Coronavirus: Supporting Businesses and Individuals

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

The past year has been terrible for so many people and disastrous for innumerable business sectors, but as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on pubs, I want to speak for those iconic small businesses, whose livelihoods have been shuttered by the Government for months through no fault of their own. An industry of 900,000 jobs contributes £23.6 billion to the UK economy annually and its venues are the lifeblood of our communities.

Pubs in my constituency of Warrington North, including the Station House in Padgate and The Albion and The Hawthorne in Orford, have gone above and beyond to support our community throughout the pandemic, providing free school lunches, a food bank and an online community to keep regulars connected, but they have been left without support.

Many publicans were looking to the Prime Minister’s announcement in the hope of refreshing news, but they remain mostly parched. Few industries have tried harder to comply with changing Government rules than pubs. Landlords spent thousands of pounds on adjustments to make their venues covid-secure, imposed unpopular and unscientific curfews, invested in tech like apps for ordering drinks, reconfigured their spaces to allow for social distancing, and even tried to unravel the esoteric substantial meal or scotch egg requirement. Yet not only did their revenues collapse, but they invested in perishable stock only to be shut in a trice because the Government had failed to limit transmission rates, spending the year doing the hokey cokey, bouncing in and out of rolling regional closures at little or no notice. So, compared to their existential crisis, last night’s road map was small beer indeed.

Pubs will look forward to reopening outdoors in April and indoors in May, assuming they can survive that long. The Chancellor’s grants of up to £9,000 have hardly made up for the shortfalls of the past year, and the whole pub industry will be looking for additional support in his Budget.

The British Beer and Pub Association estimates that 60% of pubs will not be able to open during step 2 of the road map and that many of those that can open will struggle to operate viably. That cannot be considered a proper reopening, and these pubs and landlords will still be hit hard by these requirements. Financial support will still be needed until all pubs can open fully, so Ministers should know that the Campaign for Real Ale is calling for an extension to the VAT cut and for it to apply to alcohol sales, the cancellation of business rates for another year, and furlough to be extended until every pub is properly open again, as well as a lower rate of duty on draught beer to encourage people back into pubs when they reopen.

With summer days ahead, the Government must not permit the Royal Oak to be felled and the Red Lion to be shot. These are the cornerstones of our communities, giving employment, communal spirit and mental health to so many people, and they must be supported through these dark days so that we can come together in our pubs to celebrate their end.

Towns Fund

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

Every one of us in this House wants to see investment in our constituents and our communities, particularly after a decade of Tory-imposed austerity, so I welcome the £22 million that has been allocated to Warrington from the fund. As part of the town deal board, I pay special thanks to all the stakeholders and officers of Warrington Borough Council for drawing together this successful bid. But—you knew that there would be a “but”, Mr Deputy Speaker—this is not a sustainable alternative to proper, long-term funding of our towns and their needs, and cannot and should not be sold as such by the Government.

As has already been mentioned, the past 10 years have seen core funding for local authorities cut by £15 billion, and our councils are struggling even more with the understandable impact of covid on their income streams and spending expectations, which the LGA estimates will be a further £2.6 billion. In comparison, the towns fund programme replaces only a fifth of the shortfall. We cannot expect our towns to thrive, as I would like to see, if our funding is stripped to the bone and sometimes the marrow, and we are left hoping for a special handout from Westminster once a decade. How does that assist long-term planning, or the development of sustainable local economies? We need a more holistic approach.

In Warrington, I want the certainty of a long-overdue new hospital Bill. I want assurances that there will be funding for the restoration and redevelopment of local leisure and library facilities, including Culcheth Community Campus and Padgate library. Above all, I want a guarantee that Warrington Borough Council will be reimbursed for the moneys it has had to spend because of the pandemic, or else all the work that has gone into this bid will be fatally undermined. I want towns such as mine to be self-sustaining and able to offer opportunities for young people and well-paid jobs so that they become hubs of prosperity, rather than being emptied out. We in Warrington benefit greatly from the high-skilled and highly rewarded employment opportunities provided by the nuclear industry. I want the Government to do more to deliver the next generation of new nuclear, which will provide more such quality prospects in Warrington and elsewhere, and to commit to an industrial strategy that makes levelling up the north-west about deeds, not words.

In his response to today’s debate, I hope the Minister will set out how he will judge the success of the towns fund, and how he will ensure that continuous financial support for towns is restored, rather than acting as though we should be grateful for a chance to bid for funding in a once-in-a-decade competition.

