Mr Clive Betts
MP for Sheffield South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“I wholeheartedly welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, both its content and its tone. I would like to ask about his discussions with our colleagues and allies in other countries who are looking to implement similar sanctions.”
“I offer two congratulations: first, to my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, the First Secretary, on her well-deserved promotion—I am sure she will do an excellent job. Secondly, I congratulate her and the Prime Minister for their real commitment to devolution, which I have wanted to see for an awfully long time.”
“I apologise for the fact that—as I have explained to you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will have to leave straight after my question to chair Westminster Hall. I thank my right hon. Friend for doing this very challenging piece of work. I think that the theme of fairness, for the people who need benefits and for taxpayers, is right.”
“On the other hand, so many constituents with really serious conditions get turned down for PIP, and can get it only if they struggle through the appeal system, sometimes without any help at all. So the system is not fair to anyone at present.”
“When the previous Government let the contract, we were in a situation in which procurement could not properly take account of the past record of companies, and I understand that the Government have now changed that.”
“I will dive very deeply into the question, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chair of the Committee sends his apologies for his absence; he is presently in a Committee meeting.”
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Every one of 4,726 lines we hold for Mr Clive Betts, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 18 of 95.
“I begin by associating myself with the Deputy Prime Minister’s comments. I am sure the whole House will want to reaffirm our complete support for Ukraine and for Poland in the face of Russian aggression. When he got the job, on his first day, the Prime Minister promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability”. I assume that the Deputy Prime Minister agrees with that promise and would expect all Ministers to follow such principles. Therefore, does he also agree that the Prime Minister should ensure, in line with his promise, that no Minister who has a complaint of bullying upheld against them should continue to serve in his Government?”
“We put that in context and said “some blame must attach to successive Governments for not investing enough in new homes, which has increased the sector’s reliance on outdated stock, and for not providing funding specifically for regeneration.” Some of those are not individual repairs; there are failures of whole blocks and whole estates. I say to the Secretary of State: let us share the common objectives, and let us work together to get the money to ensure that those objectives can be realised.”
“May I associate myself with the aims that the Secretary of State has set out in his statement? I think they will be supported across the House. I draw the Secretary of State’s attention to the Select Committee’s report, “The Regulation of Social Housing”, published in July—I gently remind him that the Department has not yet replied to it. In the report, we identified some social housing that was unfit for human habitation, and causing the sorts of health problems that tragically have been seen in this case. We identified problems with repair reporting, complaints handling, and a lack of proactive inspection of properties by housing providers and the social housing regulator.”
“I echo the comments made by my hon. Friends already about the excellent services provided by Radio Sheffield—local news, local motoring and local football. The key is the word “local”. People in Sheffield and south Yorkshire want to know what is happening in their immediate communities: frankly, they are not desperately interested in what is happening in Leeds and west Yorkshire. I suspect the reverse is also true. While we seem to be promised that the local morning news will be protected, it appears that excellent programmes such as those on Radio Sheffield in the afternoon will be scrapped and merged into some amorphous regional offering. Will the Minister tell the director-general that that simply should not be allowed to happen and is not what local people want?”
“The Government’s five pilot schemes to look at these issues found that, often, residents of exempt accommodation do not even require care or support; they simply have nowhere else to go because there is a lack of affordable housing in this country, so we have reiterated our call on the Government, made in a previous report, to build 90,000 social rented homes a year. The British public are living through many difficult challenges. They do not want to see money from their taxes being handed over during a cost of living crisis to corrupt people who make the lives of vulnerable people worse and create a living hell for neighbours and communities. The Government should implement our recommendations immediately and in full. I commend this report to the House.”
“Provision should be driven by local need, not by the greed of unscrupulous, profit-driven crooks. Instead, the planning system currently offers a free-for-all. It gives councils very little power to halt developments that strip out much needed family housing and create concentrated pockets of exempt accommodation that, when run badly, attract crime, antisocial behaviour and vermin to local communities. The Government should immediately end all exemptions to the licensing of houses in multiple occupation and article 4 directives, as well as ending other planning loopholes. The Government need to sort out the many issues with exempt accommodation that our inquiry identified, but in reality, they cannot sort out exempt accommodation without solving the wider housing crisis.”
