Hate Crime
Lord Greaves Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they propose to take to reduce the incidence of hate crime.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
The new cross-government hate crime action plan published in July sets out a comprehensive programme of action to reduce hate crime. This includes education programmes to prevent hate incidents, measures to improve the police response and recording of hate crime and stronger sentencing guidelines for the judiciary. As part of the action plan, we have committed £2.4 million of funding for security for places of worship which have been targeted by hate crime. We are also sharing £300,000 of funding across communities to tackle hate crime through innovative projects.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, the Home Secretary said in relation to the recent figures that the Government intended to stamp out hate crime. That and the actions referred to by the Minister are very welcome, but does she agree that, while it may be possible to stamp out behaviour, stamping out hatred in people’s hearts and minds is more difficult? What is required in addition to these actions is for the Government to take the lead in saying loud and clear that everyone who lives in this country is welcome, that we live in a multicultural, multiracial and increasingly diverse country, that this is not going to change and that it is a good thing.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I agree with the noble Lord to the extent that stamping out hatred in people’s hearts and minds is a bigger issue than just providing a hate crime action plan, but this country is tolerant and welcoming. We have seen that in the past 24 hours with some of those fleeing persecution in other countries coming across and being welcomed to this country. It involves more than just action plans—attitudes and the way that we approach our fellow man or woman in everyday life.
Bus Services
Lord Greaves Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, it is always good to follow the noble Lord, Lord Snape, on transport issues, but I really want to congratulate my noble friend Lady Randerson on securing this debate—although it is in the last gasp of this parliamentary Session, it is still very worth while.
I want to tell a story about a local service in my own patch of east Lancashire in the town of Colne—the Colne town services—because I think that there are some lessons to draw from local experience. I shall talk particularly about what is now called the 95 service, which nowadays runs from Burnley, via the hospital to Nelson, goes round the houses in Nelson, across the boundary into Colne, past the large store at Boundary Mill then, when it goes to Colne, round the estates on the northern side of Colne, up Colne to the town centre, then plunges down into Waterside—I should declare as an interest that that is the ward I still represent on Pendle Council by the skin of my teeth, or almost the skin of my teeth; we fought them off—and round the houses down the south side then back up Colne. By the way, as I keep saying “up Colne”, noble Lords will realise that Colne is one of England’s few hill towns; the town centre is on the top of the ridge.
This is one of the urban round-the-houses services that date from 1986. The Transport Act 1985 was very controversial—and has been since—as regards the introduction of competition in local bus services, but one of the great advantages, for those councils and transport authorities willing to take advantage, was the strategic and financial roles that the county councils were given in subsidising unremunerative services. In Lancashire in the mid-1980s, there was a minority Labour administration in the county council, supported to a degree by the group that I was a member of, the Liberals, which held the balance of power. Thanks to a number of determined and visionary councillors in both those parties, the county grasped the nettle, grasped the opportunities of that new Bill and led the way in providing subsidised services across the county. I pay particular tribute to my colleague David Whipp, whose vision resulted in new town services coming into effect. The county took over the rural and village services, which had previously been cross-subsidised, but the real innovation throughout the county—from places such as Ormskirk, to Clitheroe, to Barnoldswick, to Colne—were the new town services. Smaller buses ran round the estates and streets where buses had not really been seen before. They have been a great success but, inevitably, they do not make a lot of money in most cases.
Originally, the Colne services were a couple of circuits—called the Colne hopper, if I remember rightly. Over the years, and this is important, the local authority has obtained Section 106 and other moneys from development to help subsidise these services and keep a good service going. One of these subsidies, from the new Boundary Mill store on the boundary of Nelson and Colne, resulted in the county linking the town services in both Nelson and Colne and through into Burnley as the 95 service, known as the Pendle Green Line. After five years, the main Section 106 money that went into providing this really good service was used up, but the county experts were able to rationalise the route and it continued to run with county subsidisation to the absolute benefit of all people—shoppers, young people, people going to the hospital, and so on. It has been a great success.
