Consumer Affairs

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing this important debate. I extend my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall) on his elevation to His Majesty’s Government. It is an honour and a privilege to be a Government Minister, but there are obligations and responsibilities too. I have some asks for him, which I will come to at the end. I am sure he will listen to them and take action. I should declare an interest as a leaseholder, as I will touch on some leasehold issues.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington talked about a Mars bar, which took me back to my youth. I do not know what size a Mars bar was then, because we had it sliced up and shared between us. I could be getting into a bit of a “Monty Python” story, but perhaps if I had kept to that my figure would be less robust than it is today, so maybe there is an argument for that.

My hon. Friend also touched on the poverty premium. Some people are able to buy things cheaper because of where they can go to buy them. The point about differential pricing is an interesting one, and I would add that loyalty card pricing is a real concern now. It is effectively exchanging data for a discount: we can pay extra if we do not have a shop’s loyalty card. If we have a smartphone, we can jump outside, get wi-fi or a signal and perhaps download one, but we are giving away our data in order to get a discount, and the difference in price is quite extraordinary. There is a lot going with respect to pricing, and my hon. Friend addressed it particularly well. He quoted Which? a lot, and I pay tribute to it for its relentless work in standing up for consumers.

I want to talk about protecting consumers, including in financial services, and how innovation can support the consumer. Importantly, it is not all about regulation, but I will touch on that too. The Treasury Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing and whose core membership is in the room today, has been looking at a number of these issues. Obviously, there is a lot of discussion of them. The Chancellor has been clear in her Mansion House speeches about making sure the financial services sector is able to help facilitate growth. We all absolutely support that, but we need to be careful to get the balance right. The regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, has to regulate against harm while, as its secondary objective, facilitating growth. There can be a tension there.

There is an onus on us in Parliament—I am sure the Minister will have something to say about this—to make sure that our constituents are protected, and we must understand that there are different grades of understanding, particularly in the financial services area. We need to help, support and educate people, but we should recognise that there are people who will always be vulnerable and others who can be vulnerable to certain types of schemes.

The Committee has looked at finfluencers, the people who pop up on our social media feed and tell us, as they stand by their Porsche or villa with a swimming pool, how they have done very well and are going to share their tips. Of course, a number of them tip over into giving advice rather than guidance on financial services, which is a very dangerous area that the Committee is looking at. It is a challenging area to deal with. The FCA has told us that Meta—I should call it out—has not been ready to take things down very quickly when it has been alerted to them. If a major regulator like the FCA has challenges getting a major internet provider to deal with these things, then that is a really big battle.

That is a huge challenge, not just for the Government, but globally, because a lot of these people are not even based in the UK. I would be interested to know the Minister’s thinking on how we deal with that legally, even with the Online Safety Act 2023, which does not really cover a lot of this. I am not suggesting for a minute that he or the Government have a solution, because it is a very challenging problem to solve, but I am interested in what the Government are looking at.

We also have artificial intelligence coming into the financial services sector. There are examples of people who have put models into four different AI systems and come up with what is quite good guidance but very close to advice. One that I came across recently actually recommended investing in a particular named company. This is a very interesting and challenging area to regulate and, again, the Treasury Committee is looking at AI in financial services. There is an awful lot of potential, but there is a lot of risk as well. I know that it is a core area for the Department for Business and Trade to consider, along with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. I am interested to hear the Minister’s thinking on how the Government will make sure, as best they can, that they are a step ahead in protecting consumers against the risk involved.

Of course, consumers in financial services have a lot to lose. It is always said, “Don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose,” but if we are to encourage people to invest more, as the Chancellor is keen to do, we need to make sure that people really understand that and protect them from losses, which would be very damaging for many of our constituents—certainly the poorest, and even those on modest incomes who would not have the money to lose.

