Joe Powell MP: speeches 2024

Speeches

• 14 Oct 2024 · Reporting Ministerial Gifts and Hospitality · Hansard source

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  The shadow Minister may remember that he failed personally to support the suspension of Owen Paterson after he was found guilty of lobbying and being paid thousands of pounds to raise questions in Parliament. Does the Minister agree that today’s conversion to standards and integrity rings completely hollow?

• 10 Oct 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I wish my parliamentary namesake a happy birthday. Dockless e-bikes are an increasingly popular transport mode in Kensington and Chelsea and in Westminster, yet local authorities do not have the powers to regulate inappropriate parking and antisocial behaviour. Would the Leader of the House consider granting time to debate whether local authorities should have more power to regulate the dockless e-bike rental market?

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the unintended consequences of section 21 is that people often do not report damp and mould or the repairs that they need for fear of eviction, because they will be pushed into finding a new tenancy, which they simply cannot afford?

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  It is a great privilege to follow that excellent speech. The Renters’ Reform Bill is potentially transformative for Kensington and Bayswater, as it is for the whole country. Nearly 45% of my constituents are now private renters—a huge increase in the last decade and now the biggest tenure type by some distance. Those renters pay the highest rents in the country: an average rent of £1,600 per person. A rental property in my constituency now averages £3,400 a month. Yet despite the fact that those renters pay an increasing proportion of their take-home pay each month in rent, I have been inundated since the general election with cases of constituents facing the major challenges that colleagues have already highlighted—section 21 evictions, damp and mould, slow repairs, unaffordable rent hikes, bidding wars and a feeling of insecurity and lack of power that never leaves a person under the current rules. I think of my former constituents Jean and Jack Franco, who lived with their mum in a rental flat in north Kensington. After eight years of never missing a rent payment, they were served a section 21 notice by an anonymous overseas landlord and given just weeks to leave. All their attempts to challenge the decision and engage the landlord failed. Their request for just a few more weeks to find a new home was denied. The council were unable to help them, so Jack and Jean had to leave with their mum for a new part of London as rents in my constituency are so unaffordable. The letting agent told the Francos that the owner wanted to sell the property, but today that property is still being rented out, but at twice the rent that the previous family were paying—a back-door eviction by an anonymous landlord that this Bill would have stopped. I also think of the constituents who I met, along with the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister, around the table in north Kensington; they could not even bring themselves to report the challenges with the condition of their flats for fear of a section 21 notice that could leave them on the streets, sofa surfing or scrambling for temporary accommodation. This renters’ Bill is also for them. I want to focus on one critical area of implementation, the landlord register, which is a huge opportunity to give renters, landlords and local authorities the information they need to ensure that standards are upheld and new rights can be enforced. I note here my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, because I have worked on a number of new government registers in recent years, including the public register of beneficial ownership and the register of overseas entities. It is crucial to design them in a way that is as transparent as possible and does not create loopholes. I ask the Secretary of State and the Minister to look at the detail of what will be in that register, including landlord and agent contact details, details of past enforcement action, eviction notices, safety information, information about accessibility and the rent being charged. If we include all those things, we will have a genuinely useful register that will promote accountability and genuinely drive up standards. This game-changing Bill should also not be seen in isolation. The most exciting thing about today is the Government’s commitment to attacking our housing crisis from multiple angles: planning reform to build 1.5 million new homes, including the biggest increase in social housing in a generation; learning from Grenfell, and speeding up the remedial work up and down the country; accelerated implementation of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023, including Awaab’s law; a new decent homes standard for social and private housing; a crackdown on dirty money in luxury property; and an end to the feudal leasehold system. This is a comprehensive—

