Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Michael Gove)]

Earlier this month we launched the consultation on Awaab’s law, which insists upon time limits for repairs in the social rented sector. In the shaping of this law and many other initiatives and interventions to help people in social housing, the example of Tony Lloyd, the late Member for Rochdale, is in all our minds and hearts. Awaab was one of his constituents, and Tony Lloyd could not have been kinder or more supportive of the efforts of my Department and others to see justice for Awaab’s family.

[Ian Byrne]

The household support fund has supported 330,000 households in Liverpool since its introduction. The focus needs to shift from crisis support to prevention but in the short term the demand for local welfare is rising. Like many other councils, Liverpool City Council says the household support fund will need to continue beyond March 2024 to keep residents well supported to stay in and enter work and prevent an escalating crisis, reducing pressure on public services including local authorities. What representations has the Minister made to the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure the continuation of the fund after March?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: the fund has helped many communities in need, particularly in Liverpool. He and other Liverpool MPs have been assiduous in making the case for its continuation and I have passed that on to colleagues.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Ian Byrne Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 11th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It has been a privilege to sit here for five hours and listen to all the passionate contributions from all parts of the House, with a pretty unanimous view. First, I thank Cath Williams, Katie Kendrick and Barry Kushner for their help in my constituency with the many leaseholder issues that I have had. For millions of people, the housing sector is broken. Everywhere within it we see a huge imbalance of power, and that has had a devastating impact on the health and wellbeing of thousands of my constituents in Liverpool, West Derby, and so many people across the country, as we have heard today. That injustice is encapsulated by the frankly medieval ownership framework, which creates a clear imbalance of power between leaseholder and freeholder. The scandal of leasehold must be brought to an end for the millions who have bought their home but do not feel like they own it.

While I welcome the promise of some of the reforms in this long-overdue Bill, many of which came from the Select Committee on which I serve, I am extremely disappointed that it does not directly tackle ground rents. I suspect that the Government know exactly what existing leaseholders urgently require from them on ground rents, so I am dismayed that rather than addressing that matter directly, they have decided to consult on it. The vested interests have definitely won again.

Practically every constituent I have heard from on this matter—and there have been many—tells me that they want ground rents abolished so that they can be guaranteed secure, ground rent-free ownership of their property for years to come, without the stress and expense of repeated lease extensions. I note that the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) agrees. He spoke eloquently about it today, and he said last week that ground rents on leasehold properties needed to be

“peppercorn or zero, it’s as simple as that.”

My constituents also want to see a Bill that contains all the Law Commission’s proposals, rather than the watered-down version before us today. I am glad that our Front Bench team confirmed that that is what we will do if we get into government.

I am also dismayed that the Government have not gone so far as to abolish new leaseholds on flats. That is a huge mistake. Can the Minister give a reason why flats, which make up 70% of leasehold properties, will continue to be sold as leasehold, when he was elected on a specific manifesto promise to end that practice? The Government had the opportunity in this Bill to put a stop to what the Secretary of State himself recently called the outdated “feudal system” of leasehold. Instead, they appear content for new flats to continue to be bought and sold as leasehold. That is incredibly disappointing for so many people across the country.

If Ministers are serious about doing away with leasehold, they need to ban leasehold on all new flats, as well as new houses. Let us be clear: the only argument for retaining leasehold on flats is to allow management agencies and freeholders to continue to exploit leaseholders for the purpose of profit over principle, with the status quo prevailing. That has not been the mood music from those on the Government Front Bench, but talk is cheap in this place, as I have found out.

Until leasehold is banned, homeowners will continue to be held hostage in their own homes. Given the current economic situation, the delays and lack of clarity on a timetable for overdue reform are increasingly frustrating for my constituents. It is unacceptable that they continue to be subjected to extortionate, unjustified charges and escalating ground rents. What is more, I am convinced that the leasehold system is not only unfair, but a genuine health and safety risk, as has been outlined today, when we consider the continued delays to the vital fire safety recommendations made by the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire.

The National Leasehold Campaign has welcomed this long-overdue legislation, but considers several key items to be missing from the Bill, and I completely agree. Those measures include, but are not limited to: prescribed capitalisation and deferment rates for valuers to value lease extensions or freehold purchases; abolishing forfeiture, which is used against leaseholders and serves as a massive windfall for freeholders; an online calculator for lease extension and freehold purchase; steps to progress the adoption of commonhold; the regulation of managing agents, as we have heard about today; and making it easier for leaseholders to have the right to manage.

If the Government are truly serious about ending the nightmare for leaseholders, they need to urgently revisit this legislation. I suggest that they meet the National Leasehold Campaign and the Law Commission to ensure that the key recommendations by both bodies are included in the Bill as it moves forward.

Renters (Reform) Bill

Ian Byrne Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 23rd October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

For my constituents in Liverpool, West Derby, and for millions across the country, the private rented sector is the only housing option available because of the disastrous turning away from the post-war mass council house provision. Those long-term political decisions have led us to our current crisis.

The private rented sector has utterly failed to provide homes that are decent, affordable and allow people to live in safety, security and dignity. More than one in 10 privately rented homes contains a category 1 hazard that could kill or seriously maim, and tenants who raise complaints are two and a half times more likely to be handed an eviction notice, which often leads to a forced move that is disruptive to the family and to children’s education.

