Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

2nd reading
Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

Generally, I welcome what is in the Bill, as does the Select Committee, based on our 2019 inquiry. It is what is not in the Bill that is disappointing—that is the difference. Let me go back to our report, which built on the work of the APPG—I congratulate the Father of the House, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), and my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), who is now a shadow Minister, on their work. That report led to the work of the Competition and Markets Authority on mis-selling and the Law Commission report.

I want to go through some of the Select Committee’s recommendations and what the Government have followed through on, which we welcome. I also want to look at the matters omitted from the legislation, which could easily be added in Committee if the Government want to. Leasehold flats are more complicated, and they will probably not be added to the Bill in Committee. The Select Committee accepts the complications, particularly where properties are part commercial, part residential. However, our report was four years ago, which is a long time for the Secretary of State to work up a scheme to deal with leasehold flats, but we are not there. In the meantime, I hope that he will commit to the Committee’s recommendation for a programme of education and information for leaseholders, to ensure a better understanding of what commonhold is all about. There is a lack of understanding and information, and if we are to move to commonhold for new properties and encourage leaseholders in existing properties to convert, that programme is needed.

The legislation deals primarily with leasehold houses. We welcome the commitment to no new leasehold houses—or we will when the clauses are added to the Bill. We understand that that is for Committee. We welcome the commitment to removing onerous ground rents. The Select Committee looked in detail at the argument about the European convention on human rights.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill does not address issues associated with the growth in leasehold houses over the last few years? Earlier, I mentioned Persimmon, which has left a lot of residents with leases that include not only their own properties but common areas. Traditionally, when my hon. Friend and I were in local government, those would have been taken over by a local authority.

[Mr Betts]

There are real issues with that, which I was going to address later, but I will do so now. It is important to strengthen the right to manage, both for leaseholders and for freeholders in these estates who own the freehold of their house but not of the communal areas. I said earlier that in all property purchases where common areas remain in private ownership, there should be, at the point of purchase, a clear understanding of the agreement between the local authority and the developer about who is responsible for those common areas. In many circumstances it is simply opaque. Often, purchasers do not know who is responsible and are sent on a wild goose chase to find out once they have bought their property.

Returning to onerous ground rents, the Select Committee took counsel’s opinion, which was quite interesting, and made recommendations in paragraphs 114 to 116 of our report. There were two clear arguments why removing onerous ground rents from leases retrospectively was completely compatible with the European convention on human rights. The first, which most of us may not have thought about, is that controlling or changing rent is not confiscation of property but control of its use, so it does not conflict with the article on removing people’s property rights. Secondly, the convention includes a justification where the proposal has a wider beneficial impact on society, which can be offset against any impact on the property owner. Counsel’s opinion was that it was therefore perfectly justifiable under the European convention to remove onerous ground rents on existing properties.

Local Government Finance (England)

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

We have just heard it in a debate on the police grant, and we have heard it in this debate with the Secretary of State: the Government are treating 2019 like year zero. Anything that happened before then was nothing to do with them. He is increasingly trying to push the narrative that decisions around funding, local government, policing, fire or anything have somehow happened by accident. They have not: they have happened because of deliberate political decisions that, in some cases, the Secretary of State—who I think has been in the Government since 2010—has taken.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) said that the most savage cuts have been made to local government, with a 56.3% cut in the past decade. The Cameron-Osborne approach was to cut the central Government funding to councils from central taxation and push it on to local council tax payers, thereby deflecting the blame when local councillors and council officials had to take some very tough decisions. We have had the galling situation over the past 10 years in County Durham of Conservative councillors standing up and blaming the Labour council for raising the council tax, when they know the real reason is that the formula being used has shifted the way local government is funded in this country from central to local taxation.

In County Durham’s case, that means that the county council’s budget has been cut by £232 million a year—40% of the council’s budget. The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) referred to Lord Pickles, and in the early days, we were told, “Don’t worry about this; it can all be sorted out if councils get more efficient”—that if they had fewer pot plants in council offices, as I think was said at one stage, or stopped serving tea and coffee at meetings, or sacked all their chief officers, somehow that would fill the gap. Well, that is absolute nonsense.