• 12 Sept 2024 · Short-term Lets: Regulation · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake) on securing this debate and giving the subject the attention it deserves. We obviously share a border, but we also share an office in this place that, with its high ceilings and windows, comfortable sofas and views of Whitehall, I am sure would fetch a very high price if it were a short-term let. I hope we can agree that we will not be doing that in our period of sharing an office. When I was knocking on doors during the general election campaign, the issue of short-term let regulation united constituents in South Kensington, North Kensington, Bayswater and Lancaster Gate. That was due to the current effective free-for-all with weak rules that are barely enforced, leading to issues that had very real and personal consequences for them and their families. It was not just the antisocial behaviour, noise and associated crime, but the violations of building insurance, mansion block rules and tenancy agreements, which had very real impacts on service charges and their day-to-day living in flats. I therefore agree with many of the speakers in the debate that there must be a middle ground where we can find sensible regulation that allows a destination like Kensington and Bayswater to continue to welcome millions of tourists from around the world, but with a system that can also help tackle our housing crisis. To give hon. Members a sense of the scale of the problem, I share councils—Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster—and it is estimated that more than 5% of properties in both those council areas have been listed as short-term lets. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster said, the latest estimate in Westminster is 13,000. It is therefore important that any proposed changes related to change of use do not lock in those numbers, and that we sequence the reforms correctly. There are some things that work and I praise the councils that, with limited tools, have been able to take some steps on enforcement, especially in Westminster. Kensington and Chelsea agreed a deal with Airbnb that would share data around some council blocks, so that leaseholders and council tenants in those blocks who might be in breach of their tenancy could be investigated. However, that also struck me as unfair when we have 40% of our residents in the private rental sector, where there is very little regulation. As for solutions, I join others in calling for the Government to consider a licensing scheme, while thinking carefully about some of the lessons already learned. For example, the 90-day rule is totally unenforceable. With multiple platforms listing properties, and very small and limited—even non-existent—resources in local authorities to enforce the rule, we must ensure that fees are paid into the system to help cover the enforcement cost for local authorities, so that the cost is proportionate. We must also ensure that each property—not just each host—is registered, because individual properties have different consequences. This is an important part of tackling our housing crisis. I am delighted with the Renters’ Rights Bill, introduced yesterday, and I believe that if we also brought in a complementary package of reforms, it could make a real difference for constituencies such as mine.

• 11 Sept 2024 · Building Safety and Resilience · Hansard source

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  I would like to put on the record the thanks of my constituents in Kensington and Bayswater, which includes the wider Grenfell community, for the cross-party support last week when the phase 2 report of the Grenfell inquiry was published. We thank the Minister and the Government for making time today and for committing to future time, and we thank the Prime Minister for his statement and heartfelt apology on behalf of the British state for what happened. He spoke for us all, including the Leader of the Opposition. The Grenfell legacy obviously has lots of dimensions, but one of them is building safety. I urge Members to remember the 72 victims of the fire, whose legacy has to be fixing this crisis. After the report was released, there were three immediate actions that the community wanted me to advocate in this place. The first was about criminal prosecutions, which is not a matter for discussion today. However, as the Justice Secretary mentioned in questions yesterday, it is important that we ensure that the court system is prepared for any potential decisions that come through the Metropolitan police and CPS process, and that court backlogs and the complexity of any potential trials do not result in even further delays to justice. Secondly, the accountability of the companies is not just about criminal investigations; it is about their role in public procurement and paying for remedial work. We need to continue to push on that. Finally, we are discussing policy changes today to ensure that this never happens again, but the pace of change has been far too slow. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) said, that is partly due to the culture of how tenants—social housing tenants, in particular—are treated and about their agency and power and respect. There are tens of thousands of people up and down the country who are still going to bed in buildings that are unsafe. In my constituency—quite incredibly, given the history of Grenfell—we have one of those buildings that is not yet on the Department’s list. It underwent a fire inspection just a few months ago and flammable rendering was found. This is a good example of what many Members have mentioned. It is a building with approximately 50% social tenants and 50% shared ownership leaseholders, who have scraped together the money to get on the housing ladder and have now been hit with a £400 a month increase in their service charge, primarily driven by the dramatic increase in insurance after the fire inspection took place. I agree with the shadow Minister’s call to look at the insurance market, because in that case there was not a competitive bid for insuring the building. I know there has been a discussion with the Association of British Insurers to see how we can bring down the costs, but I urge the Government to look at this, because in the short term, while we wait for the remedial work to take place, the situation is simply unaffordable for those leaseholders. I certainly think we need to look at the insurance industry. In addition, that building is another example of the merry-go-round of buck passing that we talked about last week between local government, national Government, developers, freeholders and housing associations. We need clear timelines to speed this up, and I really welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment on that. We need incentives in the system—carrots and sticks—to ensure that we do not have these never-ending situations where leaseholders and tenants are unclear about when the work will be done. As the Minister said, the money is there, so this is about knocking heads together and making sure that, at an individual building level, we get the speeding up that we need. I will write to her about the specific building that I have mentioned. Speeding up this work is obviously part of the answer, but the recommendations from phase 1 and phase 2 of the Grenfell inquiry are also relevant. They go beyond cladding, as the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) mentioned. I really welcome the Government’s announcement last week that residential personalised emergency evacuation plans for disabled people will be taken forward. It is a big frustration for many of my constituents that that did not happen under the previous Government. We look forward to more detail on what those PEEPs will look like. I urge the Government in the comprehensive spending review to look at funding, for multiple years, for social landlords to implement that and at a scheme to ensure that developers and freeholders cover the costs for private buildings. We are all still digesting the full phase 2 report, and there will be time to go into it in more detail, but one recommendation that I urge the Government to think about straightaway is the streamlining of accountability in terms of ministerial responsibility and the regulator, so that we do not have a dispersed system between multiple Departments that makes it easy for things to fall through the cracks, as Sir Martin Moore-Bick made clear in his report. I hope we will have time to discuss that in detail. Finally, on the question of who should pay, I welcome the Prime Minister’s statement that he will be writing to the companies and looking at exclusions in the public procurement process to ensure that companies referenced in the Grenfell report will not be able to access public tenders. I also put on the record my thanks to the golfer Shane Lowry, who yesterday—belatedly, but he got there in the end—removed the sponsorship of one of the companies mentioned. I will not mention it by name, just out of caution. More broadly, these developers clearly need to need to pay for the remedial work. The campaigners have done an incredible job, as the Minister said in her opening remarks. Their ask has always been for truth, which we now have from the inquiry; for justice, which we hope will come from the criminal prosecution system; and for change, which it is on all of us in this House to deliver.