Local authorities have had their resources and capabilities decimated under the Government’s austerity programme. This morning alone, three families in West Derby have contacted my office after being given an eviction notice by a private landlord, with housing provision scant in Liverpool.

I have previously raised in the House the case of my constituent with asthma whose landlord left him in a damp property with no gas supply in the middle of winter. I have raised the cases of constituents, including children, who were hospitalised and suffered serious health impacts as a result of disrepair in privately rented homes, and cases of families living in fear of bailiffs, having been served a section 21 notice by their landlord after complaining about terrible conditions in their home. One constituent said, “Section 21 takes the humanity out of the situation and that’s precisely the problem—we are humans and our lives are being carelessly destroyed!”

Since I raised these cases a year and a half ago, my constituents have seen no changes to the law, so we finally welcome the Second Reading of the Renters (Reform) Bill, which we hope might at least bring an end to the nightmare of section 21 no-fault evictions. The delays to the Bill have been shameful. Nearly a quarter of a million private renters have been served with no-fault eviction notices since the Government first pledged to ban them in April 2019. During the delay between First Reading and Second Reading alone, Citizens Advice has had to help more than 10,500 people with section 21 evictions.

The Secretary of State has now said:

“Implementation of the reforms in this bill won’t proceed until further improvements are in place and HMCTS is fully prepared for these changes.”

How long will that take? Can the Secretary of State explain how this commitment will be reflected in legislation?

My constituents and hundreds of thousands of others have zero faith that they will ever see a ban on section 21 evictions under this Government, because they have seen 13 years of the Government’s complete destruction of the justice system, which has caused so much damage to those seeking justice in so many sections of society, including housing. I sit on the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee. From the Secretary of State’s response to the Committee’s report, it feels as if the ideological destruction of the justice system by his Government is now being used as a cover to bow down to the lobbying from landlords—many of them seem to be on his Back Benches—and to kick the ban of section 21 into the long grass.

Added to that are the concerns of tenants, unions and charities, who welcome the ban on section 21 evictions but are concerned that the Bill will replace section 21 with potential loopholes for landlords to evict tenants under other terms that are unfair or extremely vaguely defined. They are also concerned that landlords will continue to be able, in effect, to evict tenants by raising rents to unsustainable levels. I hope that the Secretary of State will address those fears and loopholes when the Bill is in Committee.

This Bill should be an opportunity to empower tenants and hardwire social justice into the system. So many people are looking to the Bill to rebalance the scales of justice, which are weighted so heavily against tenants and so in favour of profit. Any delay in bringing in a no-loopholes ban on section 21 evictions really is unforgivable. A nation awaits.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Monday 5th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dehenna Davison]

Absolutely not.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

4. What steps he is taking to help local authorities with budgetary pressures caused by inflation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Lee Rowley)]

I am not sure that I can respond with quite so much brevity, Mr Speaker!

In the most recent financial settlement, the Government provided billions more in taxpayer subsidy to support councils, including funds to mitigate inflation. Councils are always under a duty and a responsibility to improve and transform services and make them more efficient, but the Government continue to support them when we are able to do so.

[Ian Byrne]

A recent report from our Select Committee highlights the fact that local authorities’ revenue funding from central Government has been reduced dramatically since austerity began in 2010, and notes that levelling-up funds generally do not replace grant funding because they are capital, not revenue. Can the Minister be honest and admit that the latest local government finance settlement will entrench and widen already huge regional inequalities, leaving the levelling-up agenda in tatters?

[Lee Rowley]

Absolutely not. [Laughter.]

Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th January 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Bob Blackman]

Clauses 4 to 7 are the heart of the Bill, because clause 4 sets out the licensing regime that we wish to introduce. The measure is permissive and will allow local authorities to introduce the licensing scheme if they so choose. There is a great deal of detail in the clause, which leads on to the further provision in clause 5 and the provision in clause 6 about the need to consult, as the Minister has set out. Consultation is mightily important, because this is where all the good providers need to give the Government feedback on how they are operating and what needs to happen.

I should explain the amendments that I have tabled in respect of consultation. In the draft Bill, we put the Local Government Association down as a statutory consultee. Following that, the LGA came back to us and said, “We don’t want to be a statutory consultee, but we generally want local authorities to be.” The LGA does not want to act on behalf of all local authorities because this is a permissive measure and not all local authorities will want to introduce a licensing scheme. Therefore, the amendments are sensible tidying-up amendments. I think our explanation yesterday may have caused Ministers and officials some confusion, but I hope that the amendments can be made to ensure that the legislation is appropriate.

The key is making the licensing scheme, if it is introduced, common across local authorities. One of the things that has been brought home to me loud and clear by a number of organisations that operate across a number of local authorities is that they do not want a licensing scheme to be different from one authority to another, so as far as possible it needs to be a common practice across local authorities. It also needs to be compulsory. Birmingham Members know that Birmingham tried to introduce a voluntary scheme; all the good providers signed up, but funnily enough the rogue landlords said, “Well, we don’t have to, so we won’t.”