But then came the budget cuts. For the past two or three years, the reduction in funding for Lancashire County Council has resulted in the screws being put on the subsidised services. Fortuitously, in my view, there is again a Labour minority administration at the county hall, which again requires support from the balance-of-power Liberal Democrat group, of which I am no longer a member. That group has used its power to resist some of the cuts that were being proposed to these bus services. But at the end of last year, to the shock of everybody in the county, the Labour administration announced a proposal to abolish all subsidies in the council because of the need to save something like £55 million—a lot of money even nowadays—in its budget this year, and the county budget for subsidising bus services, which was more than £7 million, was under direct threat. To be fair, this threat flushed out operators, who said, “Okay, we will run a registered commercial service” for some services which had previously been subsidised. Over 30 years the system had got a bit flabby—there is no doubt about that—but the proposals that the county council put forward were devastating. My favourite service, the 95, which I had been involved in setting up so many years before, was under threat again.
However, because no party has overall control of the county council and because of the enormous number of local campaigns to save this service and others—petitions on the internet, on the buses and at the bus stops; people spontaneously turning up at bus stops with placards and holding them all day as the buses came past; there is fantastic public support for these services—compromises had to be reached. The county eventually put £2 million to one side and in Pendle the borough council leadership in the different parties got together with the county councillors. We put together an alternative proposal for the 95, which I wrote up and sent off, and it formed the basis of the new service that we have. So we saved the service. I am particularly proud that we saved the service going down the great steep hills into Waterside. We now have some new Section 106 money to help keep it going a bit longer. Despite the fact that one leading county councillor said that people who voted Liberal Democrat to save these services ought to rot in hell, I do not think that that was a majority view even among the Labour leadership at the county council.
What are the lessons from all this? The first lesson is that these kinds of services, particularly in the light of the budget cuts, are very fragile. It is easy for them to go and once they have gone it will be very difficult ever to get them back. At every possible level—the transport authorities, councillors in the community, campaigners and the local bus operators themselves—have to get together to try to find ways of running these services as efficiently and economically as possible, but to keep them going. But it is very difficult.
The second lesson leads on from that. We could not have done it if we were a big unitary authority. We have been able to do it because we have a lot of councillors—we have a small district council, a town council and relatively small wards—and the councillors from all the parties worked together to put the pressure on and to work out ways of doing it and to help people in the community to campaign. Without that, if we had been a big unitary authority with very few councillors left, as so many places such as Cornwall and Northumberland now are, it would have been much more difficult. That is a second lesson, which is nothing to do with buses directly but to do with the structure of the local democratic set-up.
The third lesson is that, despite all this, if the central government cuts continue at their present level for another three or four years, it will be impossible to save these services because the county councils will inevitably put all their much reduced money into the things that they have to do. They do not have to provide bus services; all the things they have to do, such as social care, will take priority. So no matter how much campaigning there is and how many people like me there are on the ground, stirring people up to campaign and trying to work out ways of saving these services, it simply will not happen. The Government have to understand that they will have to regard local bus services as a priority if they are to survive.
My final point is that the real subsidies to these services come from senior bus passes, not from the direct subsidies to the operators. People say, “Why should all these well-off pensioners get bus passes?”, but if the Government start to mess about with senior bus passes, all these services in towns and villages will go overnight.
Immigration: Harmondsworth
Lord Greaves Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
No, we have just had a Labour question.
Yesterday I visited some houses in a Home Office scheme in a street in West Drayton, run by an adjoining hotel, Heathrow Lodge, which provides a few days’ initial short-term accommodation for asylum-seeker arrivals before they are dispersed. There are very basic bedrooms, with communal bathrooms and no kitchens. Will the Minister look personally into the numerous problems that I found there? I will send him a briefing, but they included people who seemed to have been effectively abandoned there for up to three months instead of three days; the quality of food provided; a lack of necessary Home Office communication and documents; ridiculous rules; a lack of facilities for a one year-old child who had been there for some time, and much more.
