John Healey
MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough · Labour · United Kingdom
“Mr Spock, I think some would say, Mr Speaker! My hon. Friend is right. Despite global conflicts, trade tensions and rising threats in the world, which are pushing up inflation, bearing down on growth and pushing up borrowing costs, the UK economy is demonstrating huge resilience.”
“The Prime Minister and I have been clear that we must cut the costs of welfare. On levels of taxation, we had a period of Conservative Government, with low growth and high debt. They crashed the economy with the mini-Budget, and we had levels of taxation that were putting pressure on business, adding to the cost of living.”
“The hon. Lady is talking to the person who led the work to establish a defence and security partnership with the European Union and bilateral agreements with other countries, on which we now build both our economic strength and our national security strength. On the question of the Budget, I ask the hon.”
“Since day one in the job, the Prime Minister and I have been in lockstep in our determination to meet Britain’s fiscal rules. This is the bedrock on which we build good growth and help give a bit of breathing space to families and businesses.”
“May I start by paying tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves)? I am proud to have been a member of a Government with the first female Chancellor in 700 years.”
“My hon. Friend speaks up very strongly for his local area. He is right about the importance of pubs, social clubs and live venues, and about the importance of the 20% cut that we announced in July. These are the things that make the places where we live the places that we also love.”
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“It would mean naming and shaming those private block owners now, not some time in the future; setting a hard deadline for block owners to get the work done; updating the sanctions available to councils under the Housing Act 2004; making Government funding available for cladding remediation on private blocks where they have to do the work; and widening now the Government-sponsored testing regime to test comprehensively all suspect non-ACM cladding. One year and four months after the final Hackitt report was published, why is there no comprehensive implementation plan? Why is there no legislation? Today, the Secretary of State confirmed his intention to respond by the end of the year. Can he do better? Will he guarantee that legislation to implement the much-needed legal changes is part of the Queen’s Speech that is promised for next month?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for the advance copy of his statement. I have to say that I admire his air of calm. This is a Government of chaos—even the Prime Minister’s brother has walked out of office this morning—so his presence is welcome. I recognise his good intent to make good on the failings of his predecessors over the past few years. Why, two years and three months after the terrible Grenfell tragedy, are 324 high-rise blocks still cloaked in the same dangerous, Grenfell-style cladding? Why have 72 private block owners not even got a plan in place to fix the problem? Will the Secretary of State do what his predecessors did not and bring in Labour’s five-point plan to force the pace of the recladding?”
“This session may be the swan song of the Secretary of State and his team. We certainly hope not, and we wish them all well in the Tory turmoil to come.”
“Indeed. The CMA’s inquiry is certainly welcome, but it is action by Ministers that homebuyers ripped off in the leasehold system need most. The Secretary of State’s predecessor said in 2017 that the Government would stop new leasehold houses, but nearly 3,500 were sold last year. The Secretary of State himself said a year ago that he would end the use of Help to Buy for new leasehold houses, but he had to admit to me afterwards that that will not happen until 2021. As the Secretary of State reflects on his time in this job, will he concede that any Government action has been too slow and too weak and has totally overlooked the needs of current leaseholders locked into unfair contracts?”
“Well, lots of warm words and fresh reviews, but no action. There have been 19 Government announcements on leaseholds in the 15 months that the right hon. Gentleman has been Secretary of State, but there is still no sign of change for current leaseholders, or of the legislation to make it happen. Is not the hard truth that Conservatives cannot help leaseholders because they will not stand up to the vested interests in the property market? Do not homeowners who are looking for justice and radical, common-sense changes have to look to Labour to set a simple formula for people to buy their own freehold; to crack down on unfair fees and give homeowners the right to challenge high costs or poor performance from management companies; and to put an end, finally, to the broken leasehold system?”
“Is it not clear, after nine years of Conservative government, eight Housing Ministers and four Secretaries of State, that the Conservatives still have no plan to fix the housing crisis, and is it not clear that the only hope for young people with regular incomes is a Labour Government with radical plans for discounted First Buy homes, first dibs for local people on new homes, and a programme for the building of a million new affordable homes both to rent and to buy?”
