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The hon. Gentleman talks about council houses being lost to right to buy; it would be remiss not to say they are being gained by tenants who own a property—part of a property-owning democracy that we hold dear in this country.
I am losing track of the narrative in this debate. The Government do not want to sell the unit to the tenant, but that means they will forgo all the long-term health, economic, social and community benefits of home ownership. At the same time, you want to lock them into lifelong tenancies, which would take their house out of action and reduce its availability to other households that are more in need. Perhaps I have misunderstood the Bill, but that is the narrative that I understand the Government are setting out. Can the Minister confirm that for me?
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will make a statement on the electronic monitoring of offenders.
You would not believe, Mr Speaker, listening to the Minister that the numbers of prison places and prison officers are actually down. It all sounds like it is going very well according to her version of events. Labour told us that to keep the public safe from the dangerous criminals it is releasing early, the Justice Secretary would implement the toughest tagging regime in British history, and that there would be a new presumption that offenders will be electronically tagged and monitored when they leave prison. But the Metropolitan police told Sky this weekend that it will not act on all breaches of tag conditions by bailed offenders, blaming the pressure created by Labour’s early release scheme. Just in London, there have been 100 tag breaches a day by released prisoners since the first early release scheme started, with two to three released prisoners now being rearrested every week. The Met commissioner said that “95%-plus of the tagging breaches that we arrest are simply being bailed back into the community on the same condition”. He says, “there is zero sanction”. One sergeant said: “There are not enough cops” to handle Labour’s early release of thousands of prisoners. The Justice Secretary, when he stops hiding in his Department and sending junior Ministers to answer for him, needs to be straight with the House and the public. Four days after his early release scheme started, he told the BBC that he did not know—that it was impossible to know—how many prisoners had been tagged. He wrote to me yesterday admitting that he still does not know, and that is 26 days later. The Times reports that most prisoners will not be tagged as they are released from prison, and we know that more than 5,000 offenders went unmonitored in the first half of this year because they were not fitted with tags. This is a mess. So chaotic is Labour’s early release scheme that prisoners are being given tents instead of housing upon release. As a matter of policy, these prisoners will be in probable breach of their licence and tagging conditions, which require them to have an approved address, all because the Probation Service is overwhelmed. We know that two thirds of prisoners who are sleeping rough go on to reoffend within the first year. Ministers keep telling us that the full data on tagging and reoffending cannot be published until the regulation publication dates. I ask again: will Ministers publish full data on how many released prisoners have been tagged? Will they publish comprehensive data on reoffending by prisoners let out through Labour’s early release scheme, and will the Justice Secretary apologise to the House for telling the public that they would be kept safe?
I call the Chair of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy.
Order. I am just as interested in the response, as it covers my constituency too, but we need to make sure that questions are much shorter and answers are on point.
Order. In case I was not understood earlier, questions need to be shorter and answers on point.
I call the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.
I thank the hon. Member for giving notice of his point of order and for ensuring that Members were alerted before they were mentioned in the Chamber. This is not a matter for the Chair, but he has got his point on the record; those on the Government Front Bench will have heard what he has said and will pass his point on.
I congratulate my Staffordshire colleague, the hon. Member for Burton and Uttoxeter (Jacob Collier), on introducing this important debate so effectively. Five years ago, when I was chairman of the all-party parliamentary beer group, I chaired an inquiry examining the importance of cask ale to British pub culture and how to revive real ale. We took evidence from more than 30 witnesses for our May 2021 report, “Caskenomics”. Five years on, rather than celebrating a renaissance, cask ale is facing an arguably even worse situation than in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Nothing illustrates that more starkly than the recent announcements that Molson Coors will close Sharp’s brewery in Cornwall and Carlsberg will close the historic Marston’s brewery in Burton upon Trent, having already closed the famous Banks’s brewery right on my doorstep in Wolverhampton last year. Losing Banks’s, Marston’s and Sharp’s should set alarm bells ringing across Whitehall. Cask beer is a uniquely British product, and the handpump at the bar defines the British pub. Cask ale has a proud history, and having a proper pint in a British pub is consistently one of the top three things that overseas tourists say they want to do while they are in the United Kingdom. Pre-pandemic, cask ale was worth £577 million, directly supported 72,500 jobs and accounted for one in nine on-trade pints while providing up to 70% of output for small and regional brewers. Delivered live for the publican to condition in the cellar, its freshness makes it uniquely vulnerable when footfall falters. Once tapped, a cask must sell within two to three days, averaging 23 pints daily, or it spoils. Without thriving pubs, cask has no route to market as it cannot be properly reproduced at home. Conversely, without real ale, pub footfall suffers. That can be either a virtuous or a vicious cycle, depending on the decisions we take. During the pandemic, cask volumes understandably plummeted, with 87 million pints, worth over £300 million, having to be poured away, and more than 2,000 pubs closed for good. As “Caskenomics” warned five years ago, uncertain trade forces publicans to rationalise handpumps in favour of longer-life kegged lagers, as the hon. Member for Burton and Uttoxeter said. That reduces the variety that draws drinkers into our pubs. Five years later, mounting cost pressures, some of which are the direct result of decisions taken by this Government, have turned the pandemic shock into a structural crisis for cask ale. Why does it matter so profoundly? First, as the hon. Gentleman said, there is an “umbilical cord” that links cask ale to community pubs. Three quarters of British Institute of Innkeeping members view cask as vital to their pub, and cask drinkers spend twice as much on average as other adult drinkers, while typically choosing a venue for mixed groups. It is a genuine heritage product and should be recognised as such. Secondly, cask underpins the social service that pubs informally provide in tackling loneliness and bolstering wellbeing. Professor Robin Dunbar’s Oxford University study for CAMRA, “Friends on Tap”, proved that regulars at a local pub have more close friends, higher life satisfaction and greater community trust. They socialise in conversation-sized groups of three to four, unlike in large city venues where bigger groups fragment conversation and encourage heavier drinking. Thirdly, at typically between 3.5% and 4.8%, cask ale served in pubs is tailor-made for responsible consumption. Fourthly, brewed with domestic Maris Otter barley and British hops in casks that are reused thousands of times, it is a near zero-waste, low-food-mile product that sustains a British hop industry dating back to the 14th century. To protect this important heritage asset, the Government must act on three core lessons that we found in “Caskenomics”. First, they must reform taxes and widen draught duty relief. The Treasury takes about a third of every pub pint, and pubs massively overpay business rates compared with other businesses with similar profit profiles. Brewers such as Black Sheep see about 60% of their turnover taken in taxes. Lowering business rates and building on a reduced duty for draught beer are vital for shifting sales from supermarkets back to cask ale in our local pubs, so widening the draught beer duty differential introduced by the previous Government should be a no-brainer tomorrow. Secondly, we need to back British agriculture. Following New Zealand’s $8 million hop sector investment, we need targeted support for British hop growers and maltsters, who are so important to British cask ale. Thirdly, we need fair market access to champion and celebrate British cask ale as a heritage product. With multinationals closing, independent cask brewers need fair access to pub cellars. Alongside that, cask ale deserves official heritage designation to celebrate it as uniquely British, just as champagne is French, chianti is Italian and port is Portuguese. Cask ale is the lifeblood of our brewing heritage. It is important to the local identity of so many of our communities, and it is the anchor of our community pubs.
The investment that successive Governments have given to Pub is the Hub could not be better spent, so I certainly welcome additional investment. As the hon. Lady says, John Longden has done a formidable job with Pub is the Hub. I remember going around Cornwall with him to see pubs that were not only the last pub standing in a village but the job club, the post office and the village store. In one case it was even the hairdresser, and I think there is a photo of John pretending to cut my hair in the saloon lounge. Cask ale needs these protections, and there is action that the Government can take starting tomorrow. I urge the Minister, and more importantly the Chancellor, to give our brewers and publicans the fighting chance they deserve.
