Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

John McDonnell Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

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

Reference has been made to Bob Kerslake consistently throughout today. Bob and I were friends. I go back longer than most, because I go back to 1981, when I was a young man and a GLC councillor and Bob was a young man and a GLC officer. I fully concur with all the tributes that have been paid, but I also want to say that he was a good man. He was a very good person and a good friend, and we will miss him.

Let me come on to this debate. I do not want to repeat some of the arguments, but I want to get on record for my constituents why I am voting the way I am this evening. I will vote in solidarity with the amendment, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) on her speech, but I will also be voting against the Bill, because I cannot do anything else.

The debate has largely focused on the specific BDS movement and Israel. Just to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), I want to talk about the right to boycott, to disinvest and to sanction as an issue. At the weekend I drafted an article, because I wanted to get clear in my own mind the whole issue around boycotts and the past history of the boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement. To be frank, virtually all of my life I have been involved in some boycott, disinvestment or sanctions campaign, so it was almost like a flashback. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), I was outside the South African embassy when the City of London anti-apartheid group was on a 24-hour permanent picket.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I was arrested there.

[John McDonnell]

He was arrested; I was not. I was there on Christmas day simply singing carols.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

You got off lightly.

[John McDonnell]

I got off lightly. All we were singing for was the release of Nelson Mandela.

For the other one, I plead guilty. I was one of the organisers of the demonstrations over a decade ago against the royal visit of the Saudi leaders. We were calling for no public contracts to be awarded to companies operating in Saudi Arabia, because at that time they were beheading gay people for being gay. That was later focused on military support from this country for the Saudi attacks on Yemen. The list of BDS campaigns that I have supported goes on and on. I campaigned against the Bahraini regime and its ongoing brutal repression of the country’s democratic movement, and the continued imprisonment of opposition political leaders. We have met some of them over the years, and they are still inside.

I have campaigned against the Sri Lankan Administration owing to their genocidal attack on the Tamils, with their continued abuse of human rights, their use of torture, the disappearances, and the colonisations of Tamil homelands. Again, I have lost constituents who have been disappeared when they have gone out there. I campaigned for sanctions against the military junta in Myanmar to halt the attacks on the Rohingyas and to demand the freedom of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Yes, I have supported the boycott of goods coming from the Palestinian territories occupied illegally by Israel. The campaign in my constituency was undertaken by young people when the bombings in Gaza were killing young people there. In solidarity, young people in my constituency went round the local shops asking them to check where their goods were coming from and urging them not to sell goods from the occupied territories.

There has been some reference to BDS campaigns being associated with antisemitism. That is not what I have witnessed in my constituency, but if there is evidence that individuals associated with these campaigns are antisemitic, we already have laws to deal with that, and I believe that the full force of the law against racist behaviour should therefore be deployed.

More recently, I have called for sanctions against the Chinese Government for the barbaric treatment of the Uyghurs, and also because they have imprisoned a group of my Unite trade union friends who worked with me on the British Airways campaigns. All they were demanding was adherence to democracy by the Chinese, and they have been inside for two and a half years, without any form of access to their families in many instances.

The common factor in all those campaigns is that they would not have been supported by Government policy. Therefore, they would have been rendered illegal in their demand for action by public authorities to boycott, disinvest and sanction. I agree with the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) that there needs to be clarity about who is making foreign policy and what is being referred to, because actually the Bill makes the Secretary of State ex cathedra—infallible—and puts at his whim decisions about what is right and what is wrong across the globe, when Governments in this country have consistently got it significantly wrong. They have certainly not backed such campaigns and would have outlawed them overall.

All those campaigns have focused on pressing for action from Government, local councils, pension funds, private companies and investors. It is interesting that a few hon. Members have mentioned the focus on the local government pension fund. I declare an interest as a member of the local government pension fund, and I think it is up to members of the fund to determine its investment policies. I must say, as a constituency MP, that the campaigns have reflected the diversity of my constituency. There is not a campaign that has not involved a constituent or group of constituents or has not been asked for by my constituents. It is a matter of standing in solidarity.