The FCA has also proposed allowing contactless payments to be unlimited. During covid, we saw the contactless limit go up, and it is often even higher on mobile phones. Many of us will have lost a card and only found out because something has gone out of the account. I pay tribute to my bank; I will not name it—it would, perhaps, be unfair for me, as Chair of the Treasury Committee, to pick one out just because of my own consumer moment—but it was very quick off the mark in realising that there had been some fraud. The payments were only very small amounts, but they were outside my normal pattern of purchases. The bank rang me and went through the security processes thoroughly to make sure that the card was stopped and I was reimbursed. The banks are doing a lot of work, but the challenge of increasing freedoms is that on the other side there is the risk of fraud, so thinking about how consumers will be protected is important.

Not long ago, the Treasury Committee published our report on access to cash. We held a very illuminating set of hearings. We highlighted in our report that, with fewer places accepting cash, certain groups, such as older people, those on lower incomes who use cash for budgeting, those with certain disabilities and those in domestic abuse situations, often have nowhere that they can buy things. Dame Siobhain, I think it was you who coined the phrase “the poverty premium”. Some big businesses, and others, will not accept cash. That means that the poorest, who budget with cash, have to travel further. Sometimes they will not be able to buy in their neighbourhood, have not really got the means to travel and have to pay the higher prices of the shops that will still take cash.

I should say that the Association of Convenience Stores is clear that it wants to see cash accepted, and many such stores do. As a point of principle, I sometimes go into the big supermarkets with cash and say, “Where can I queue?” There is often a longer queue for the machine that accepts cash, and it marks out those who only use cash. Mostly, they are not in my situation—I could pay with a card or a phone. They pay with cash because that is how they budget, and they do not want to risk spending more than they have got.

We know the challenges with paying in cash for electricity. There has been some progress in making sure that bills are equalised between those paying on a meter and in cash, but that has taken many years. I have been in this place for 20 years and, dare I say it, Dame Siobhain —it is hard to imagine—you have been here longer than me, and we know that that was a very big battle to fight.

One of the other things about getting consumer affairs right is that if consumers are supported, confident and protected, that hopefully means they have more confidence to buy. We saw the good news that consumer spending was up this July, but it has been a very challenging time for the economy. This Government inherited a really big set of challenges from the last Government, thanks to the Budget of September 2022. There were world events as well, but that dented consumer spending and raised mortgage rates, meaning that people have less money to spend.

I want to touch on the regulation of e-bikes, which is about protecting consumers. According to the London Fire Brigade, e-bikes are one of the major emerging causes of fires. One of my fire stations, in Shoreditch, has been holding what might be called amnesties. Delivery drivers will often buy an extra battery online in order to boost the range of their bike, because of course they make money on the number of deliveries that they make. They have been invited into the fire station to have them checked, and a number have been found to be dangerous. In particular for someone living in shared accommodation in London, if the battery in the bike in the hallway—which might be their livelihood—catches fire, it can be devastating. It can lead to loss of property and loss of life. It is really important that we give some thought to the regulation of e-bikes and batteries.

I have many issues with Lime bikes, which I will not go into now, but one of the things that legitimate e-bike providers, whether for sale or hire, would agree with me on—we do not agree on everything—is the need for proper regulation of e-bike batteries. We need to make sure that online sellers do not get away with selling dodgy batteries and that there are better checks in place. The Minister may not be able to give me a detailed answer right now—he has only been in the job three or four days, so I do not expect a full answer—but if he is not able to answer some of my points, it would be helpful if he could write to me. I have many constituents who are very concerned about these issues.

Utilities is a big area of concern. I have the privilege—I should state for the record that I am speaking with irony—of being a Thames Water customer, as are my constituents. We have seen the challenges there. I am sure the new Secretary of State will be as robust as the last in trying to tackle that. We have had a poor service, with burst water mains and our bills just going up all the time. That does not feel good for consumers. We need to make sure that the Government are given all power to their elbow in trying to tackle the water companies.

One thing that is very specific to the Minister’s Department is the licensing review. Again, that affects a lot of businesses in my area. It is partly about regulation, but it aims to equalise the price of licences at a lower level nationally. This is a very specific point, and I will be writing to the Minister or the Secretary of State on about it, but the London Local Authorities Act enables inner-London boroughs in particular—it affects them most—to charge a certain rate for licence fees for businesses. Hackney has the fastest-growing economy in London, according to the Office for National Statistics and the Greater London Authority, and many of its businesses require licensed premises. Equalising the rate at a lower level will reduce the council’s capacity to enforce licensed premises.