It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. Clause 25 allows a court to make a slavery and trafficking risk order when someone is acquitted of a slavery or trafficking offence. The court may do so only when it is satisfied that the person’s conduct shows a risk that they will commit such an offence, and that an order is necessary to protect people from harm. It is worth reminding the Committee that these orders exist because of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, brought forward by Theresa May as Home Secretary. That legislation put this country at the forefront of the fight against modern slavery, and the Opposition welcome measures that build on it. Modern slavery is a vile crime. It preys on the vulnerable and hides in plain sight in our towns and on our high streets, and the police need every reasonable tool to get ahead of it. Let me be clear: an acquittal must be respected, and nobody should treat a risk order as a second verdict. However, a trial can bring out evidence of risky conduct that falls short of proving the offence charged. Where the statutory test is met, it makes sense for the court that has heard all the evidence to be able to act there and then. The alternative is that the police must start again in another court, with another application, another handover and another chance for the case to fall through the cracks. The person at risk cannot afford that. This power will not use itself, however. Prosecutors and police need to have considered it before the trial ends, with the evidence ready and a plan for who will manage any restrictions afterwards. Otherwise, we risk passing a good clause that goes unused at the very moment it matters. Government amendment 113 corrects the Government’s own drafting—I suspect that it will not be the last correction we see in Committee. An appeal against such an order will be treated like an appeal against sentence. The Court of Appeal may end up making an order itself. The amendment ensures that any late application to vary, renew or discharge that order goes to the Crown court. Officers should know which court to go to without a dispute over jurisdiction, so we support the amendment, but we should be honest about where many of the applications will land. The Crown court backlog reached a new record of more than 80,800 cases at the end of June. Every additional application joins that queue, and victims are already waiting far too long. That is not a reason to oppose this power, but it is a reason for the Government to tell the Committee what assessment they have made of the court time needed and how it will be found. The clause also amends the Scottish and Northern Irish legislation, so that breaching one of the new orders is an offence in those jurisdictions, too. Those who exploit others do not stop at borders, and someone subject to an order must not be able to escape enforcement by moving to another part of the United Kingdom. We support the clause and the Government amendment, but I would be grateful if the Minister answered three questions. First, who will be responsible for identifying suitable cases before an acquittal brings proceedings to an end, and what guidance will prosecutors be given? Secondly, how many of the orders do the Government expect to be made each year? Thirdly, if someone subject to one of the orders moves to Scotland or Northern Ireland, how will the order be enforced there promptly?
Clause 26 brings the chief constable of the British Transport police into the arrangements for applying for slavery and trafficking prevention and risk orders. Clause 27 widens the ability of territorial police forces to apply for these orders against people who live outside their area. The Opposition welcome both clauses. The gangs behind modern slavery do not respect police boundaries, and our ability to stop them should not be hemmed in by those boundaries. The gangs move people by road and rail, they recruit in one town and exploit in another, and they rely on the gaps between agencies. Officers on our railways might be the first to see what is going on. If a British Transport police officer keeps seeing the same man shepherding the same frightened young people between stations, and gathers the evidence and identifies the risk, the next step should not be a phone call to ask another force to make the application. Clause 27 deals with the same problem for territorial forces. Under the current law, a force can apply only in respect of someone who lives in its area or who intends to come into its area, but someone can live in one force area and do their damage in another. The force holding the evidence should be able to act, but wider powers require clear responsibility. If several forces have an interest in the same individual, who leads? Who checks that the person is complying with the order? Who answers the phone when a victim reports contact that might breach the order? Criminals exploit gaps, and we should not create new gaps between police forces. Let me make a point that applies to the whole of part 5 of the Bill, so that I do not have to repeat it when addressing every group of amendments. Every new power in clauses 25 to 34 comes with work attached. Officers must recognise when an order is appropriate, build an application that will stand up in court, attend hearings and then manage the order for years. The British Transport police already have a demanding job keeping passengers safe, and our courts are already stretched. This is not about point-scoring on resources, but none of those powers will work just because a clause has been passed. Officers need training, guidance and capacity, and Ministers cannot hand forces new duties and leave them to pick up the bill. We support clauses 26 and 27, but I would be grateful if the Minister could answer the following questions. First, were these changes requested by chief officers, including the chief constable of the British Transport police, and if so, what problems did they identify? Secondly, will there be an agreed protocol in place before these powers come into force, setting out which force leads when more than one force is involved? Thirdly, what assessment have the Government made of the training, guidance and capacity that forces will need to use the new powers set out in this part of the Bill?
Clauses 28 and 29 make compulsory the core notification requirements for slavery and trafficking prevention and risk orders. The clauses also allow for the specification in regulations of further information that a court can require in a particular order. The principle behind the clauses is simple: if the police are to enforce an order, they need to know who the person is and where to find them. An order is not worth the paper it is written on if the person it covers can simply disappear, so the Opposition welcome making the requirements compulsory, rather than optional. A “requirement” to notify must be exactly that—a requirement, not a polite request. Anyone who gives false details or deliberately keeps the police in the dark should expect consequences. We made the same argument during the passage of the Crime and Policing Bill, to which we tabled amendments that would have put real penalties on registered sex offenders who failed to notify. An obligation with no teeth is no obligation at all. However, collecting information is only half the job. A notification requirement is only as good as the system behind it. If someone moves but the police are still working from their old address, officers knock on the wrong door and time is lost; when someone is at risk of exploitation, lost time can mean real harm. An address being on a form does not prove that anyone lives there. Someone has to check and record that address, and make sure that the information reaches the officers who need it, including those in other forces. The clauses leave further requirements to be made under regulations. I welcome the fact that those regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure, but before we give the Minister this regulation-making power, the Committee should understand the gap it is meant to close. What can officers not currently find out through the orders, and how would that information help them to prevent exploitation? Finally, I want to raise the orders already in force. Under current law, a court making an order can choose whether to include notification requirements, meaning that some existing orders will contain no such requirement at all. Subsections 28(6) and 29(5) make clear that the new requirements will not apply to orders made before the clauses come into force. That means that even after the Bill becomes law, a person already subject to an order may have no duty to tell the police their name or address. The Committee will come on to discuss the powers to vary and renew orders under clause 34 of the Bill, but the Government should not wait for cases to come back to court by chance. They need a plan to find the existing orders that do not have those requirements, and to bring them up to the new standard. We support clauses 28 and 29, but for these requirements to work in practice the Committee needs answers to three questions. First, on the regulation-making powers in both clauses, what additional information do the Government expect to require, and will the Committee see draft regulations before Report? Secondly, on enforcement, who will check that the details a person gives are true, and how will that information reach other police forces when the person moves? Thirdly, how many existing orders are currently enforced without notification requirements, and what is the Government’s plan for reviewing them?