In debates on previous clauses, we talked about the standards to be provided and the requirements on local authorities and the Secretary of State, but the heart of the Bill is a licensing scheme that is fit for purpose and ensures that fit and proper persons operate in these areas and provide accommodation. We must ensure that not-for-profit originations are not completely inconvenienced and that the fees are not so high that organisations are impoverished and driven out of providing accommodation in the first place.

Exempt accommodation can be provided only through a not-for-profit organisation. The scandal at the moment is that unscrupulous landlords buy a property, expand it to the maximum possible under permitted development, provide a small living area and a small bathroom, stack the house with as many people as they physically can, and then claim housing benefit on an enhanced basis for vulnerable people. Members might say, “Well, hang on. That’s a private landlord operating that way,” but what the private landlord does is set up a not-for-profit organisation alongside that, to which they lease the property. The not-for-profit organisation runs the service and provides the rent to the landlord, but the landlord is also running the not-for-profit organisation.

That scam has to be dealt with, which is one of the reasons why a licensing regime needs to be introduced so that we have a fit-and-proper person test and ensure all the aspects of what needs to be provided. We must ensure that accommodation is decent and that the services for vulnerable people are provided in the way they should be. We cannot have a situation in which vulnerable people are exploited and almost retained as prisoners within their own accommodation. That is extremely important.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I wholeheartedly agree with this Bill. We have seen on the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee some of what the hon. Gentleman has outlined and some of the scandalous places people are forced to live. The leverage that rogue landlords have over them is absolutely appalling and at times life-threatening. Is he talking about landlord licensing only for exempt accommodation, or right across the board? Should private landlords be part of the landlord licensing scheme? A pilot was successful in Liverpool, but it has ended.

[Bob Blackman]

Generally speaking, licensing schemes for private sector housing are outside the scope of this Bill. We are looking particularly at supported housing and exempt accommodation. We have had some discussions about extending the scope of the Bill to all supported housing. I think the hon. Gentleman is referring to a very different licensing regime, which of course can be introduced, but we are concentrating on vulnerable individuals who are provided with accommodation.

The problem is that exempt accommodation is just that: it is exempt from all the regulations relating to houses in multiple occupation and all other aspects, and enhanced housing benefit can be claimed as a result. There have been some financial scandals. As the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby knows, during the Select Committee inquiry we uncovered a number of scams; whether we can fix them all in this Bill is another matter. What we can do—what we are doing—is lay out a whole series of things. When the Bill was first drafted this section was a great deal longer. We were convinced—I cannot remember by which Minister, but one of the three—that we should remove a large section and put it in regulation, because it is then easier to change and amend as the market changes.

Private Rented Sector Housing

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered private rented sector housing.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Gary. I thank Members for attending this debate today and for what I know will be powerful contributions. I start by paying tribute to my constituents in Liverpool, West Derby, who are the innocent victims of this country’s current housing system. I also want to thank ACORN, the Vauxhall law centre, Generation Rent, Shelter, the Daily Mirror and the many other organisations for their campaigns to get the changes we need.

For millions, the current system in the private rented sector is failing to provide homes that are safe, secure and affordable for everyone. Mindful of this House’s sub judice rules, I am unable to go into the details of some of the appalling cases that my constituents have written to me about. However, issues raised with me by private renters include: constituents with health conditions such as asthma whose landlords have left them in damp properties with no gas supply in the middle of winter; constituents, including children, who have been hospitalised and suffered serious health impacts as the result of disrepair in their homes; and families living in fear of bailiffs, who were served a section 21 eviction notice by the landlord after complaining about terrible disrepair and conditions. My constituent told me:

“Section 21 takes the humanity out of the situation and that’s precisely the problem. We are human and lives are being carelessly destroyed!”

Other constituents who have contacted me wanted the Government to take urgent action so that nobody in future has to go through the same horrific experiences. Nationally, the private rented sector includes some of the oldest stock in England; it remains the tenure with the lowest standards, based on the Government’s decent homes standard. The latest English housing survey found that one in five homes in the private rented sector is classed as non-decent, and 12% have a category 1 hazard for which the most serious harm outcome is identified, for example, as death, permanent paralysis, permanent loss of consciousness, loss of a limb or serious fractures.

Does the Minister know how many serious injuries and deaths have resulted from making people live in such appalling accommodation? Shamefully, we have a system that means a private renter has more than a one in 10 chance of living in a home that could kill or seriously harm them or their children. Let that fact sink in—how can this be allowed to continue?

Private rented sector homes also have the worst energy standards on average. That means private renters will have to pay significantly more in heating bills because of poor insulation, inefficient heating systems or lack of double glazing. With the cost of living crisis starting to bite and energy prices set to soar, private renters really are in a precarious situation. Added to that, it seems that complaining puts them on a fast track to eviction. Research from Citizens Advice shows that those complaining to their local authority about disrepair were 46% more likely to get a section 21 from the landlord. Section 21—the fast track to eviction—must be scrapped.