Unsafe Cladding: Protecting Tenants and Leaseholders

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I am glad to be able to speak on this important subject, although to call it a debate might be to slightly over- dignify it. Labour’s argument that dangerous cladding must be addressed urgently with up-front funding and money sought from those responsible for building unsafe properties is so indisputable that the Government are not planning to oppose it today, but nor are they willing to accept it and turn it into action to actually help leaseholders and people living in potentially dangerous flats.

We all have examples in our constituencies, and constituents worried about their children trying to get on to the housing ladder elsewhere. The hon. Member for Gedling (Tom Randall) underlined the importance of getting it right, saying that this accounts for the delays we have seen so far, but our constituents deserve better than the lack of action in the three and a half years since Grenfell. It is not nearly good enough. If anything, residents’ worries have grown even more acute during the pandemic, when so many people will have been forced to stay at home day after day, week after week. This has had huge impacts on mental health for everybody, but how much worse for those worrying about the safety of their own homes and the financial impact that this also threatens?

The situation is clear: tenants should not have to stay in homes that are unsafe, leaseholders should not have to pay for remediation for conditions that they were assured met appropriate standards and the Government have it within their power to take steps now to end the misery that has beset so many people for the last few years. They should support this motion and act now.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to speak in this important debate as a proudly Jewish parliamentarian.

This year, Holocaust Memorial Day and today’s debate coincide with the Jewish festival of Tu Bishvat. It is one of four “new years” within the Jewish calendar, marking the birthday of trees for the purposes of the mitzvot relating to farming practices and the permissibility of the fruits of those trees for eating or bringing to Jerusalem as a tithe. In contemporary Judaism, and in the context of increased awareness around ecological issues and the climate emergency, the festival is having something of a renaissance, with millions of trees planted every year and lively debates within our community about what we can learn from our traditions of sustainable farming practices and respect for the divinity of the natural world. In the context of Holocaust Memorial Day, there are some deeper lessons we can take from Tu Bishvat into our reflection, as we honour the lives of those murdered in the holocaust and subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur, and into action as we resolve to make “never again” about more than just platitudes.

I spoke in my speech last year of the incredible story of the Sarajevo Haggadah and Dervis Korkut, a Muslim man who is recognised by the Yad Vashem world holocaust memorial centre as a righteous gentile to whom the Jewish people owe a huge debt. We are not short of these stories of heroism and resistance, and in this place we are enormously privileged in our position of being able bring about the kinds of large scale changes that these heroes could only dream of. We need not risk our lives smuggling Swedish passports into Nazi-occupied Hungary, like Raoul Wallenberg, or smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, like Irena Sendler, or hiding Jews in the Albanian mountains, like Vesel and Fatima Veseli, because we can bring about a fair and just immigration system that protects the lives of refugees, we can work to halt the proliferation of fascist propaganda online, and we can use our international standing, our influence and our trade policy to hold other nations accountable. We need not look the other way as people are persecuted around the world when we have both the moral obligation and the means as a nation to “be the light”. It brings me great sadness to say that, as a House, we are failing in this duty. Solidarity is our most powerful weapon against genocide, and our communities must not allow us to be divided nor to see others scapegoated or disasters exploited by the far right.

One of the stories often told from the Talmud at this time of year is of Honi the circle maker. One day, Honi the circle maker was walking on the road and saw a man planting a carob tree. Honi asked the man, “How long will it take for this tree to bear fruit?” The man replied, “Seventy years.” Honi then asked the man, “And do you think you will live another 70 years to eat the fruit of this tree?” The man answered, “Perhaps not. In the same way as my fathers planted for me, I will also plant for my children.”

We know about the long-reaching shadow of inherited pasts and post-memory—the relationship that the generation after bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those that came before—but Tu B’Shevat marks the time when the sap starts flowing in the trees again, the welcome reminder of nature’s rhythm and light returning after the darkness, with trees growing, blooming and fruiting. As we preserve the memory of those who can no longer share their own stories, all of us have a duty to sow the seeds of solidarity and friendship for our children, even if we may never live to see the fruits ourselves.

Hospitality Industry: Government Support

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Westminster Hall

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) on securing this important debate. This discussion is not before time. Within the wider hospitality industry, I will focus on the pub trade, as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on pubs.

We all recognise the crisis that the pandemic has caused pubs over the past year, with takings having collapsed through the floor, thousands of staff made redundant, and the closure of many pubs that may never open again. Not all of that damage was inevitable. Landlords invested many thousands each in making their establishments covid-secure during 2020, only to have rules changed or imposed on them at short notice, collapsing their trade time and again. I remain angry that many of those restrictions were put in place without any scientific evidence for them. We asked for any available, but it seems that Ministers simply thought that they should be seen to be doing something—whether enforcing pub curfews or requiring farcical definitions of substantial meals, prohibiting the trade of wet pubs.