Clause 30 allows a court to adjourn proceedings on a slavery and trafficking prevention order at sentencing. If the defendant does not attend the adjourned hearing, the court may adjourn again, issue a warrant for their arrest or, subject to safeguards, proceed in their absence. A court deciding whether to make one of these orders needs the evidence to get it right, and the Opposition support giving it the time to do so. Proposed restrictions may need checking, or information from another force may still be outstanding. Rushing that work could produce an order that misses the very conduct it is meant to stop. We should be clear about what an adjournment means in practice: another hearing has to be listed, officers may have to return to court, and if the offender is not in custody the risk they pose has to be managed while the case waits. When someone has been convicted of exploiting another human being, the public will rightly expect any continuing risk to be dealt with promptly. Given the Crown court backlog of a record more than 80,000 cases, nobody should be adding avoidable hearings to that list. It is also worth noting that the clause places no limit on how long proceedings can be adjourned or how many times. That is why so much depends on preparation. The possibility of a prevention order should not suddenly occur to someone at the end of a sentencing hearing. An adjournment may sometimes be necessary, but it must not become the fall-back for an application that nobody got ready. We welcome the power to proceed when the defendant fails to attend; a convicted offender should not be able to hold up a protective order simply by staying at home. The safeguards in the clause matter. Before issuing a warrant, the court must be satisfied that the defendant had “adequate notice” of the hearing before proceeding in their absence. It must also be satisfied that the defendant was told the hearing could go ahead without them. If that is not done properly, the court cannot take the next step. Getting the paperwork right is what allows the court to act firmly. We must not forget the victim. If the hearing has been put off, the victim needs to know that restrictions are not in place. Otherwise, they may rely on protection that does not yet exist. We support clause 30, but I would be grateful if the Minister answered the following questions. When proceedings are adjourned and the offender is not in custody, how will any immediate risk be managed until the order is made? Who will be responsible for telling victims that an order has been delayed and what has and has not been put in place? Will the Government monitor how often such proceedings are adjourned and how many times in a single case, so that a sensible power does not become another source of delay?
Clauses 31 to 33 provide for electronic monitoring in slavery and trafficking prevention orders and risk orders, including interim orders, and require the issuance of a code of practice on how the monitoring data is handled. A court order must mean something. If somebody is told to stay away from a potential victim or a particular place, the authorities need to know when that order is broken, and they need to act. Electronic monitoring can help with that, and the Opposition support these powers. However, we should not view tagging through rose-tinted glasses. A tag tells the authority where someone is. It cannot stop the person picking up a phone and getting someone else to do their dirty work, and a tag is only as good as the response when it goes off. Picture someone walking into an area the court has barred them from because a potential victim lives there. The device records it and an alert is raised. Then what? Who receives that alert first, how quickly is it passed to the police, and how quickly do officers arrive? Someone who is at risk at 11 o’clock on a Saturday night cannot wait until Monday morning for someone to check a screen. That is not a theoretical concern. Only this week, Sky News reported that the Metropolitan police will no longer respond to curfew or tag battery breaches lasting under an hour, unless the wearer is judged to pose a particular risk. The commissioner says his officers are dealing with more than 100 tag breaches a day, driven in part by the Government’s early release scheme. One sergeant put it simply: “there are not enough cops”. The Met itself described cases in which officers were told about a breach many hours after it had happened. The problem is therefore at both ends: alerts that are slow to reach the police, and police too stretched to respond when they do. The Minister must tell us how alerts under these new orders will avoid both. Monitoring can also be imposed only where suitable arrangements are available in the area, so a court may decide that monitoring is necessary but still be unable to order it. Will monitoring be available consistently across the country from the day these powers come into force, or will protection depend on where a victim happens to live? The person being monitored must allow the equipment to be fitted and maintained, and must not interfere with it. Deliberate tampering cannot be allowed to defeat an order, and it must be treated as the enforcement matter it is. Equally, officers need to be able to tell a flat battery from a deliberate attempt to go off the radar, so that they spend their time on the real risks. Clause 33 requires a code of practice on monitoring data. That code must protect the data properly, but it must also let the right officers get hold of information quickly, and make sure that it is preserved where it may be needed as evidence. We support clauses 31 to 33, but we have questions for the Minister. When an alert is raised under one of these orders, who receives it? How is it passed to the police, and how quickly will officers respond, including at night and on weekends? Where will monitoring be available when these powers come into force, and when will it be available everywhere? When will the Committee see a draft of the code of practice on monitoring data?
The clause brings the new notification and electronic monitoring requirements into the process for varying and renewing slavery and trafficking prevention orders and risk orders. An order has to keep protecting people long after the day it is made. Those subject to the orders could move, change how they operate or find a way around a restriction and the police must be able to respond. The Opposition support the clause. There should be no reward for wriggling around an order. If the evidence shows the restrictions need strengthening, the authorities should be back in front of the court quickly, not waiting for someone to come to further harm. A power to apply for a variation, however, does not tell an officer when to use it. Take someone whose activities have shifted to a different town. The police know things have changed and that the original conditions no longer fit the risk, but unless someone picks up the file and takes it back to court, the order stays exactly as it was. Someone has to be responsible for spotting that gap and closing it. The clause also deals with orders made before the Bill. As we discussed under clauses 28 and 29, some such orders contain no notification requirements at all. Under clause 34, when an older order is varied, the court can add those requirements only if it is satisfied that they are necessary, but when an older order is renewed, they must be included. That is welcome, but it means the protection depends on someone bringing the older order back to court. Electronic monitoring brings deadlines of its own. A court can extend a monitoring requirement by no more than 12 months at a time, so every order with a tag will need to come back to court at least once a year to keep it in place. Expiry dates should never come as a surprise. An ongoing risk must not go unmonitored because a renewal application was left sitting in someone’s in-tray. There is a practical catch, too: a tag can be added on variation only if the defendant is present in court, so the person who stays away from the hearing may be the very person who cannot be tagged. I will be grateful if the Minister could say how that will be handled. The clause rightly keeps the requirement for the court to assess risk and necessity. Good evidence makes for a stronger order, and a stronger order is one that officers can enforce with confidence. I set out our concerns about police and court capacity when we debated clauses 26 and 27, and they bite the hardest here. Reviewing existing orders and returning to court every year is exactly the kind of work that does not happen unless someone is given the job of doing it. We support clause 34, but I would be grateful if the Minister could answer the following questions. Who will review existing orders, and who will ensure that a renewal reaches the court before the order or the monitoring runs out? How quickly will an urgent variation be heard when fresh evidence shows that the risk has grown, and what happens if the defendant does not attend? How will victims be told when an order is varied, renewed or allowed to lapse, so that they know what protection they actually have?