“That is why we are calling for a national oversight committee to pull together all the different strands and fill the holes in the current patchwork of regulation. We are also calling for compulsory registration with the regulator of social housing. If providers and properties are registered, local authorities will have the basic information to enable them to enforce standards. We look forward to the Second Reading of the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill, sponsored by the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who is a long-term and valued member of the Select Committee. The Select Committee will be doing pre-legislative scrutiny of that private Member’s Bill. Finally, there need to be greater controls on the development of exempt accommodation.”
“These standards should be in place within 12 months, and local authorities should be given the powers and the resources to enforce those standards, to improve the overall quality of exempt accommodation and establish greater consistency. Councils can then collect data, which the Government can collate, to give an accurate national picture of the exact scale and cost of exempt accommodation. The oversight of exempt accommodation is a complete mess. There are lots of different regulators overseeing different bits of the system. There is the regulator of social housing, the Care Quality Commission and the Charity Commission, but no single regulator has overall responsibility for overseeing all the different components, and no single regulator has complete coverage of the sector.”
“The Government cannot know whether the system is providing value for money, but given how much money is being siphoned off as profit at the expense of vulnerable residents, we think it is quite possible that the Government may not need to spend more to improve exempt accommodation. They simply need to put in place systems so that the money spent is spent on good accommodation and appropriate levels of support. We are therefore calling for national standards for exempt accommodation, covering the referral process, the care and support provided, the quality of the housing and the information given to the residents. It is, quite frankly, shocking that national standards do not exist.”
“West Devon Borough Council told us about a portfolio of properties that were bought for £6 million and sold on the same day for £18 million to an offshore investment company, in anticipation of the returns to be made from converting those properties into exempt accommodation. Local councils also end up footing much of the bill for accommodation that is not registered. While taxpayers are footing the bill of this goldrush, the Government have no idea how much they are spending on exempt accommodation, how many people are living in exempt accommodation or how many providers there are. The Government tried to convince us that the bad experiences we heard about were the minority, but no matter how many times we asked for data to back that up, they could not provide any.”
“Residents we spoke to found their accommodation on sites such as Gumtree and Facebook, and for many there is no way out. Without their housing benefit, they cannot pay their rent, so they are afraid to enter employment and risk losing the roof over their head. Women’s Aid told us about survivors of domestic abuse actually going back to their perpetrators because they felt safer returning to an abusive relationship than remaining in these settings. This simply must change. To add insult to injury, this mess is all being paid for by the taxpayer through housing benefit, which local authorities have inadequate powers to control. Not only that, but we heard numerous stories of providers exploiting loopholes to pocket that housing benefit as profit.”
“For some people, the support on offer was just a support worker shouting from the bottom of the stairs, “Are you all right, then?” or a loaf of bread and jam left on the table. Others are given no support whatsoever, or worse still are exploited by staff. We heard stories of individual residents being forced to undertake work on the property, or asked for sex in return for better accommodation. We heard of vermin, organised crime, prostitution and harassment. Unbelievably, residents are often asked to pay additional charges for the support that they may or may not receive. There is no requirement to assess people’s support needs before offering them accommodation. Survivors of domestic abuse are being housed alongside people with a history of sexual abuse. Recovering addicts are being housed with drug dealers.”
“Those with an eye for quick and large returns, sometimes with malicious and criminal intent, see the system as an opportunity to make large and potentially illegal profits, all at the expense of the taxpayer. I thank everybody who provided evidence to the Committee’s inquiry. In particular, I thank Birmingham City Council for helping to arrange the Committee’s visit in June this year, and all those who took part in it and gave evidence. Their stories brought to light just how appalling the situation can be, both for residents and for neighbours who have to live with the impacts on their communities. We heard from people living in squalid conditions—tiny rooms with walls smeared with faeces—with no gas, electricity or internet.”
“The people who live in exempt accommodation are often the most vulnerable in society, such as survivors of domestic abuse, care leavers and people who struggle with their mental health or with addiction. Because this type of accommodation can be more costly to run than general needs tenancies, it is exempt from locally set caps on housing benefit, hence the name “exempt accommodation”. To qualify for those uncapped rates, the provider must be not for profit, and provide care, support or supervision to residents. Where the system works well, responsible providers offer a safe and supportive setting for people who may have fallen on hard times, and equip residents to move on and lead independent, fulfilling lives, but our inquiry found that where it works badly, vulnerable people are being exploited when they should be given support.”
