bad the human rights situation is in Saudi Arabia, but it is not the only case. I hope that the Minister will be able to reply to some short, simple points. The UN Human Rights Council has expressed many concerns about human rights, the judicial process and the plight of individuals in Saudi Arabia. That does not appear on the surface to have affected the British Government’s relationship with Saudi Arabia very much. As far as I can work out, it has not led to the Government making many remarks to the Saudi Government to try to bring about change.”
“Absolutely; I thank the hon. Lady for drawing the House’s attention to that. The abuse of all human rights in Saudi Arabia is very serious, but the treatment of lesbian and gay people there is particularly appalling. In the UN Human Rights Council, the UK routinely takes up issues of systemic discrimination in many countries all over the world, but there seems to be an unfortunate silence where Saudi Arabia is concerned, and I do not believe that that is the way to act.”
“We should make that clear in our foreign policy relationships with Saudi Arabia.”
“I hope that the Minister will be able to tell the House that tough representations will be made to the Saudi Arabian Government, and that we will suspend arms supplies to Saudi Arabia if it is shown to be using weapons illegally in the Yemen. There is also the question of past weapons use in Bahrain. I hope he will say that we will demand rights for women, an end to the death penalty, and rights and justice for the migrant workers in the region. We cannot just say that because Saudi Arabia is oil-rich and has huge amounts of money with which to buy arms from us and from other places, human rights standards should be lower. We should say that human rights standards should be the same throughout the world. The declaration of human rights is, after all, a universal declaration, not a selective one.”
“Generally speaking they are poorly treated everywhere, but 300,000 have been deported from Saudi Arabia, and others who have protested in any way about their conditions of work have been summarily removed from the country. We ought to be aware that that is a systemic problem across the region. British companies are heavily involved in service industries and oil exploration and exploitation in Saudi Arabia and other places. I am not saying that British companies are particularly exploiting migrant workers, but I do say that Britain should not turn a blind eye to what is happening to many vulnerable people across the region. What is happening in Qatar has at last got some publicity, because of the number of migrant workers who have died on construction sites. Things are not that different in every other country of the region.”
“Ministers have often said to me that they are concerned about human rights in Saudi Arabia. Usually the narrative from the Foreign Office is that constructive dialogue is making progress. It is not obvious to me what progress has been made in the matter, but that is what is often said. The Minister, I am sure, can speak for himself. My last point is about migrant workers. There are hundreds of thousands of migrant workers all over the Gulf states. They are doing the jobs that nobody else wants to do. They run the economy; they run the oil industry; they clean people’s houses; they fix the roads; they run the railways. They run just about everything. The whole economy relies on them completely.”
“The covenant that my hon. Friend has mentioned would also help to protect migrant workers, who, as I pointed out, are incredibly badly treated in Saudi Arabia. Does she agree that we should do more about migrant workers in that situation?”
“The Minister mentioned the UN Human Rights Council’s universal periodic review, which was very strict and raised many complaints about Saudi Arabia. What are the Government doing to monitor progress on that? Is the UN going to send any special rapporteurs to Saudi Arabia, and have the Saudi Arabian Government agreed to that process?”
“I think we should thank the Freedom of Information Act for today’s statement. The Secretary of State really ought to come clean. What specific discussions has he had with Saudi Arabia about what happens to the arms supplied to it? Are any of them leaking through and ending up with ISIL forces or, indeed, any other weapons supplier in the region? Secondly, what is happening about the oil that is clearly sold from the ISIL area of Syria to someone else and the money that then flows back to support it? How effective is the sanctions regime conducted by the western forces, with the co-operation of other Governments, to stop arms and money flowing to ISIL?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for giving way so early on in his speech. Obviously, all of us are supportive of a productive, growing economy—that benefits everybody. But when he drew up proposals for this Bill, did he look at the levels of child poverty in Britain? Did he look at the levels of homelessness, destitution and rough sleeping in Britain? How does he think this Bill is going to improve that situation? Alternatively, will it make the holes in the welfare state safety net rather bigger, with more people falling through it as a result?”
