argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Fire Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-27
Topic: Housing
Rebecca Long-Bailey (Labour, Centre-left): I speak in favour of the Bishop of St Albans’ amendment. As the UK Cladding Action Group has previously reported, there have already been leaseholder suicides and, worryingly, 23% of those surveyed by the group have considered suicide or self-harm The Government must realise that the building safety fund only covers unsafe cladding, yet 70% of the buildings surveyed have non-cladding fire safety defects. They must understand that providing cladding remediation funding for buildings over 18 metres, yet forcing leaseholders in buildings under 18 metres to pay, is entirely unfair. They must recognise that there is no support available at all for interim measure costs, including increased insurance premiums and waking watches, which often run into figures of more than £15,000 per week To add further devastation, as we have heard today, Inside Housing has reported that even the minority of leaseholders who could apply for loans face a wait of potentially years. In the meantime, many residents still live in unsafe buildings and are understood to have already received requests for up-front payment, with freeholders sometimes instructing solicitors to carry out debt recovery. This could result in a tide of bankruptcies and evictions. The situation is so bad that I understand that analysts at the Bank of England are now assessing whether Britain’s building safety scandal could cause a new financial crisis It is clear that the Government’s approach is untenable and it must change today. Even the National Housing Federation states that the only way to prevent leaseholders and social landlords from having to pay to remediate buildings they did not construct is for the Government to provide up-front funding to remediate all buildings. I hope all MPs today can recognise the moral duty they personally have to protect our constituents and will vote in favour of the Lords amendment.
Fire Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-27
Topic: Housing
Paul Christopher Blomfield (Labour, Centre-left): I actually think that the Prime Minister framed this debate well, because he told the House on 3 February that "no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing safety defects that they did not cause and are no fault of their own."—[Official Report, 3 February 2021; Vol. 688, c. 945.] Those were his words. No ifs, no buts—it was an unequivocal pledge. Clearly, the Government’s measures so far fall well short of fulfilling it. Today we have the opportunity to address that, because the Lords amendments make good on that failure I have spoken previously in the House about leaseholders in the Metis building, Wicker Riverside, Daisy Spring Works and elsewhere in my constituency who face a range of issues with ACM and other cladding, compartmentation, flammable materials wrongly used and other fire safety products. They are trapped in homes that are unsafe and unsaleable, facing bills that will break them—some up to £50,000 each Let us remember that we are talking about young people who stretched their budgets to the limit to buy their first home; couples unable to move on when they have their first child; others who cannot take new jobs because they cannot sell; and older people who have sunk their life savings into their flat and have nowhere to turn. They are being put under unbearable pressure and unimaginable mental strain. People have told me they fear collecting their post in the morning because of the bills it might contain. It is simply unacceptable. Today we can end that misery Those who say that the costs should not fall on the public purse are right. The developers responsible should pay up, as well as those responsible for failings in the building regulation system. The only way that developers and others responsible will be held to account is if the Government own the problem, urgently undertake remediation and then use the full resources of the state to chase down those responsible. Leaseholders simply cannot do it on their own We have that responsibility because successive Governments oversaw a flawed system of building inspections, which signed off so many of these unsafe buildings. These leaseholders are victims of comprehensive regulatory failure. There is a grave injustice here that must be remedied, and the Government must face up to it. Those responsible for the failings should be responsible for putting them right, without any costs falling on leaseholders, either now or in the future through loans schemes. Many leaseholders have stretched their finances to the limit to buy their home. Some have already been bankrupted. Others are facing ruin. We have to put a stop to it today, so let us put aside other differences and do the right thing by accepting the Lords amendments.
Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-27
Topic: Other
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Government amendments (a) to (c) in lieu of Lords amendments 1S, 1T and 1U Government manuscript amendments (d) and (e) Government motion to disagree with Lords amendment 5B.
Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-27
Topic: Other
Kevan David Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I agree with my right hon. Friend’s comments about their lordships, but does he agree that if some of the amendments that were tabled in Committee had been adopted, the Lords would not have had to redo the work on the Bill? Is he as disappointed as I am that the Minister at the time would not take into consideration any amendments in Committee?
Electricity — House of Commons, 2021-04-27
Topic: Other
Alan Patrick Vincent Whitehead (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Minister very much for giving way. I detect that she may be coming towards the end of her comments. I wonder if she might pause to reflect briefly on the whole question of thresholds and obligations, and how they might work out over the next year, particularly with the new scheme as it comes forward after her proposed consultation period.
