Helen Hayes MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Jun 2026 · Tenant and Resident Management Organisations: Regulation · Hansard source

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  14. What steps his Department is taking to improve the regulation of tenant and resident management organisations.

• 15 Jun 2026 · Tenant and Resident Management Organisations: Regulation · Hansard source

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  Residents on the Loughborough estate in my constituency have suffered years of appalling service from their resident management organisation, the Loughborough Estate Management Board. It has a failing repair service; dangerous chemicals were being stored in the community centre; there were allegations of threats and harassment; and more than £350,000 of its funding was spent on overseas trips and gifts. Eighteen months ago, residents voted overwhelmingly in favour of not renewing the board’s mandate, yet it is still operating, and there appears to be no straightforward mechanism that the local council can use to close down this failing organisation. Will the Minister work with me to bring this scandalous situation to an end, and to ensure that the Loughborough estate’s residents receive the housing services that they pay for and deserve?

• 13 Apr 2026 · Southport Inquiry · Hansard source

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  All of our thoughts today are with the families of Alice, Bebe and Elsie. They have already suffered the most horrific loss, and to have confirmation today from Sir Adrian Fulford that their loss was preventable is utterly unbearable. Sir Adrian’s report highlights the failure of the multi-agency safeguarding hub, which was exactly the place where joint responsibility between different agencies should have been held, and he also said that children’s services were not well equipped to manage a risk presented by a young person, as distinct from risks to a young person. Can I therefore ask the Home Secretary what plans she has to work with the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that, as a matter of urgency, every professional working with high-risk young people knows exactly what to do when they are fearful that a young person is a risk to others, and is accountable for taking that action?

• 26 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  The right of tenants and residents in social housing to manage their own estate is an important one. Many tenant management organisations deliver excellent services for their residents. However, that is not the case for residents of the Loughborough estate in my constituency, who have been badly failed by the Loughborough estate management board for many years, with poor repairs and maintenance services and truly shocking conditions on the estate. The mechanisms to resolve those issues are within the control of the very organisation that is failing residents. The renewal ballot for the LEMB is now more than a year overdue, and a recent annual general meeting was held outside the rules, with many residents denied entry. Can we have a debate in Government time on resident and tenant management organisations, and changes in the law that may be needed to ensure that, when things go as badly wrong as they have on the Loughborough estate, steps can be taken quickly to intervene?

• 2 Mar 2026 · Small Religious Organisations: Safeguarding · Hansard source

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  My constituent is a survivor of abuse within a religious organisation, and she represents a larger group of survivors at the same organisation. She has found the Charity Commission to be utterly ineffectual and far too slow in dealing with her complaint. When I wrote to the Minister about this issue, she referred me to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. When I wrote to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, I was referred back to the Home Office. The religious organisation continues to operate with the suspicion that the practices that led to the abuse claimed by my constituent are continuing. We are a couple of years down the line in raising these concerns, so will the Minister advise me how I can get some traction on behalf of my constituent to ensure that her allegations and those of other survivors of the organisation are properly dealt with, and that the organisation cannot continue to operate with the same practices?

• 10 Feb 2026 · Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes the point very well. It is the reality of people’s lives. People come to all of us who represent constituencies at the heart of the housing crisis in the most desperate of circumstances—in circumstances that everybody would agree are completely unacceptable—and there is no relief for them, because the options that are on the table are simply unaffordable, and what is affordable is unacceptable. I am grateful to the Government for listening and for changing the deprivation criteria to include housing costs. I also completely recognise the very deep poverty and deprivation that affect other parts of the country. I grew up in the north-west and before I was elected to Parliament, I worked with communities all over the country. This should be about not pitting different areas of our country against each other, but resourcing and empowering local authorities right across our country to meet the needs of their communities. Some of those needs are universal, and some are specific. While I welcome the changes made to the formulae in recent weeks, inner-London councils will still remain in a very difficult financial situation as a consequence of the settlement that was finalised yesterday.