The advice of every human rights lawyer I have spoken to so far, and all the briefings from human rights groups and trade unionists, have all made it clear that that range of activities will be outlawed and it will be made illegal for decision makers even to talk about the strategy. That is why I oppose the Bill. I am voting against it because we have heard today, right across the House, that not a single clause has stood up to scrutiny. Therefore, I do not believe it can be amended; it is fundamentally flawed and should be defeated.

Let me make one final point, as an aside. We should change the Standing Orders or look at “Erskine May”, because it would have been useful if the Secretary of State coming here to present the Bill had actually read it or addressed the same Bill that we are addressing in this debate. All we saw today was a diatribe of the lowest politics we have seen for a long time, which divides our community unnecessarily and, to be frank, appallingly.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

John McDonnell Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Commons Chamber

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

Often what will happen between a Budget being announced and its final debate is that the world can move on, so I have two warnings and a plea, if I have time.

The first warning is that we are making the Budget in the middle of a banking crisis and we need to recognise that. It has moved from Silicon Valley Bank to Credit Suisse to First Republic Bank. For those not in the House 15 years ago when we debated the start of the banking crisis, it started with Northern Rock. A lot of the signs that underlined the crisis then are evident now: failure of regulation, mismanagement and speculative gambling all leading to a crisis of confidence among customers and investors. It spreads very quickly, like wildfire. I hope it is not on the scale of 2008, but I just warn the House that it can rapidly get out of hand. Often what will occur is a lull and then it comes back with a vengeance.

The role of this House is to ensure that the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority are not found asleep at the wheel during the crisis. I urge the Bank of England to again undertake stress tests on all the banks and financial institutions within its remit, and a stress test on the overall regulatory system, and to publish those tests. The Financial Services and Markets Bill introduces an element of further deregulation. I urge the Government to pause. Now is not the time to prioritise the deregulation of our financial system. To the Bank of England, I say that this is not the time to increase interest rates, particularly at this moment.

The other warning is on pay. The Government are seeking a settlement to the NHS dispute and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers has already settled with Network Rail, but they should not consider that the issue of pay is in any way going away. That is a complete misreading of the situation. Major disputes are still happening: the Public and Commercial Services Union in the civil service, the junior doctors, the universities with the University and College Union, and education with the National Education Union. In the private sector in my constituency, Unite the union is representing the lowest paid security workers at Heathrow. The Government should not underestimate in any way the strength of feeling that workers have about the pay freezes and cuts of the last 13 years. Pay settlements of 5% or 6% still mean people will be struggling to pay the rent and feed their family. The Government should not fail to understand the anger and resentment at the grotesque levels of inequality in our society.

It is interesting that on the picket lines are young people struggling with low pay. They are unable to get on the housing ladder. In addition, they are burdened with debt from qualifications obtained through higher education. These young people have had enough. I think they will increasingly react to the injustices they see in our society and I warn the Government that that ferocity of concern has not disappeared.

My final plea is to follow up on what my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) said about unpaid carers. They are living in poverty and endure hardship, and many are exhausted because of the lack of social care and financial support. They need an income to reflect the care that they provide—a real living wage—or at least a first step by increasing carer’s allowance to maternity allowance levels. Carers are saying clearly that this Government should stop taking them for granted, given the essential role that they play in our society.

Council Tax

John McDonnell Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2022 Commons Chamber

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

The debate so far has been superb and I want to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) on the expert way in which she completely took apart the Government’s arguments. I was 20 years in local government before I came here, and the last exercise in voter suppression was the poll tax. I was in local government at the time—I was chief executive of the Association of London Authorities, which represented both Conservative and Labour councils—and we explained to the then Government what the effect of introducing the poll tax legislation would be. It might well have been advertised as a fairer way of funding local government and collecting resources, but we argued that the Government needed to be careful because it could also possibly result in voter suppression. Naively, we did not think that that was an exercise being deliberately undertaken by the Government.

Although the poll tax brought down Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister, it ensured that a Tory Government were elected in 1992 because of what happened in many constituencies. Take my own constituency as an example, where 5,000 mainly working-class people dropped off the register. As a result, there were four recounts and I lost by 54 votes. I know every one of them and I visit them every so often, but there we are. That was an exercise that was done for one reason but actually had a sub-reason, which was voter suppression, and unfortunately I think that is what is happening today.