“Is not the truth that the Government have been failing young people on housing for nine years? One in five of those on the Help to Buy scheme are not even first-time buyers, the average age of those on the right to buy scheme is over 50, and not a single one of the new starter homes that were pledged in 2014 has yet been built. Where is the new hope, and where are the new housing plans, from the wannabe Tory leaders?”
“Will he widen the Government’s testing regime to run full tests on all suspect non-ACM cladding? Will he bring in the long overdue overhaul of building safety legislation? Finally, will the Secretary of State accept that only such tough action—only such far-reaching changes—will provide the proper legacy for those who perished at Grenfell Tower and that only such action and such changes will allow us all finally to say, with confidence, this can never happen again in our country?”
“Yesterday, there was the fire at Barking, where early reports point to serious problems: as at Grenfell, the De Pass Gardens residents raised safety concerns and were ignored; wood cladding was untreated for fire safety because the developer was not required to treat it; and the local council did not have the necessary powers to act to deal with this private development. Will the Secretary of State now take up the five-point plan that Labour has published today to force the pace? If he does, he will have our full backing for such action. Will he name and shame the owners of blocks with dangerous cladding? Will he set a December deadline for the block owners to get work done? Will he update the sanctions available to councils under the Housing Act 2004 to include fines, followed by the takeover of blocks that still have dangerous cladding?”
“There has been a failure to give justice to the Grenfell community: despite the first phase of the public inquiry first having been due to report at Easter last year, it has still not been published. There has been a failure to re-clad other dangerous high-rise blocks: despite 176 private blocks having been confirmed to have the same Grenfell-style ACM cladding, nine out of 10 have still not had it removed and replaced, and more than 70 of the block owners do not even have a plan to do the work. There also has been a failure to identify unsafe non-ACM cladding, despite the Government’s testing contract having set a completion deadline of November 2018. There has been a failure to overhaul building safety legislation, despite the final report of the Hackitt review having been published in May 2018.”
“They said that in two years: “Little has changed and justice still seems so far off”. There has been over these two long years some progress, which we welcome and for which individual Members and Ministers, including the Secretary of State, deserve some credit, but a national disaster on the scale of Grenfell Tower requires a national response on the same scale from the Government. That has not happened. Ministers have been frozen like rabbits in the headlights. Their action has been too slow and too weak on every front. There has been the failure to rehouse survivors, despite the promise that every victim of the fire would have a new permanent home within one year.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for the advance copy of his statement. At the start of this, the week of the second anniversary of that truly terrible Grenfell Tower fire, above all else we remember the 72 men, women and children who lost their lives, and we rededicate ourselves to doing everything needed to ensure that such a fire can never happen again. The Grenfell survivors and families who are with us today will draw little comfort or confidence from the Secretary of State’s update statement. He made no new announcement and offered no new action. Earlier, he and I both spoke at the two-year Grenfell memorial event, with you, Mr Speaker, in Speaker’s House. Those survivors from Grenfell United who are still campaigning for change told us today: “We shouldn’t be here; we should be at home, rebuilding our lives”.”
“I desperately want this to be the last anniversary of that terrible fire when the basic duties of Government are unfulfilled and when the necessary fundamental changes to our system are incomplete. Until then, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington said, we will return to this issue again. We will continue to press, with the Grenfell community, for justice and for the far-reaching changes that can guarantee that a tragedy like Grenfell can never happen again in our country.”
“Following the publication today of the post-Hackitt consultation paper, will the Minister now tell us when he will publish the legislation itself and when the Government will take the steps needed to keep buildings safe? Most importantly, when will the Government retrofit sprinklers in all social housing blocks, as Labour, the fire chiefs and the chairman of the all-party group on fire safety, the hon. Member for Southend West, have all long argued? The Government have been too slow to grasp the depth and breadth of the problems that they need to fix, and then too slow to act. A few weeks after that terrible fire in June 2017, a leading housing chief executive said to me, “Grenfell changes everything.” It should have done, but it has not.”
“Two years on, tests on hundreds of blocks with other types of potentially dangerous cladding are still not done, despite the Government’s testing contract having set a deadline for the work to have been completed by November 2018. Will the Minister now confirm, for thousands of high-rise residents, when he will publish the results, and that the tests will be comprehensive pass/fail tests and will cover all, not just some, types of non-ACM cladding? Finally, there has been a failure to overhaul the building safety system, as many Members mentioned. The Hackitt review published its final report in May 2018, yet two years on the legislation is still not in place.”