I recently spoke to Professor Ian Sinha, a consultant respiratory paediatrician at the fantastic Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in my constituency, about the health impacts of poor housing conditions. Ian told me:

“The consequences of poor quality housing can be fatal for children: the National Child Mortality Database identified poor housing as one of the top risk factors associated with the inequalities that result in children's deaths....If babies and children breathe air rife with fungus, toxins, and dust, in overcrowded and cold homes, their lungs develop abnormally. Even though we focus on the shortterm effects, the problems they face in adulthood are even more stark—the poorest children are 5 times more likely to develop adult diseases like COPD, and chronic illnesses such as this lead to the poorest adults dying two decades earlier than the richest ones in Liverpool and many other cities...Poor housing can result in 20 years being taken away from your life...There is a window of opportunity for children to develop and grow—and the state of housing in which millions of children are forced to live is holding them back...That’s why good housing for all should be the very essence of any levelling up agenda otherwise it’s a vacuous nonsense.”

Professor Sinha continued:

“Parents are gaslighted at every opportunity—landlords deny pest problems—but mothers of premature babies tell us they know there are rats in the house because they see bite marks in their baby’s oxygen tubing; mothers tell us that when they reach for the cereal there are rodent faeces in them; mothers tell us that their toddlers are afraid to go in rooms because they see mice looking at them through the gaps in the floorboards that still haven’t been fixed. While parents are told that damp isn’t an issue, they tell us their children are waking up coughing thick mucus every night in rooms riddled with mould, and they are bullied because their clothes smell of damp”.

After listening to that, we must remind ourselves that it is 2022, not 1822.

It is clear that the current legislation is failing, which is compounded by a decade of Government cuts to local authority budget cuts and the cutting of access to free legal support. Between 2009 and 2019, local authority budgets to ensure that private rental standards were kept up were slashed by 44%. Local authorities have lost almost half their capacity to enforce standards.

Selective licensing is a tool that local authorities can use to tackle poor property conditions and poor practice in the private rented sector. The landlord licensing scheme in Liverpool, which ran from 2015 to 2020, found that 65% of properties were not fully compliant on the first visit. Some 37,000 compliance actions were taken to improve conditions and 250 rogue landlords were prosecuted. I saw this first hand when I worked with my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), as his office manager, when we utilised the scheme to tackle rogue landlords. I hope the Minister can enlighten us further as to why landlord licensing is not operational across the whole country.

The regulatory framework for the private rented sector is fragmented, underfunded and, quite frankly, broken, and the White Paper and renters reform Bill must address these systemic issues. A renters reform Bill was promised by the Government in 2019. Where is it? Every single day that the Bill is delayed is a day millions spend in cold, insecure, unsafe and unaffordable homes.

During the height of the pandemic, renters were trapped in unsafe housing while the Prime Minister was apparently picking out new wallpaper. Now, many renters are fearful of section 21 evictions if they raise complaints, because they cannot afford to move house in the middle of this appalling cost of living crisis. The power imbalance means that the mental pressures facing renters are built into this broken system.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

I wholeheartedly agree with the points my hon. Friend is raising and I thank him for leading this debate. I am regularly contacted by constituents whose private landlords are refusing to fix issues. Like the examples raised by my hon. Friend, they are not small problems; ranging from black mould to rat infestations, these failings have a disastrous impact on my constituents’ health and wellbeing.

As it stands, tenants who decide to withhold rent from landlords who fail to maintain their properties to standard will be in breach of contract and have next to no protections. Does my hon. Friend agree that increasing protections for tenants should form a fundamental part of our strategy to make the PRS safer and improve conditions overall?

[Ian Byrne]

My hon. Friend makes some fantastic points, and I fully agree. I thank her for all the work she does on this issue in her constituency.

The Government must present the White Paper as a matter of urgency, and new legislation must have real teeth and be enforceable. A renters reform Bill must abolish section 21 and end no-fault evictions, drive up standards through an updated and improved decent homes standard and create a national landlord register and licensing scheme to improve accountability and ensure that legal standards are met. It works—Liverpool has shown that. This is not more red tape, but an investment in the health and wellbeing of present and future generations. To reinforce this, have the Government undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of what it means for a child to grow up in a home that is a threat to their health and safety?

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of the people whose cases I have outlined. If an MP or a Minister were asked to live in a flat riddled with mould, in such a state of disrepair that it endangered the life of their family members and might lead to reduced life expectancies, we would rightly hear howls of rage reverberating from both sides of the Chamber. Let us take that fury and that righteous anger and, as legislators, represent with the same force the millions who are suffering that fate daily, forced into silence because of our unjust system. That would really be levelling up, and the Minister knows it—taking on the vested interests and doing something transformational, changing the life chances of millions for the better. Surely that is why we are all in this game.

This Bill must not tinker around the edges of a broken system, and it should not just move the goalposts. It must empower tenants and hardwire social justice into the system. From working with the Minister on numerous Bill Committees and Select Committees, I know he understands the need for change; but deeds will be the measure, not words.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Byrne]

It is clear from the contributions to the debate that the message is loud and clear: for so many, the system is unfair and unjust, and it leaves so many tenants living in fear, squalor and genuine worry about what the future holds for them and their families. We should think of this statistic when we leave this place today and we should think of it every day: poor housing can knock 20 years off somebody’s life. That is something that we should never forget. It is what should drive all of us in this Parliament.