My second point is that, because of my local government background, I know that there is a long tradition that we listen to our electoral administrators. They are the one group of people in an authority whose professionalism we do not contest, because they serve all political parties, and they do so independently and to the best of their abilities. Most of them have limited staff and limited resources, and they are not particularly well paid either. Survey after survey shows the majority have no confidence that they can deliver this change in time for the local elections. First, they do not have the staff in place because of cutbacks. Secondly, they do not have time to have their computer systems properly tested and operating effectively. Thirdly, they do not have time to launch campaigns informing people of what they need to do to register. Even if they launch a campaign and it is sufficiently successful, the prediction is that anything up to 16% of the electorate might apply but there will not be the staff to administer it.

We should listen to the constitution unit’s report: this is an accident waiting to happen. Just in administrative terms, whatever the political motivations, this policy is not supportable and is not needed, as has been demonstrated by speech after speech. Unfortunately, not only is it a policy that will ensure some people do not get the right to vote and will cause conflict and contests at individual polling stations, but it is a policy that people will come to regret. It smacks of the dangerous dogs legislation, on which we cannot find anyone who supported it or promoted it.

My only reason for speaking in this debate, apart from my local government experience, is so that when people examine this legislation in six, 12 or 18 months’ time, or in the years ahead, I will be on the record as speaking out against it. I think this is a disaster waiting to happen.

Levelling Up: Local Councils

John McDonnell 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.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Neil O'Brien)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing this very important debate. I am not sure whether he or I will be more alarmed to find that we are, as he suggested, in quite strong agreement on much of this agenda.

[John McDonnell]

I am so convincing, do not worry.

[Neil O'Brien]

The right hon. Gentleman is always convincing when he talks about the lost opportunities caused by having parts of the economy overheating where people cannot afford a house, whereas other parts of the economy are crying out for investment. I felt that his was an echo of the Prime Minister’s speech, so we all find ourselves in at least a pretty high level of agreement on the challenge.

[John McDonnell]

Does the Minister recognise that the Prime Minister is my next-door constituency neighbour?

[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.

[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.

[John McDonnell]

The example of Liverpool has been given. It would be incredibly helpful, just to bring the Minister up to speed on a specific example of what is happening, if he would meet a delegation of the Liverpool MPs, maybe with the council leader, to talk about issues there.

[Neil O'Brien]

I am planning to meet various leaders from Liverpool city region as part of the Mersey Dee alliance discussions, so I would be delighted to have that conversation. I am very proud of the progress we made for that city through the devolution deal, bringing new powers, new funding and the defragmentation of local government that I think we all agree on in principle.

In the months ahead we will set out in more detail our plans for the levelling-up agenda, with the White Paper that will give us the long-term blueprint, but that is not the end of the story. We have a levelling up Department that will continue to power ahead with this agenda over the coming years. The Prime Minister already gave a clear indication of our position in July when he said we take a flexible approach to devolution, so local leaders in our great cities and historic towns have the tools they need to make things happen for their communities.

Exceptional Mayors are already making a huge difference. If anyone wants to see levelling up in action, I suggest they take a trip to Teesside where, during his four years at the helm, Ben Houchen has managed to secure a brand-new economic campus in Darlington with civil servants from the Treasury, moving the Tees crossing to alleviate congestion and bringing the Teesside airport into public ownership, on top of the freeport that I mentioned. That shows that local areas do not need to be micromanaged out of SW1; they can get ahead if they are given the financial power and the local powers and leadership that they need.

There is no reason we cannot bottle and replicate the brand of leadership embodied in people such as Ben Houchen and Andy Street, our fantastic West Midlands Mayor, and apply it to other areas of the country, and so use local leadership and local government to drive forward this incredibly important levelling-up agenda that we all agree on.

Question put and agreed to.

Building Safety Bill

John McDonnell Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

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

In the final minutes of the debate, perhaps I can provide some time for the words of one of my constituents. The latest email that I have received says this:

“The impact of the Fire Safety Scandal on leaseholders’ mental health is considerably underestimated”

by the Government.