“The first phase was due to report at Easter 2018, but it has still not been published. Will the Minister now confirm when it will report, when the crucial second phase of the inquiry will start, and when the inquiry will finish? Thirdly, there has been a failure to re-clad blocks that have been confirmed to have the same dangerous Grenfell-style ACM cladding. Two years on, eight in 10—that is 272—of those high-rise blocks that are known to be clad in the same dangerous material have not had it removed and replaced. Seventy private block owners do not even have in place a plan to do the work. Will the Minister set a deadline by which all blocks that are known to have this dangerous cladding will be made safe? Fourthly, there has been a failure to identify unsafe non-ACM cladding.”
“So let me set out for the Minister where the Government are still failing and must do more, and I hope that he will be able to respond to these points. First, there has been a failure to rehouse the survivors. Two years on, one in 12 of the families from the tower are still living in emergency or temporary accommodation, even though Ministers promised that every victim of the fire would be rehoused in a new home within one year. Will the Minister now give the House and those families his cast-iron assurance that every survivor will be in a permanent home by the two-year anniversary at the end of next week? Secondly, there has been a failure to give the Grenfell community justice. Two years on, the public inquiry is moving too slow and its remit is too narrow.”
“Since 2010, Ministers have abolished the tenants’ regulator for social housing and National Tenant Voice; they funded just 1,000 new social homes in the year of the fire, when they also became the first Government since the second world war to stop all national funding to help build new social housing; and they have pursued a regulation policy of “one in, two out”, with the then housing Minister saying after the coroner’s report on the Lakanal House fire that on fire safety measures such as sprinklers it was “not…for the Government to make a case for private industry around what they should be doing.” When the far-reaching changes that are demanded in this country by the Grenfell tragedy must mean tougher safety regulations, stronger enforcement powers for councils, clearer legal duties for private block owners, and greater rights for tenants and for leaseholders, it is clear that the fundamental problem lies not in slow administrative decision making or in the lack of compassion from individual Ministers; it lies in the basic beliefs of the Conservative party in government about hands-off government, light-touch regulation and private sector market solutions.”
“Ministers have been like rabbits in the headlights. For two years, the action they have taken has been too slow and too weak on every front. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North rightly set out for the House the background to this fire: the collapse in social house building, and rapidly rising homelessness. This wider context of the night, after seven years of a Conservative Government, is important, because it helps to explain why action from Ministers has fallen so far short.”
“Friend the Member for Lincoln (Karen Lee) also cited FBU research, which concludes that at present our fire services are now unprepared for and potentially unable to tackle a fire on a similar scale—that really should worry the Minister. We do not underestimate the Government’s challenge in responding to Grenfell. Some progress has certainly been made over these long two years, which we welcome and for which Ministers, including the current Secretary of State, deserve credit. There has been some Government procurement of new housing for survivors, and there is now a ban on combustible materials for new high-rise homes and funding for the cladding remediation on existing blocks. However, a national disaster on the scale of Grenfell Tower requires a national response from the Government—that has not happened.”
“Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) talked about the need for residents to have the right to complain about problems in their building and, in particular, about safety concerns—the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) picked up on that. My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris), speaking with the backing of the Fire Brigades Union, rightly reminded the House of the vital role and bravery of firefighters. He made the important point about the impact of the past nine years of austerity, the cut in the number of frontline firefighters and the loss of one in four fire safety officers. My hon.”
“I say to him that it is not a lack of clarity that has led to the fact that they are not, but a lack of will and commitment from the Government to make sure that that happened. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), who also has experience as a serving fire officer, made the same strong argument about the value of fire sprinkler systems. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) asked why hotels have been excluded from the Government’s new ban on inflammable cladding and why action has been so slow on testing non-ACM cladding. That was echoed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith, who rightly described the failure to do this systematically as negligent. He also called for an open-book approach to get to the root of what the problems really are in rehousing the Grenfell survivors. My hon.”