Decisions that were not based on scientific recommendations led to public resentment and non-compliance, as well as the exasperation of the industry, which is doing its best. Now that we are in full lockdown once again we have another example. Official guidance suggests that pubs are permitted to sell alcohol only for delivery as opposed to takeaway. What is the reason for that decision, which puts them at a disadvantage to off-licences and supermarkets? I cannot believe that there is a scientific basis, so that discrimination must be because there is not a strong enough voice in Government making the case for pubs and the wider hospitality sector.

I am glad that the Government recognise the need for further support for businesses that are prevented from trading by law, but one-time £9,000 grants are a drop in the pint glass. Pubs up and down the country need the reassurance of a proper financial package that recognises what they have lost this year and what they contribute to our communities as a vital social hub. When the pandemic is over, people will want to congregate in relief to see their friends again. It will be devastating if the venues in which they can do that have died in the meantime.

Arcadia and Debenhams: Business Support and Job Retention

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

I know Guildford very well. It is a destination for residents around Surrey and further afield. Yes, we must all work together to get the balance right so that we do not hollow out our town centres, including Guildford.

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

The Debenhams liquidation is a tragedy not only for the thousands of Debenhams employees but for all retailers in shopping centres like Warrington’s Golden Square, where Debenhams is the anchor department store driving footfall for the whole centre. With Arcadia brand stores in Golden Square also at risk, and confidence in the wider retail sector waning, what specific support will shopping centres like Golden Square get to protect all its retailers, their employees, and the vibrancy of our town centres?

[Paul Scully]

In terms of shopping centres it is really important that we get the balance right between landlords and tenants. The moratorium helps tenants but clearly does not help landlords, so we have to get the balance right. We will work with the retail sector to try to achieve that balance in the weeks and months to come.

Leaseholders and Cladding

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

Local authorities have a suite of measures with respect to enforcement—fines and the like that can be brought to bear to address the concerns, or some of the concerns, that my hon. Friend raises. As I have said previously and shall say again, the work of Michael Wade, a very experienced player in the insurance sector with 40 years’ experience behind him, is to bring the sector together to find sensible and innovative solutions that will result in the costs that may fall to leaseholders being mitigated. That is the solution to this problem, not simply writing a blank cheque on behalf of taxpayers, which would send entirely the wrong message to the developers and the owners of these buildings, who are, in the first place, responsible for remediating the issues that they have caused.

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I should make a declaration of interest that I am a leaseholder, although I am personally unaffected by the matter we are considering. However, I have heard from a number of constituents who are—or whose children are—affected. Does the Minister agree that the principle is simple? They have purchased flats in good faith that have subsequently been shown to have been built potentially dangerously. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) said, that extends far beyond combustible cladding. If they had bought some other item with inherent faults, they would not be expected to pay for repairs, so those leaseholders should not be liable for remedial works to make their homes safe, should they?

End of Eviction Moratorium

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. If a landlord wishes to pursue an action through the courts, that landlord will have to give the courts clear and defined information about the status of the tenants and the way in which the covid-19 emergency has affected them. If any landlord fails to do so, or attempts to circumvent those rules, the courts can adjourn the case, pushing it to the end of the queue, which will cost the landlord, if nothing else, probably quite a bit of money. So we have made sure there are tenant protections in place as we move through this crisis.

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

As of yesterday, Warrington North is subject to local lockdown. The Government have announced that bailiffs will not evict in areas under local lockdown, but the eviction ban has been lifted and the guidance for bailiffs remains unpublished. Given that local lockdown guidance does not clearly rule out bailiff actions, what assurances can the Minister give to constituents of mine in the private rented sector, anxious about losing their homes as we stand on the precipice of a second wave of this pandemic?

[Christopher Pincher]

As I said in a previous answer, the Lord Chancellor has written to the bailiffs’ association to make absolutely clear what its responsibilities are.  Further guidance will be published in due course, but we are absolutely clear that, where there is a lockdown where movement restrictions are in place, evictions should not take place. The Lord Chancellor has made it clear in his letter and I have made it clear from the Dispatch Box.

