It is a pleasure to follow my near north-west London neighbour in one direction, the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), and to support a Bill introduced by a north-west London neighbour in another direction, my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck).
When we consider legislation, there is usually a sophisticated lobbying operation through Change.org and 38 Degrees spamming us with lots of emails, but on this Bill I have been contacted by a far wider range of people. In fact, every Friday at my surgery—I will hold my surgery after I finish here today—people come before me to ask, knowingly or unknowingly, for this legislation.
In September 2017 my office went over the 20,000 mark of individual cases processed since 2015, and a large number of those cases are housing issues. People come and show me on their phone pictures of damp problems that are too big to be dealt with by buying a spray, and “Bang! And the dirt is gone.” It is a bigger problem when the ceiling is caving in. There are people living in properties with rodent infestations, and their children cannot sleep at night because of the gnawing.
There are a multitude of cases, and I am getting a strange sense of déjà vu because in 2015 one of the first debates I spoke in was on my hon. Friend’s Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill. That Bill was talked out by Conservative Members, which is why some Opposition Members were getting jittery when the hon. Member for Harrow East was being a bit loquacious. We are relieved to hear that he was not trying to talk out the Bill. It is not a good look for a modern Conservative party to oppose homes fit for human habitation, and I am glad it has seen the error of its ways and will be supporting the Bill today.
I will be brief because I do not want to play the same game and talk out the Bill. The gaps that have led to this Bill, such as the difficulty of enforcement, have already been mentioned, but I draw attention to fire safety, which is not addressed in existing legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North and I have the A40 between our constituencies, and at the side of
the A40 is Grenfell Tower, which I went past yesterday. Anyone living in Ealing who goes to central London by road passes Grenfell Tower, which is a burned carcase on the skyline of one of our nation’s richest boroughs.
Our nation used to be the world’s fifth largest economy—post-Brexit, I think it is now the sixth largest, which is another story that I will not go into now—and the fact is that people were burned alive in their homes because people pooh-poohed the idea of regulation and batted away the idea of health and safety as meddlesome and troubling. What happened is the logical extension of that, and it is something that shames our nation.
My hon. Friend mentioned the powerful groups that are backing her Bill, including the Law Society, the National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and Shelter. Fifty-one years ago, Shelter’s film “Cathy Come Home” shocked the nation, and Grenfell has shocked the nation a second time.
As an Opposition Member, I am into holding the Government to account, and this Bill holds landlords to account where standards are not met. As the chair of the new all-party parliamentary group on single-parent families—Members do not have to be a single parent to be in our group, so a quick plug—I am duty-bound to point out that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s figures show that single parents are more likely to live in substandard accommodation and poverty than any other type of family, a rate of 20% compared with a national average of 7%. The English housing survey shows that people in poverty are far more likely to live in hazardous homes than those who are not in poverty, which is why this Bill is needed.
I am pleased to see the Government’s change of heart. Last time such a proposal came before the House, the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), who is now a Conservative party vice-chair and is no longer a Minister in the Department, scandalously said that the proposals of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North, and in fact all the Labour party’s proposals on things such as landlord licensing—I am pleased my council, the London Borough of Ealing, has a register of landlords—will
“result in unnecessary regulation and cost to landlords, which will deter further investment and push up rents for tenants.”—[Official Report, 12 January 2016; Vol. 604, c. 785.]
The new Prime Minister talked on the steps of Downing Street about burning injustices, and I am glad the Government will put their money where their mouth is and back this Bill, which I hope will be a staging post for a Government after the next general election that is for the many, not the few.
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