Financial Services and Markets Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Chapman of Darlington

Report stage
Tuesday 13th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly, having spoken on this issue both in Committee and back in the last financial services Bill, just to put a human face on this. In doing that, I remind the Minister of the representatives of the mortgage prisoners whom we heard from at the meeting in the Treasury a couple of months ago.

The face I have chosen to put on is that of 63 year- old Jacqueline Burns, who spoke to the I newspaper in April about what her life is like now that she is a mortgage prisoner. She said:

“I am cutting back on food because I can’t afford to eat … I am so stressed out right now, I am at the end of my tether”.


The story, as Ms Burns told the I, was that she bought her home in Cambridgeshire for £69,000 in 2006 from SPML, which was an arm of Lehman Brothers. Ms Burns remembers that the broker “was really nice” and “pushed me … towards SPML”. We can all probably imagine why that was. The situation in which Ms Burns now finds herself is that she is on the standard variable rate and owes £109,000; remember that she paid £69,000 for the house. Because of the rise in interest rates, her mortgage payments have gone up from £333 a month to nearly £700 a month. She simply cannot pay.

She is in this situation because of a failure of government regulation, and because of arrangements made by the Government that made a significant profit. There is a huge moral responsibility. If we think about the costs that must be being imposed on the NHS by people who eventually become homeless and need council homes et cetera, it is clear that the Government should look not just at their moral responsibility; they also need to ensure that people get a fair deal and do not end up—even if the Government are not thinking of anything else—costing the taxpayer a great deal.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, for bringing back this amendment and for his persistence on this issue over many years. We are also grateful for the work of the APPG, particularly to Rachel Neale, who herself is a mortgage prisoner and has become a champion for those people who have been affected by this problem. I also want to mention my colleague in the Commons, Seema Malhotra, who is doing a lot of work on this issue.

We are hugely sympathetic towards mortgage prisoners, who have endured difficulties over so many years now, and wish that the Government had acted earlier to ease the burden on them. We were pleased to back this amendment during the passage of the Financial Services Bill in early 2021, when it passed by 273 votes to 235. However, we are mindful that at that point the House of Commons rejected that amendment, and did so at a time when a much larger proportion of the population was experiencing issues with mortgage affordability. In recent weeks, however, we have seen hundreds of mortgage products pulled and rates hiked on those that remain available. A number of major banks have even temporarily withdrawn offers for new customers, putting the brakes on the aspirations of many first-time buyers.

Of course, mortgage prisoners are in a different position, in that they have been facing problems for many years and are just not able to simply switch products in the way that others can. As the Minister will no doubt outline, while this amendment did not make it into the Financial Services Act 2021, it did prompt some new and welcome actions from the Treasury, regulators and banks. New advice was available and a number of lenders relaxed their criteria in certain cases. We know that the elected House has already rejected this proposal and, realistically, it is unlikely to reconsider in the current context, but more does need to be done. Can the Minister let us know whether the Government intend to respond to the recommendations that were made by the LSE in its report? If they are, when will that response be forthcoming? The Government urgently need to get a grip on the issues facing the mortgage market generally and, once that situation has calmed, we hope they will be able to do what they can to ease the difficulties faced by mortgage prisoners.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Chapman of Darlington

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I just want to make what I think is an important point here. The Government are talking about the totality of regulations and saying that it does not stop the asbestos regulations becoming stronger. If the total has to be less, what are we going to lose in the protections so that we do not have a higher total? An addition has to mean a subtraction.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Before the Minister responds—I may be taking advantage here—the Health and Safety Executive is an agency that is able to impose sanctions. However, under this Bill, under whose auspices the Health and Safety Executive will be conducting its review, as the Minister describes it, it will not be able to impose or suggest anything that could be a financial cost, an administrative “inconvenience”, an obstacle to trade and innovation or a sanction. The Minister is chuntering from a sedentary position about totality but the Bill does not say anything about totality. That is their interpretation; it may well not be a court’s interpretation. We need some more information from the Government on this issue.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Chapman of Darlington

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Lords Hansard - part one & Report stage
Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I was pleased to attach my name to these two amendments, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, for leading on them. The case has already been clearly made and I will not speak for long, given the hour, but it is worth looking back at the history of this. I looked it up and found a House of Lords Library note from 25 January 2008, referring to a debate drawing attention to the case for setting up a women’s justice board. In 2014, there was an amendment to the legal aid and sentencing Bill seeking to do the same thing. We are often accused of proposing novel ideas that, we are told, we need to go away and think about, but that argument simply does not apply in this case.