“The Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee today published its report on exempt accommodation. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for providing time for this statement, and our excellent Committee staff and specialist advisers for helping to compile the report. Members of the Committee are experienced public representatives, but individually and collectively we were appalled by what we heard in this inquiry, which revealed a complete and utter mess of shocking accommodation and inadequate support all funded at enormous expense by the taxpayer. Here is how the system is supposed to work: exempt accommodation, which is supported housing, should offer suitable accommodation and care to its residents.”
“Perhaps some of the funds that are being siphoned off inappropriately could be channelled into providing good accommodation, provided by organisations such as Women’s Aid, which came to give evidence to us.”
“I thank the hon. Member genuinely for the way he engaged with the Committee as a Minister. Some Ministers engage better than others with Select Committees, and although he did not always agree with us, he engaged with us entirely properly, so I thank him for that. In terms of the hon. Member’s question, he is absolutely right, and we reflected that, but what we are asking of even the best providers is simply that they register, so that we can be aware of who they are and what they are doing. They have nothing to fear from a basic registration fee—that is all. I completely agree with him: it is not just about closing down the bad; it is about how we can expand the good, particularly on domestic abuse. There is a shortage of such accommodation for people fleeing domestic abuse in this country, so there need to be more funds.”
“We heard from the pilots that there were problems in lots of places, not just Birmingham, and every council that fed back said it could do more once it had some additional funds through the pilot schemes. That additional funding needs to be rolled out to all local authorities.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that question, though perhaps it would be better addressed to Ministers, rather than the Committee. I do not know why the Government do not want to act more quickly. I take the point about not putting off good providers, but we have talked about a light-touch registration scheme for the good providers. We are not calling for more money; we said that. There is enough money in this system. We hear of organisations buying properties for a few thousand pounds—probably £100,000—then converting them into exempt accommodation and charging £1,000 per room in housing benefit per month. These are eye-watering sums of money. If that money was diverted into better accommodation and if local authorities had the powers to enforce it, using existing funds, it could all work well.”
“I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, my friend on the Select Committee, with whom I have worked on many issues; this is a unanimous report. That is why we have called for local authorities to be given those powers. The Government have laid down some guidelines on standards, but they are not enforceable. In such a situation, it is no use saying to providers who are making millions of pounds, “Oh please don’t do it.” The standards must be enforced. Local authorities need those powers and they need to control access to the accommodation so that people with particular needs are put into accommodation that can deal with those needs and has the right sort of support. That is why we are calling for local authorities to have powers over the support as well. It is a comprehensive approach, and local authorities are best placed to enact it.”
“Once the money loophole has been closed, the rest of the abuse will stop —in our view.”
“We did not specifically look at that issue, but we looked at giving councils the powers to ensure that standards are met. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that one of the problems is that there is no control over the referral process—anyone can refer themselves, which is why people use Facebook and Gumtree to self-refer. If we can give powers to the councils to control referrals, it would be appropriate for them to consider commissioning services themselves in some circumstances. Some services are already commissioned; many are not. We did not call for all services to be commissioned, because some very good voluntary local providers are doing work in this area and we do not want them to close down. It is about controlling the referral process and ensuring that housing benefit is paid out only for properties that meet these standards.”
“That is why local authorities need the powers and the resources, and why we need to bring all such properties within the HMO regulations, so that local authorities can send their health inspectors in to make sure that standards are kept and maintained.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for drawing the Committee’s attention to the issue, because he had had experience in his constituency, as he pointed out to us. He was the first Member who said, “You need to have a look at this. It is absolutely awful.” Unfortunately, he was absolutely correct about that. The idea of a fit and proper person test is interesting. We did not specifically address that as a Committee, but if we are going to have proper standards of accommodation and proper support on an ongoing basis, we need to ensure that the people doing that are legitimate people with legitimate objectives. He is absolutely right that if we are going to have standards, we need to enforce them.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right to identify a particular group of people who need support and proper accommodation, and who can easily be exploited. There are many groups in that situation, which is why we should not simply shut down accommodation; we need to make sure that sufficient supported accommodation of an appropriate standard to meet particular needs is provided for a whole range of different groups, including people with acquired brain injury. We will certainly feed that back, as he has suggested.”