I welcome the passionate contributions today from my fellow Members—the debate has been excellent—and from the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook). I also welcome the Minister’s commitment. I know that he genuinely wants to drive social justice through the Bill that we are talking about. I welcome his commitment on abolishing section 21 and his acknowledgement that current landlord licensing is patchy. We will see what is in the White Paper when it eventually comes. I look forward to working with the Minister in driving that. I hope that he redresses the situation and that we get a landlord licence scheme rolled out nationally, because licensing works and would make such a difference.

I thank everybody very much for taking the time to participate today. I really hope that the Minister does remember the 20-year fact, because deeds are far more important than words.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered poor quality conditions and disrepair in private rented sector housing.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for articulating so clearly the concerns that so many of her constituents have. I am glad that the request for funding for waking watch has been removed. That follows on from the announcement that we made on building safety a little earlier this year. As she rightly points out, with regard to the allocation of costs and responsibilities, more needs to be done. I hope that by the end of this month the clarity that she seeks and the safe passage of the Building Safety Bill will provide the constituents for whom she speaks with the reassurance they deserve.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

9. What steps he is taking to protect tenants from housing disrepair and poor-quality housing conditions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Eddie Hughes)]

This Government are committed to driving improvements in both social and private rented homes. This spring we will publish our White Paper setting out our ambitious proposals to reform the private rented sector, including exploring a legally binding decent homes standard as well as a landlord register. We are driving forward reform of social housing quality through our social housing White Paper commitments, including a review of the decent homes standard.

[Ian Byrne]

One in four properties in the private rented sector are classed as non-decent. Every day that the Government delay their White Paper is a day that millions spend in cold, insecure, unsafe and unaffordable homes. The words “levelling up” will ring hollow in the minds of millions of tenants living in these awful, awful conditions. Will the Minister commit that the White Paper will actually have teeth to resolve the crisis that we are seeing in our communities and hold rogue landlords to account, which is not happening now?

[Eddie Hughes]

I have tremendous respect for the hon. Gentleman and his work, and the work of the Select Committee in total. I will be working very closely with them to ensure that the White Paper does indeed have teeth and that our collective efforts drive down the number of non-decent homes. The target set in the levelling-up White Paper was to reduce the number by 50% by 2030.

Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Bill [ Lords ] (Third sitting)

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th December 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Eddie Hughes]

As we draw towards the end of the Bill Committee, I thank Members on both sides of the room for their considered input. We work best when we work collaboratively. As I have said a few times, this is an issue I started to champion as a Back Bencher, so it is an incredible privilege to be the Minister leading the discussions. I thank everyone for their time.

New clause 3 brings us back to the issue of service charges, and to concerns about freeholders using such charges to charge ground rent by another name. The Government believe that all fees and charges should be justifiable, transparent and communicated effectively. Service charges that have been artificially inflated to make up for lost ground rent income would not meet those requirements. If any landlord seeks to recoup what they consider to be lost ground rent or other funds through service charges or any other charge, the wide definition of the term “rent” in the Bill will allow a tribunal to take the charge into account when deciding if it is actually prohibited rent. That is why the Bill has been drafted as it has, and why we have adopted a flexible definition of rent. As I explained in a previous sitting on Tuesday, the definition relies on its naturally understood meaning and includes anything in the nature of rent, whatever it is called. Where a freeholder has attempted to get around these provisions, the definition allows the tribunal to consider, in each case, whether such a charge actually represents a prohibited rent, even if it is not explicitly called a ground rent.

As was discussed earlier in the week, the penalties for landlords who charge a prohibited rent are significant —a maximum of £30,000 per lease. If a landlord had a block of 10 flats, then the penalty they would be risking would reach a significant amount.

We have provided a robust system with not only a serious deterrent, but a route for challenging freeholders who act this way. That is all relevant to the new clause, which asks for an impact assessment. I understand the concerns that motivated the new clause, but hopefully the hon. Member for Weaver Vale can appreciate that the drafting of the Bill is intended to specifically guard against service charges being used in the way that he mentions.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Elliott. Surely the new clause would make the Minister’s job easier, because after two years we would have an assessment of how successful the legislation has been. I am at a loss for a reason why the new clause should not be accepted; it would make it easier for the Minister, his Department and the Government to tighten legislation, if that was required. It asks for an assessment of the issue that we are speaking about. Could the Minister respond to that?

[Eddie Hughes]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It seems perceptive, given that the paragraph that I was about to move on to says: hon. Members will know that further leasehold reform will follow later in the Parliament, so the efficacy of an impact assessment of this kind, during a period of wider reform, would be questionable. It is difficult to carry out an impact assessment when many moving parts are changing simultaneously; this is not a laboratory experiment in which we can control just one element. As the hon. Gentleman is a member of the Select Committee on Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, I can say that I look forward to working with him in the future. Should any concerns arise, my door is always open.

Levelling Up: Local Councils

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Westminster Hall

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of local councils in levelling up.

The debate is about the role of local councils in the levelling-up strategy that the Government are pursuing. I applied for it because I had hoped that the Government’s White Paper would have been published either last week or this week. Unfortunately, it has been delayed until the new year. Nevertheless, at least the debate gives us an opportunity to feed some last thoughts into the pre-White Paper discussions in Government on the way forward, although the reality is that the most valuable dialogue will most probably come as the Government plan the detail of the roll-out and delivery of the policies set out in the White Paper.