“Obviously, a reduction in local authority rents is good for tenants—I fully understand that—but does my right hon. Friend know whether the Government have given any consideration to the effect that a consistent drop in rental income over five years will have on the housing revenue account; on housing maintenance, including of the common areas of estates; and, of course, on any future building programme that could have been funded by the housing revenue account?”
“Is my hon. Friend aware that my borough of Islington has a good record of building new council houses to a high standard? We have just completed an excellent development on Caledonian Road of 25 first-rate flats. If the Government’s policy goes through, they will all be sold and not one person on the housing waiting list or in housing need will get them. They will just be sold on to the private market and rented out privately. Does she agree that that is a scandal?”
“Before my right hon. Friend gets fully into the issue of social housing, he must be aware of the problems of the permitted development rule, by which any industrial or office premises can be converted into private sector housing with no need for planning permission and therefore no control whatever over the kind of property put there. That is yet another example of missed opportunities: good quality council housing could have been provided but instead there is very expensive, upmarket private rented stuff.”
“I was talking last night to a well qualified and experienced social worker in a London borough who is worried about applying for promotion, because success would put his salary up, which would more than double his rent. A salary increase of more than £10,000 a year would leave him worse off. That is a ludicrous situation. Council tenants should pay a council rent that they can afford.”
“Nothing that the Government have proposed since they were re-elected in May is going to do anything to alleviate the crisis facing large numbers of people in London. First, there is the idea of cutting most local authority tenants’ rent by 1%. I have no particular problem with that, but I hope that the housing revenue account will be compensated accordingly by central Government; otherwise, it will lead to an investment problem in the future. Then there is the bizarre idea, which I suspect is a Trojan horse for changing the whole local government rent regulation system, of charging market rents for those earning not very high incomes—median incomes.”
“The length of the speech of the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) proves the failure of self-regulation in the House of Commons and, indeed, anywhere else. I will genuinely attempt to be as brief as possible. There is an enormous housing crisis in London, and it is getting worse. Someone walking around the streets of London on any night will see the number of people now sleeping rough, without benefits and begging. Every day, people are being evicted from the private rental sector to make way for somebody else moving in on a still-higher rent. There is something brutal and unnecessary about the way in which many people in this city have to live. The abject failure of Government policy to address the issues of housing in London is making the situation worse and worse.”
“My hon. Friend is right. I hope that the Government will think this through and not introduce the regulation. It is unworkable and will lead to a lot of perverse results, unless it is a Trojan horse for something else, as I suggested, putting all council rents on to a completely market level. I suspect that that is in the beady eye of at least some in the Conservative party. The second area of concern is the private rented sector. More or less a third of the population of my borough live in that sector, often in poor conditions. Most are on six-month assured shorthold tenancies; they have no control over the rent and, in reality, no protection against eviction. We must address the question of the quality and regulation of the private rented sector.”
“There will be a smallish number of people remaining in council and housing association properties in central London, and those will be the only social rented places available. The rest of the residents will be wealthy enough to buy, or to pay very high rents to live here. All the workforce will travel long distances on trains and buses to keep the city going. We should ask the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry about its concerns for the future London labour market, and we should look at the problems. We are destroying this city by our failure to build enough social housing, regulate what we have and plan for the future, other than by allowing funny money to flow in to buy up large amounts of land and property, which is often left empty and used only as a cash machine.”
“More than a third of the council properties recently sold in my borough have ended up in the private rented sector, often for very high rents. There is something ludicrous about a council rent of £100 to £110 a week being charged for a flat when an identical flat next door is rented for £400 or £500 a week, with most of it being paid for through the housing benefit bill. If this Government deserve a prize it is for subsidising the private rental system in this country. We need a serious, sensible form of regulation of the costs of housing and particularly the private rented sector. Average rents in Britain are more than double the average for the rest of Europe—in London particularly. We must address the issue, or this city will become even more divided. In 10 or 20 years it will resemble Manhattan.”