“It should not be. Currently, all that providers have to do to get the higher level of housing benefit, which is almost uncontrolled, is to provide support “beyond the minimal level”—nobody knows what that means; it does not mean very much. Some authorities have tried to challenge the housing benefit requests that have been made, but the problem is that all providers have to do is to show that the rent is reasonable—they are issuing freedom of information requests to find out the amounts of rent being charged for other properties in the area—and that there is no alternative accommodation, which there often is not, for reasons that I have explained. People are allowed to write a virtually blank cheque. That needs to be closed down, because the money can be put to better use than being siphoned off for profiteering, as it is currently.”
“We owe it to both the individuals needing supported accommodation and the individuals in communities where lots of accommodation is being created to change the system and help everyone.”
“The hon. Gentleman is spot on with that. When we went to Birmingham, we heard not from individuals living in exempt accommodation, but from those living in communities where dozens of properties in the same small area were being converted. They explained to us the amount of criminality and drug dealing going on, that the police were turning up every night and that there were people lying in the road and people begging. They often tried to help where people were vulnerable and in need, but they said that there was no control over how many properties could be turned into exempt accommodation in the same area. They were people with family homes and kids, who had often lived in that stable community all their lives, but who were seeing that community being destroyed around them. That is not acceptable or appropriate.”
“Many of my constituents really value Doncaster Sheffield airport and want to keep it open. I hope that, putting aside party politics, the Minister will congratulate Oliver Coppard, the Mayor of South Yorkshire, on the efforts he has made on a constructive, cross-party basis to engage with Peel and other potential investors to try to keep the airport open. The Minister referred to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) as being partisan. Does she not accept that it looks partisan indeed when Ministers are prepared to meet Government Members but not Opposition Members? Will she correct that and have a joint meeting?”
“The hon. Gentleman was just asked a direct question. It does not need a public inquiry to work out what the factual position is. Will he say very clearly what powers he thinks the Mayor has to go in and intervene with Peel, which clearly does not want to engage and does not want to sell?”
“I am interested in what the hon. Gentleman is asking for. He must accept that the airport in Teesside is costing an awful lot of public money. Presumably he is happy for the Mayor of South Yorkshire, if Peel agreed, to put in just as much money, perhaps £20 million out of the £30 million a year. He then argues for franchising. Does he accept that choices have to be made? The Government have not given the Mayor an unlimited budget. Presumably he wants everything to be spent out of that £30 million, when that clearly is not possible. Is he saying we should give Peel an open cheque and it can have what it wants? That is what he seems to be saying.”
“Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that parts of South Yorkshire sometimes think that the way forward is to have a row with other parts of South Yorkshire rather than working collectively, as the Manchester authorities appear able to? This is not about Doncaster’s airport versus Sheffield’s trams. Sheffield is a major city. Major European cities have light rail systems; Sheffield needs and wants a light rail system. It should not be about having one or the other or fighting over the scraps; it should be about arguing collectively for extra money for the infrastructure that we need in each of our areas. That is why Sheffield MPs are here tonight to support Doncaster Sheffield airport—”
“I am sorry if I confused you, Madam Deputy Speaker; I hope that I did not confuse anybody else at the same time. I was intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) to ask whether he agrees that it is unfortunately all too common among some people in South Yorkshire to start a blame game between the constituent parts of the authority, rather than working collectively as Sheffield Members are here to do tonight.”
“I want to push the Minister a little bit further, as he might appreciate. There is widespread support for the fan-led review. Okay, have the discussions about how it is going to be done, but can we have a commitment from the Front-Bench team that they are going to implement the principles of the review—an independent regulator, fairer distribution of funding, and an end to parachute payments?”
“My right hon. Friend talked about the Government imposing the ban because of the risk of disturbance to local communities. There was a proposal to frack in Marsh Lane, which happens to be in a neighbouring constituency—that of the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), who I think has responsibility for planning and will perhaps deal with fracking. There would be dozens, if not hundreds of lorry movements a day down rural lanes—that is what “disturbance” means—and lots of wells drilled that would despoil the local environment. That is the reality of fracking, which every Conservative Member should think about if they are prepared to accept fracking in their local areas.”