• 10 Feb 2026 · Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes the point about the recovery grant very well. I will come on to some practical suggestions for what the Government could do to alleviate that situation in the short term. Council tax equalisation, such that the grant is now based on each area’s share of the national tax base and not actual local tax levels, penalises low tax base, high-needs areas like Lambeth and Southwark. The business rates reset will wipe out historical strong growth in some inner-London boroughs, and falling numbers of children will also have an impact through the children’s formula, even though need is growing and increasingly complex. The risk is that our councils are left in an increasingly precarious situation and are forced to make impossibly hard choices about local services in the face of increasing need. Having agreed the final funding settlement—it is welcome that it is for three years, which gives our councils more certainty—there is more for the Government to do to help councils bring down their costs and reduce need, so that service delivery is manageable within the resources that are available. On behalf of my councils of Lambeth and Southwark, I have a number of asks of the Minister. Our councils desperately need help with the costs of temporary accommodation. The average cost of temporary accommodation in London has risen by 75% over the last five years, and the number of people seeking help with their housing has also increased dramatically, yet the amount that the Government pay councils to subsidise temporary accommodation has been frozen since 2011. Will the Government work towards increasing the subsidy so that it is closer to the actual housing costs that our councils face? Temporary accommodation is the least stable form of housing and it has terrible consequences for residents. I have known many constituents to get up at 5 am to travel long distances by bus to keep their children in the same school and give them some stability. Those costs could be saved if more residents could afford to rent privately, yet the freezing of the local housing allowance has made that increasingly impossible. Will the Minister work with her counterparts in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury to increase the rate of local housing allowance to stop private renters from needing temporary accommodation? Some of the £5 million that is spent every day by London local authorities on temporary accommodation would be much better deployed keeping residents in stable homes through the local housing allowance than propping up the most awful situations in temporary accommodation. With the application of the £35 million cap, councils in receipt of the recovery grant currently face a cliff edge. For Lambeth council that will mean, as my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) said, a loss of £47.5 million over the next three years. If the cap was removed for just next year, it would give the council an additional £11 million to reduce the savings that it is currently having to plan for. Will the Minister consider that? Councils have expressed concern to me about the Government’s assumptions about the level of council tax receipts. Will the Minister work with councils to ensure that the assumed level of council tax receipts closely matches actual council tax collections? The social housing crisis requires that new social homes are delivered at pace. In my constituency, we have council and housing association-owned sites with planning permission that are not currently being delivered because the soaring inflation caused by the Liz Truss mini-budget priced them out of viability. The Government’s commitment to invest £39 billion in social housing is very welcome, but will the Minister ensure some of that funding is urgently made available to London boroughs that have sites that are ready to build? We urgently need that. The overnight accommodation levy is very good news for London but it must be apportioned to where it is most needed. Will the Government mandate that at least 50% of the funds raised by the levy are retained locally by London boroughs to cover the costs incurred by services affected by tourism and to support local growth?

• 10 Feb 2026 · Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member for his intervention. I will come on to talk about those sites in my constituency that have planning permission but currently are not funded to build the social homes that could be on those sites. I think that is an important part of how we solve these challenges. The Conservatives’ interventions to reduce social housing rents have also been disastrous for the ability of our councils to fund the maintenance of social housing and to fund new social homes. Southwark council calculated that Conservative-imposed rent cuts and freezes will cost the council’s housing revenue account £1 billion over 30 years. What is a very small saving for tenants has had a really big impact on the ability of councils to keep up with the maintenance needs of their social housing stock. The Conservatives were happy to cut our councils’ budgets to the core and did not worry about the erosion of services that inevitably followed. Reform imagined that our councils were full of waste and profligacy, only to find that they are lean organisations that have constantly innovated in the face of austerity but that, over time, have become stretched, sometimes to breaking point. A budget settlement based on a definition of deprivation that did not include housing costs, as was originally proposed, would have had absolutely dire consequences for inner-London councils. The reality is this: if rent eats up so much of someone’s income every month that they cannot afford the bare essentials, or if the only property they can afford to rent is so bad that it causes them and their family to become ill, then they are deprived and they face exactly the same consequences of that deprivation as anyone else anywhere in the country who simply does not have enough money to get by.