As it is now, licensees pay a fee, and they know that the bad licensed premises will also be inspected—there will be regular review points. That works well, because the good providers are very concerned that the bad providers should not get away with it. If the fee is equalised at a lower level, Hackney council stands to lose up to half a million pounds a year in fees, and will have no ability to carry out the enforcement work as proactively as it does.

We have a high density of licensed premises in Shoreditch and in Dalston, which I have had the privilege of representing since last year. Providers on those strips are very keen to have good enforcement. One licensee said to me, “Every morning I wake up and check my phone in case anything happened the night before,” because they know the responsibility of being a good licensee; it is really important to protect their customers, and also the sector as a whole, because people flock to my constituency to use these premises. If the council is unable to enforce on bad behaviour by licensees, that will damage the sector—and, I contend, damage the growth that is happening in Hackney.

Hackney South and Shoreditch is only half an hour away, so if the Minister or one of his team wanted to visit, or to bring officials in for an explanation from the council, I would very much welcome them. I hope that this issue will be considered. We certainly do not disagree with removing regulation or easing the path for businesses, but if we throw out the baby with the bathwater, we could end up with worse than we started with.

Insurance is another big issue for consumers. It seems incomprehensible to many people how much insurance premiums have gone up. Again, the Treasury Committee called in the insurance companies and raised some of the challenges with them. I will not go through that in detail—not least because most hon. Members in the Chamber were in the room when we had them in—but the costs for leaseholders seem to be going up, and there is a real issue about support for leaseholders, particularly in respect of transparency and accountability for service charges.

As I mentioned, I am a leaseholder myself. We get several long spreadsheets of information about how money is allocated, but it is very difficult to judge whether we are being charged a fair amount, whether that is for window cleaning, general cleaning or insurance. Obviously, since the tragedy of Grenfell, insurance for a block will be not just for the flat and the floor concerned, but for the whole building, and that has caused premiums to shoot up, but they have gone up by an incredible amount given the actual rate of tragic incidents—the reality has not matched the cost of the potential liability—so that is a big area of work.

That is also affecting consumer spending. Many of my constituents are first-time homeowners, who bought their dream homes as leaseholders. Some are shared owners, and they are in the worst of all worlds; they pay a mortgage on one portion and rent on the other, but they have responsibility for the whole thing, including all of the service charges and any remediation works that need to take place—I will leave cladding aside for a moment, but other works may need to take place—and then they are trapped, because the service charge and mortgage have gone up, and sometimes their rent has too, and they are unable to sell. Many are very much trapped in that situation.

On consumer affairs, I must of course mention the issue of cladding. Many of my constituents are still waiting for the first bit of work to be done; all they have had is a slight investigation to determine that the cladding needs to be removed. Sometimes it is only a small amount, but because of the risk-based approach, those with the least cladding are sometimes at the back of the queue. In many cases, scaffolding has not even gone up. We are in 2025. The tragedy of Grenfell happened in 2017, and by 2018 it was very clear what the problems were: a failure of regulation over many generations, which has led to a real problem. That is one of the biggest consumer scandals of a generation.

I know that it is not in the Minister’s Department, but we now have the Building Safety Regulator. My constituents and I are impatient for work to happen as fast as possible. We need to step up not just the number of skilled people to do the work, but—the trade deals done by the Minister’s Department may help with this—the supply chains, so that the necessary materials are available alongside the skills. There is so much more that I could say on this—I have repeated it endlessly in the House—but people are trapped. They have lost faith in the housing system. They feel, quite rightly and understandably, that they were sold the dream and bought a home in good faith, and now they are living the nightmare and trapped. Often, they want to move to a bigger property but are unable to do so because they cannot sell theirs. There is an awful lot to be done there.

