Welfare Reform Bill Debate
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Anne McGuire
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Welfare Reform Bill
Anne McGuire Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
I will not follow the same order as the Minister. I will deal first with under-occupancy, because rarely have I heard such a pathetic defence of a Government’s position as I have heard here today. Their proposals are not based on fairness, and they are not intended to deal with the under-occupation of social housing. They are a bare-faced attempt to cut housing benefit.
Mrs McGuire
Since the Minister did not afford my hon. Friend much opportunity, I will give way to him.
Mr Roy
I thank my right hon. Friend. What would she say to the 55-year-old man I met on Saturday, who has lived in his council house with his parents for 43 years and is now on benefit? He was genuinely frightened about the proposals being put forward. What can we say to that particular gentleman?
Mrs McGuire
That the proposals are unfair and are an attempt to disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged in many respects. They, along with some of the other elements of the Bill, are about to hit the poorest people.
I want to put on record the fantastic work of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who is in her place. The Minister talks as though there were millions of houses out there ready for people to move into, but the Government do not know how many there are. They cannot even agree on what constitutes under-occupancy.
Mrs McGuire
I will certainly not give way at the moment.
My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North asked Ministers at the Department for Communities and Local Government what constituted under-occupancy, and they said that it was two spare bedrooms, whereas the Department for Work and Pensions has a far more restrictive interpretation.
Ms Buck
We know from the Government’s own impact assessment that under-occupation is a problem particularly, but not exclusively, in the north of England, and that overcrowding is a problem particularly, but not exclusively, in the south. Local authorities have legal duties to their tenants, and if somebody from Salford is seeking to downsize, local authorities in Doncaster or Hull are not permitted to take them because of residency qualifications. Will my right hon. Friend help me to understand something that the Government have completely failed to explain? How will tenants be able to move from one local authority to another?
Mrs McGuire
Frankly, I do not think the Government know how. The DCLG and local authorities certainly do not know.
Mrs McGuire
I want to make a little progress, and I also intend to leave some time for other Members to contribute.
I shall give the House an illustration of what I have said, for which I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell). Northumberland county council, which has a mixture of housing in various types of locality, has estimated that it will take eight long years before it can put in place the Government’s proposals. During that time, people on the housing list will not be able to get into housing that is suitable for them.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Andrew Gwynne
Does not what we have heard highlight the Conservative party’s misunderstanding of how social housing operates in reality? As my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) said, we are talking about people’s homes. Even if they wanted to downsize, the housing stock is not there for them to move into.
Claire Perry
I am most grateful. On a point of clarification, I thought I heard the right hon. Lady say that Members of this House continued to occupy social housing. Does she think it is appropriate for MPs earning £64,000 a year to occupy social housing and, presumably, have lifetime tenancy over it?
Mrs McGuire
The hon. Lady has a philosophical misunderstanding about people’s homes and houses. My mother lived in a local authority house all her life. She never thought it was anything other than her home. She did not see it as second class or inferior. She lived in it and it was right for her.
Sir Bob Russell
Does the right hon. Lady agree that successive Labour and Conservative Governments—[Interruption.]
Sir Bob Russell
Successive Labour and Conservative Governments from 1945 to 1980 built a massive supply of family council houses, but for the next 30 years, they did not. It is a question of supply and demand. Does the right hon. Lady agree that we need more affordable rented houses?
Mrs McGuire
I would not disagree with the hon. Gentleman. Housing was built in the 1940s and ’50s to deal with the nuclear family that everybody knew at the time. The way in which families have developed, including the growth in the number of single-parent households, was not factored in. That goes for the social rented and private sectors.
Mrs McGuire
The hon. Lady definitely is not getting in—certainly not at the moment.
The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) said that there are communities in all nations of this country—smaller communities, but sometimes larger ones—where there is an insufficient supply of houses, which is very true. People might have lived in them all their lives and would be unable physically to move.
Dr Whiteford
The hon. Lady makes an extremely important point. This problem is not isolated to Argyll and other island communities. In Scotland, 44% of social tenants need a one-bedroom house, yet only 24% can have one. That is the fundamental nature of the housing stock in the whole country.
Maria Miller
I thank the right hon. Lady. It is very gracious of her to give way so that I can clarify matters. She will obviously be aware of the new national home swap scheme, which, importantly, will help people to identify housing in other areas, which is what she is talking about. We are also providing funding to councils of some £13 million over the next four years so that they can support under-occupying tenants who wish to move.