• 10 Feb 2026 · Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding · Hansard source

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  I am not taking an intervention; I have been really clear about that. I am grateful to the Minister for her response. I fully appreciate the challenging situation that she is in, the complexity of her brief and the pressures that she is facing from colleagues and from councils all across the country. I appreciate deeply her commitment to local government, and her deep understanding of its workings and the challenges that our council colleagues face. I am encouraged by her assurances on local housing allowance in particular, and on the costs of temporary accommodation. I look forward to seeing progress on those points and will certainly remain engaged on those issues. I would be hugely grateful for anything that the Minister can do to unlock the stalled sites. We have three in my constituency—two of them are council-owned and one is owned by a housing association. Between them, they have the capacity to deliver quite a good number of council and social homes. We would really like to see those come forward quickly. I believe that the Minister has good intentions in the settlement that has been announced today. I support her in her aim of reconnecting local government funding with deprivation and ensuring that funding is fairly distributed, but the challenges that our councils face will remain. There is further work to do, and I hope to be able to engage with her further on behalf of my boroughs as we seek to repair the damage that has been done over a long period of time, and get things back on a better footing so that our councils can deliver for our communities. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered funding for local authorities in inner London.

• 10 Feb 2026 · Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding · Hansard source

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  I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.

• 17 Dec 2025 · Local Government Finance · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for her statement. I particularly welcome the restoration of the link between funding for local government and deprivation, and the inclusion of housing costs within the measure of deprivation. It makes no sense to do anything other than that. Even with the funding settlement, the financial situation will continue to be very challenging for my local authorities of Lambeth and Southwark without meaningful support from the Government with the costs of temporary accommodation. When does the Minister expect to be able to set out more detail on how councils will be supported to reduce the need for temporary accommodation and to bring the costs down?