More widely, there are options with regulation: we can have regulation that is very heavy-handed and protects people but can be a burden on businesses, but we can also have self-management. We saw that the regulation of building safety went way too far in one direction. Regulations were removed incrementally, so that no one knew who was responsible for certain things and proper checks were not done. We need to get the balance right. Self-regulation can work very well, but there needs to be a robust and, in a way, fearsome regime to make sure that it is audited. There is no point in saying to a sector, “Self-regulate,” if that is not double-checked and triple-checked at some point, so that the sector knows that the heavy hand of the regulator, whoever it may be, can come down heavily on it. If the Government are moving away from regulation—as we are certainly seeing in financial services—or trying to loosen it a bit, we need to make sure that we watch very closely, protect the consumer along the way, and get key assurances in place.

This is an important debate, and there is so much more that I could talk about. I started with Mars bars and ended with building safety, which shows the gamut of important issues that matter to consumers. We need to make sure that they are protected from the worst harm while innovation in things like fintech can give people more choice—that is also important.

Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill

Meg Hillier Excerpts

2nd reading
Saturday 12th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds]

A transfer of ownership to the state remains on the table. It may well, at this stage, given the behaviour of the company, be the likely option. However, our aspirations for British Steel remain a co-investment agreement with a private sector partner to secure a long-term transformation. The action I seek to take today is not a magic wand or a panacea. The state cannot fund the long-term transformation of British Steel, nor would it want to, but a failure to act today would prevent any more desirable outcome from even being considered, and that, again, is why we must act today.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I applaud my right hon. Friend for his decisive action in this matter. I have only had a chance to read the Bill for 10 minutes—[Interruption.] That is not a criticism; it is the natural procedure of this House. The Bill could not be laid until First Reading. The Bill talks about compensation. He has made the point that he is not planning to take over and run British Steel, which is not the desirable option, but has he done some sort of impact assessment on the potential range of costs to the taxpayer in these circumstances?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I think my hon. Friend refers to clause 7, which deals with compensation. Again, let me be clear: this is a clause that we would put in any Bill. We are not Russia, and we do not sequester assets. The language in the clause—the legal definition—is something that we would use in most standard procedures. Going back to the question from the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis), the effective market value of Jingye is zero, so there is no inconsistency between those two points.

Whistleblowing Protections

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) on bringing this really important debate to the House. I was reflecting on the number of different Departments involved in trying to tackle the issue, so I do not envy the Minister, but I hope that he will take the messages back to the other Departments that are connected, because I want to focus particularly on the NHS.

We know that the courageous people we have heard about, who blow the whistle, protect us and our communities, yet we do not offer them the same protection—that is the nub of the problem. As I said, I want to focus particularly on the NHS, because we have seen many examples—I will not go through them all—where someone in the NHS whistleblows and their career is in effect over, or very badly damaged, as a result. I want to raise that alarm to the House, and I hope the Minister will ensure that these messages are relayed to the Department of Health and Social Care.

In too many cases, whistleblowers face sanctions at work or threats, and the toll that takes on people’s mental health is enormous, as we heard described eloquently by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Before this Parliament, I was a member of the Public Accounts Committee for a total of 13 years, including nine years as Chair, and back in 2014, when I was a member of the Committee, we looked into whistleblowing and found that there had been failure

“to protect some whistleblowers from being victimised.”

That puts it mildly. We recommended then that where the identity of whistleblowers is known, steps must be taken to

“ensure that they are protected, supported and have their welfare monitored.”

We said that that should include providing whistleblowers with

“support and advice, such as access to legal and counselling services.”

We also highlighted the fact that too often whistleblowers were “unclear” about who to raise their concerns with, and we recommended “a route map” that showed different

“internal and external reporting routes.”

The Government at the time agreed with the recommendations about a route map, but they deferred further action on whistleblowing policies across the NHS, as they were being considered separately through Sir Robert Francis’s Freedom to Speak Up review. That was a reasonable response from the Government at the time. But then I became Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and we revisited the issue of whistleblowing—and guess what? We were disappointed at the slow progress. If I had been paid £10 for every time I had to use that phrase in that role, I would probably not be here now but sunning myself in the Caribbean, because “too slow progress” is often the mantra.