There were 23,411 referrals into the national referral mechanism last year, which is the highest number since it began, and 25,373 in the year to June. Behind those numbers are genuine victims who deserve our protection, but there are also people who have worked out that a modern slavery claim can be used to frustrate removal. The British public want two things from our modern slavery system, and they are not in conflict: they want genuine victims protected, and they want the system to stand firm against those who try to game it to avoid removal. Every bogus claim wastes taxpayers’ money, ties up officials who should be helping real victims, and delays the removal of people with no right to be here, and every bad decision risks leaving someone who has been exploited in the hands of the very people who exploited them. The Opposition believe that these clauses can help on both counts and we support them. Clause 35 sets out who makes the decisions. For adults, it is the Secretary of State. For children, it can be the Secretary of State or another public authority nominated for that purpose. Schedule 4 makes the consequential changes needed for that to work. A name in legislation has to mean real accountability. A child’s treatment should not depend on whose desk the file happens to land on. Clause 36 deals with credibility. When deciding whether to believe someone’s account, decision makers must treat certain things as damaging to credibility unless there are good reasons for them. Those things include a delay in making a claim or providing information, material inconsistencies and omissions, inconsistencies with what the person has said in an asylum claim or in court, and striking similarities with other people’s accounts. That is common sense. If someone tells one story in an immigration application and a very different one the moment removal becomes a real prospect, the decision maker should test that difference hard. If an account bears an uncanny resemblance to someone else’s, officials must be free to ask whether they are looking at genuine evidence or a script supplied to frustrate removal. The principle behind the clause is one that we legislated for in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022: that late disclosure without good reason should count against credibility. Labour opposed the Act at the time, so I welcome the fact that the Government now recognise the value of that principle and are building on it. There is common ground across the Committee on this issue. The clause is carefully drawn. It is about damage to credibility. It does not say that every claim must fail or that every inconsistency proves a lie, and it allows for good reasons. Someone threatened by a gang may be terrified to speak. Someone describing horrific events that they have witnessed may not get it all out at once. However, the Bill does not define a good reason; it leaves it to guidance. That guidance must help caseworkers tell a genuine explanation from a convenient excuse, and it needs to be ready before the clause comes into force, not cobbled together afterwards. The rules will work only if caseworkers have the information to apply them. The clause asks them to compare an account with what the person said in an asylum claim or in court proceedings, and with accounts given by other people. That is not much use if the caseworker cannot see the earlier account or has no means of spotting that the same story has appeared in a dozen other claims. We support clauses 35 and 36 and schedule 4, but I would be grateful if the Minister could answer the following questions. First, which authorities does she expect to be nominated to make decisions in children’s cases? Has legislative consent been sought from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and who will check the quality of decisions across the United Kingdom? Secondly, will the guidance on what counts as a good reason be published in draft before Report, and how will it apply at the reasonable grounds stage where the threshold is deliberately low? Thirdly, what systems will caseworkers have to see earlier accounts held elsewhere in the Home Office and to identify striking similarities across different claims? Clear credibility rules should mean quicker and better decisions. What happens to support once a negative decision has been made is the subject of clause 37 in the next group, and I will come to it there.
Clause 37 raises a simple question: once the competent authority has considered a claim and reached a negative conclusive grounds decision, why should the recovery period carry on just because the calendar has not yet reached 30 days? Under clause 37, the recovery period ends when a negative conclusive grounds decision is made, even if that is before the 30 days are up. If no decision has been made by then, the period continues until a decision is made. Corresponding changes are made for further recovery periods. The Opposition support this principle. The recovery period exists so that a claim can be properly considered. Once it has been considered and found wanting, the protection should not roll on automatically. Our immigration system will not command respect if an unsuccessful claim simply buys another stretch of waiting at taxpayers’ expense. Where the legal process is complete and someone has no right to be here, they should leave. We should be honest about what the clause does and does not do. Ending a recovery period lifts the legal bar on removal and ends the support that goes with it. However, it does not remove a single person; that depends entirely on what happens next, which is a point that applies just as much to the groups of clauses either side of this one. Too often, a decision is made in one part of the Home Office, while another part carries on as if nothing has happened. Ministers should be lining up the next steps while a case is still being considered, so that a negative decision is followed swiftly by action, not by a trip to the back of another queue. Speed must not come at the expense of getting it right. A rushed decision that falls apart under scrutiny helps nobody and ends up in court. In the year to June, more than four in five conclusive grounds decisions that were reconsidered came out positive. Whatever the reason for that, it tells us that first decisions do not always hold up. If a negative decision will now end support immediately, the quality of that decision matters more than ever. The Government announced earlier this month that the backlog of conclusive grounds decisions had been cleared, yet more than 6,000 cases were still waiting at the end of September, and that number has been rising. The Home Office’s own statistics show that the number of cases awaiting a final decision fell in every quarter until April this year, but has since risen by 23% between March and June and by a further 6% in September alone. I would be grateful if the Minister explained what the Government mean by “cleared”, and what they are doing to stop the queue from growing again. The person, their representative and the organisations supporting them also need to know what has been decided and what happens next. A recovery period that ends overnight must not leave anyone unsure of whether they are still entitled to support. We support clause 37, but I would be grateful if the Minister answered three questions. First, what checks will take place before a negative conclusive grounds decision is issued, and how will a genuine mistake be put right without that process becoming an endless source of delay? Secondly, once a negative decision is made, who takes ownership of the case, and how will cases that are already in the system when the clause comes into force be treated? Thirdly, will the Government publish regular figures showing how long it takes, after a negative conclusive grounds decision, for the next enforcement step to happen? Counting decisions alone will tell us nothing about whether the system is actually working.
A modern slavery claim must never become a “get out of jail free” card for someone who threatens our national security or is deliberately abusing our immigration system. Clause 38 deals with disqualification from protection on grounds of national security, public order and bad faith, and the Opposition support its purpose. It builds on the public order disqualification that the last Conservative Government introduced in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022—a measure that Labour voted against. When we legislated again in 2023, the then Prime Minister said that our modern slavery measures would drive “a coach and horses” through protections. Labour has kept those measures and is now are adding to them—we welcome that. However, the Committee must understand exactly who is caught, which protections fall where and how such decisions will be taken. The Government have had to table—
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. As we read the amended clause, the national security ground applies regardless of age. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed that, where a child has been groomed and exploited into offending, that must be properly weighed. The public also expect serious offending by under-18s to be dealt with, so the Minister should tell us what assessment has been made of the cases affected and how the safeguarding, criminal justice and security systems will handle that. The bad faith provisions apply to claims made as an adult, including where someone knowingly provides false information or makes a claim when their removal is due. We all know the pattern of the claim that appears at the 11th hour, just as the flight is booked. The Home Office’s own figures show the scale of this: last year, around a third of charter flight returns that failed to go ahead involved a modern slavery referral made after the return had been arranged. On flights with an out-of-hours decision service, three quarters of the referrals were made between 3 pm the day before and 6 am on the day of removal, with one in seven made after 11 pm. Members can draw their own conclusions about what that pattern tells us. The clause contains exceptions to the timing rule when someone met a claim notice deadline or had compelling reasons for not claiming earlier. Those exceptions have their place, but “compelling reasons” has to mean something. It cannot become a catch-all for explaining away every claim made at the departure gate. I would welcome the Minister giving the Committee examples of what would and would not meet that test, and telling us who will make that judgment. A late claim and a knowingly fabricated one are not the same thing. Decisions needs clear reasons if they are to survive a challenge. Otherwise, an attempt to tackle delay just produces another round of litigation. Government amendments 116 and 117 take the provisions on leave out of disqualification sections, and amendment 118 deals with leave in section 65 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, covering national security, adult public order cases and bad faith claims made as an adult. We accept that restructuring, but the decisions on protection and leave must join up. The Minister should set out how existing grants of leave will be reviewed and how revocation decisions will be made where the law allows. Disqualification is not removal. The point I made about clause 37 applies here in full. Once a disqualification decision is made, the case must not fall into the gap between two processes. These measures are a step in the right direction, and we support clause 38 and the Government’s amendments. We look to the Minister to show that the amended clause will work in practice.