“A series of powerful points made by Members on both sides of the House require action and answers from the Government, and we look to the Minister to provide them. The Chair of the extremely important Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), rightly said that the real problem concerns private block owners, where he said almost no progress has been made. He asked a series of important questions about the new £200 million fund for block owners and freeholders, which of course is not yet open for business. The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant), whom I was interested to hear spoke as an ex-fire officer, said that sprinklers should become a “natural” thing in all our high-risk buildings.”
“Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) said: “Grenfell should not have happened and it is a stain on this place that it did”. May I add to that by saying that all of us in this House have a deep responsibility to make sure that it never happens again? Members on both sides in this debate caught the human side of the tragedy and of the aftermath. My hon. Friends the Members for Westminster North (Ms Buck) and for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), both of whom have constituents who were caught and lived in the tower did so, as did the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), although I have to say that he lost Opposition Members when he started lauding the merits of universal credit as a humanised welfare system.”
“She has done so again today, setting out the way in which the trauma and problems of that night continue for the survivors and for the community of north Kensington. Let us also pay tribute to that community—to the churches, faith groups, advice centres and residents associations—for their compassion and commitment to each other, not just in the immediate aftermath of the fire but in the two years since. We especially pay tribute to the Grenfell survivors and families, who, like Grenfell United, have turned their grief into their fight for justice and for wider change. It is precisely the wider policy, procurement and political decisions of those in power that the residents and the communities affected by this tragedy want us to tackle. This was not a natural disaster; it was man-made. The hon.”
“Today in this debate and over the next week, above all else we remember the 72 men, women and children who lost their lives that night in the terrible Grenfell Tower fire. We recognise the continued suffering of the survivors and bereaved families. We rededicate ourselves to seeing the survivors get the homes and other help they need; to bringing all those culpable to justice; and to putting in place every measure needed to make sure we can with confidence say that Grenfell can never happen again. May I therefore congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) not only on securing today’s important Back-Bench debate but on the extraordinary way in which she has fought for her community over the past two years?”
“I have to tell the Secretary of State that warm words and fresh funding will mean very little to worried residents unless they know that the dangerous cladding on all blocks will be removed and replaced, and that as leaseholders they will not pick up the bill. Will he now set a hard deadline for that work, so that every block and every resident can be made safe?”
“On the detail of the Secretary of State’s announcement, is the £200 million new money from the Treasury to his Department, or will it be taken from other housing programmes? Is the fund simply a bail-out for block owners and developers who will not do their duty to replace dangerous cladding? How will he ensure that they pursue liability claims and repay the public purse? Will he consider emergency legislation to make block owners actually do this work and pay for it? Is the fund enough? Per block, it seems to be only half the funding announced last year for the social sector. The Secretary of State says that the fund will cover the costs for 170 privately owned blocks that have Grenfell-style ACM cladding. Will he fund the costs for other blocks that are found to have similarly dangerous non-ACM cladding?”
“But after the solemn pledges made by the Prime Minister and other Ministers in the aftermath of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire, who would have thought that nearly two years later there would still be Grenfell residents in hotels and temporary accommodation, not permanent homes; that Grenfell-type cladding would still not have been replaced in almost eight in 10 blocks; that in over half of them, no work would have started at all; and that no comprehensive testing programme would have been done on the estimated 1,700 high-rise or high-risk buildings with dangerous non-ACM cladding? The Secretary of State says that the Government acted urgently. The sorry truth is that in the face of these post-Grenfell problems, the Government have been frozen like a rabbit in the headlights—too weak and too slow to act at every stage and on every front.”
“I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. His announcement is welcome and needed; most important, it should start to relieve the worry of the thousands of people who live day and night in a high-rise block that they know is unsafe. But why on earth have they had to wait for nearly two years? For two years they have had their lives on hold. How long will the thousands more who live in tower blocks with suspect non-ACM cladding have to wait for Government action? Like the Secretary of State, I pay tribute to those who, with Labour, have campaigned hard for the Government to act: Grenfell United, the UK Cladding Action Group, the Manchester Cladiators, Inside Housing and hon. Members on both sides of the House.”