Research and Innovation Funding: Scottish Universities — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Mixed Topics
Andrew John Gwynne (Labour, Centre-left): Both Aberdeen and St Andrews universities stand to lose £2.5 million each as a result of official development assistance cuts. Among the ongoing projects at risk at Aberdeen is a £1.8 million research initiative into the spread of infectious diseases between rodents and humans. Given that we have recently been reminded of the importance of long-term, well-funded research in responding to a global crisis, what steps are being taken to ensure that these cuts do not impair Scotland’s ability to respond to future crises?
Engagements — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Other
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Have you got the answer, Prime Minister? Tell us more about PMQs. I am sure the Prime Minister knows the answer. [Interruption.] We will try to come back to that question, and I will go to the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer.
Engagements — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Mixed Topics
Lilian Rachel Greenwood (Labour, Centre-left): Is not the truth behind all of this—the sleaze, the scandals, the jobs for your mates, the cash for curtains —that the Prime Minister thinks that rules, laws and decency are for other people? He thinks they are for the sort of people who shop at John Lewis, Ikea or Argos and who do not have wealthy donors to fund their lifestyles, not for people like him and his Ministers.
Government Support for India — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Mixed Topics
Questions: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs if he will make a statement on the support the Government are providing to the Indian Government.
Deborah Angela Elspeth Marie Abrahams (Labour, Centre-left): As it is in the UK, the impact of covid in India is a human tragedy. I heard from a family friend in Delhi who says that people are terrified, frantically looking for beds and oxygen, with disgraceful profiteering ramping up prices and making support unaffordable for the poor. As we have heard, nearly half of all global covid cases are now in India, and nowhere in the world is safe until we are all safe, so it is absolutely right that the UK has provided ventilators and oxygen, but there are also issues with vaccination logistics and therapeutic supplies. Can I ask what the Minister knows about how Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir are faring, given that there has been no opportunity for an independent visit to the region by parliamentarians or journalists since the revocation of articles 370 and 35A nearly two years ago?
Fire Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Housing
Hilary James Benn (Labour, Centre-left): The Minister knows that this problem is not going to go away. Whether it is the Fire Safety Bill today or in the Building Safety Bill, we will keep returning to this. He knows that because what has been done so far is insufficient. He knows it because, as things stand, the length of time it is likely to take to sort this out will be too long for many leaseholders to be able to continue to bear the costs that they are paying at the moment and to contemplate the future costs that hang over them. And the Government know it because, as they said right at the beginning of this crisis—we intend to hold them to this promise—it is not right that leaseholders should be asked to bear the costs of something they were not responsible for I really do not understand the Minister’s argument. The uncertainty is not caused by our voting for the Lords amendments; it is the unresolved problem that is causing huge uncertainty. As for his point about drafting complexity, he should give a commitment to go away and draft something and bring it back in the Building Safety Bill, because either his view is that it is complex and no one has drafted anything suitable yet—so go away and draft it—or it is simply a way of trying to resist the idea that leaseholders should not have to pay In the meantime, I have a practical suggestion to make. All those involved, including MPs, spend a lot of time going back and forth about practical problems in respect of blocks, difficulties, delays, a lack of communication and so forth. I have had to use parliamentary questions to try to find out what has been happening in respect of applications to the building safety fund for particular blocks in my constituency. I have to say, the replies I have received have been distinctly unhelpful A very large range of people is involved: leaseholders of course, freeholders, the fire service, managing agents, building companies, developers, chartered surveyors, local authorities, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and the Minister’s Department. I know that Ministers and officials meet individual groups and organisations regularly, but I think there would be great merit in bringing together representatives of all these groups to establish what we can call a contact group or an action group, so that the Minister and his officials can sit around a table on a regular basis to share information about what is happening and to progress-chase, iron out problems, test out ideas and find answers to the problems for which there is as yet no plan, but which my constituents in Leeds have to live with each and every day and which weigh so heavily upon them, their lives and their sense of whether there is a future that they can look forward to, because, as things stand, there is not one. I really hope that Ministers will take up the idea and finally acknowledge that only a comprehensive plan is going to bring this nightmare to an end.