• 15 Sept 2025 · Children with SEND: Assessments and Support · Hansard source

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  I will not give way again because of the time constraints. I will point to a few of the big themes that came through in our evidence, to which our report will speak. There are major problems with accountability in the SEND system. Accountability is overwhelmingly loaded on to the statutory part of the system, which means that if ordinarily available provision is not there or goes wrong, there is no recourse for parents. That problem needs to be fixed. There is a problem with how we equip teachers. There are children with SEND in every single school, in every classroom, up and down the country, but we do not routinely equip teachers to teach the children who are in front of them. The funding system is broken. There are problems about place planning, both in the inclusivity of mainstream schools and for specialist schools within the state sector. Most importantly, the trust and confidence of parents in the system is utterly broken. In seeking to solve the crisis, the Government must turn their attention to the ways in which that trust and confidence can be rebuilt, so that children across the country who deserve far better than they get at the moment can access the education to which they are entitled.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Children’s Social Care · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this statement. Today I speak on behalf of the Education Committee and, more importantly, the thousands of children across England whose lives are profoundly shaped by our children’s social care system. I put on record my thanks to the Committee Clerks and specialists, who have supported this inquiry, as well as to Georgia, Jake, Lamar and Louise, the four young adults with recent experience of the care system who came to give oral evidence to the Committee in person. I know that it was not easy to speak about the challenges that they have faced, including experiences that no child should ever have to endure, but by doing so they have helped to shape our report and ensure that young people have been at the centre of our thinking. We are very grateful. Children’s social care provides essential support to some of our most vulnerable young people—children who have faced trauma, neglect, abuse, bereavement or instability. They need not only protection but love, stability and the opportunity to thrive. In December 2023, our predecessor Committee launched an inquiry into the state of children’s social care. Following the general election, my Committee resolved to continue that critical work. Our inquiry builds on substantial evidence, including the independent review of children’s social care, published in 2022, which concluded that the system was failing to meet children’s needs. The evidence we have received from care-experienced young people, social workers, local authorities, charities and academics confirms that many of these challenges persist. The system is under significant strain. Rising need, stretched budgets and workforce shortages are compromising the ability to put children genuinely at the heart of the system. We have seen a significant shift in the profile of spending on children’s social care, from spend on early help services, which has fallen 31% in real terms over the last decade, to spend on costly crisis interventions, which has rocketed. This imbalance is unsustainable. The 2022 independent review proposed a £2.6 billion uplift in children’s social care spending between 2023 and 2027, with £1 billion annually ringfenced for family help services, to shift focus toward early intervention. That recommendation has not been fully implemented. There has been rising need for children’s social care over the past decade, with the number of looked-after children standing at almost 84,000 in 2024—an increase of over 20% since 2014. These pressures reflect broader social and economic challenges. Poverty is a key driver of social care involvement, and the forthcoming child poverty strategy must be ambitious, aiming to significantly reduce the number of children growing up in financial hardship. We urge the Government to allocate a substantial portion of new funding from the spending review to restore early intervention services to 2010 levels in real terms. Prevention is not only the right thing to do by children and their families; it is also more cost-effective. The shortage of appropriate placements for looked-after children is a critical issue. In 2024, 45% of looked-after children were placed outside their local authority, and 22% were placed more than 20 miles from home, disrupting education and relationships and exacerbating trauma. We call on the Department for Education to publish a national sufficiency strategy for children’s social care, requiring every local authority to develop plans to reduce out-of-area placements and demonstrate how they are implementing best practice. Not every local authority sends children far away from home, and we believe more can be done to reduce this harmful practice. The children’s social care market is failing to deliver for children and local authorities. The excessive profits of some providers are unacceptable, and reports of financial instability among some large operators are deeply concerning. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes provisions to reform this market, which we welcome. However, these measures must be rigorously monitored. The Department should provide annual updates to Parliament on their impact, and if a profit cap is introduced, my Committee must be consulted on draft regulations. Our inquiry examined all forms of children’s social care: foster care, adoption, kinship care, residential care and support for disabled children. Within foster care—the most common placement type—there is a shortage of approximately 6,500 carers. We urge the Department to develop a national fostering strategy. Simply continuing to advertise for more foster carers will not be sufficient, and work is needed to address some of the practical barriers that prevent foster carers from being able to sign up once they show an interest in doing so. In particular, we are calling for collaboration with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that housing policy properly supports foster carer recruitment. Kinship care is a vital option for many children. The forthcoming kinship allowance pilot must provide financial support equivalent to that of foster carers, and we call for legislation to guarantee kinship leave entitlements. For adopted children, the adoption and special guardianship support fund must be made permanent to eliminate annual funding uncertainty. While we support the emphasis on kinship and foster care, high-quality residential care remains essential for some children. Reports of children placed in unsuitable settings such as caravans and boats are completely unacceptable—the opposite of a child-centred approach. The new regulation and inspection regime for supported accommodation is a positive step, but universal care standards must apply across all placements. The social care workforce is in crisis, with high turnover and overstretched staff increasing safeguarding risks. We call for a comprehensive workforce strategy to improve retention and reduce reliance on agency staff, which increased by 38% over the five years to 2022. Disabled children face significant barriers, including limited access to respite care and inconsistent assessments. We heard that support for disabled children is often deprioritised as social services focus on child protection concerns, and that sometimes parents of disabled children are treated with suspicion and subjected to inappropriate assessments without justification when they need support. We urge the Department to implement the Law Commission’s proposals and establish clear national eligibility criteria. Mental health support is another critical gap. Children in care are four times more likely to experience mental health challenges, yet access to services remains inadequate. We recommend piloting co-located mental health services between social care and child and adolescent mental health services, and strengthening mental health assessments for children in care. It is essential that children in care have a voice when important decisions are being made about their lives. Currently, too few children are accessing the advocacy support they are entitled to, with an average referral rate of just 5% across local authorities. We endorse the independent review’s proposal for an opt-out model of independent advocacy for all children in care, to ensure their voices are heard. Reunification with birth families, when safe and appropriate, can be a positive outcome for children and parents. However, current practice is inconsistent. The Department must evaluate reunification practices and publish national guidance to ensure it is prioritised when suitable and in the best interests of the child. There were 49,000 children on child protection plans in 2024—an increase of 1,600 from 2014. Neglect remains a significant concern, and we call for a national survey on the prevalence of abuse and neglect and a dedicated national neglect strategy. Finally, and most concerningly, support for young people when they leave care is simply not good enough. Care leavers have some of the poorest outcomes in society across a range of measures: 39% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 are not in education, training or employment, compared with 13% of all young people in that age group, and it is estimated that a quarter of homeless people have been in care. Care leavers still face a cliff edge in support on turning 18. We heard from young people who had to drop A-levels and struggled to afford rent while in full-time education at the age of just 18. The Department for Education must develop a national care offer to ensure minimum standards of support across the country and review and improve the financial and housing support available to care leavers. Our children deserve a compassionate, coherent and effective social care system that places their needs at the centre. Behind every statistic is a child who deserves the same opportunities as their peers to feel safe, loved and empowered to thrive. The recommendations in my Committee’s report provide a road map for reform. We urge the Government to act swiftly in addressing rising need, restore early intervention, reform the delivery of care placements, ensure better mental health services, support the workforce and stop care leavers facing a cliff edge at the age of 18. We owe it to these children to build a system that is not merely reactive but restorative, not just efficient but compassionate, and not only functional but transformational.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Children’s Social Care · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his question, and for bringing his personal experience to the debate. I agree with him about foster carers. We looked in detail at the issue, and the gap between the numbers of people expressing an interest in foster care, compared with those who sign up and become foster carers, is enormous. We focused our attention on some of the practical barriers that prevent people from becoming foster parents, especially housing. That is particularly the case for foster carers who might be living in social housing. Housing policy does not adequately support people who might want to come forward but do not have enough space at home, when that is often the responsibility of the same local authority that is their landlord. We think that more could be done to overcome the practical barriers that foster carers face.