Lord Bates
I am very happy to look at those issues, just as we looked at the issues raised by cases in Cardiff and Middlesbrough recently. If the noble Lord supplies me with information, I am very happy to look at it more closely.
Bus Services: Local Government Funding
Lord Greaves Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effect of reductions in local government spending on local bus services in 2016–17.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport and Home Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, decisions about the provision of bus services requiring local government subsidy are a matter for individual English local authorities in the light of their other spending priorities. The majority of public funding for local bus services is via the block grant provided to local authorities in England from DCLG. The Department for Transport also provides £40 million in bus service operators grant funding directly to English local authorities to help deliver local bus services.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, that is a factually correct account. However, all over the country there are horrific stories about local bus services being cut as a result of cuts in council subsidies which are as a result of cuts in the funding of local authorities. In my own county of Lancashire, the proposal that will go before the county council is to abolish bus subsidies for services to villages, services in rural areas, and the little buses that go around the towns, which are so important. Is this really the legacy that this Government want to leave?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
It is not. I mentioned the bus service operators grant. In Lancashire, last year, we provided £1.86 million directly for the purposes of retaining services. The Government are looking at the overall offering of bus services, particularly in rural areas, to ensure both connectivity and the sustainability of essential transport links.
Police: Funding Formula
Lord Greaves Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact on police numbers and local crime of the proposed new funding formula for police forces in counties such as Lancashire.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)
My Lords, allocations for individual police force areas have not been set and decisions on funding will not be made until the spending review reports in November. We will carefully consider the impact of the spending review alongside the implementation of a new funding model in the design of transitional arrangements.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, only today, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has issued the results of its police efficiency review, which shows that Lancashire is one of only five forces in the whole country rated as “Outstanding”. Lancashire was a pioneer in the development of neighbourhood policing and now has a comprehensive and highly successful neighbourhood policing system across the country—across the county, I should say; we have not taken over the whole country yet, but wait for it. Have the Government heard that the chief constable of Lancashire, Steve Finnigan, has said that if the present expected spending cuts come about, together with the proposed changes in the police funding formula announced last week, by 2020 the county would have to get rid of most of its specialist police units, and the whole of its neighbourhood policing would have to be swept away? Is this really the legacy that the present Government want to see at the end of this Parliament?
Lord Bates
No, absolutely it is not, but I certainly join the noble Lord’s tribute to Lancashire police constabulary. It has been judged “Outstanding”, it has produced an incredible performance, it has reduced crime by another 3% this year, and it has managed to increase its reserves by a further 30%.
The formula to which the noble Lord refers went out to consultation. The predecessor arrangements were widely criticised by all chief constables and police and crime commissioners. They wanted something simpler, more transparent and easier to understand and more stable for the future. Invariably, when you consult on something such as that, there will be winners and losers. Lancashire is making representations to Mike Penning—the consultation is open until 30 October —and I know that he is meeting Members of Parliament from Lancashire tomorrow. In the event that that decision stands, there would be transitional arrangements to dampen the effect of any changes in Lancashire.
Economic Case for HS2 (Economic Affairs Committee Report)
Lord Greaves Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I believe that I am one of the majority of people in the north of England who are in favour of HS2, if not necessarily of all its details. I thought that the report was a little disappointing because it cannot seem to make up its mind whether it is against the whole project or is simply making some specific—in some cases, quite positive and constructive—suggestions. I suspect that this was the compromise that the committee came to in order to produce an agreed report.
A lot of the detail in the report is useful. I shall read out one of the main conclusions and recommendations:
“An investment decision on the scale of HS2 should have been made with reference to a co-ordinated transport plan for passenger and freight traffic across all modes of transport”.
That might be a little ambitious, but the decision should certainly have been made with reference to a co-ordinated plan for passenger and freight traffic on the railways and perhaps beyond that. This criticism, which I think is right, is not of HS2 but of the infrastructure planning system in this country, which does not do this; it puts projects forward in a piecemeal way, not as part of a co-ordinated national planning system. Noble Lords who have attended debates on planning and planning Bills will know that I consider that the whole planning system in this country is fairly bust; this is an example of that at national level. However, we have the system that we have and we are not going to get a super-modernised, streamlined planning system that works in the short term or indeed beyond that, so we have to deal with HS2 as we have it.