“From the many messages on Twitter and Facebook, there are millions of devastated lives and souls in the country. Many families and young adults had to live through not just the pandemic during the last 18 months, but also the added anxiety of the unfolding and ever growing Fire Safety Scandal.

It is a triple hit for so many leaseholders: the pandemic, then losing jobs or being furloughed on smaller salaries (with the constant threat of losing their jobs if their employer would go bust) and then the ever increasing costs of the Cladding scandal. This government has totally ignored the cries of its citizens for help.

Knowing that there is a ready solution to the issue in Australia—which could easily be adopted in the UK as well…shows that the Government is simply not interested in fixing the problem for innocent leaseholders. The contempt—with which they treat their citizens—is truly shambolic.”

I received that email from one of my constituents this week, and I think that it reflects the views of hundreds of them.

In opening the debate, the Minister mentioned Ballymore. I am dealing with Ballymore; I have dealt with Ballymore since it first submitted a planning application to build apartment blocks in my constituency. I welcomed the news of developments that would provide homes for local residents, but not a single one of the planning gains that Ballymore promised has been delivered. It went bust, and was then bailed out by the Irish Government.

Subsequently—and since this scandal has hit us—Ballymore initially refused to meet and seriously discuss with residents the problems that they were facing. My constituents demonstrated, so Ballymore is now meeting them and having proper discussions, but it threatened them that if they demonstrated again, it would end the talks. Now it has applied for the building safety fund, but will not give any assurances that it will cover the full costs of what my constituents are facing until it knows what resources from the fund are available to it.

This continuous blackmail—and, indeed, emotional blackmail—of my constituents is simply unacceptable. As the email from my constituent made clear, it is having a direct impact on their mental health. We are facing a pandemic of mental health problems because of the covid crisis, but this adds to it. It requires Government intervention which is serious, which takes responsibility, but which then pursues the developers to ensure that they are held accountable as well.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Because it is almost Christmas, Jim, we are going to give you a bonus minute. Four minutes! I call Jim Shannon.

Building Safety

John McDonnell Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Commons Chamber

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

My reason for speaking briefly in the debate is that I promised my constituents currently affected by the cladding scandal that I would use every opportunity I could to raise their plight. To recap my past interventions, the largest number of those constituents live in properties constructed by Ballymore—they are homeowners, private renters, leaseholders and housing association tenants—and as with many other high-rise properties around the country, cladding inspections have revealed a range of other safety risks resulting from the construction techniques used in the development of those properties, including a risk from the wooden balconies. That also reflects the regulation and inspection regime in place when the buildings were constructed.

My constituents bought, leased or rented their homes in good faith and with various assurances from developers, builders, landlords and regulators about the quality of their homes’ construction. Now, they remain trapped, fearful for their safety, unable to sell and move on and still facing potentially huge bills to make their homes safe. There are heartbreaking cases, and this is impacting on people’s health—their mental health in particular—and the stability of their relationships.

Ballymore informed my constituents that it has applied for building safety fund grants, but they will not cover the range of safety defects, which will cost thousands of pounds per property. After Ballymore residents staged protest demonstrations and there was a fire in a Ballymore property in east London, the company made noises that those additional costs would be covered. We await legally enforceable commitments from the company.

It is rumoured that Ballymore threatened to withdraw any assurances to cover costs if the residents’ demonstrations continue. I hope that is not the case, but let me make it clear to the Ballymore company that I will not tolerate any threat to my constituents and their right to expose and protest against the way in which it has treated them. I expect the company now to bring forward urgently legally enforceable agreements to secure the safety of my constituents, firmly based on the principle that the developer—the perpetrator—must pay.

Finally, in my constituency there is a massive construction programme of up to 4,000 new properties in central Hayes. I am concerned that the design and intensity of the developments, and, yes, the lack of community facilities, may well mean that we are witnessing the construction of the slums of tomorrow. I am also concerned that more than a decade of savage cuts in local government funding has resulted in a lack of planning officers and building inspectors to ensure that these new developments comply with basic environmental, planning and safety standards. I have a real fear that what is being stored up is the same risks we saw at Grenfell and elsewhere, and a new generation of hazards and potential tragedies. I urge the Government to take swift action to give my constituents the assurances they need, to join me in condemning Ballymore if it threatens to withdraw the assurances it gave simply because my constituents are publicly expressing their concerns, and to look again at local government funding so that we have proper building regulation and planning controls in place with sufficiently staffed local authorities to enforce whatever regulations are available to them.

