Lord Pickles
Main Page: Lord Pickles (Conservative - Life peer)(9 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
8. What steps he is taking to stop unfair parking enforcement practices.
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
Councils are making a profit of £667 million a year from parking. That is unacceptable, so this Government are bringing forward a series of measures to make local parking fairer for residents and shoppers. This includes curtailing the use of CCTV spy cameras, introducing grace periods, and giving local residents and firms new rights to demand a review of yellow lines and parking charges in their area.
Nick de Bois
Over-zealous parking enforcement by these methods, and in particular by mobile cameras in Enfield’s Hertford road, is one of the most damaging practices to shops and shopkeepers, and the more so because Labour-controlled Enfield council is reducing the number of parking spaces. What advice does my right hon. Friend have for this council to put shoppers and high streets first?
Mr Pickles
On my visit to my hon. Friend’s constituency, he was kind enough to show me Hertford road, which does not have a very easy trading environment. We have placed an obligation on local authorities to look after local businesses, and we know that that plays an enormously important part in people’s management of their shops. I would simply urge Enfield council to get together with local traders to ensure that people do not have to drive further and further from Enfield to do their shopping.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State join me and many Congleton residents in objecting to proposals to introduce parking charges at Congleton War Memorial hospital for the first time? That plan is likely to increase, rather than decrease, local parking congestion, and rather than benefiting patients and their families it will in all likelihood benefit the car park charging company through aggressive fines.
Mr Pickles
I have a War Memorial hospital in my own constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) has been vocal in pressing local health authorities on this practice, which particularly affects people who are visiting patients who are in hospital for a long stay. It does not seem to be the most sensible way of raising funds.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
10. What assessment he has made of trends in the level of (a) homelessness and (b) rough sleeping.
Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
11. What steps his Department is taking to freeze council tax charges for 2015-16.
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
Under Labour, council tax more than doubled. Under this Government, it has fallen by 11% in real terms. Further funding will be available to freeze council tax in 2015-16, which will mean five consecutive years of freeze funding since 2011-12. That is worth £1,075 for an average household over this Parliament. An announcement on the detail of this will be made shortly.
Dr Offord
I am very grateful for the Secretary of State’s response. My hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) and I had the tremendous problem of keeping council tax down in the London borough of Barnet under the last Labour Government. What steps will the Government take to continue in other areas to help hard-pressed families, pensioners and individuals by supporting them with their cost of living and to ensure that the London borough of Barnet protects front-line services?
Mr Pickles
I commend Barnet for freezing council tax for four successive years. It proves that councils can run their services efficiently and encourage growth without increasing taxes on local people. The council tax went from being a modest sum in people’s budgets to being absolutely overbearing, and it is exactly right that the most vulnerable people—pensioners and the like—have benefited from this freeze.
Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)
20. I thank my right hon. Friend for his earlier reply. As council tax is such a large bill, especially for those on fixed incomes, will he congratulate my local South Derbyshire district council on keeping its council tax at a zero increase for the past four years? We hope that this year’s settlement from the Government will help it achieve a record five years of frozen council tax.
Mr Pickles
On behalf of the Government, I say bless you, South Derbyshire. You have done a fantastic job. You have looked after the coffers very carefully and you have fulfilled good quality services at a reasonable cost, without going for the incremental rise every year.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
12. What progress he has made on delivering large-scale housing sites.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
Some 180,000 homeowners have bought or reserved a property during this Parliament through one of the Government-backed schemes. Our support for home ownership also prompted a sharp increase in house building to a six-year high. Today we are setting out the next step of our long-term economic plan to improve the housing market. The starter homes programme will offer 100,000 first-time buyers the opportunity to buy a new home with a 20% discount.
Alistair Burt
I thank my right hon. Friend for that statement. Has he received much communication from some of our smaller councils—town and parish councils—about the pressure they are under from vexatious freedom of information requests, inappropriate pressure from members of the public, and sometimes problems of resolving their difficulties with a monitoring council, such as those between Arlesey and Central Bedfordshire in my constituency? Does such a problem arise rather more often these days?
