Safe Streets for All

John McDonnell Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]]

After 11 years of harsh austerity and a year in which the covid pandemic has resulted in such a scale of human suffering, the Queen’s Speech should have been a paradigm-shifting intervention in which were established a new set of ideals upon which the future of our society was at least envisioned. Instead, it was crowded with little more than base, grubby political manoeuvres aimed at corrupting the electoral system and suppressing opposition. It failed completely to capture the spirit of the age.

The pandemic pressure-tested our society and exposed the appalling impact of a decade of gross underfunding of our NHS and social care sector. Covid has laid bare the millions who are in poverty and a social security system that has provided no security. Austerity fatigue and the pandemic are prompting a paradigm shift. The old neoliberal dominance of trickle-down economics, the market always knowing best and “private good, public bad” is under serious challenge. Even this Government have been forced through political expediency to synthetically get with the programme. That is why this Queen’s Speech is so full of rhetoric but so easily exposed as lacking in substance.

The pandemic has created a renewed sense of social solidarity. There is a greater feeling that we all stand or fall together and that everyone should have a right to a decent job, education, a home, health and social care, and an income to secure good quality of life. This should not depend on where people live or what their background is. There is a greater belief that the distribution of rewards in our society should be based on the social value of the contribution that a person makes to our community and not solely on its market value. The mismatch in the Queen’s Speech between these values of our age and what the Government propose is starkly exemplified.

There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech that will realistically ensure that the NHS receives the funding to cope with backlog of treatments or, especially, to deal with the impact of long covid. It maintains the pay cuts to NHS staff and public sector workers, forcing many into absolute penury. Social care reform is delayed yet again. We await the outcome of further discussions in the autumn but doubt whether anything productive will come from the Government.

There is nothing to give hope of a secure home to many people, nothing to address low pay and poverty on a scale that we have not seen for a generation, including the rising numbers of the homeless back on our streets and the renewed threat of eviction that is affecting so many of our constituents who rent their properties.

The existential threat of climate change is met with nothing more than press releases and, obscenely, international aid is cut and the Government fail to back Biden’s patent-waiving campaign to save lives as the covid pandemic ravages the global south.

This is a Queen’s Speech that does not just fail to meet the challenges of our times, but drags us back to mundane politicking, providing no sense of hope or direction at a time when our people are in desperate need, having suffered 12 months of tragic loss of life and 11 years of austerity pay cuts and the undermining of their public services. This Queen’s Speech is a grotesque disappointment and has failed the community yet again.

Immigration

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]]

I find it hard to believe that we are having this debate today, and that this delegated legislation has been introduced at all. Emotionally, many Members of the House will find it hard to take, especially those of us who have taken any interest in detention, and specifically modern slavery and trafficking, over the last two to three decades.

After all the years of campaigning to expose modern slavery and trafficking, and after Parliament’s achievement of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which we are all proud of, this is like stepping back in time. It is a hugely retrograde step. After the exposure of trafficking and the recoil from the policies of the hostile environment, I thought we would never see this sort of legislation again. It is shameful that it has been brought before us. Have we learned nothing about the suffering that trafficking imposes on people? I urge the Minister and hon. Members not to support the motion, and to go back and look at some of the reports and investigations that led us to put in place extra protections for trafficking victims.

In 2017, Rahila Gupta—a member of Southall Black Sisters and now a famous author in my local community—wrote the book “Enslaved: The New British Slavery”. It was reported extensively at the time, and it shook many of us to the core with its descriptions of trafficking and the impact on our fellow human beings. Many other reports then followed, and we learned something of the scale of trafficking and its consequences in this country.

Yesterday, in Westminster Hall, the Government seemed to claim that the reason for this legislation was that the system was being abused somehow. No evidence for that claim has been published by the Home Office, and we have seen no independent assessment of the claim or data that the Government may want to bring forward to argue this case. What we do know, however—this is on the basis of research backed by the Home Secretary and undertaken in 2020 by Justice and Care and the Centre for Social Justice—is that there are estimated to be more than 100,000 victims of modern slavery in the UK. In 2020, only 3,000 people were positively identified as survivors of slavery in the second stage of the decision-making process.