• 9 Jul 2025 · Early Years Providers: Government Support · Hansard source

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  On the first part of the hon. Lady’s intervention, that is exactly what the Government are trying to do in establishing school-based nurseries: to ensure that across the country there are a range of settings that support children’s development so they arrive at school in reception year ready to learn. I welcome the Government’s expansion of early years provision through the roll-out of funded hours and the delivery of 3,000 new school-based nurseries. That will make a huge difference to families, giving parents the option to return to work and helping with the costs of childcare, which under the previous Government resulted in many families spending more on childcare than on their rent or mortgage and, for the first time in decades, saw women leaving the workforce because the costs of staying in work were simply unviable. In delivering the roll-out, it is important that the Government pay close attention to the financial resilience of early years providers. Many providers have been flagging for a long time the fact that the hourly rate they have been paid does not match the costs of delivering funded hours. There have also been inconsistences in the way local authorities pass on the Government subsidy. The previous Government’s funding model created distortions in the costs of childcare, with parents of the youngest children paying very high rates to cross-subsidise the costs of providing underfunded funded hours for three and four-year-olds. Nurseries have also experienced rising costs in relation to energy, food and insurance, and they are also now having to adjust to increased employer national insurance contributions and the increase in the national minimum wage. Sadly, we have seen far too many early years settings close in recent years because they cannot make their business model work. It is important that the Government pay careful attention to the financial resilience of the sector and take steps to ensure that nurseries do not close due to high costs and inadequate rates of funding.