“If he goes to any inner-London tube station in the morning, he will see children who travel quite long distances to attend primary school, because their family want to return to the borough they come from and hope desperately to get a council place there to move into. It is a reasonable aspiration, and one obviously hopes for success. My final point is about sales of council properties. With a £100,000 discount, a vast amount of money is being given to the people who are lucky enough to get a council place. If a tenant of council property buys it and remains there, that does not make much difference to the overall social make-up, the housing stock or anything else; but when they decide to move on, the homes are never sold to people on the housing waiting list. They cannot be.”
“The quality of management of much of the private rented sector is appalling, and the lack of regulation of letting agencies leads to many shocking cases. It is often the most vulnerable people who are victims of what happens in that sector. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate was complaining about the number of people moving in to his borough from other boroughs. Indeed, people from my borough go there—they get moved there because the council has nowhere to put them in Islington. They want to come back. Often they live in poor conditions. The hon. Gentleman is right up to a point that the practice meets a need of the borough; however, it also creates a problem for the children involved.”
“I am pleased that this agreement has been reached; it is a huge step forward. As a result of it, does the Foreign Secretary think there is a possibility of holding the middle east weapons-of-mass-destruction-free-zone conference, which was envisaged at the last nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference and was supported by all parties, including Iran? This is surely a great opportunity to push forward to end proliferation across the whole region.”
“It will be solved by looking at the cause of the crisis and providing a high level of humanitarian support. I realise that we have given a great deal of support to Syrian refugees, but clearly more has to be done globally.”
“In the later part of the Home Secretary’s statement, for which I thank her, she drew attention to the wider question of desperate migrant people around the world—my Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) did the same. Are we not facing a global refugee crisis of similar proportions to that which took place after the second world war? We see the tragic, awful symptoms in the camp in Calais, in the Mediterranean and in many other places. Does it not require a much stronger, bigger and more humanitarian global response, possibly through the United Nations as well as through the European Union? Many people are destitute, desperate and fleeing from the war in Syria and many other conflicts. The problem will not be solved by turning people back.”
“I long for the day when a Chancellor of the Exchequer introduces a Budget, in a way that very few have done in the past, and says, “The priority is to have an expanding and sustainable economy with sustainable jobs in an environmentally friendly way and to eliminate poverty and destitution at the same time.” We had none of that. We had all this anti-benefit narrative as though nobody was sleeping on the streets of Britain, as though the number of children growing up in desperate poverty was not increasing day after day, and as though there were no young people who are unable to do their homework because their bedrooms are too crowded with their siblings.”
“It has exactly the same narrative of cutting taxation for the very richest, making life worse for the very poorest and selling off state assets to pay for it all along the way. It is time for the Conservatives’ strategy to be significantly challenged, and there are a number of points on which I wish to challenge them. The first is the Chancellor’s really strange statistic that Britain spends 7% of the world’s welfare budget, which is, he said, way above the average of every other country. He may be unaware of it, but many countries in the world have no welfare budget of any sort. In large swaths of Africa and Latin America, there is no public assistance for people in poverty or desperation. It is a ludicrous statistic plucked out of the air and used to justify a quite appalling attack on many of the poorest people in this country.”
“I pay tribute to the two Members who have made their maiden speeches today, the hon. Members for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) and for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Philip Boswell). I mean no disrespect to the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle when I say that we are all going to miss Sir Peter Tapsell and his view of history. I hope that all his recordings have been kept for posterity so that we can understand what a catastrophic mistake we made in Afghanistan—I agree with Sir Peter Tapsell on that. The Budget we have just received today is the first Tory Budget for a very long time, but I have been here long enough to remember the last one. It is as though this is the land that time forgot, because this Budget is exactly the same.”