We now have a new Government, with a new Employment Rights Bill, and I hope we will see further progress. We were not really convinced that change had happened on the ground and we were also very clear that whistleblowing is a sign of complete failure of the system. We should not have to have whistleblowing policies, because modern institutions that work well should have routes whereby complaints, concerns and issues are raised as a matter of routine. I will come to some good work in other sectors in a moment, but we found generally that there was not enough focus on whistleblowing in the wider public sector. The Francis review of the health sector highlighted the need for effective whistleblowing policies not just in the health sector, but more widely.

Earlier this year, the Public Accounts Committee revisited whistleblowing again—it seems to be a bit of a theme—and still we stressed the need to embed a “Speak up” environment. We were looking particularly at whistleblowing in the civil service at that point, but the lessons read across, sadly. The National Audit Office found earlier this year that just 52% of people in the civil service

“think it is safe to challenge the way things are done”.

That was from a review of the responses to the 2022 civil service people survey—that is a bit of a mouthful. The National Audit Office also highlighted the number in the NHS with the same concern—61.5%. That was in 2024, so this year. Less than two thirds of NHS workers think it is safe to challenge the way things are done; lots of work needs to be done to improve that.

There are institutions that do this quite well. Earlier this year, the Public Accounts Committee visited NASA, in Washington. As a result of the tragedies with the Columbia and Challenger space shuttles, the people there have a very open approach to raising concerns. However junior someone is, they are expected to raise a concern up their chain of command in their specialist area, and if they are still concerned, they can take that to another party within the organisation—a whole other set-up—to make sure that they are challenging the approach taken on risk. That is expected. It is embedded in the training that people look at the risk and make sure that they are calling things out. Nothing is too small, and no one is too junior.

[Gareth Snell]

My hon. Friend probably has unparalleled experience in this House, through her important scrutiny work as both a member of and Chair of the Public Accounts Committee; I was happy to work with her on many inquiries when I was a member of that Committee too. Could I tempt her to tell us how many millions on public procurement projects we might have saved had the system that she has just described been in place in this country? How many hours of time might have been spared? It sounds like an incredible system, and one that this country should seek to emulate.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

As ever, my hon. Friend manages to cut through to a really important issue. It is not only about the whistleblower; in the whole public sector and parts of the private sector, it is time-consuming and cumbersome to deal with whistleblowing on both sides, and it is very mentally draining, particularly for the whistleblower. It is costly when a mistake happens and is not caught early. A stitch in time saves nine, as they say. That is very much the bread and butter of what the Public Accounts Committee does; it looks at where problems have arisen that could have been predicted and prevented.

The Chancellor is to launch her Budget next week and we need to save money, but—I am not being flippant—in the long term we need to see a change in culture. Aviation is another example of where things happen well. In that sector, it is expected that people call things out. Things do still go wrong, but staff get praised, rather than penalised, for calling out what might happen in safety terms.

This debate has come at an important time for my constituent, Sarah McMahon, who has agreed that I may share with hon. Members her sad experience as a whistleblower. Sarah is a consultant orthopaedic and limb reconstruction surgeon at Great Ormond Street hospital for children. In the summer of 2021, she was asked to look after some patients of her colleague, Yaser Jabbar, after he had an accident. Overseeing those patients, she found things that made her so alarmed that she blew the whistle in the autumn of that year. I am sure many Members will have heard about that case in the media; in short, Mr Jabbar was accused of inappropriate and unnecessary surgeries that led to life-changing injuries for children in his care.

Sarah McMahon wrote to suggest an external review, but nothing was done to address her concerns and Mr Jabbar was allowed to continue operating on children. She tells me:

“I was effectively told to keep quiet and concentrate on my own patients.”

Despite that, Ms McMahon bravely continued to raise concerns about Mr Jabbar and the harm caused to children in his care, and in February 2023—some 18 months after she first raised her concerns—an investigation by the Royal College of Surgeons began. That investigation concluded in spring this year and the outcome is now well known. When the investigation was launched, Sarah learnt that Mr Jabbar had raised counter-allegations against her. It was only last week that Sarah was given any information about those counter-allegations, which Great Ormond Street hospital has now confirmed were completely unfounded.