I contend that the Government’s main worry should be their failure to identify and make safe the vast majority of people who have been trafficked into this country. The Government should concentrate on that, rather than on unsubstantiated allegations of abuse in the system. With no data published to prove it, the Government have argued that over the last 12 months, there has been a surge in foreign national offenders claiming to be victims of trafficking to disrupt immigration proceedings. That represents a complete failure to understand everything that we have learned about how many of those who are convicted are convicted of crimes that they were forcibly trafficked to commit in this country. I cite the recent examples from many of our constituencies of the Vietnamese young people who have been trafficked into cannabis farms in the UK. Many of those who are trafficked and then convicted of crimes lack access to legal advice and support even to explain their circumstances and case.

The Government appear to be arguing that the threshold of reasonable grounds for determining whether someone has been trafficked is too low. Under the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking, the threshold was deliberately set low to ensure that people are identified. I believe we have an international obligation to uphold that standard under the convention. People who are referred into the system are referred, as the Minister knows, by first responders, who are professionally trained and authorised by the Government. In detention, virtually all the referrals come from the Home Office itself. As the Minister said, the Government have offered us revised casework guidance. That has not even been published, yet we are expected to vote into law this statutory instrument—a leap in the dark.

If the consultation had been adequate, no Government could have reasonably brought forward this statutory instrument. As other Members have said, the consultation was extremely limited, in both who was consulted and the timescale. Consulting for only two weeks on something so significant is a dereliction of the Government’s duty, particularly on openness, transparency and the consideration of all reasonable factors. As others have said, the Home Office admitted to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that more people will be held in detention if the instrument is approved. It will mean more people going into detention, but it will also be more difficult for people to get out of detention.

We need to recall the people we are talking about. These people are trafficked, exploited and abused, physically, sexually and mentally. They are extremely vulnerable. They are isolated and confused, often even lacking the ability to speak English, and they are suspicious of authority. Often, they have been emotionally abused to the extent that they are traumatised, and many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. These are the people that this statutory instrument will increasingly force into detention. And let us be clear: we know now that, in detention, there is little access to legal advice or to emotional or health support, so it is often very difficult for these people to communicate their circumstances and their case.

What does detention mean? Well, this is the reality of detention. I have two detention centres in my constituency: Harmondsworth and Colnbrook. I have been visiting Harmondsworth for more than 30 years. Years ago, it was a couple of Nissen huts, with no more than about a dozen people detained there. Now we have what are, effectively, two prison-style buildings housing anything between 800 and 1,000 detainees.

These detention centres are notorious. Detainees have died, with accusations of neglect, lack of care and abuse. Perhaps the Minister will remember the 83-year-old man who was taken from detention to Hillingdon Hospital and died still in handcuffs. On two occasions, riots have broken out, with Harmondsworth being burned down.

Detainees get lost in the system, too, with examples of some being detained for long periods, trapped in detention. The irony is that most will eventually be released and allowed to settle, becoming valuable members of our community. The moral of this story is that we detain too many people unnecessarily and in unacceptable conditions. I believe that, in years to come, people will look back on this system with incredulity but also disgust.

I believe that this legislation, in addition to increasing the number of victims of trafficking in detention, will deter victims from coming forward. It will be used by traffickers to discourage victims from escaping. If the SI is passed, traffickers will say to victims, with some accuracy, “If you try to escape, you’ll be locked up anyway in a detention centre or prison.”

I believe that, if this House allows the statutory instrument to go on to the statute book, it will be seen as a disgraceful act of inhumanity. To attack some of the most vulnerable people, living in fear in our community, is a new low for this Parliament. I thought that we had all moved on. I thought we had moved forward. I hope that sufficient Members of this House still have the humanitarian instincts to reject this appalling measure.

Support for Asylum Seekers

John McDonnell Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]]

I have two detention centres in my constituency, Harmondsworth and Colnbrook. I will come back in another debate to explain the brutality of the regime in those detention centres, which is abhorrent.

One of the opportunities given to us by Westminster Hall debates is to explain to Ministers what is happening on the ground, as against some of the advice they might be getting from officials. Since last June, two hotels in my constituency have been used to house 600 asylum seekers, as a response to the covid pandemic.