“I welcome the fact that the Chancellor has changed the method of calculating poverty to produce the statistics that he wanted in the first place. He is doing extremely well on statistical changes, and I admire his gymnastics in that regard. This Budget, with its benefit changes, is essentially an attack on the poorest and on young people. What do the Conservatives and the Chancellor have against young people? We start off with a third child onward policy. What is that about? If the Chancellor is saying that children deserve to be supported through child benefit—I guess we all agree on that—why does it stop after the second child? If a family happens to have four or five children—some of us come from families of three, four or five children—is he saying that the third, fourth and fifth children are less valuable than the first and second?”
“Because of the benefit cap and the very high rents in the private rented sector, many people are being forced out of the community. The same thing is happening all across central London. Those who say that it does not matter because they do not represent a London constituency should think on: this principle could apply everywhere else. The Chancellor’s proposals on housing are very interesting.”
“I am pleased that we are getting something approaching a living wage, though it is not very different from what the minimum wage would have been by that time anyway. We must look very carefully at the issues surrounding this Budget. There are also other problems for young people, such as cuts in benefit, their inability to access housing or to get a reasonable level of room rate if they are single, the continuation of the low wage rates and the conversion of all grants into loans for those from poorer backgrounds who were hoping, planning and aiming to go to university. What is it that the Conservative party has against the young people of this country? I find it very strange. I represent a constituency that, in housing terms, has about 40% council tenancies, about 30% social private rents and about 30% owner-occupation.”
“Indeed; my hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Although London has very high property prices and a number of extremely wealthy people—it is the centre for some of the world’s wealthiest people—it also has appalling levels of poverty. Some of those people in desperate poverty are being forced out of London by a combination of the high rents and the benefit cap, and the proposal now is to reduce the benefit cap. I am not pleased that we have to spend £25,000 or more on supporting some families, but from the way that this statistic is presented by the Chancellor, one would imagine that the entirety of that £25,000 went immediately to that family. Well, it does not; it goes straight into the pockets of a private landlord, just as the in-work benefit often goes to subsidise low wages.”
“At the same time, the Government are investing a huge amount of money in road building. It is as if the whole transport strategy has been turned on its head, so that instead of going for the more environmentally sustainable rail transport, particularly for freight, we are once again on a road-building binge in a country that is already polluted and has too many vehicles on the roads. Surely we should be trying to rebalance our economy in favour of sustainable transport. I am not saying that we have to get rid of all cars—obviously not—but our transport policies have to be more sustainable.”
“The Budget reflects the long journey from the Prime Minister’s hug a husky days and the promise of being the greenest Government ever to the sale of the Green Investment Bank to the private sector—with what sort of requirements for its future performance, I know not, because nothing is made clear in the Red Book—and the cancellation of at least two major rail electrification projects, which were trumpeted before the election and used as part of an election-winning strategy to show that the Conservatives had really got it on railways and really wanted the railways to expand. Instead, they have cancelled the electrification of the midland main line and the Manchester to Leeds line. Is the western region electrification safe? There are many other projects one begins to worry about because of those announcements.”
“Levels of tax evasion in Britain are high, and I am pleased that the Chancellor is prepared to address the issue, but why have the 15-year rule for non-doms? Why not abolish the non-dom status altogether? Why not, as part of the EU negotiations, consider the tax-evading loopholes that exist all over Europe? We have islands around our shores where tax rates are remarkably low. Switzerland manages to charge remarkably low rates of corporation tax, as do Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Monaco. Should we not be looking to close all those loopholes? Instead, the Chancellor proposes yet another cut in corporation tax and says that the way forward is to continue the race to the bottom in lowering corporation tax.”
“Why is the age at which people here are able to leave home and live independently the highest in Europe, and why is it getting higher and higher? This Budget offers nothing to those people in housing stress. The Chancellor is very keen on regulating local authorities, by increasing the rents for those on higher earnings and decreasing them for others, with no remarks about compensating the housing revenue account for the income lost, but he says nothing about regulating the private rented sector and tackling the astronomical rents being charged in some parts of London. In my constituency, it costs at least £350 a week to rent a two-bedroom flat; a house costs between £500 and £1,000 to rent. It is completely off the scale in terms of what most people can even begin to think about being able to afford.”