How terrible it must be for a surgeon doing their very best, working alongside a colleague with no animosity, and then discovering that there were problems. Sarah had to raise her concerns; it was absolutely the right thing to do, professionally and for the patients. She wrote to me about her experience of raising the alarm, saying:

“I have since been threatened with disciplinary action without proper basis. I feel sidelined and excluded in my work and I am exhausted. The impact of this stressful process on my health, family, reputation, and career has been profound. I feel greatly let down by the way I have been treated as a whistleblower.”

Three years into this ordeal, it is clear that hospitals cannot mark their own homework when it comes to whistleblowing concerns.

I want to raise with the Minister some points, not all of which are directly related to his portfolio. I hope that he and his civil service officials will take them back to the relevant Departments, as I ask him directly for a detailed response. An amendment is proposed to the Employment Rights Bill that would give further protection to whistleblowers; I hope it will be considered sympathetically or, if necessary, rewritten by the Government to make it work and deliver on that intention. I also hope that the Cabinet Office works hard to improve the situation across Whitehall. Its representatives appeared before us when I chaired the Public Accounts Committee, so we know that there are some bits of good practice, but a lot more needs to be done. I hope that the Government commit to making that a high priority.

I will not repeat the points that were made very well by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central about the importance of the duty of candour, but I will say that we need that to be embedded in the system if we are to change the way these things work. I endorse the points made about the office for the whistleblower. Crucially, I hope that the Minister will talk to the Department of Health and NHS England. If we want to modernise our health service and ensure that patients are safe, we need to support brave people—like Sarah McMahon—who have had to go through the mill to raise concerns that have been proven to be very well-founded.

I will end with Sarah’s own words:

“Unless the safety system is radically reformed my advice to future colleagues facing this problem would be: ‘raise it, because you must, but do not expect to survive what follows.’”

What a terrible indictment of the system so far. I hope the Minister takes that message back to the relevant Departments.

Budget Resolutions

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is quite surreal to follow the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell). Like him, I believe in small business, but small business growth will not solve the problems in the public sector, which has been squeezed during 14 years of this Tory Government until the pips squeak. However good it is, small business will not refill council coffers and ensure basic social services and special educational needs in schools. Small business will not solve the NHS waiting lists or bring schools off their knees.

This Government and the Government of the austerity years have caused all those problems, and crashed the economy in September 2022, leaving families and businesses crushed. Those who survived the pandemic have faced real hardship since. This is a Budget of a desperate Government—another slew of promises that will not be delivered on. That is what we focus on in the Public Accounts Committee: delivery. We look at optimistic, sometimes well-intentioned promises that fail because there is no plan for delivery.

In my own borough we see such poverty. Earlier today, in Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister said that equality has increased and inequality has reduced under his Government. Not in my borough, as 48% of children in Hackney—nearly one in two—live in poverty after housing costs are taken into account. Even in inner London, we are the 22nd most deprived local authority in England. There is real, day-to-day poverty. I invite anyone to join me on my doorstep surgeries and see the reality.

Let me tell the House a story about that reality. I could choose many constituents, but I visited a particular lady just a few weeks ago, who lives in a two-bedroom council flat with her husband and four daughters. The flat is only marginally bigger than my office in this building, and only a bit smaller than a Committee Room. Three of her daughters share a very small bedroom with bunk beds. The toddler shares with her parents. The bathroom and kitchen are so tiny that two people at a time hardly fit. They share one living space.

Government failures over housing and Brexit mean that children are leaving London. For my constituent, that means that the local school is closing because rolls are dropping. The cost of housing means that they have no prospect of moving anywhere else, because of the shortage of properties in the social rented sector, where more than 8,000 households are on the waiting list. According to the most recent verified figures, only 671 homes became available during 2021-22, compared with more than 1,200 in 2016-17. Both of those figures are outstripped by demand.

The cost of housing means that many people are being shipped out to temporary homes, ripped from their schools, churches, mosques and communities. That means that my constituent’s local school is closing, as are others. On top of the overcrowding, her four daughters need to move schools. They are a working family who want to do well, but they have little opportunity. Down the road is the product of the Government’s free school policy: a school with 25 pupils per class. Members who know how schools funding works will know that that school will never be financially sustainable, because schools are funded on 30, 60 or 90 pupils per class. The trust that has taken it over from the one that failed is struggling with the finances. A brand-new building has been built, but it is unsustainable, while other schools are closing thanks to Government policies.