The Government have rightly put great emphasis on levelling up the country, so much so that we now have a new Department—the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. However, they have not yet defined what achieving levelling up would look like, what targets they have set themselves to achieve through that policy programme, or what the timescale for the programme will be. Hopefully, the White Paper will set out these things clearly when it is published in the new year.

There is widespread agreement that there is a need for levelling up. Way back in 2016, at a conference that I convened in Liverpool, I launched a similar policy with the CBI, using its regional government investment analysis at that time. That demonstrated the stark inequalities that exist. The figures are stark. London receives about twice as much capital investment per person as the south-west of England and the north-west of England receives only two thirds of the level that London receives.

Back then, I also used Department of Health statistics to demonstrate the consequences of inequality, and particularly the consequences of low incomes and poverty, with a difference in life expectancy of 20 years between Kensington in Liverpool and Kensington in London. The Minister may know that we have two Scousers in Westminster Hall today to evidence that.

The harsh reality, which we have all accepted, is that this imbalance of investment has meant that too much priority has been given to investment in parts of London and the south-east, as well as too many of the best jobs in the country. I speak as a London MP, because there are also grotesque levels of inequality within London and the south-east. Over-investment and the heat that it generates in such an particular economy has a negative impact on the area, with exorbitant housing costs that leave many workers priced out of ever owning their own home and paying a disproportionate amount of their wages in rent.

The other element, which I have drawn attention to in past debates, is the way that, just to keep a roof over their heads, families are working every hour God sends, which unfortunately undermines family life as well. The grotesque imbalances in our economy are not an accident, or even the invisible hand of the market. They are a deliberate, ongoing Government policy—one that has gone on for the last four decades, at least, regardless of the party in Government.

I looked at the detailed analysis of what the cost of levelling up would be. To bring every UK nation and region up to London’s level of funding would require an additional £30 billion in annual capital investment per year. Even to level up every nation and region to the current UK average, the capital spend required would be an additional £6 billion in funding.

To be successful, levelling up has to be about more than capital spend. It has to be about more than just physical infrastructure, important though that is. We need a comprehensive and holistic approach to building both the physical and the social capital of an area, but that cannot be done when local government funding from central Government is about £16 billion lower than it was in 2010. There has been a cumulative reduction of more than £100 billion in central Government funding for local councils over the last decade.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. On the funding aspect, Liverpool has lost £450 million since 2010, with further cuts of £32 million expected in April. Levelling up rings hollow in Liverpool. The sustained attacks that we have seen, starting with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, have ripped the heart out of the fabric of Liverpool, so levelling up is hollow rhetoric there. I look forward to the next Government spending review for local councils.

[John McDonnell]

The message I am trying to get across is that although the emphasis in Government announcements has been on capital spending, levelling up will not become a reality in cities like Liverpool and elsewhere unless we address the issue of council funding overall. When we debate the White Paper, I hope that we can have a serious and sensible debate about how, over time, we can address what has happened over the last 11 years. We can have a political knockabout about whether or not it was justified, but I think we just have to move on and look at how we can address the situation, perhaps being more creative than we have been in the past.

The situation is serious in Liverpool, but it is not just Liverpool. In recent years, we have seen three councils issue section 114 notices, while another dozen or so have had to call in exceptional financial support from the Government to avoid the same fate. I do not know whether the Minister saw the recent evidence session of the Public Accounts Committee, but we know that there are possibly dozens more councils in contact with the Department over their financial situation.

The issue of central Government funding has to be addressed. The figures are pretty stark. Since the 2015-16 financial year, local authorities have lost 41% of their central Government funding—equivalent to the loss of £8.7 billion a year. Although I accept that some of that has been offset by the retention of business rates and raising council tax above inflation in recent years, it has still left councils with significant real-terms losses in their overall spending power. It has had real consequences for all parts of the country.

According to the briefing provided by Unison, the local government union, councils in England have closed more than 859 children’s centres since 2010, although that figure has been contested—some people think it is actually more. They listed 940 youth centres and 738 libraries that have been closed, while funding for more than 1,200 bus routes has been withdrawn. That has an impact on communities across the country that has to be addressed if we are going to genuinely level up.

I will give an example. It is difficult to see how local economies can be levelled up if childcare and support for parents is not available. How can we level up our town centres and high streets if people do not have a means of transport to get there, or even just basic public conveniences when they do? My argument is that, when we debate the levelling-up White Paper—I look forward to it—we need to debate both the revenue and capital funding that is needed. Let us look at one region, the north-west of England; this example will be relevant to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) and it is where I did the most intensive work on Labour’s policies, talking with local communities to find out what was needed. Local authorities in the north-west of England are receiving £1.2 billion less per year in 2021-22 in central Government funding than they did in 2015-16; that is a 36% cut. The calculation is that the north-west would need an extra £3.47 billion per year in capital funding just to reach London’s level. The north-west received nearly £500 less—well, £492 less—per person per year when compared with London.

We know of some councils that are so depleted by cuts that they did not have the in-house capacity to even submit bids for the levelling-up fund. These are funds that were allocated in the recent Budget, which we welcomed. We cannot have a begging-bowl approach, with councils fighting over scraps; we need a rising tide of funding that raises all local authority ships.