“I am glad that so many Members are keen to speak in the debate, which has been delayed for too long and is unfortunately too short. It has been almost a year since we had a housing debate in Government time. The Secretary of State told us in December: “Housing remains the Government’s top priority”. —[ Official Report , 10 December 2018; Vol. 651, c. 18.] It is a pity that he has not made it the top priority in his diary today.”
“They do not get the lives blighted by bad housing—children growing up in temporary accommodation hostels, renters too scared to ask landlords to do repairs, young couples stripped of the hope of home ownership and prevented from starting a family or putting down roots—and they do not get the fact that a systematically broken housing market demands wholesale change and cannot be fixed without big action from Government.”
“I enjoyed the Minister’s speech, but the story that he tries to tell is so at odds with the experience of millions of people up and down the country that he and his colleagues risk sounding complacent. They risk sounding as if they just do not get it. They do not get the public’s anger and frustrated hopes of a housing market that they feel is rigged against them. They do not get the despair at being one in a million on council housing waiting lists when the number of new homes for social rent built last year was just 6,453.”
“No. It is good to see the Housing Minister speaking for the Government today. He not only told the House that housing was the Government’s chief domestic priority, but told an industry conference in February that “once we get beyond Brexit, housing will be the Government’s priority.” Given the mess that the Government have made of Brexit for more than two years, and given that the Prime Minister is in Europe today begging for an extension just so that we can move on to the next stage of the negotiations, that bodes badly for the Government’s future focus on housing. I have to say to the Minister that Brexit is a very feeble alibi for a totally non-Brexit Department with six Ministers and 2,000 civil servants.”
“Unfortunately, although there are good landlords and many tenants are satisfied with the homes that they rent, my hon. Friend has described the experience that too many of the country’s now 11 million renters face from day to day. After nine years in office, the Government just cannot carry on talking about what they are going to do. What they are doing at the moment simply is not working.”
“I have to say that, nearly two years on from that shocking national tragedy, the Government’s action is still on go-slow. He would not give the House the figures, but one in 10 of the residents from the tower and one in three of the residents from the wider estate who were involved in the fire still do not have a permanent new home. Eight in 10 residents of other high-rise blocks across the country that are covered in Grenfell-style cladding have still not had it removed and replaced. Those are residents in 354 high-rise blocks across the country, nearly two years on from the fire.”
“Private rents are higher, with the average tenant paying £1,900 more than in 2010. The rate of social house building is lower, and in the last two years it has been the lowest since the second world war. Let me say this to the Minister. If the Government had only continued to build homes for social rent at the same rate as Labour did in 2009, there would be 180,000 more of those homes—more than enough to house every family in temporary accommodation, every person sleeping rough on our streets, and every resident in every hostel for the homeless. The Minister said, in response to an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), “We are very close to completing the rehousing of everybody who was involved in the Grenfell Tower fire”.”
“The hon. Gentleman has a very short memory. In 2009 we were in the direct aftermath of a global financial crisis and recession. It was the action that the Government took then that kept house building going and helped to pull the country out of the crisis. More than a decade on, under this Government, the level of house building has still not reached the pre-crisis peak. We have seen a pitiful performance over the past nine years. The public have lost patience with a Government who, nine years on, try to blame their Labour predecessors. The Government’s record is now very clear. The rate of home ownership is lower, with almost 900,000 fewer under-45s owning a home now than in 2010. The level of homelessness is higher: the number of people sleeping rough on our streets has more than doubled since 2010.”
“The Minister does himself, the Government and the Grenfell survivors a disservice when the story he tries to tell with those figures is so at odds with the experience of the people affected by the fire.”
“We will end rough sleeping within five years, with 8,000 new homes available to those with a history of rough sleeping and a £100 million programme for emergency winter accommodation to help to prevent people from dying on our streets. We will legislate so that renters have new rights: to indefinite tenancies; to new minimum standards; to controls on rents; and to tougher enforcement. We will give young people on ordinary incomes the home ownership hope that they deserve, with first-buy homes, with mortgage costs linked to a third of local incomes and with first dibs on new homes in their area.”
“So after nine years, we must conclude that the Conservatives in government cannot fix the housing crisis, and that it will fall to a Labour Government to do that. Here is the plan. We will build 1 million genuinely affordable homes over 10 years, the majority of which will be for social rent, with the biggest council house building programme in this country for nearly 40 years. We will reset grants for affordable housing to at least £4 billion a year. We will scrap the Conservatives’ so-called affordable rent and establish a new Labour definition linked to local incomes and not to the market. We will stop the huge haemorrhage of social rented homes by halting the right to buy and ending the Government’s forced conversions to affordable rent.”