Mr Pickles
It is not a general problem, though we have come across it. I know that my right hon. Friend is very disturbed by it. The best way to avoid freedom of information requests is to be open, straightforward and transparent, and sometimes some authorities are not. But there can be no excuse for persecuting a public official. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 lays down guidance with regard to vexatious claims. I understand that my right hon. Friend intends to write to me and I will look at the case very carefully.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
May I start by expressing the Opposition’s concern about the situation in Sydney today? Our thoughts are with all the people who appear to have been taken hostage and with their families.
We are all aware of the threat posed by Islamism, the extremist ideology that wrongly claims to be informed by Islam and which attempts to recruit and radicalise our citizens. Can the right hon. Gentleman update the House on what his Department is doing with faith groups to help identify and deal with the sources of extremism and radicalisation in our communities?
Mr Pickles
I commend the right hon. Gentleman for his statement about events in Sydney. Our primary thoughts must be with the hostages, but I am sure the right hon. Gentleman will be as heartened as I am by the response to the worries expressed by Muslims in Australia about travelling on public transport, and the “I’ll ride with you” campaign, whereby Australian citizens are standing by the Muslim community and ensuring that Muslims feel they are good Australians.
We have spent about £45 million on integration projects since 2010 and an extra £11 million to support 29 projects this year, but I expect the right hon. Gentleman is more concerned about work with specific groups. Indeed, we have given priority to working with groups in east London, east Birmingham and along the M62 corridor. We work closely with them and with various other groups in the spirit of “not in their name”, to show that we recognise the full strength of the Islamic community’s love of peace.
Hilary Benn
Interfaith dialogue of the type that the Secretary of State describes with mainstream religious groups is important. The problem is that radical Islamists are not part of it, and Muslim communities are just as keen as others to know what he is doing to help them identify, isolate and deal with the conditions in which such an ideology develops. Does he agree that it is now time for his Department to focus its efforts on helping families to stop the radicalisation of their children and on promoting greater mutual understanding so as to undermine the corrosive effects of Islamism, which so damages our values and our democracy?
Mr Pickles
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I intend to put out a written parliamentary statement that lays out the full breadth of what we have been doing to deal with this issue. The empowerment of women and of families in knowing what is going on on the web is a recognition of how things have changed. Those who expect this to come out of the mosque are living in a past world. This battle is fought on the internet and by modern methods of communication. Of course, as always, I will keep the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends completely informed about what we do.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
T2. My right hon. Friend will be aware that Labour Front Benchers appear to have a plan to impose a homes tax on people earning more than £42,000, and this is causing great concern to my constituents in Wimbledon. I note that all Labour’s mayoral candidates for London have disowned the plan. Does he agree, first, that this tax is inequitable, and secondly, that our Government would never impose such an inequitable tax on my voters?
Mr Pickles
We certainly have no intention of persecuting the good people of Wimbledon; nor do we intend to make people suddenly find themselves in a mansion that they did not realise they owned. These are people who bought a property a few years ago and whose incomes have not gone up, but now Labour apparently wants to take £3,000 or £4,000 from them every year.
Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)
T3. Those who risk their lives to protect us deserve a decent pension. Will the Minister explain why firefighters have recently been on strike in England, but not in Scotland or in Wales?
Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State recall that I asked him during the previous Question Time to give an early decision on the Coventry gateway project and that I followed that up with a letter? I have not received a reply to either request. I am sure he means no discourtesy, but could he tell us when we might expect a response, because a lot of jobs, business rates and development in the south of Coventry depend on it?
Mr Pickles
I apologise to the hon. Gentleman for not replying earlier. He will understand that the issue is very much tied up with adjoining authorities. A number of schemes are currently being negotiated under various growth deals and I hope the Government will be able to make a decision fairly soon.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
T8. The Secretary of State has made localism his thing and he has come across very strongly as the champion of the people. Will he ensure that the people’s voice is heard and listened to when the first wave of hydraulic fracking applications go through, and will he insist that the Government follow the precautionary principle so that all environmental and health concerns will be addressed before an application is granted?
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
As I understand it, we will get an announcement later this week about the local government financial settlement for next year, which could involve a 10% reduction in local authority spending. That is as big a cut in one year as central Government Departments have faced throughout the whole of this Parliament. Will the Secretary of State, in the interests of transparency, give an assurance that he will come to this House and make an oral statement, rather than hide behind a written statement as he did last year?
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman’s recollection is wrong: we made a statement from this Dispatch Box. We cannot anticipate what the business managers of this House will do. We will take the hon. Gentleman’s words into consideration.