I want to talk about power. Levelling up must mean not just an injection of cash, but a redistribution of power as well. Councils need more than just greater resources in order to level up—they need to be given powers to do so. That is the message from all local authorities controlled by all political parties. I will watch with interest the Secretary of State’s recently floated idea for further Mayors—or governors, as he said—covering more of the country. It will be interesting to see how that can be rolled out. I am not opposed to it. I am not happy with the mayoral principle, but it has been established and it seems anomalous that there are Mayors for cities but not for other areas.

Let us talk about now. We have devolved Governments in the nations, and a dozen or so city-region Mayors in England. I hope the Government will listen to the demands from, for example, the Mayor of London for more powers. He is asking for more powers to set rent controls—powers which major cities around the world, from Berlin to New York, possess. Shelter, the housing charity, has recently published a report that explains the consequences of levelling-up infrastructure investment without taking housing need into account. I will use my area as an example; the Minister is welcome to come down and visit and we could have a discussion on site if necessary. In my area, a consequence of the welcome multi-billion pound investment in Crossrail is that land and house prices have shot up. Without new council housing or rent controls, local people are being forced out of the local housing market. Alongside the building of more council housing, a Mayor with powers of rent control would really help level up in London and areas like mine.

I hope the Government are going to listen and back the Mayors who are seeking to re-regulate the buses in Greater Manchester, Liverpool city region and West Yorkshire. It is a great policy. It is about improving infrastructure that will increase private investment, it is about a modal shift that will improve carbon emissions and improve air quality, and it is about increasing the act of travel, which has health benefits as well. I point the Minister towards the recent reports from Green Alliance, a coming together of various national environmental groups. They have pointed out how much more could be done on the Government’s climate change agenda if the powers and resources were made available to local government.

When I raised the issue before, Government Ministers have argued that council spending has been boosted by the retention of business rates and the ability to raise more through council tax in recent years. First of all, based on the National Audit Office’s figures, it is likely that councils’ overall spending power is now some £5 billion lower in real terms than it was in 2010. The Minister will also know that raising council tax has very unequal impacts: a 5% increase in Surrey raises about £38 million, while a 5% increase in Blackburn with Darwen raises £2.8 million. It is a similar story with business rate retention: councils with prosperous commercial centres can raise significant sums, whereas councils without such areas cannot.

As such, alongside discussing the levelling-up agenda in investment terms, it is now time to have a serious discussion in Government about a more radical reform of local government finance to provide a stable, locally determined income stream from councils. There have been discussions in all our political parties about options for doing so, but we need to bring those options forward more rapidly. For example, I am interested—as are a number of Conservative MPs—in some version of land value taxation that might transfer both resources and, more effectively, power to the local level.

I also want to raise the issue of debt, in the Liverpool context as well as that of other local authorities. We have a responsibility here: to be frank, central Government have encouraged local authorities to borrow, often heavily, to go into property deals in order to secure much-needed additional revenue income. The result is that the local government debt burden is now becoming crippling for some, which is why the Government should explore new mechanisms for debt relief for local authorities. I was here during the banking crash, and can remember when that whole exercise was undertaken and the bad debt bank was established to sort out the debts of the banks involved. It may well be that the most responsible thing at the moment is for the Government to take over some of that debt, and even write some of it off through a debt jubilee for some local authorities.

Finally, I am concerned that as the levelling-up policy programme is developed, it must be seen to be fair. We all have a responsibility on a cross-party basis to not allow even the perception of pork barrel politics to take hold in this country, which is why there must be the fullest openness, transparency, objectivity, and engagement in decision making about the distribution of resources. One proposal is to consider a Barnett formula-type approach, one that would be objectively based on population, to determine the distribution of capital investment alongside the local government finance formula. Another is the establishment of government structures that bring local government representatives into government more effectively. Some ideas have been floated on all sides, such as a new Cabinet sub-committee that invites Mayors and other representatives to participate, or—as suggested by the Local Government Association—a national taskforce on levelling up that, again, rebalances some of the relationship between local and central Government.

In conclusion, I hope that a central plank of the Government’s levelling-up White Paper and the subsequent policy direction will be the empowering of local government to show that councils can play their role in levelling up our nations and regions. The Minister and the Government will not find local councils lacking, either in enthusiasm or in commitment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O'Brien]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. We are being run by a west London mafia.

As a lifelong advocate for ending the kinds of regional disparities that run through the country, I want to reiterate the importance that I, and the Government, feel about restoring a sense of local pride right across the country. I will start by stating a very obvious point, which is that local councils are an absolutely central part of our levelling-up agenda. They have to be. They have long been huge parts of the democratic fabric of this country and I firmly believe that our huge ambitions for levelling up will not be realised unless local leaders and communities are properly empowered to deliver for their local areas.

Levelling up must now go beyond the first stage of devolution. It must be a mission that gives local leaders and communities the tools they really need, as the right hon. Gentleman said, to take control of their own destiny, boost people’s living standards and spread opportunity. It will not be an exercise in levelling down London or the south-east in order to lift up other areas; it will be one with a clear-eyed focus on using local leadership to spread opportunities to parts of the country that have long felt that Governments in successive decades have not been interested in their city or their region.