Fire Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Housing
Barry Strachan Gardiner (Labour, Centre-left): This Bill has been passing backwards and forwards between the Lords and Commons because the Government will not do the right thing and protect leaseholders from the ruinous costs of replacing cladding and remediating internal fire safety defects during construction. By refusing to do so, the Government are making liars out of all the successive Ministers—and, indeed, a Prime Minister—who have told this House that leaseholders should not pay for building defects for which they are not responsible Today I want to focus on the impact of the EWS1 regulations and the callous way in which another operator, FirstPort, is treating vulnerable residents in Blackberry Court in my constituency. FirstPort has written to the 27 leaseholders in Blackberry Court, which is a two-storey block of flats, to advise them that the fire safety work will cost more than £20,000. It has not provided a breakdown of costs or issued a section 20 notice, as it is legally obliged to do for any work costing more than £250 per leaseholder. What is most disturbing, however, is that FirstPort has been demanding access to the roof void through the only loft hatch, which is located in the bedroom of my constituent, who is an elderly lady of 94 years of age. FirstPort would brook no objection to this until I intervened to forestall this intrusion and asked it to create new access to the roof void from the common parts of the building. But the fact that it had not yet been able to access the void to survey it means that it must already have been aware that there was no compartmentation in the roof space. Indeed, I have discovered that Blackberry Court, which was built in 2007, never got a completion certificate, despite being covered by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. That prompts the question of why the company had not acted on this fire safety defect before. Some may suspect that the properties were unsaleable and devalued—unless the work was done—because of the EWS1 form. The Government did change the requirements on the form, but the Minister knows that the banks and the mortgage lenders have not changed their stance, nor have the insurers.
Fire Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Housing
Ruth Margaret Cadbury (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and all the Members who have spoken since the Minister sat down Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have said in the House and in the other place on many occasions that leaseholders would not have to pay for fire safety failures not of their making, so why do the Government still disagree with the Lords amendment? The Minister said yesterday and just now that the Government do not have time to draft appropriate amendments to the Bill in the way we seek, yet they have had seven months since Second Reading and five months since Third Reading—plenty of time to try to sort this out. The safety scandal exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire affects up to 1.3 million flats. Current leaseholders cannot sell, and potential leaseholders cannot get new mortgages until they can prove the homes are safe. Insurance is impossible to come by. Worse, residents of those flats live with the fear of being trapped by a fire in their home. Leaseholders live with the fear of unaffordable costs for the remediation being imposed on them The human cost is incalculable. In my constituency alone, at the Paragon estate, built by Berkeley, about 70 homeowners, along with hundreds of assured tenants and students, were evacuated with a week’s notice and cannot return. A fire raged up the cladding of Sperry House in the middle of the Great West Quarter estate built by Barratt Homes. Leaseholders in at least 25 blocks in my constituency that were built by volume house developers face unknown costs, including for waking watch, for the replacement of flammable cladding and wooden balconies and, most expensive of all, to address the lack of fire breaks or proper compartmentalisation The building safety fund does not even cover the cost of cladding remediation throughout the country, let alone any of the other failures in these buildings, and it provides loans only for sub-18-metre blocks. Nor does it support housing associations with the cost of rectifying the safety failures that affect the social rented flats for which they have found themselves responsible through planning gain, so they are having to take the repair costs from the funds meant for the building of new social rented housing Unamended, the Bill will mean that leaseholders will be forced to pay. They should not have to pay—they did not design or build their flats and they do not own the building their flat is built in. This Parliament, with the support of this Government, could take the burden from leaseholders now, but instead we are told that we have to wait for a different Bill, the content of which is unspecified, as is its timetable. That is unacceptable.