Planning Process: Probity

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

As I said in my opening remarks, planning is essentially a local matter. The vast majority of local planning decisions are made locally. Sometimes they are appealed against to the Planning Inspectorate, but only on a small number occasions will those applications come to a Secretary of State. I am very keen to ensure that the planning system is swift, transparent and reflects and adheres to local needs, and I shall make sure that my hon. Friend’s comments and concerns are properly reflected in all our considerations about planning processes.

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

Campaigners in Warrington North have been battling to save Peel Hall from development for over three decades. With planning law already weighted so heavily in favour of development, what assurances can the Minister give that the developer cannot simply make a substantial donation to the Conservative party to subvert the process and that residents will get the fair hearing they deserve and can have confidence in that process?

[Christopher Pincher]

The planning law in this country is very clear, as the hon. Lady knows. I suggest that she go and read it.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate, and one that is very close to my heart. As part of this country’s vibrant and diverse Jewish community, I have had the honour of knowing a number of holocaust survivors at first hand—like Marianne, who came to this country on the Kindertransport, and who taught me and so many others in my community Hebrew. I will be forever indebted to her for helping me to access the Torah much more deeply. Our tradition teaches that the Torah is the tree of life to all who hold fast to it, and I thank and cherish Marianne for giving me that opportunity. With the passage of time, as the holocaust fades from living memory, this is something I will never take for granted.

I pay tribute to the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for their work in providing more people, particularly young people, with opportunities to hear powerful first-hand testimony from survivors and to learn about the holocaust. I also pay tribute to the survivors for their bravery and for their generosity in educating others, reliving again and again some of the most traumatic personal experiences that many of us can never even begin to comprehend.

There is something about the sheer scale of the holocaust that makes it so hard to comprehend; it becomes almost an abstraction. Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager, the part that really brought it all home for me was standing in one of the gas chambers and realising how small it was, how many people had been murdered inside it, and in such a relatively short timescale. It began to dawn on me how mechanised the holocaust was. It was a whole system, designed with the goal of murdering Jewish, Roma and Sinti, disabled and LGBT people on an industrial scale. Civilians from across Nazi-occupied Europe and political prisoners were also murdered in great numbers. As someone raised with the belief that humans are inherently good, facing up to the reality of man’s capacity for evil towards his fellow man totally shook my world view.

In the midst of the horror of the holocaust, however, there were some glimmers of hope that should stand as an inspiration to all of us in upholding the diversity of this country, which is its strength, and not being bystanders to evil and to fascist tyranny. I encourage all Members of this House to research the story, for example, of the Sarajevo Haggadah—a priceless artefact and a keystone of Bosnia’s Jewish heritage. The Haggadah escaped the Spanish inquisition and migrated east along with the Jews expelled from Spain, and in 1894 it was obtained by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Nazi occupation of Sarajevo, it was saved from destruction by the museum’s chief librarian—a Muslim man named Derviš Korkut, who risked his life to smuggle this priceless, sacred artefact from the museum, giving it to an imam who hid it under the floorboards of a mosque outside Sarajevo, then returning it to the Jewish people after the war. Derviš Korkut is now recognised by the Yad Vashem world holocaust memorial centre as a righteous gentile to whom the Jewish people owe a huge debt.

Holocaust Memorial Day also commemorates the post-war genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia. Four years ago this month, I took part in the Lessons From Srebrenica programme organised by the charity Remembering Srebrenica with an inter-faith delegation of 21 women from Greater Manchester. Our trip had a specific focus on the women of the Bosnian genocide, learning about the use of rape as an act of genocide, including in camps set up specifically for this purpose—on European soil, in my lifetime. I met the mothers of the Srebrenica and Žepa enclaves—women like Munira Subašić, who has shown such unimaginable resilience and empathy. I was particularly struck when speaking to her about the trials taking place and her saying that she had pleaded for clemency for a Serb soldier who had been directly involved in the murder of her family because he had recently had a young family and she did not want anyone else to have their families taken away from them like hers was from her. It was a harrowing experience and one that will stay with me forever.

This experience has hardened my resolve to bring all our communities together so that never again can such horrors take place. We cannot allow our communities to be pitted against each other. Our oppressions and our destinies to overcome these are inextricably linked to one another. The Bosnian genocide was within my own lifetime. I am determined that my generation will carry forward the memory of the holocaust and subsequent post-war genocides for the generations that come behind us. As Elie Wiesel, of blessed memory, wrote, we now have

“a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

We must not allow these atrocities to fade from the public consciousness, nor our commitment to standing against hatred and division to be dulled by time. We must stand firm against fascism and confront it by any means necessary to stop this vile poison from again taking root. If you will forgive my bad Yiddish, mir veln zey iberlebn—we will outlive them.