The noble Baroness, Lady Corston, produced an enormously important report well over a decade ago that made a huge number of recommendations, most of which have not been implemented. This really is another way, as several noble Lords, particularly the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, have said, of getting at the problem of implementation. We have been talking about how the criminal justice system is failing women for a very long time, and it really is now time to take action. I will finish with a quote from Baroness Howe of Idlicote, who has now retired from your Lordships’ House. She said, back in 2008:

“I must say that I have become tired of seeing this matter brought to debate again and again”.—[Official Report, 31/1/08; col. 805.]


Surely it is time for action.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate because I have been making speeches on this topic for 12 years. I believe, if memory serves, that I was the Front-Bench speaker in the other place who proposed the amendment to the LASPO Bill. It is quite extraordinary. I think it is now 22 years since this was first suggested and, as others have said, we have had the Corston report. We cannot have a debate on women in prison without reference to my noble friend Lady Corston—Jean Corston—and the work that she has done. The idea of a women’s justice board has been around for so long because it is such a good idea. There is so much evidence of the impact, and probably the savings, that it would make, should we take that path.

There is a long-accepted problem—and I know the Minister accepts that there is a problem—with the failure of the criminal justice system properly to address the needs of female offenders. This leads to poor reoffending rates and devastation for families, with children often bearing the brunt. The social and economic cost is enormous. Women make up only 4% of the prison population and are still too easily overlooked in policy, planning and investment decisions for the reasons that my noble friend Lady Kennedy outlined so well. Female offenders are different from male offenders: they have different health needs, including pregnancy, miscarriage, breastfeeding and menopause. We know that these issues are neglected, and we know the failure to tailor provision for women affects reoffending rates.

The frustration is that the Government agree with all this, yet they seem constantly to fail to move the dial. Unfortunately, according to the excellent work done by the Prison Reform Trust, fewer than half, I think, of the commitments made in the Government’s Female Offender Strategy, which was published in 2018, have been met so far. We know that community sentences can be more effective than short prison sentences, yet the use of community sentences is dropping—it has dropped by two-thirds since 2010. Community provision for women needs to be so much better, and the quality everywhere needs to improve. There are many excellent projects, but provision is way too patchy. One of the functions of a women’s justice board, like the Youth Justice Board, would be completely to transform that.

The Government’s Female Offender Strategy is not being delivered quickly enough. This leads many of us to conclude that a new lead organisation for female offenders would make the difference. Since my noble friend Lady Corston’s report, understanding of female offending has improved so much—this is a real positive—and the Government have played their part in this. I believe Ministers want to act and want female offending to improve. I hope the Minister is not just going to stand up and say “We are making progress—bear with us”, because we can all see that it is inadequate. Nothing that has been done so far is making a sufficient difference. Interventions in this space are too often short-term. They leave the fundamentals of substance misuse, mental health, housing, financial literacy and domestic violence unaddressed. We know that self-harm in women’s prisons has reached record levels. The situation is getting worse, not better. More than 20% of self-harm incidents involve women, with 12,000 incidents in 2020 compared to around 7,500 in 2016. A strategy is great, and we need a strategy, but we need leadership to ensure that delivery takes place. A women’s justice board would provide the strategic framework to identify and prioritise the specific needs of women within the criminal justice system.

Having been around this a few times now, the Government have previously argued that this can be achieved through ministerial working groups or strategies, and it could have been done, but the truth is that so far it has not. Many of us will have visited women’s prisons and seen what happens. One of the most upsetting things I have ever seen was when I was present for visits where women were interacting with their preschool children. The response of the women and the children was difficult for prison staff as well. That was an annual thing in that prison—once a year that happened. There is no central co-ordinating body able to identify best practice and make sure it happens everywhere. We fail on that because the Government do not have that central body. Women are going out; they are not making progress—reoffending is as bad as it has ever been. I feel we have come to a point where it is time to bite the bullet and accept the idea of a women’s justice board.