“It seems that investment zones are one of the few bits of the mini-Budget that are still on the table. Can the Secretary of State clearly explain how investment zones will be financed? Will it be completely new money, and, given the pressure that local authorities have been under from austerity and now from inflation, will he give an assurance that the money for investment zones will not be found by transferring it from other parts of the local government budget and particularly from levelling-up funds?”
“Will the Minister, as a matter of urgency, agree to meet the Mayor and Members of Parliament for South Yorkshire to discuss the cuts, and how additional Government funding could save these essential services?”
“The Minister will not necessarily know what the 8, 27 and 655 bus routes in my constituency have in common. The answer is that they have all been cut completely, or substantially reduced, in the last few weeks. That means that NHS workers cannot travel to their shifts, pensioners cannot travel to the Crystal Peaks shopping centre, and kids cannot travel to and from school. Will the Minister reflect on the fact that the previous Prime Minister told us that people would not need a timetable, because the service would be so good that they could just walk to the bus stop and get on a bus? They do not need a timetable for many routes now, because there are no buses running.”
“Beth Winter was not present for the beginning of the debate, but she gave advance notice to me, as Chair, that she would be late because she was in a Delegated Legislation Committee. Given that no others wish to catch my eye at this point, I now call Beth Winter.”
“We now come to the Front Benchers. We have a little bit more time than the 10 minutes that is normally allocated, if you want to take a bit more time—15 minutes or whatever.”
“The wind-ups have to start at about quarter past, so that is six Back Benchers in about an hour. I think you can probably work out the time limits for yourselves in that respect. First of all, from the Government Benches, I call Peter Gibson.”
“Those Members who were listening intently to what I said earlier will have noticed that I tried to extend the debate by a further half hour, although we do have to start the wind-ups at about quarter past. For guidance, that gives about five minutes for each speech.”
“I remind hon. Members to try to keep to five minutes. The next Member indicated that he has to leave before the end of the debate, and I accept his reasons, so I call Anthony Mangnall.”
“To co-operate with the timing, we head to the Front Benches, with five minutes for the Opposition, 10 minutes for the Minister and a couple of minutes at the end for the mover to wind up.”
“We do not know much yet about the Government’s new investment zones, but in order to achieve success for the primary investment in them, will the Government have specifically targeted funds for infrastructure projects in those zones? If so, will this be a further unfunded expenditure commitment?”
“So after 12 years of failure, the answer, apparently, is first to blame workers and their trade unions, and then to blame the planning system—the system for which the Government have been responsible for the past 12 years. On the new investment zones, which sound rather similar to the failed enterprise zones of the 1980s, will the Chancellor explain what planning requirements will be abolished? Will that include the abolition of the requirement to build affordable homes for those who cannot afford to buy? Has he done a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the proposals, and if so, will he put that assessment in the Library by the end of today?”
“I want to follow up on the question of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) about the position of local authorities. Come December, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities will make a spending announcement for local authorities for next year. Does the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy agree that his review of energy costs should be incorporated into that, so that local authorities get one presentation of what the future will look like rather than myriad different ones not joined up together?”
“The Secretary of State has admitted the environmental impact of fracking—the drilling platforms, the wells and the lorry movements—which are significant and substantial. The planning system is best placed to deal with those, so in 2018 the Select Committee on Housing, Communities and Local Government produced our “Planning guidance on fracking” report. We concluded that fracking decisions were best made by elected local planning authorities. We do not know what the Government’s view is, as four years after that report we still have not had a response from Ministers to our recommendations. Will he assure us that by the end of October, when we come back, the Government will have responded, four years late, to that report?”
“Yesterday, the County Councils Network produced a statement saying that there is a crisis in social care, which echoed the findings of the Select Committee on Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. The Secretary of State’s announcement of £500 million is welcome, but all it does is replace the funding stream that was cut in April, and will do exactly the same job. When is she going to recognise the enormous financial gap that councils are facing and the poverty pay that is not attracting care workers into the sector, and actually come forward with a real policy? If she wants the money, why not cancel the cut in corporation tax and use that funding to create real benefits for people in social care?”
“I thank the Minister for giving way. I think there is strong cross-party support for the assistance that the British Government have given. The Ukrainians themselves say that they want longer-range missiles and more tanks, particularly from Germany. What is the Government’s position on that, and what are they doing to encourage other countries to respond positively to those requests?”