Supporting a victim of modern slavery and deciding what immigration permission that person should have are related questions, but they are not the same. The law must protect people who have been exploited while maintaining an immigration system that is controlled, and that the public can have confidence in. Clause 39 removes the specific duty to grant limited leave to help someone recover from physical or psychological harm caused by their exploitation. It keeps the duty where leave is needed for a victim to seek compensation or to co-operate with an investigation or criminal proceedings. Whatever some may claim, this is not the removal of every route by which a confirmed victim can receive leave. The Opposition support keeping this route focused on a specific, evidenced need. A finding that someone has been exploited does not answer every question about where they should live or for how long. The Minister needs to tell us how this will work for a genuine victim who still needs help, and how continuity of recovery support will be ensured. There is also a bigger point here: the grounds that remain are the ones that matter most for bringing traffickers to justice. However, according to the figures that charities have put before the Committee, in 2024 only a handful of grants were made so that victims could seek compensation or help with criminal proceedings. A prosecution that collapses because the key witness left the country is a win for the trafficker, and nobody on the Committee wants that. Can the Minister tell us how the Home Office will ensure that these remaining grounds are actually used, and that its decisions never undermine a victim’s ability to help put an exploiter behind bars? Government amendment 119 adds existing leave to enter and the right of abode to the circumstances in which there is no duty to grant leave under this provision. Avoiding duplication makes sense, and we support it. New clause 29 goes in a very different direction: it would require at least five years’ leave for qualifying confirmed victims, with access to public funds and permission to work, as well as eligibility for settlement after five years’ residence with any form of leave. That is a very substantial immigration proposal, and it would send exactly the wrong signal to the gangs who sell places on small boats. We oppose it. Being recognised as a victim is a serious finding, but it should not automatically settle the separate question of a long period of residence, access to public funds and a route to settlement. Those who back the new clause need to explain why five years is the right minimum in every single qualifying case; how many people it would cover; what it would cost in housing and public services; and why residence under any form of leave should count towards settlement. We support clause 39 and Government amendment 119, and we hope that the Minister will set out the safeguards that will sit alongside them.
A child who has been trafficked or enslaved has already been let down by adults in the worst way imaginable; they now need adults who will take responsibility and keep them safe, not a maze of agencies arguing about whose job that is. That is the test that we apply to these clauses and, based on that test, the Opposition support them. Clause 40 renames independent child trafficking advocates as independent child trafficking guardians. Those advocates were one of the innovations of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and we have no difficulty with a title that better describes their role. However, a new name will not, on its own, protect a single child. What matters is whether the guardian has the expertise, access and authority to make a difference. Clause 41 is more substantive. It allows guardians to provide representation, support or both, and makes clear that the role covers children who may be victims of slavery as well as trafficking. That recognises that exploitation does not always fit neatly into one box. Many of us have seen in our own communities how county line gangs groom children to run drugs. That is exploitation, plain and simple. The clause also allows assistance to be given indirectly through the professionals who provide services to or make decisions about the child. Helping those professionals to understand the risks has real value, but indirect support must never become a convenient substitute for someone actually being there for a child who needs them. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us who will decide whether indirect support is enough and how the child’s own voice will be heard in that decision. The guardians’ involvement in decisions must also be meaningful. There is little point in appointing someone to stand up for a child if the big decisions have been made before they are in the room. Guardians also need a clear and fast route to the police when an exploiter is trying to get back in touch with a child. They are part of the safeguarding response, and the gangs who prey on children must be hunted down and prosecuted. Clause 42 would remove the requirement to report to Parliament on proposed steps under section 48 of the Modern Slavery Act and change the commencement arrangements. In July, the Government announced £25 million to extend the guardian service to the remaining 179 local authorities in England that do not have it yet. We welcome that, but a child in one of those areas needs a guardian now. Can the Minister tell us when the service will be available in every one of them? Removing a reporting requirement must not mean that Parliament knows less about whether children are actually being kept safe. Finally, the service will work only if it can meet demand. Can the Minister tell us how many children the expanded service is expected to support and what will happen when demand outstrips capacity? The Government should set out how they will measure whether guardians are actually making children safer, to ensure that this is a real step forward and not simply a change of name. We support clauses 40 to 42.
Support for potential victims must reach those who genuinely need it, with clear responsibility for decisions and proper accountability for every pound of taxpayers’ money. Clause 43 raises three practical questions. Who assesses that need? Who can overrule that assessment? How does this support fit alongside other services? The clause allows an authorised person to assess the assistance someone needs while keeping a power for the Secretary of State to override a positive assessment. Amendment 70 would scrap that override. I understand the worry about specialist advice being set aside, but Ministers must remain answerable to this House for the public money in this system, so we cannot support the amendment. What the power does demand is clear reasons. I would welcome the Minister telling us when the override is expected to be used, what evidence would justify it, and how a wrong decision would be put right. Amendment 71 would add a list of factors to be assessed, including the best interests of the person and their dependent; their individual needs; and compatibility with the relevant conventions. Good decision makers should already be weighing a person’s need, and writing a long list of factors into statute invites challenge on every one of them and risks turning each decision into a legal contest. We do not support the amendment. Government amendments 120 to 123 are the latest in a string of changes that the Government have made to their Bill in this part alone, but these amendments are an improvement. Where someone loses support elsewhere because of their conduct, the exclusion is narrowed to the particular kind of support they have lost, rather than letting the loss of one service become a reason to withhold everything. That is a fair balance. Conditions attached to public assistance must still mean something, and the taxpayer should not simply be asked to replace support that someone has lost through their own misconduct. Government amendment 123 removes the word “properly” from the test of whether that conduct is attributable to harm arising from exploitation. We will not oppose it, but the Minister should explain why the word is going, and confirm that it does not lower the bar. The question must still be answered on the evidence. Neither an automatic excuse nor an automatic penalty makes for good decisions. Amendments 72 and 73 concern children. Clause 43 removes children from these Home Office support duties while separate duties on local authorities and other agencies remain. Amendment 72 would keep the Home Office duty for children, and amendment 73 would require resources for local authority provision and reporting on funding. Protecting children is essential, but keeping two overlapping duties risks the very thing we all want to avoid: two bodies each assuming that the other has it covered while the child falls through the middle. We do not support these amendments either, but the Government must be clear about where responsibility now lies. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out who is responsible at each stage of a child’s case, how local authority provision will be funded, and what happens immediately if that provision is not there. We support clause 43 and Government amendments 120 to 123.
Clauses 44 and 45, together with schedule 5, set out what businesses must tell us about modern slavery and who takes responsibility for that information. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 put responsibility on businesses to explain what they were doing about the slavery in their operations and supply chains. That was an important Conservative reform. We should build on that where there are gaps, and judge the changes by whether they help to expose and stop exploitation. An honest business that pays its workers properly should not be undercut by someone whose low prices depend on exploitation further down the chain. Nor should a customer have to wonder whether the bargain they have bought came at somebody else’s expense. Clear information can help with both, but a longer statement is not necessarily a better one, and paying someone to produce a polished document is no substitute for checking what is happening on the ground. Clause 44 and schedule 5 make reporting topics compulsory. They cover the organisation and its supply chains; the risks and the steps taken to address them; policies, checks and staff training; and whether action taken has worked. We support the principle of making statements more useful and easier to compare. A reader should be able to work out what an organisation has actually done without wading through pages of comforting language. Ministers will have a power to change the required content, so I would be grateful for an assurance that any future change will be assessed for its cost to business as well as for its expected benefit. There is an important qualification, however. Schedule 5 still allows an organisation to say that it has not assessed the risk, put policies in place or taken particular steps, provided that it gives an explanation. The Minister should be clear about what is being promised. This is a duty to report on specified matters; it does not, by itself, require every organisation to take every action described in the schedule. That raises an obvious question: what happens when the same organisation reports year after year that it has done nothing? Who will look at the explanation and what will prompt further scrutiny? There is a difference between being honest about a gap and treating an annual explanation as permission to leave that gap untouched. The detail must be workable. A company may buy through several suppliers before the chain reaches the people making the product, and information will not always be easy to obtain. Ministers need to explain what reasonable inquiries look like to avoid creating a system in which large companies simply pass endless questionnaires down to smaller firms. Small suppliers should be able to spend their time dealing with real risks, rather than answering the same question in 10 different formats. Businesses will also need proper notice before the new requirements apply; I hope the Minister will tell us how much notice they will get. Clause 45 deals with approval and signing, including certification by a parent undertaking. That can avoid duplication, but it must not allow the activities of a subsidiary to disappear inside a vague statement about the wider group. The person signing should have asked enough questions to stand behind the declaration of accuracy. Board approval should mean that somebody has actually paid attention. The Minister should explain how group reporting will stay clear about which businesses it covers, and what evidence directors should have in front of them before they sign. We support clearer reporting and proper responsibility at the top, but the Government must show that the changes will help to identify exploitation, and that the information produced will actually be used. Otherwise, we will have added to the paperwork and left the people being exploited exactly where they were.