One of the little things in the report that niggled me was its continued references to “taxpayers’ money” and “taxpayer subsidies” and quotes such as,
“many taxpayers would derive no benefit from the project”.
The use of the word “taxpayer” in this context is sloppy, ideological right-wing language of the sort that has taken over in this country. I find that disappointing coming from a committee of your Lordships’ House, from which I expect better.
As far as the money is concerned, everyone is talking about £50 billion, although, as we know, the figure is £28 billion plus contingencies plus the rolling stock. Some people think that the existing network can be fettled in such a way as to cater for the required extra capacity, but that would need the extra rolling stock anyway, so at least some of that rolling stock is to be discounted, and we do not know how much of the contingencies might be required.
Even if the cost is £50 billion, I wonder why people are upset about it. Perhaps it is because it is a railway line to the north of England—to Manchester, Leeds and strange foreign places like that where people talk a bit odd. Let us look at the London schemes that are around. There is Crossrail, costing £15 billion—a super scheme with some fantastic engineering, but expensive. We have Crossrail 2, which is forecast to cost £25 billion, although I do not know whether that includes contingencies. Thameslink has cost at least £6 billion. The proposed extensions to the Bakerloo line could cost £3 billion or £4 billion, depending on how far they go.
So we are talking of investment in London that is of the same order as HS2, but no one says that these projects are too expensive, cannot be afforded, are going to bankrupt the country and all the technical stuff that the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, came out with, which I am afraid I did not understand, although I am sure that it was all very good. Why? Because it is in London. Not very long ago, the Mayor of London, bless him, was calling for a scheme for a great ring rail around the outside of London—a sort of M25 railway, as I understood it—and he was happily saying, “Oh, it’ll only cost £40 billion, that’s all right”. That seems to have been put on one side for the moment, but who knows? If you are talking about things in London, money does not matter; when it comes to the rest of the country, people say that it cannot be afforded.
I associate myself with everything that my noble friend Lady Kramer said in her excellent, passionate speech. I also associate myself with what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, who talked about line capacity with more expertise than I could, so I shall not try to say some of the things that I might have. However, the meaning of capacity seems to have been misunderstood both in this report and in a lot of what is said. People look at capacity as being the proportion of the seats that are occupied on the trains that are running. If one is running a transport service, be it bus, rail or some other service, capacity is about the whole service provided. One cannot expect to run late-night trains and to have them as full as at peak times, such as teatime. Without the late-night service, there is no overall service and some of the daytime trade that would go back at night will be lost. Therefore, a proper, comprehensive and regular service is bound to have lots of trains that are not full. That does not mean to say that they are under capacity.
My time is up. Some of the points in this report should be taken forward. We should get a better response from the Government, because the Government’s response was pretty pathetic. However, for goodness’ sake, let there be no more delay. Once people start putting their feet on the brakes, this scheme will never happen. For the economic good of the north of England and the Midlands, of all the cities, the towns and the whole area, we need this railway line built as soon as possible.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Greaves Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
I want to speak mainly about housing and, in so doing, I remind the House of my various declared interests and particularly that of being deputy leader of Pendle Council. I have been interested to hear all sorts of spokespeople claiming that the new Conservative Government have a massive mandate for pretty well every detail in their manifesto. I suggest that this is nonsense; they clearly won the election under the first-past-the-post system and have the right to form a Government, but they did so on 37% of the vote, which means that nearly two out of three people who voted voted against the present Government. Indeed, only 25% of eligible voters voted for them. So the idea that they have an overwhelming commitment by the people of this country to all the things in their manifesto is a slightly dodgy argument.