I welcome those people into my constituency. I have met them and they are largely seeking refuge from Syria, Iran and other oppressive regimes or war-torn or impoverished areas of the world. Many arrived here with little more than the clothes they stand up in. To respond, I set up a working group, with representatives from the Home Office, the contractor Clearsprings, the local NHS, council and community groups. I commend the Bell Farm Christian Centre, and Diane Faichney and Stuart Mathers in particular.

Despite all the hard work of those involved, major problems have arisen due to the basic administration of the scheme. For instance, outsourcing food provision to a hotel resulted in people going hungry, and the Bell Farm Christian Centre’s foodbank being overwhelmed, as refugees simply sought food to feed their families. The small financial support allowance is often not paid and backlogs build up. At one point a curfew was imposed, causing real anxiety because detainees felt they were almost in a prison. We also struggled to get agreement with the local council on school places.

Since then, there have been sudden removals of families from those hotels. Although we had been assured that there would be adequate notice, people have sometimes been given just two hours to move, and not told where they are going or where they will eventually be put. Local teachers have contacted me extremely distressed about the impact on already vulnerable children, who had just begun to settle in their schools. We were assured that everything would be done to provide settled accommodation, but we now discover people have simply been dispatched around the country into more hotels and often into appalling standards of accommodation.

We all accept that the overriding concern during the pandemic was to keep people safe, but immediate action is needed to provide support and assistance to these often extremely traumatised people, many of whom have already been diagnosed with PTSD. That means decent, settled accommodation and advice and support, ensuring that those families are fully engaged in determining their own futures. This has been a shameful, disgraceful performance by this Government.

Fire Safety Bill

John McDonnell Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. We will have to leave it there.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]]

I, too, send my best wishes to the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire) and wish him a speedy recovery.

I have been listening to the debate and the various interventions. A question asked consistently in interventions from Conservative Members has been whether it is not best to put things right rather than act quickly. I remind those Members, as others have, that it is now four years on from Grenfell. Four years is a timescale in which we should have been able to address this issue and given people security and some form of confidence.

Confidence has been shattered by the failure to include in the legislation the recommendations from the first phase of the Grenfell inquiry. I share the view of the Fire Brigades Union that the Government seem to be doing the bare minimum to fend off bad headlines. I have not the eloquence to speak on behalf of my constituents and portray just how strongly they feel about this matter. They are really very angry—and, I have to say, distressed. They feel not only at risk but that their lives have been put on hold by their inability to sell their properties and move from them.

We have heard today about the £5 billion that the Government have allocated; my constituents, like those of other Members, are asking what happens if the money runs out—the costs so far have been estimated to be nearer £15 billion. In addition to that, just as the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, the money will not cover many of the defects that have now been found and the additional measures that have been demanded and required. My constituents are now being hit with potential bills from the developers—including the worst, Ballymore—for things such as rectifying wooden balconies and other defects that were not of their making. The idea of waiting for the Building Safety Bill is like “Waiting for Godot”, what with the time it takes to get the right type of Bill and then get the legislation through and implemented.

My constituents in lower-rise blocks do not see why they are being discriminated against. My constituents were blameless. They were failed by developers, regulators, suppliers of materials, inspectors—all of them. Many of those developers made fortunes out of developments in my constituency; it is they who should pay the cost of their own failures. I urge urgency, which is why I will support all the amendments that would protect leaseholders from being burdened with the debt caused by others who have failed us all.

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

I welcome the Government’s commitment to correct the historic wrongs, and I especially welcome my hon. Friend the Minister’s commitment to fundamentally change the culture in the building sector and to take a more robust, risk-based approach. Leaseholders are the innocent parties in this matter and rightly expect that the developers, builders and current landlords—some of whom were developers—along with the local building controllers, national regulators and component manufacturers, should be the ones to bear the costs.

My constituents have raised a range of their outstanding concerns that they feel still need to be addressed. They are concerned, first, that those responsible should take far more of the financial burden; secondly, that they have the unfair burden of massively increased insurance costs and waking watches; and thirdly, about the distinction between buildings above and below 18 metres and why they should be treated so differently.

To many people, a monthly cost of £50 may not be a great deal, but for many others who are already at their financial limit, the equivalent of a 13th month of mortgage payments is a huge burden that they can barely afford—if they can afford it. They want to be able to move on with their life—they may want to have a family, or move for work or for a whole range of other reasons—but they cannot. They feel trapped.