The housing costs across my borough are absolutely wretched. So many people are renting privately but unaffordably. More people rent socially than privately, but they live in overcrowded conditions. An average two-bed rent is just under £2,000 a month. There are 30% fewer privately rented properties available now on Rightmove compared with before the pandemic, and no properties available to those on low incomes at local housing allowance rates. This is the real, day-to-day impact of Government policy. So many people are housed outside the borough.

[Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)]

Forgive me if I misunderstand how our system of government works, but social housing in the hon. Lady’s constituency is the responsibility of the Labour Mayor of London, is it not?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I do not have time to explain, but no; it is the responsibility of the council. Many properties were sold off under right to buy, which means that fewer properties are available. People like my constituent are living cheek by jowl with people in private rented accommodation, often sold to cash buyers if it is above seven storeys, who pay private rents at the rate that I mentioned. The differential is extraordinary, and it means that no one can move from one to the other. The social rented housing that is so desperately needed because of the cost of buying or renting private housing is not available.

Under this Mayor and the previous Mayor, my borough has been building council housing for social rent, as have many housing association partners, but because there is no Government subsidy, every time they build a social rent they pretty much have to build another to sell at market rate in order to cross-subsidise. That is a quick lesson in social housing economics. That shows the detachment, because people in this Chamber do not realise the reality of life for so many in London.

Let us look at the real human impacts. There are 3,777 children in temporary accommodation in Hackney—enough to fill eight primary schools, and equivalent to 1% of the borough’s population. Those children want to live in London but cannot afford to do so. Not only that, but they are being passed from pillar to post, from temporary accommodation to temporary accommodation, and moving school regularly. This is a squeeze on opportunity.

For those at the higher end who might be able to get on to the housing ladder, the lifetime ISA is an opportunity missed in the Budget because it provides support only for a property purchase of up to £450,000 nationally. That rate is higher in London, but even that does not cover the cost, given that, typically, a brand-new two-bedroom property costs £750,000. Who is able to afford that?

On public spending, the Chancellor merrily talked about reductions in spending in most Departments. I have not had time to go through the Red Book in detail, but we see a huge drop. The Home Office budget alone is going down significantly, which is a concern considering all the challenges in policing, immigration and other security issues that it has to deal with, and we could look at education, too. All those budgets are reducing.

There are big nasties out there in every Department that will cost money for whoever is in power. There is the civil nuclear decommissioning and rebuilding of our nuclear power stations, the nuclear enterprise and the costs of decommissioning nuclear submarines. We have not even decommissioned one of those—the first will be done in 2026—and that is becoming an urgent crisis.

There are 700,000 pupils in crumbling schools. These are just some issues where input is needed. On the schools budget, the Department for Education wanted £4 billion a year to build the new schools that were necessary, but it was granted £2.7 billion. We have already seen its capital budget reducing.

The Chancellor talked about public sector productivity and reform. The Public Accounts Committee, which I am proud to chair, examines that endlessly, and too often we see optimistic plans that do not deliver, as I said. He is already spending what he is promising to deliver on that. Let me tell hon. Members that this takes a long time. We need reform and digital transformation, but we cannot deliver those changes and budget savings overnight. We need a long-term approach—slow politics, if you like—where both sides of the House, whoever is in government, agree that some things just have to happen and should not be at the whim of a Government who are on their last desperate stages to try to prove that they have something to offer the British public.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech about all the things that were not in the Budget. Does she agree that the biggest missed opportunity is not investing in the green transition?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

There are so many missed opportunities. The child benefit issue was a mess of this Government’s making. They have now broken the independent taxation rule and that is a problem.

This Government have broken Britain. My constituents are worse off than they were 14 years ago, and worse still, they have no hope. We need to see a Government who will deliver hope, opportunity, housing and school improvements, and cut waiting lists. We need to mend broken Britain; we need a general election and a Labour Government now.