Clause 46 brings public authorities within the modern slavery reporting system. It is right that we look closely at how they account for the money they spend. If we expect businesses to explain what they are doing about exploitation in their supply chains, public bodies should be prepared to do the same. Taxpayers are entitled to know that money taken from their wages is being spent responsibly. The fact that a contract is paid for by the state does not make the risks behind it disappear. We support the principle of the clause. Let us consider a public body that buys uniforms, cleaning services or equipment. The contract may look perfectly respectable, but who has checked the arrangements further down the chain? Who has asked how the workers are recruited, or whether a subcontractor is using labour supplied on terms that should ring alarm bells? Those questions need asking before a problem becomes a scandal, and the Government should lead by example here. Ministers cannot demand standards from the private sector and then accept an annual statement from a public body as evidence that everything must be fine. The statement needs to reflect the decisions made by the people who are actually buying the goods and services. If the procurement team finds a serious risk, it needs a clear route to someone who can act on it. The threshold also matters. The Bill leaves both the minimum budget and the way in which it is calculated to be decided by regulations. Until we see them, we cannot know which bodies will be covered or what the burden will be. Businesses must report once their turnover reaches £36 million; I would be grateful if the Minister told us whether the public sector threshold will match that. How many authorities are expected to be covered, and what assessment has been made of their capacity to comply? The Government’s notes say that applying those duties to public authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland requires the consent of the devolved legislatures. Has that consent has been sought? The clause also allows one public authority to certify another’s statement. There may be sensible reasons for that, particularly where services or purchasing arrangements are shared, but responsibility must remain clear. If a statement turns out to be inaccurate, the answer cannot be that one authority relied on another and neither checked. The Minister should tell us what assurance the signing authority will be expected to obtain. The named intelligence agencies are excluded—there are obvious sensitivities around public disclosure of their operations—but the power to add further exemptions should be used sparingly. I would welcome it if the Minister set out the principles that will govern any further exclusions. We support clause 46, but now we need is a workable timetable, clear responsibility and a proper connection between reporting and purchasing decisions. Public bodies should be able to show that they are tackling the risks that they find, and Ministers should be ready to answer when those bodies are not doing so.
We talked about the number of organisations that we expect to be impacted. In terms of proportionality and balance, where will the threshold lie? For businesses, it is a turnover of £36 million, but what will be the scale of public sector organisations expected to comply versus the private sector?
Following our consideration of what these statements should contain, clause 47 turns to whether they reach the people who need to read them. There is little value in requiring a statement if nobody can find it, or if the only version available is several years out of date. A customer, supplier or member of the public should be able to see what an organisation says it is doing and when it last accounted for its actions. We support making that information easier to find. The clause requires publication on an organisation’s website, when it has one, with a prominent link on the home page. It also allows regulations to require electronic submission to the Secretary of State. Organisations must comply as soon as reasonably practicable after the financial year ends and within six months at the latest. That gives them a clear deadline, but the practical question is whether the Home Office will know when it has been missed. A collection of statements tells us who has submitted what; it does not, on its own, tell us who should have submitted one and has stayed silent. The existing registry can already send reminders to organisations that have signed up, but it cannot chase an organisation that should be reporting and has never registered at all. I would be grateful if the Minister explained how the Department will identify every organisation covered, and how it will follow up missing statements.
For these new duties to work, the people carrying them out need clear instructions. That is where the guidance under clause 48 comes in. It is a short clause, but the guidance will matter a great deal to the people expected to make the preceding clauses work. They need to know what a useful statement looks like, what information they should seek from suppliers and how to explain a risk they have identified. They should not need a lawyer to translate the Government’s instructions before they can get started. Timing matters. Organisations need time to understand the requirements and put arrangements in place. Publishing guidance at the last minute would create avoidable mistakes and leave Ministers blaming people for confusion of the Government’s own making. Will the Minister commit to having the guidance available well before the new duties take effect? Businesses have also only recently been told to review updated Home Office guidance on their statements. They should not have to rewrite everything a second time; the new guidance should build on what organisations have just put into place rather than start again from scratch. There also needs to be a clear distinction between what the law requires and what the Government would like organisations to do voluntarily. The clause allows guidance to cover additional information that statements may include. That should be plainly labelled; businesses should not discover that an optional suggestion has become an unofficial requirement when somebody comes to assess their compliance. Practical examples would help, particularly for organisations with different kinds of supply chains. Guidance should explain how to report a problem honestly and what to do when there is evidence that somebody is being exploited. Nobody should wait for the next annual statement before raising a serious concern with the appropriate authorities. We support clause 48, but the Minister should tell us who will be consulted on the guidance and how future changes will be communicated, so that organisations are never caught out. Clear instructions from the outset would save everybody time and keep the focus where it belongs: on the people these measures are intended to protect.
Clause 49 brings us to the practical question of what happens when an organisation fails to do what the law requires. We have spent preceding groups discussing what organisations must report, and how we must publish it. Those duties need to mean something. A business that takes its responsibility seriously should not find that a competitor can ignore the rules and carry on without consequence. We support effective enforcement against organisations that fail to comply without a reasonable excuse. The clause allows Ministers to establish financial penalties through regulations. The maximum for an individual penalty will be the higher of £1 million or 1% of the organisation’s total turnover, or of a public authority’s total budget. That is a substantial power. It is a ceiling, not a standard fine, and how penalties are set below it will matter enormously. There must be a sensible distinction between a genuine mistake that is quickly corrected and a deliberate refusal to comply. An organisation that has ignored repeated requests should not be treated in the same way as one that has made an isolated administrative error. Equally, the “reasonable excuse” provision must not become a stock response for those who simply cannot be bothered. Much of that detail is left to regulation. The clause allows for warning notices, representations and appeals. Organisations should know how a penalty has been calculated and have a fair opportunity to challenge a wrong decision. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed which of those safeguards the regulations will include, and how the seriousness of a failure will be assessed. There is a particular issue with fining public authorities. A fine on a public body ultimately comes out of public money, but that does not mean that public bodies should escape enforcement. However, moving money out of a service budget while leaving the same failures untouched would achieve very little. The Minister should explain how a penalty will lead to better conduct and how senior officials will be held accountable for putting matters right. The clause also provides for civil court enforcement; the Minister should explain how that route and the penalty regime will fit together, and who will make the decisions. There is an example here from the existing law. The 2015 Act already allows the Home Secretary to seek an injunction against a business that fails to publish a statement, yet that power has, as far as I am aware, never been used. A strong power on paper is of little use if the enforcement team lacks the information or capacity to use it. The Minister should tell us what resources have been judged necessary and when the new arrangements will be up and running. Finally, we should be clear about what the penalties address. They concern failures to comply with the reporting duties. The compliance statement is not proof that exploitation is absent and a reporting penalty is no substitute for investigating evidence of slavery. Where such evidence emerges, there needs to be a clear route to the agencies that can protect victims and pursue the perpetrators. We support giving these duties proper teeth and we support clause 49. The test for Ministers is whether persistent non-compliance is tackled, whether decisions are fair and whether identified risks lead to action. I look forward to the Minister’s explanation of how the regulations will deliver that in practice.