I was extremely interested in the extraordinarily good speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, on housing associations and social housing. We look forward to the housing Bill coming to this House, at least in a chronological sense, if not in the sense of its contents. I would advise the Government, if they ever listen to me, to look very carefully indeed at that speech, reprint it and get lots of advice on it. It referred to a huge number of the problems that the Bill will have, if reports are true, and the debates that will take place on it here, as well as the problems that the Government will have in persuading us that they are right on these matters.
I shall take a brief total overview of housing in this country. There is nothing original about what I am going to say, but it is worth putting it yet again on record. First, owner-occupation is for many people a good thing. It means that people own their own houses and put their efforts, money and resources into that property to keep it in good condition. Very often, people in owner-occupied houses live in those houses for longer than those who live in private rented accommodation, so it is good for creating communities. However, this was not always Conservative policy. In the 1930s and 1950s, the idea of ownership for all, as it was called, was promoted by the Liberal Party, particularly by that stalwart Yorkshire Liberal, Elliott Dodds. That received a lukewarm reception from the Conservatives until Harold Macmillan got a grip on it, and got a grip on the housebuilding programme in the 1950s.
For many people, however, owning their house is either not possible, or only marginally possible, or not convenient. We have to remember that and make proper provision for those people who cannot do so. Certainly, in the first half of the 20th century, the Conservatives were more interested in private landlords. It is worth looking at the statistics over the years. In 1918, only 23% of properties were owner-occupied, there was virtually no social housing as we know it, and the private rented sector was 77% of the total housing stock. By the middle of the 1950s, that was reversed and by 2005, which was the peak of owner-occupation, it was 69% of all housing. By 1990, the private rented sector had gone down to 9%. These are a mixture of English and UK figures, but they are very similar anyhow. Yet by 2013, the proportion of people owning their own houses had started to go down; in that year, it was only 63%, whereas it had been 69%. Social housing had filled the gap; originally it was council housing, which at one stage occupied most of the rented housing market. Yet council housing has been in decline and the rise in social housing has not filled the gap. In 1980, 31% of houses in the UK were owned by local authorities; that figure is now down to 7%. The change that has taken place is astonishing. Housing associations have come in with 10%, but the amount of social rented housing has gone down from 31% in 1980 to 18% in 2013. Of course, the private rented sector is filling the gap; having gone down from 77% in 1918 to 9% in 1990, it is now back up to 20%.
The deregulation of rents and the rights of tenants has had a huge effect—but another reason for this change is that if you go to council estates anywhere in the country you see “to let” boards up. Those are on houses owned by private landlords. Council estates are being sold cheap to tenants, and when the purchasers move on for very good reasons, they put them on the market and buy-to-let people move in. In January 2014, London Assembly Member Tom Copley—he is not in my party, but that does not matter—produced a report, From Right to Buy to Buy to Let. Although the statistics are difficult to pin down because the Government do not tend to keep them, he found that, by 2013, at least 36% of homes in London sold cheaply under right to buy had been sold on to private landlords. That figure will obviously now be higher. In three boroughs, it was around half. One of the fundamental questions is: why will it be different under right to buy from housing associations?
When this Bill comes, I shall tell the House all about the situation in Pendle, which is very different from London. It is a low-price housing area. Rents and house prices are low, but the impossibility of replacing existing stock as it is sold off is the same. There are different reasons, but it is just the same.
In her opening speech, which was admirably succinct and coherent, the Minister said that 90% of people aspire to owner-occupation. This strange word “aspiration” seems to be taking over political debate at the moment in all parties. I do not quite know what it means. We all aspire to all sorts of things. I might aspire to owing an express steam locomotive and being able to drive it up and down the main lines of this country, but I am never going to do it. I would love to do it. If someone says, “Would you like to do it?”, I will say, “Yeah, great idea—I’d love it”, but when it comes to politics, aspiration seems to be a nice word, a euphemism, that actually means ways of bribing voters with public money to vote for a political party. That seems fundamentally wrong. There is a severe housing crisis in this country. The Government are not tackling it—no Governments have adequately tackled it in my time—and the proposals for right to buy in social housing are seriously misconceived.