Fire Safety Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Housing
Paul Christopher Blomfield (Labour, Centre-left): We have heard a lot recently about the Prime Minister’s honesty and integrity. It is important to our democracy that people can trust the word of their leaders, but this debate highlights that issue yet again. As I reminded the House yesterday, on 3 February the Prime Minister told us that "no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing safety defects that they did not cause and are no fault of their own."—[Official Report, 3 February 2021; Vol. 688, c. 945.] It was a clear statement of policy—an unambiguous pledge to those who face ruin as a result of fire defects that are the responsibility of developers. Yet the Prime Minister has consistently whipped his Members to oppose amendments to the Bill that would honour his pledge I have listened carefully to the justifications from Ministers for opposing the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and by the Bishop of St Albans, and we heard them again yesterday. The Minister described the amendments as "laudable in their intentions" but "unworkable and an inappropriate means to resolve a problem as highly complex as this."—[Official Report, 27 April 2021; Vol. 693, c. 264-265.] His ministerial colleague in the other place, the Minister for Building Safety and Communities, said that it was "the Government’s view that the Bill is not the right legislation in which to deal with remediation costs."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 April 2021; Vol. 811, c. 2207.] So, they are not the right amendments and it is not the right legislation Surely the Government should embrace the new Lords amendment, because it gives them the opportunity to draft their own proposals in separate legislation and to honour the Prime Minister’s promise to leaseholders. The Minister claimed today that it will take time; the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) rightly pointed out that they have had time. It has been five months since the hon. Gentleman tabled his amendment and three months since the Prime Minister’s promise: if the Minister genuinely felt that the objectives were laudable, he has had time to come up with his own proposals. Those in the Metis building, Wicker Riverside, Daisy Spring Works and other buildings throughout my constituency deserve nothing less, because they face bills of up to £50,000 each to fix the mistakes of others. Unlike the Prime Minister, they do not have access to private donors. They face bankruptcy and ruin, trapped in homes that are unsafe and unsaleable, facing unbearable pressure and unimaginable mental strain We have to recognise our responsibility. The leaseholders have been let down by not just the developers but a flawed system of building inspections. They are—as I know Ministers recognise—the victims of comprehensive regulatory failure. The Government have to step in, urgently fix the faults and then recover the funds from those responsible—
Insolvency — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Other
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her point of order. I hope she will appreciate that it is not really a point of order for me, but I am sure that the Treasury Bench will have heard what she has said and will report it back in the usual way, through the usual channels. The hon. Lady has obviously also placed it on the record by raising the point of order in the way that she has We will have a short two-minute suspension for cleaning before the next business.
Immigration — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Mixed Topics
Holly Jamie Walker-Lynch (Labour, Centre-left): I am afraid that we are not at all satisfied with the Minister’s contribution. This is a shameful downgrading of essential, hard-won protections for those who have been subject to some of the worst forms of exploitation and abuse. The Minister says that we lead in Europe on modern slavery, but he uses that as a justification for downgrading protections, which means that we will trample all over that sense of leadership and welcome progress on this issue. We will no longer lead in this policy area, which is much more about humanity than it ever will be about practicalities The Minister suggested that only one other colleague attended the Westminster Hall debate yesterday, but he did not clarify the fact that it was a 30-minute debate. As such, there were no contributions from other parties or other Members. The early-day motion praying against the statutory instrument has secured 77 signatures, and is a more appropriate reflection of colleagues’ interest in this important matter My right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made some incredibly powerful points, and I thank him for his leadership on this issue. We do not have the confidence to support the Government on proposed guidance that is yet to be published. I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for his typically powerful contribution as well The protections currently in place represent far more than a policy anomaly. There is a strong case for them to be in place and we want to see those protections extended. We seek to divide the House to revoke these proposals Question put.
National Security and Investment Bill — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Other
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): In order to observe social distancing, the Reasons Committee will meet in Committee Room 12. Business of the House (Today) (No. 2) Ordered, That, at this day’s sitting, the Speaker shall put the Questions on the motion in the name of Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg relating to Amendments to the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme not later than one hour after the commencement of proceedings on the motion for this Order; such Questions shall include the Questions on any Amendments to the motions selected by the Speaker which may then be moved; the business on that motion may be proceeded with at any hour, though opposed; and Standing Order No. 41A (Deferred divisions) shall not apply.—(Scott Mann.)
Amendments to the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme — House of Commons, 2021-04-28
Topic: Other
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): I know that Mr Speaker and the other Deputy Speakers would want me to agree wholeheartedly with the words of the Leader of the House about Ray Mortimer, whose service to the House is deeply appreciated, as is the kindness and courtesy that he has always shown to us. We will miss his cheerful presence. We wish you well, Ray.
Trade: UK and EU — House of Commons, 2021-02-11
Topic: Mixed Topics
John Eugene Joseph Dromey (Labour, Centre-left): A Make UK survey shows that 61% of manufacturers are suffering disruption to their supply chain; one car company is parking hundreds of cars because of problems with its supply chain; road haulage in Northern Ireland is in chaos; the Road Haulage Association survey shows that more than one in two of its members throughout the UK are swamped by red tape; and Government officials are even advising companies to set up hubs on the continent, when we should be building British and buying British. What will the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster do finally to ease such burdens on business on our great British companies, which are deeply damaging, at the worst possible time?