Employment Rights

John McDonnell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

I have talked about the fact that fire and rehire should not be used as a bully-boy tactic, but the hon. Gentleman talks about it as if it binary. Can he define exactly what it is? Some of the examples I have heard about over the past year would be considered traditional fire and rehire and would be the subject of this debate, while others have drifted into other areas of employment law.

We need to make sure we can continue the flexibility for employers so that they do not have to make redundancies in the first place, because clearly what would affect those employees badly is not having a job. That is why we need flexibility and dynamism, and we must have measures in place to ensure that responsible employers stick to their responsibilities for the lowest paid.

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

That is possibly one of the most mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed, ineffectual statements that I have ever heard in this House. It is a betrayal of working people. Fire and rehire commenced in my constituency with companies such as British Airways and Heathrow Airport Holdings Ltd, and it spread like a pandemic, harming my constituents. It is galling that these companies have been receiving taxpayer support through furlough, grants, loans and tax reliefs. We need legislation, not guidance that can be ignored. If the Government are to go down the guidance route, will the Minister confirm that they will insist that no grant, loan or tax relief—no taxpayer support—will go to companies that do not abide by this guidance?

[Paul Scully]

I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman is not at the Dispatch Box talking about mealy-mouthed statements while throwing Chairman Mao’s little red book at me as I talk about supporting business and workers. We will strengthen the guidance. Nothing is off the table. We will clearly see what is going on. We will work with ACAS and colleagues to see how this lands and look at what happens with irresponsible employers. It should not be used as a bully-boy tactic. It is right that we have wrapped our arms around the economy with £407 billion-worth of fiscal and financial support. We now have 407 billion reasons to shape the economy, allow these businesses to survive, protect jobs and create new jobs so that we can build back better.

Fire and Rehire

John McDonnell Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Westminster Hall

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

I want briefly to outline some of the implications of fire and rehire in its latest use for individuals, families and communities. I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne), who has been an asset to her constituency and the House since she was elected.

The latest wave of fire and rehire, which is not a new phenomenon, started in my constituency at Heathrow through the activities of British Airways and Heathrow Airport Ltd. Both companies saw the pandemic as an opportunity to implement their long-held strategy of cutting wages and undermining working conditions and terms of employment. The wages and the terms of employment were fought for over generations by trade unions to ensure that people got a decent wage and were treated properly at work. That is all people wanted.

The reaction to the attempt to cut wages on such a scale and to tear up employment agreements was, first, absolute anger. The frustration among the workers at Heathrow was palpable. The staff were so loyal. They were proud to work for British Airways, the national carrier, and many had worked there for decades. Whole families depend on the airport, working for either BA or Heathrow Ltd. They faced wage cuts, even though house prices and rents in my area are so high, and were under real stress, and they were looking at whether they could maintain their livelihood and keep a decent roof over their head.

That stress has brought about almost a mental health crisis in our community. There is real resentment because those companies have made vast profits and taken furlough money from the Government, and they were simply using a short-term crisis to impose long-term pay cuts. Owing to the resolution of my community, individual workers, Unite the Union and others, we fought back and have settled as best we can to protect people, but the protection can come in the longer term only if the Government act and introduce legislation to ban the practice of fire and rehire once and for all.

Lord Hendy reminded us a couple of days ago that fire and rehire is not a new practice. The general strike was provoked by it when the miners were sacked and brought back to work only if they accepted wage cuts. I warn the Government: if they do not act and change the legislation, there will be more industrial action and more disputes, so they need to act with urgency.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (in the Chair)]

I thank everyone for keeping to the time limit, because everybody has got in. I call the SNP spokesperson, Gavin Newlands.

Residential Leaseholders and Interim Fire Safety Costs

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Westminster Hall

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

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) for securing the debate. May I say how impressive her introduction was? It is a reflection of the immense talent she brings to the House.