Another issue that affects counties like County Durham is that we now have an inbuilt mechanism that deliberately moves money from the poor areas with the highest need, to more affluent areas. That is no accident, but the result of a political choice. I take as an example County Durham, where 58% of our properties are in council tax band A, so if we raised the council tax by 1% we would raise £3.8 million. There are a couple of higher-band properties in my constituency—there is at least one castle, which may well be in the higher tax bracket—but there are very few higher band properties across County Durham. That should be compared that with Wokingham in Surrey, where only 2.8% of properties are in band A, so if it raises council tax by 1% it generates £8.9 million. Add to that the fact that we are not just moving that money to areas of lower need, but are ensuring that the poorest people in County Durham, or Knowsley or any other deprived community, pay the most, because we all know that council tax is a very aggressive form of taxation.

That is continuing. We again have a one-year settlement, and councils are now having to work out what they will do in coming years. The Policing Minister told us earlier that when it came to the fairer funding review on police funding, the train had left the station. He gave no indication of when it would arrive. Unless we tackle this issue, councils such as County Durham will always be at a disadvantage

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East said, there is a lot of press and PR. The Government work on the basis of slogans, gimmicks and spin, and the latest one is levelling up. I might be one of the few people who have actually read the entire levelling-up White Paper, including the annex.

[Mr Betts]

Sad.

[Mr Jones]

Yes, I am, and the hon. Member for Redcar (Jacob Young) called me an anorak, so possibly I am both.

The White Paper’s analysis is not bad in that it raises the issue that we should be tackling, but it offers no solution to enable us to do that. I really enjoyed the undergraduate thesis on the Venetian city state and how Babylon was built, but again it did not reach any conclusions. Nevertheless, we have a Government who talk in terms of levelling up. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East is right: you cannot have levelling up if you exclude the way in which local government is financed.

The other sad thing is that the Government’s approach has mainly been around capital projects. I think it is because the Prime Minister has a fixation—he has a fixation on quite a few things—on projects where you can see that something is being built. No doubt a Minister or local Conservative Member of Parliament can unveil a plaque and say, “This is what we have achieved.” As my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth) said, if it was a fair process, fine.

I used to have a saying, when I was in local government, that any idiot can spend capital, which they can. The more difficult thing is to get the revenue streams into the future. Like my right hon. Friend, distantly I used to understand local government finance, but no doubt my knowledge is a bit out of date. What I do recognise is that we can spend as much capital on projects as we like, but what is needed is the revenue funding to go alongside it for the day-to-day needs of our local communities.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley covered the bidding process very well, but the point is that, if it were a fair process, then fine, but it is not. Quite clearly, it is a pork barrel approach to the doling out of money to certain Conservative seats. Let me give an example in County Durham. Which constituency has either got new towns funding or levelling-up funding? The answer is Bishop Auckland.

Defence Spending

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jones]

No, I will let others make their speeches.

Ministers kept repeating that claim. I kept asking them about it, but never got an explanation. I think it came from a National Audit Office report from 2009 that said that if the equipment budget was flat over the next 10 years, that might get us to £36 billion; if it rose with inflation, it would be about £6 billion in the defence capital budget. The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) was talking about the two budgets conflated.

We then saw slash and burn, with stupid decisions such as the scrapping of Nimrod and the Harriers, vicious cuts made to people’s pay, and redundancies. That led us to a situation where we have an Army that, at 82,000 personnel, is the smallest it has ever been. No one has yet explained to me how that figure was set.

We are told that the defence budget is rising, but the foundations are shaky. If we look at the 2015 SDSR, we see a huge amount of it is based on billions of pounds of efficiencies that have not yet been and cannot be met. To return to the claim that Labour somehow left a £38 billion black hole, if the situation was so terrible, it is strange that two years in, the right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond) eliminated it overnight.