The Prime Minister told President Zelensky recently that he stood “in complete solidarity” with Ukraine over President Trump’s dirty diesel deal over Russian diesel exports, and I support the Prime Minister on that. Earlier, the Foreign Secretary mentioned hitting Russia in the pocket, so why are his Government still importing jet fuel and diesel, albeit through other countries? They have weakened the sanctions against Russian diesel and fuel, which I would suggest is a complete inconsistency in UK foreign policy.
The Security Minister and Cabinet Office Minister knows that I have a huge amount of time for him, but I want to slightly break the consensus that has mostly held in the Chamber today. I think the Government’s communications—mass public communications—are confused on this issue. We are being asked by senior Ministers to stock up on corned beef, water and whatever, because of storms. Well—breaking news—there have been many storms over the last 80 years in Shropshire, and indeed across the country, and we have never been given this advice before. If this is about war preparedness and being on a war footing, as the Defence Secretary has suggested we should all be, I think the Government should just come clean and treat the British public with a little bit more respect. At the beginning of the Ukrainian war, defence intelligence was signed off by the excellent then Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, and shared with the British public, so that they came along with the Ministry of Defence and the Government. I think that the Security Minister needs to look at that as a good example.
When President Trump met Xi Jinping last month, the US President raised with the Chairman the case of imprisoned British citizen Jimmy Lai. Has the Minister had a readout from that conversation, and what can he tell us about his own efforts to bring about Jimmy Lai’s release?
I thank the Minister for giving way; he is always very generous with his time, and I think he is a very competent and diligent Minister in the Department. Can he provide the evidence base for what he has just said? I was the leader of a local authority, and I never once met a housing provider that told me they cannot build any more social housing because of the right to buy.
I ask genuinely about disposals, in a nice and polite way, so I wonder what the Minister’s comments will be. When housing associations or councils dispose of properties, they generally do so for a reason—for example, not being able to spend the money to get it up to a certain EPC grade that the Government have set for them. What evidence does he have that, where one company cannot do something for a social home, such as spending the money to increase the EPC rating, and therefore is selling it, another social housing provider will be able to do it? I want to understand where we are going with these amendments and this part of the Bill. When properties are disposed of, it is usually done for a reason. What makes him think that where someone cannot do it, someone else in the industry could?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I have lived in a shared ownership home, so I thought it only right to support this part of the Bill. Usually on Bill Committees, I speak against and ask the Government to take something out of a Bill, rather than keep it in. This is important. The Minister, on opening, summed up the issues that lots of constituents with shared ownership face right across the country. If the Government are already doing part of the review anyway, and if they are committed to that review, I do not see why it cannot stay part of the Bill. The cynic in me thinks that the only reason why the Government want to remove it from the Bill is so that they can change their mind and not actually do that review of shared ownership, which has been a long-standing feature of the housing market for a number of years. It is high time that we do a review. The hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip spoke eloquently about the issues that his constituents face in some of the developments in his constituency. That is not too dissimilar from developments in my constituency. Staircasing has major issues, particularly if ownership is shared with a large social housing provider, such as one of those that operate all across the south-east and London. Residents who buy those shared-ownership homes feel that the social housing provider is unaccountable. They lack transparency on their fees, and I have heard some horrific stories about people buying into shared ownership and wanting to use that as a stepping stone to buy a house on the open market, but having to buy selling packs off the social housing provider at extortionate costs, or the provider not getting back to them and the sale of their property falling through. New clauses 41 and 45 are trying to solve a number of issues in the Bill. If the Government are doing some of the work already and think that this review is needed, I urge them to keep it in the Bill. As I said, the cynic in me thinks that the Government want to leave it out so that a few months down the line they can say, “We’ve changed our mind. We’re not doing a review.” Do the Government really want a review of shared ownership and to listen to shared owners? The Minister outlined quite eloquently some of the issues that affect shared owners, such as leasehold and commonhold—we look forward to that Bill coming forward—but shared ownership does tend to fall through the cracks. We have not spent enough time speaking about the issues that shared ownership tenants face, so I really urge the Government to change their mind. I was left with the impression on Second Reading that clause 13 would remain part of the Bill and that the Government would accept the amendments tabled in the other place. I hope that the Government can reflect and keep this clause as part of the Bill.
To draw out the point a little further, will the Minister commit to making an oral statement on the Floor of the House in the near future so that Members from across the House can ask questions and he can update us on what he is doing about shared ownership and improvements to shared ownership?
I thank the Secretary of State for her remarks. All of us, across the House, agree on the fundamental need to resolve this issue. As she movingly said, the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower and the resultant loss of life were horrifying. I join her in paying tribute to the victims, survivors and their friends and family. We all agree that home is the place where people ought to feel safest. It is deeply concerning that so many people across the country still live in a home that has been rendered unsafe, and we welcome the Government’s desire to put that right. The Opposition have concerns about some of the Bill’s provisions, and about whether the proposed measures will definitely ensure that more people end up living in a safer home. I will set out some of those concerns. We look forward to working with the Government to improve the Bill however we can. Remediation of unsafe cladding is often slow because there are simply not enough qualified people to do the work. This point has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), but I will spend a moment on it. Every affected building needs a specialist assessment of its external walls, at a time when fire engineers and assessors are in short supply. Training new specialists takes years, yet the Bill does not lay out any particular plans for training those skilled professionals. Contractors face the same shortage of skilled labour and materials. Too often, owners who want to act cannot find anyone to carry out the work. Remediation is slow because the work is complicated and unpredictable. When old cladding is removed, contractors regularly find further defects, so the scope, cost and delays grow. On top of those practical difficulties, many of the buildings concerned are part-owned by their leaseholders. Remediation is also slow because when it comes to the practical implementation of the legal regime, the situation is fragmented. Implementation is managed building by building, and the responsibility is split between owners, managing agents, contractors and three overlapping regulators. Unsurprisingly, that drives up costs and drags out timelines, however willing the owners are. The Bill’s answer is to ask the three regulators to write a statement on how they will co-operate, which is not the same as getting the work done. We already have evidence that a legal obligation, such as the one proposed in the Bill, does not by itself guarantee timely remediation. Developers on the developer remediation contract, which the last Conservative Government implemented so that developers, not taxpayers, would cover the cost of remediation, are already bound by equivalent requirements, which is why the Bill exempts them. The Government’s figures show that developers have finished work on only a third of their buildings, and fewer than one in four of all their buildings with life-critical defects. Responding to the Public Accounts Committee, the National Fire Chiefs Council warned that limited workforce capacity was the primary bottleneck to remediation. The then NFCC chair, Mark Hardingham, put it best when he said that “we cannot enforce our way out of the cladding crisis.”