I will speak briefly, because I promised my constituents who live at the Ballymore development at High Point Village in Hayes that I would take every opportunity I could to raise their concerns. Like other Members, I find it virtually impossible to describe the distress that my constituents have experienced and are going through. It started the day after Grenfell, when they were concerned about their own safety, but it then took a long time to get a thorough inspection under way.

The developer has behaved totally irresponsibly and is failing to communicate effectively with my constituents. In addition, we are only now into the application stage for Government assistance to tackle the cladding costs and removal, and we have discovered that, as others have said, large measures will not be covered by the Government’s grant. I find it intolerable that the developer is now coming back and saying that all these other defects, which it is equally responsible for, including the wooden balconies, will not be covered in those costs. Therefore, my constituents feel that they will not be made safe, or, if they are, that it will be at a high cost to themselves and not the developers.

In the meantime, like other Members’ constituents, my constituents are being hit with increases in their service charges, particularly around insurance. There is no way that they can afford the waking watch costs that are being imposed on them. Like others, they feel lost. They are trapped in their homes. They cannot sell on. They are growing families. People are trying to move around the country to get a job, as a result of the job losses in my area, but they cannot, because they just cannot sell on. Their whole lives are being put on hold.

There has to be a sense of urgency from the Government now—a clarity about what is covered by the building grant put forward by the Government, to ensure that there is comprehensive cover. Secondly, all the interim measures have to be covered. Thirdly, there needs to be action from Government on the control of service charges imposed on many of our residents by some of these developers, whom most of us have lost confidence in, even if we had any in the beginning.

I close by re-emphasising the distress that this is causing my constituents—distress to the point that it is affecting their health. I think we have a number of mental health crises now as a result not just of what has happened to constituents because of the development of buildings that were not properly regulated or inspected and that were faultily built, but because of the distress caused by the laggard way in which the Government have handled this issue. I cannot stress enough the sense of urgency that there should be at the heart of Government about addressing these issues.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Everyone has been so good that we can splash out and raise the time limit to three and a half minutes. Enjoy!

Unsafe Cladding: Protecting Tenants and Leaseholders

John McDonnell Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2021 Commons Chamber

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

Happy birthday, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I have many constituents whose lives have been thrown into turmoil by the failure of the Government to act promptly on this issue, and by what can only be described as abusive behaviour by the developers of their properties and neglect by housing associations. I wish to name one developer in particular—the notorious Ballymore Group. It is notorious for its profiteering from extortionate, ever-increasing service and insurance charges. From the start of the cladding crisis, Ballymore has lived up to its track record of failure to communicate with and consult its residents, and its continuing attempts to shirk its own responsibilities and load as much cost directly on to the residents as possible.

My constituents have submitted their case study of their experiences to the Minister. They have explained that, as leaseholders and participants in shared ownership schemes, they are being placed in extremely vulnerable positions, facing the risk of heavy cost burdens. The delay in Government decision making over arrangements to cover remedial costs has meant that many of my constituents are unsure of their safety and unsure when their properties will be made safe. Ballymore has just said not until 2023, and that items such as other safety defects revealed on inspection beyond the cladding will not be covered by the Government grant or by the company. This includes the very wooden balconies that this company installed itself. The scale of the costs will clearly overwhelm the amount allocated by the Government. That, plus the restrictions on what work is eligible for financial support, is resulting in developers such as Ballymore seeking to shift as much of the cost burden as possible on to leaseholders and shared ownership residents.

Shared owners are absolutely over a barrel. They own nothing. They cannot sub-let or sell. The clocks are ticking on short leases. The housing associations are charging premiums for lease extensions but doing nothing to help in any way, while taking a management fee on top of the developer’s management fee. Shared owners now risk having to pay for 100% of remediation and the interim costs, despite owning nothing. How can that be termed affordable housing? The emotional stress on my constituents is immense, especially as many have lost their jobs or had their wages cut as a result of the pandemic.

The message from my constituents to the Government is very clear. They want an immediate assurance, with legislation, that their homes will be made safe and that the developers who caused these problems will be the ones to pay.