In defence, we need honesty. There is a degree of consensus across the House on the support needed for members of our armed forces and for defence. What we need now is an honest stocktake, looking at our commitments and what we want to do in the world, and ensuring that, as the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan) said, we fund not just the capital side—equipment is important—but the people. I hear all the time that we can do more with more sophisticated equipment, but as any military technician will say, mass and people are still important. We must invest in them over the long term.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

The hon. Gentleman can have an extra minute, because the Front-Bench spokespeople have agreed to take only five minutes, so hon. Members have four minutes each.

[Mr Jones]

I always liked the Minister; he is very good.

Investment in people does not just mean balancing the in-year budget, which I suspect is what has happened. How was money taken straight out of the defence budget in 2010? It happened in two ways: by taking equipment out, as the Government did by putting a wrecking ball through the Nimrod and Harrier programmes; and by slowing the recruitment pipeline. That will lead to problems in future years as people develop and we find that we have capability gaps, not in equipment but in people’s skills, which are important.

Regarding the Conservative party’s commitment to defence expenditure, let us hope that the promises made by the two contenders to become the next Prime Minister hold water. I will support any Government who want to increase spending and, more important, invest in the people we rely on every single day for our peace and security.

Cities and Local Government Devolution [Lords] Bill

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

Wednesday 21st October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Of course, the whole principle of the devolution that the Government propose, which I support, is that areas should come forward with their own ideas about what they want to see devolved. Why should they not also come forward with their own ideas about how that devolution should be exercised and about the governance arrangements for it?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I agree with my hon. Friend, but it is obvious why the Government want mayors. In certain areas—in his area and in others—they are hoping to break up the powers of locally elected Labour local authorities in the hope that if they have an elected mayor, they will either get an independent or someone who claims to be independent but is actually a member of the Conservative party.

[Mr Betts]

I would not want to second guess the motives of the Secretary of State, so I will use my own arguments to resist what the Government are trying to do.

Apart from the inconsistency of approach, the proposals are confusing. That takes me back to the point I made in my intervention on the Minister. In the Sheffield city region the economic powers, which are important and cover skills, economic development and the infrastructure associated with it, are to be devolved to the combined authority, which will cover nine districts—four metropolitan and five non-metropolitan districts. But as I understand it from the deal, the mayor will have responsibility for just transport. So the mayor is to run transport, and the combined authority is to run economic development. The public want some consistency of approach on these matters. I do not believe that the combined authority, the district, would naturally have come forward with a proposal that broke up the responsibilities in this way.

Local Government Finance (England)

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

Wednesday 13th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

There are lots of factors that have been put into the formula in the past. We can all make arguments about the details. For example, it is more expensive to provide services in Sheffield because of its topography. We have hills, so construction costs, such as for the tram, go up. But on the index of deprivation, the most deprived areas will get the biggest cuts. There is no argument about that—if there were, Ministers would be jumping up to the Dispatch Box to deny it.

The Secretary of State says, “It is all right, councils have got reserves. There is no need for cuts.” That is not true. Yes, Sheffield has around £150 million of reserves, but more than £25 million of it is held for schools, and it cannot spend that; £25 million is in the housing account, ring-fenced and dedicated; some £50 million is to be allocated for capital projects; and then there is the money that has to be used to match-fund a PFI scheme that the Government have just approved—I give credit to them for taking forward that Labour scheme. That leaves around £11 million of reserves, and it would be folly for the council to put that money into services next year and leave itself with no reserves. So the council is being prudent and appropriate, as are most councils, in how it deals with that issue.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a sleight of hand in things like the new homes bonus? The Government are giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Newcastle, for example, will get £6 million for 2018-19, but will lose nearly £17 million. The 12 councils in the north-east will lose some £275 million over the period.

[Mr Betts]

There are smoke and mirrors all over the place. Ministers talk about the new homes bonus as if it were new money as well as new homes. It is not: it is top-sliced from the grant. In Sheffield’s case, the figures are very stark. For every 55p the council gets from the new homes bonus, it would have received £1 if the money had been allocated through the grants system. It is not that Sheffield does not want to build new homes. There is a reason. The market is flat in the private sector, the money for housing associations comes through the Homes and Communities Agency and the money for council housing is not there because the Government have capped the amount councils can spend from the housing revenue account. That is why not so many new homes are being built in Sheffield—it is not through want of trying or want of effort on the part of the council.