The levelling-up agenda will recognise that disparities are not just between everyone who lives north of Watford Gap on the one hand and everyone else. Cookie-cutter policies are not going to bridge the divides that exist between Leeds and Bradford, between Blackpool and Manchester, and between different boroughs in London. We recognise that there are some of the same issues in Darlington and in Hayes and Harlington. We also recognise that levelling up—I agree with the right hon. Gentleman—is a major challenge that will take some time, but work is well under way.

Nobody understands the needs of a local area as well as the people elected to serve as the leadership of that local area in local councils. We are taking forward several programmes that will press ahead with meaningful devolution, including the new county deals that the right hon. Gentleman talked about, to spread devolution across the whole of England beyond the larger cities, and new funding streams to give people the financial firepower to make the changes they want to see in their communities. For example, we have agreements with 101 towns across England that have seen £2.4 billion allocated to local projects through the towns fund and the efforts we are making to resurrect our high streets as we continue to respond to the economic headwinds of the pandemic, with £100 million of combined investment from our welcome back fund and the reopening high streets safely fund.

Those investments are just the start. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor and the Treasury have shown that they are foursquare behind the levelling-up agenda with the recent spending review. As part of that review, we committed £1.7 billion in the first round of our flagship £4.8 billion levelling-up fund, backing 105 different initiatives across the country, from the South Derby growth zone to an upgrade to the ferries to the Isles of Scilly. Both received nearly £50 million from the fund. Other successful bids that we have been funding through the levelling-up fund include the Bolton College of Medical Sciences, the reopening of the world’s oldest suspension bridge in County Durham, and the redevelopment of Leicester train station quite near to me. Those are examples of how the fund is flexible in backing the ambitions of different local places, whatever they may be. The funding builds on the foundations laid in the March Budget this year, with plans to bring regeneration, new prosperity and restored pride to 10 different places through the new freeports, which are levelling up in action. In fact, only three weeks ago Teesside became the first of those amazing freeports to open its doors for business and future investment from top-end employers.

In the time remaining, I would like to turn to local government finance. The right hon. Gentleman talked about the need to move on from the debates we had for a long time at the start of the 2010s. I think that is right. There is no point in re-rehearsing those arguments. We will not convince each other of our positions at this point. He talked about a rising tide of funding. We now have a rising tide of funding. For the last couple of years, our core spending power in local government has started to go up. At the spending review, the Treasury backed councils with an average annual increase in the core spending power of local government of 3% in real-terms per year.

[Ian Byrne]

The issue when talking about levelling up and moving on from 2010 is that in 2022 the budget cuts affecting my city once again will mean that, potentially, four community libraries will be shut down in some of the poorest wards in the country. Does that equate to levelling up? Last week, a study by Feeding Liverpool found that a third of my city are experiencing food insecurity. Again, how that does chime with levelling up and moving on from 2010, if in 2022 we will still be facing savage austerity? Austerity kills, and austerity enables poverty.

[Neil O'Brien]

As I said, the core spending power of local government will be going up in real terms each year by 3%, on top of all the other things we are doing through the future high streets fund, the levelling-up fund and the forthcoming UK shared prosperity fund, to invest heavily in areas such as Liverpool and the wider Merseyside area. All those things are, at their heart, about investing in locally delivered early help for families of the exact kind that the hon. Gentleman would like.

Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Bill [ Lords ] (First sitting)

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Maria Eagle]

It is good to see that there is some provision about enforcement because there is often a gap in legislation, so the law is made and practical enforcement is not set out. I find it quite an interesting approach to enforcement to say that local trading standards or weights and measures authorities in England and Wales “must enforce” in their own area the standard statutory obligation of such an authority but

“may enforce…elsewhere in England and Wales.”

I may be wrong, but that seems a fairly novel approach to enforcement. I am not saying it is bad, but I would like the Minister to set out in a little more detail why the clause is worded in this manner and whether there are any precedents in respect of other enforcement arrangements that have been drawn on to set out the provision.

Subsection (2) says:

“A district council that is not a local weights and measures authority may enforce section 3 in England (both inside and outside the council’s district).”

We have the prospect of roving entrepreneurial weights and measures departments perhaps thinking that they can go and levy fines of up to £30,000 for a breach somewhere else entirely. I think I have read somewhere that they get to keep the proceeds, so this is quite an interesting tax farming idea—perhaps going back to old England, whereby the collector is given a percentage of the takings. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale, I was going to ask what provision the Government will make to enable a local authority’s trading standards department to search out such breaches. Perhaps they intend to enable trading standards from elsewhere in the country to come galloping in.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. On the point raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Garston and Halewood and for Weaver Vale, Liverpool has lost £465 million of funding since 2010, and another £34 million of savage cuts are mooted for the upcoming budget. How does the Minister expect a council such as Liverpool City Council to finance a trading standards team that can actually carry out what the Bill proposes under what we are experiencing through austerity?

[Maria Eagle]

I agree with my hon. Friend about the savage reduction in available resource that the Government have visited on Liverpool. I am interested to hear from the Minister about the intention of this formulation and whether he anticipates that trading standards from out of area will be galloping around the country doing enforcement work in the manner that the clause lays out, because it is not something that I have seen before in legislation. I may be wrong, but it is not something that I can recall seeing.