The right hon. Lady will also know that there is a great deal of commitment from the Government in terms of helping to build affordable housing: some £4.5 billion will help to deliver up to 170,000 new affordable homes. Those are all ways in which we can make the sort of changes that she wants. Just to clarify, as a lady who was born in a council house—
Mr Speaker
Order. This really is an abuse. It is a novelty, in my experience, for a Minister to intervene from the Front Bench reading from a folder. That really will not do. Interventions should be brief, and it would be good if the House—both sides—could get back into the courteous mood in which it found itself yesterday and for part of today.
Mrs McGuire
I listened to what the hon. Lady said, but she has obviously had no experience of trying to arrange a mutual swap in a small local authority area. We will have not only mutual swaps in small local authority areas, but national swaps, all supported by some anonymous Government agency. Frankly, the hon. Lady is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Mrs McGuire
My hon. Friend makes a very good point and no doubt he will pursue it outside this House.
Before I move on, I want the House to hear what Lord Freud said in the other place when asked about how people would cover the reduction in rent. The Minister glibly passed over it, saying that it was only £12 or £14 on average. Lord Freud said:
“Claimants affected by this measure will have to decide whether to meet any shortfall themselves—from their earnings for example, or they could take in a lodger, or someone they know, to fill the extra bedrooms.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 18 October 2011; Vol. 731, c. GC72.]
How many times does the Government expect people to take lodgers into their family home? Will social landlords even allow lodgers to be taken in, because in my experience they do not allow it? I see the Liberal Democrats are nodding. Ministers also need to make it clear whether rent received in such circumstances would be taken into account in benefit calculations. They are putting people in an unbelievable bind.
This proposal is ill thought-out and will not achieve its aims. It is predicated on an assumption in the impact assessment that will not work. It will push the poorest people, including those who are working—we should not forget that this is an in-work benefit—into even greater disadvantage. It will force social landlords to take eviction action if people end up in arrears. In other words, it is a disaster of a policy, and we should support the Lords in these amendments.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
As well as the socially disastrous consequences that my right hon. Friend has mentioned, does she recognise that under the parity principle this measure would have to be transposed to Northern Ireland? Particular difficulties will be caused in relation to access to social housing in the future and to the demands for new social houses that are benefit-sized to be built in particular locations. Given the geo-sectarian tensions in parts of Northern Ireland, it could be a factor for destabilisation, with certain communities being seen to be punished for their current demographic status.
Mrs McGuire
My hon. Friend has highlighted exactly why this particular proposal has been ill thought-out.
Mrs McGuire
No, I do not want to take up as much time as the Minister. I shall move on to the Child Support Agency—
Mrs McGuire
I have made it perfectly clear that I am not giving way: I am moving on to the subject of the CSA.
The Government should never have brought forward this proposal, although I welcome the Minister’s statement today that they have reduced the fee. Why they put everybody through the anxiety of putting a fee—
Mrs McGuire
I have not really said anything about the CSA yet, so if the hon. Lady could just be patient—
Mr Speaker
Order. Let me just make it clear. It is obvious that the shadow Minister is not giving way at the moment. On the Government side, during my time in the Chair since 5.30, there was a preference—on the whole—not to give way to Opposition Members and that is now being replicated by the right hon. Lady. Members may make what they like of that, but there is nothing disorderly about it. It is no good people yelling from a sedentary position to express their frustrations. They must try to contain those frustrations, which I notice the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) is now successfully doing.
Mrs McGuire
Thank you for your wise words, Mr Speaker.
We welcome the reduction that the Minister announced today, and for the record, we welcomed in the other place the additional funding of £20 million that was going to be put in to encourage—
Anna Soubry
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Could you help me? If a Member asks a question of the whole House, how does one respond to that question other than by asking that Member to give way?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Lady is asking me to speculate about a hypothetical. We could probably have a seminar about the matter, and it might be instructive. There could be a time for that, but it is not now. I feel sure that the hon. Lady has raised not a point of order, but a point of disappointment.
Mrs McGuire
I always hate to disappoint Tories, Mr Speaker.
The Minister mentioned some concessions, but it remains an unfair imposition on parents with caring responsibilities to make them pay a fee to obtain, in her words, a calculation of what they may be entitled to. The Government are always keen to say that people should do the right thing, but what happens when they try to do the right thing and adopt a collaborative approach? Frankly, all the evidence shows that a collaborative approach is often the last thing that people can get when a marriage breaks down—all sorts of issues to do with personalities, emotions and children being part of the bartering process between two parents make that almost impossible.