“That is why the Conservatives have been losing the argument and have been forced to cede ground to Labour, from legislating to outlaw letting fees, to banning combustible cladding on high-rise blocks and lifting the cap on council borrowing to build new homes. However, those are baby steps. The biggest roadblock to the radical changes needed to fix the housing crisis for millions of people is the Conservative party itself. It is largely the same ideologically inflexible Conservative culprits who are making the Prime Minister’s life so difficult over Brexit who will not countenance the Government action that is needed to deal with the other big challenges our country faces: social care, falling real wages, deep regional divides and, of course, housing.”
“It is the most obvious sign of a broken market, when house builders are making bumper profits and bumper bonuses building homes that ordinary workers cannot afford to buy. These are the fundamental facts. These are the hard truths about the Conservatives’ record on housing, which Ministers cannot deny or disguise, and which, come the next election, the Conservative party will not be able to dodge. Given that record over nine years, it is little wonder that, when asked, three in four people say that they believe the country has a housing crisis. They are right, of course. Everybody knows someone who cannot get the home they need or desire. They say that the crisis is getting worse, not better, and they are right. Even many Conservatives have lost faith in the free market fundamentalism about housing, because it is failing on all fronts.”
“Where this Government have failed, a Labour Government will bring in the radical change that so many millions of people now want and need.”
“It is indeed, and if my hon. Friend looks at the big Green Paper plan that Labour has published, “Housing for the Many”, she will see that we talk not only about building more but about building better. We talk about doing what the public sector has often done in the past—namely, building to better standards. We want these to be the highest standards of design, accessibility, energy efficiency and high tech, so that in future, Labour’s affordable homes will become people’s best choice, not their last resort. Finally, we will create a fully fledged new Department for Housing, both to reflect the scale of the crisis and to drive our national new deal on housing. This will be Labour’s long-term plan for housing that will help to fix our country’s housing crisis.”
“Two years ago, the Prime Minister at long last admitted that “we simply have not given enough attention to social housing”. —[ Official Report , 22 June 2017; Vol. 626, c. 169.] Will the Secretary of State confirm that, since the Prime Minister’s admission, his Government have recorded the two worst years for social house building in the 74 years since the second world war?”
“What the Secretary of State is doing is not working, which is why we have a housing crisis. One thing that he did not confirm is the hard fact that social house building has hit a record low under this Government’s watch. He told me recently that he has committed to funding only 12,500 new social rented homes over the six years to 2022, which will not even replace the homes lost through sales in the last year alone. This Government are failing on all fronts; we have a crisis with Brexit and a crisis with housing. When will the Government get serious about building the social rented homes that this country needs?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. One year on from the Salisbury poisoning, we stand with the people and the city, and we applaud their resilience. The other message from Labour is also clear: such foreign aggression on our soil will never be tolerated. Four weeks to Brexit, yet the Secretary of State is part of a Government who still threaten the country with a final collapse in negotiations and a crash-out exit. He may say that a no-deal Brexit is not his preference, but he supports this remaining an option and he is part of a Cabinet preparing for it. How many fewer homes will be built each year in the event of a no-deal Brexit?”
“Well, the Secretary of State has either not done the analysis or he refuses to share it. The Bank of England says that house prices could plunge by 30% on a no-deal Brexit—almost double the fall after the global banking crisis. A Labour Government kept Britain in business after that global financial crash with a big stimulus programme and a new low-cost house building programme as its centrepiece. If he still cannot say no to no deal, will he commit to a new stimulus of at least £4 billion for new low-cost homes next year so that, come what may, those who need new homes will not pay the price of this Government’s mess of Brexit?”
“Last year, nearly 600 people died homeless in this country. The Secretary of State was right to admit, in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), that this is truly shocking. In a country as decent and well off as ours, this shames us all. We cannot stop homeless people dying if we do not grasp the reasons why it is getting worse, so why does the Secretary of State think that the number has risen in the last five years?”