I note that the council was blamed by the Deputy Prime Minister the other day when he said that it was cutting front-line services. Yes, it is. There is a proposal to close the Don Valley stadium where Jessica Ennis trained because there is not enough money to keep it going. There are cuts to early-years provision because the council has lost more than £6 million in grant directly, so it cannot be kept going. There are cuts to the eligibility criteria for adult social care.

The Deputy Prime Minister ridiculed the council for cuts to libraries. What the council is doing is a very detailed and proper consultation, recognising that it simply cannot afford to keep libraries going in the way they were funded in the past. It is looking at 10 different models from 10 different authorities across the country. Those are out for public consultation on the different ways of doing things. That is a responsible way to try to approach a very difficult situation.

The council was also ridiculed by the Deputy Prime Minister for spending £2 million on council meeting rooms. No, it has not done so. It has had to make some essential repairs to a grade 1 listed building, the town hall, and it is putting money into reorganising the council accommodation to save £30 million in running costs over a 10-year period. It is not just Labour-controlled Sheffield that is doing that; many councils up and down the country and of all political persuasions are approaching things responsibly in that sort of way.

The Government should listen to the siren voices—Sir Merrick Cockell, Baroness Eaton, the leader of Kent county council. These are not just siren voices, but voices of reason. The graph of doom, whether it comes from Birmingham, Barnet or Sheffield, is a reality. The reality is that if we keep on cutting council funding and the demand for social care goes up, other council services are going to get squeezed out of existence.

Ministers are fond of saying that localism is not just about councils. No, it is not; it is about communities as well. At the end of the day, these cuts are not going to hit councils; they are going to hit communities, and they are going to hit the most deprived communities hardest. When the public, already sceptical, see these cuts become a reality, the anger against this Government will grow considerably in the coming months.

Local Government Finance

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

Sheffield city council is making cuts of 11% in its budget this year, and that is substantially more than many councils in more affluent parts of the country are making—much bigger in percentage terms, let alone in amounts per head.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

rose—

[Mr Betts]

I will give way to my hon. Friend, but then I must make progress.

[Mr Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is nonsense to suggest, as the Minister did, that somehow an organisation such as Sheffield city council can have 11% taken from its budget without that affecting front-line services—no matter how many pot plants are consigned to the dustbin?

[Mr Betts]

I agree with that point without in any way saying that Sheffield city council spends a great deal of money on pot plants; of course it does not.

Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Clive Betts and Kevan Jones

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

Absolutely. We are told that vulnerable people—perhaps people on very low incomes with children—are going to be protected, or have to be protected, by councils under the scheme, but are they going to be or not? Are the Government going to insist on that? We are not quite sure. We are told that local authorities have to take account of the tapers under universal credit, but what does that mean? Are they obliged to respect completely the 65% taper element within universal credit or not? If so, will that mean that a smaller and smaller number of people will have the totality of the cuts in benefits imposed on them? That is the reality. Will the Government explain what they think is going to happen?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one problem that the Government seem to ignore is that a lot of the people affected will not be on benefits but will be in low-paid work and that this will be a disincentive for them to work?

[Mr Betts]

Of course it will, unless the Government are saying that those people should be exempt as well. To what extent will councils be obliged to take account of the tapers in universal credit in the system they devise? Will Ministers give a clear answer on that? If councils have to take account of it, full stop, that will really throw the onus back on attacking benefits and on reductions for the unemployed. Is that the situation? Is that what Ministers are trying to achieve?

The LGA has done some calculations to the best of its knowledge and information. It says that because of the exemptions for pensioners and others for whom the Government say local authorities cannot make reductions under the scheme, those who are left whose benefits can be reduced—the 1.3 million claimants out of the 5 million who currently claim—will lose, on average, £320 each a year. That is £6 a week being lost by people who are already on low incomes—that is why they are claiming benefits in the first place. That will be on top of any other benefit losses from any other benefit reductions the Government intend. Have the Government analysed whether that £320 figure is right? Do they contest it?