I think it is fair to say that there are all sorts of ways in which the response to this appalling event and the wider questions that it raised did not happen as quickly and was not as effective as we might have liked—otherwise, we would not still be discussing it today. What is important now is that we make sure that whatever plan we come up with together, as a Parliament, is as effective as it can be to make sure that people are living in the safest possible homes. That is our responsibility now. It should not come as a surprise that legislating to make something true does not make it so. Passing a law that says that buildings must be fixed will not create a single new fire engineer. Rather than easing those practical bottlenecks, however, the Bill too often assumes that the main blocker to timely remediation is owners deliberately choosing not to act. Our fear is that, as drafted, the Bill may risk making the problem worse. Under the Bill, every building must be assessed within a year, and every assessment that recommends work must be audited by Homes England, drawing on the same small pool of specialists. There are owners who obstruct, and they should face the full force of the law, but they are the exception, not the rule. I say once again that I do not doubt that the intentions behind the Bill are noble, but we must always be careful that legislation, even when drafted with the best of intentions, does not produce unintended consequences. Perhaps the clearest risk of unintended consequences comes with the proposed new legal duty. Owners could face two years in prison or penalties of up to half a million pounds for deliberately failing to remediate as soon as reasonably practicable. Those standards—“deliberately” and “as soon as reasonably practicable”—are broad and subjective, particularly given the severity of the punishments prescribed by the Bill. Given that many of the decisions about whether owners have complied with the standards will fall to the regulator, can the Government be sure that due regard will be given to the real practical hurdles to remediation? What guidance will regulators get on what counts as “reasonably practicable”? Doubtless the Government intend for these measures to be used only in the most extreme cases of deliberate obstruction or delay, but we must be incredibly careful when designing new legal duties and criminal penalties. Like it or not, these standards will hang over owners who are attempting to act in good faith, but who are constrained by the practical difficulty of remediation. Likewise, opening up directors to personal prosecution on grounds of neglect risks generating unintended consequences. While directors’ liability for building safety is long established, the Bill goes much further. Have the Government assessed how many capable people will simply refuse to be named as directors on remediation compliance plans? What will it do to the cost of directors’ insurance? What impact will it have on the willingness of well-run management firms to get involved in residential property? How many will conclude that it is simply no longer worth the legal risk? Have the Government assessed whether the Bill will have an impact on access to directors’ insurance more broadly, and whether it could create a disincentive to involvement in residential property by well-run management firms? Another point of concern derives from the Bill’s approach to group accountability for parent companies and firms that are deemed to exercise control. The Bill builds on powers in the 2022 Act, but extends them from recovering costs to imposing penalties for offences. The Government must do more to explain where this stops. In 2022, Parliament let a court or tribunal look through a company’s structure where it was just and equitable to do so. The Bill will allow a regulator to adopt quasi-judicial powers and enforce large penalties in doing so. Limited liability is an important principle that, in its modern form, has endured in this country for more than a century and a half. It encourages investment and entrepreneurship. The erosion of limited liability that the Bill represents may set a worrying precedent. Until now, Parliament has qualified the principle only through the courts. The Bill qualifies the principle through regulators rather than judges. If that is acceptable in one sector, why not in others? Even if we confine ourselves to this sector, can the Government be sure that the erosion of limited liability will not create a direct deterrent to investment in large residential properties, including build to rent? Housing in this country is far too expensive for far too many people. People must be able to trust that their homes are safe, but they also need homes to buy or rent in the first place. Another concerning legal precedent emerges from the Bill’s provisions on retrospective liability for product manufacturers. In 2022, the previous Government gave building owners a route to claim against the manufacturers of defective cladding. The Bill goes much further. It loosens the test itself, so that a product need only have contributed “more than trivially” to a building’s being unsafe. The Government must explain why the 2022 test was not enough. Complying with the regulations in force at the time will no longer be a defence; firms that followed the rules can no longer rely on having done so. Nobody would deny the existence of bad actors—firms that have broken the rules or falsified evidence about their own compliance. Such firms have put people in danger, and some of the consequences have been unimaginably awful. They must be punished. However, there is no reason to believe that those firms would have complied had the legal standard been tougher. The point is that firms that break the rules are going to break the rules, no matter what they are. As is so often the case, the problem is one of enforcement. However, in an effort to tackle this non-compliant minority, the Bill extends retrospective liability well beyond what Parliament agreed in 2022—something that we must always be very cautious about doing. When firms or individuals cannot be sure that complying with the law today will ensure legal safety tomorrow, their behaviour can change. They may be more reluctant to enter the market in the first place, and will certainly be more reluctant to innovate. Insurers will price in that risk, and every new home will cost more to build. As with so many aspects of the Bill, the Government, in attempting to achieve a noble aim, risk undermining important principles. The presumption against retrospective legislation, the principle of limited liability and the principle of clear legal tests are foundational to the way in which we have designed the law in this country. Of course, we can deviate from them—in our country, Parliament is sovereign and can make whatever law it chooses—but when we do deviate, we ought to ensure that we do so with a full appreciation of the facts and implications. It ought to happen only when we can see no other way to solve the problem at hand, and only when we are sure that new legislation, rather than better enforcement or efforts to ease practical bottlenecks, is the right course of action. I reiterate my appreciation for the intention behind the Bill. That anybody should feel unsafe in their own home because of structural or material faults is a profoundly depressing state of affairs. However, we are concerned that, in pursuing this noble aim, the Government may not have given due regard to some of the unintended consequences of the solutions they propose. As the Bill progresses, we will probe all those points and more. We look forward to working, with the same noble aim, to improve the Bill however we can.
I would like to acknowledge some of the Back-Bench contributions to the debate. The sheer volume and range of locations affected by unsafe cladding is remarkable and speaks to the scale of this terrible problem. We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune), the right hon. Member for Leeds South (Hilary Benn), and the hon. Members for Ipswich (Jack Abbott), for Woking (Mr Forster), for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer), for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Reading Central (Matt Rodda), for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum), for Putney (Fleur Anderson), for Harlow (Chris Vince), for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) and for Bournemouth West (Jessica Toale), who have all spoken of the challenges that their constituents have in dealing with that terrible problem. We of course heard from the hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell). It must be a great responsibility to be the Member of Parliament for so many victims and survivors of Grenfell tower in his constituency—an area that we both know well. I am sure that he feels that acutely. Some of his descriptions of rogue and dangerous activity were shocking. As outlined in my opening remarks, those of us on the Opposition Benches share the fundamental aims of the Bill. We too believe that every building with unsafe cladding should be fixed—and fixed fast. The questions that the Opposition pose are not about the Bill’s aims, but about whether it will work in practice and whether the full implications of its provisions have been considered by the Government. The evidence suggests that remediation is slow mainly because there are not enough capable professionals to do the work, because the work is hard and unpredictable, and because delivery is fragmented. Elements of that have been acknowledged by Members on both sides of the House. In our view, there is a risk that a Bill that creates new legal duties, deadlines and penalties, but not a single new assessor or contractor, may add more pressure on the system and risk making the problem worse. As the Bill progresses, I hope that the Government will be able to answer some of the questions raised in this debate. First, on capacity, every building in scope of the Bill must be assessed within a year of commencement, and every assessment that recommends work must be audited by Homes England. What assessment have the Government made of whether there are enough qualified people to meet that deadline and, if there are not, what happens to owners who miss the deadline through no fault of their own? Secondly, on the new legal duties and associated offences, owners could face up to two years in prison or a penalty of up to £500,000 for deliberately failing to remediate as soon as reasonably practicable. What guidance will the relevant regulators be given on what that means in cases where qualified professionals are simply not available? Can the Minister be sure that an owner who is trying in good faith to commence remediation, but cannot get the work done, will not be prosecuted? Thirdly, on group accountability, in 2022 Parliament allowed a court or tribunal to look through a company structure when it was just and equitable to do so. The Bill hands a version of that power to regulators through the power to issue penalty notices. Why was the judicial route not enough? Fourthly, on manufacturer’s liability, the 2022 Act gave building owners a route to claim against those who made defective cladding. The Bill loosens that test, but why was the 2022 test not sufficient? Have the Government made any assessment of what that will do to insurance costs and the cost of building new homes? There is also a great deal that we have not yet seen. Remediation management orders will be set out in guidance that has not yet been published. Councils are being given new duties, including the remediation backstop, with no clear sense yet of how they will be resourced. Parliament should see the detail before it can approve those powers. The Opposition intend to table amendments in Committee to test each of those points, and we look forward to continuing that discussion with our shared ultimate aim in mind.