• 10 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T3. Over the weekend, Lord MacDonald, the former director of public prosecutions, warned that court backlogs and the complexity of any trials that may arise from a CPS decision in 2026 about the victims of the Grenfell fire may further delay justice. Could the Minister give us and the victims reassurance that the criminal justice system will not further delay justice for those victims?

• 5 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T6. Businesses—especially creative industries—in Kensington and Bayswater tell me that they are fed up with the adversarial relationship we have had with the EU and the pointless red tape and trade barriers that have come with it. Will the Minister outline what steps the Government are taking to address that challenge?

• 4 Sept 2024 · Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report · Hansard source

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  As we have heard, it is now more than seven years since 72 people lost their lives in Grenfell Tower in north Kensington. As we have heard again today, the disaster was entirely foreseen and entirely preventable. It was the result of organisations and individuals being systemically dishonest and putting profit before people’s lives. I pay tribute to the next of kin, the bereaved and the survivors, including those who are here today, for their resilience and strength; this is a very painful day for the community. The shameless merry-go-round of buck-passing that has happened for the past seven years must now come to an end, so I thank the Prime Minister for his personal commitment to driving lasting change and holding people accountable. Can he assure me that the Government will now do everything in their power to ensure that criminal prosecutions take place as soon as possible? Can he commit to ensuring that companies identified in the report are excluded from public contracts, are held to account to the full extent of the law, and pay their full weight of the cost of the building safety remedial work that is necessary? Can he also ensure that the phase 2 recommendations for central Government will be a blueprint for real change, and that their implementation will be swift and as comprehensive as possible, so that we can truly say that a tragedy like Grenfell will not happen again?

• 3 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  A forthcoming Transparency International report has identified 28 contracts worth £4.1 billion that were awarded to parties with direct political connections to the Conservative party, so can the Chancellor update us on the progress in appointing the covid corruption commissioner and whether they will take evidence from corruption campaigners such as Transparency International?

• 2 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  On Wednesday, the phase 2 report of the Grenfell inquiry will be published, and I am sure that the whole House will join me in remembering the 72 residents who lost their lives in an entirely preventable tragedy over seven years ago. Four recommendations for central Government are still outstanding from the phase 1 report, including personalised emergency evacuation plans for disabled people. Will the Secretary of State update us on the progress in implementing the phase 1 recommendations in full?

• 25 Jul 2024 · Public Procurement: Value for Money · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for her answer. As she said, value for money is fundamental, but procurement can also be used strategically to ensure that growth opportunities and social benefits are felt across the country. What steps will the Government take to up the ambition in the implementation of the Procurement Act 2023, so we have the data, skills and digital tools to drive a more mission-driven and economically transformative commissioning and purchasing across the Government?

• 25 Jul 2024 · Public Procurement: Value for Money · Hansard source

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  14. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help ensure value for money in public procurement.

• 25 Jul 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T4. In just over a month, phase 2 of the Grenfell inquiry will report. There will be implications for the entire Government, but what preparations have been made ahead of the report’s publication? Will the Minister commit to engaging with the bereaved, survivors and the affected community before the Government respond in full to the recommendations?

• 24 Jul 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  On Sunday night, at a community event in north Kensington attended by hundreds of people, 15-year-old Rene Graham was shot and killed in a senseless act of violence. My heart goes out to his family and the wider community, who are feeling anxious, frightened and shocked. Can the Prime Minister ensure that north Kensington gets support from the Government at this difficult time, and can he outline what measures the Government will take to tackle gun violence and prevent young lives like Rene’s from being taken in the future?

• 22 Jul 2024 · NATO and European Political Community Meetings · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome the announcement that the UK will lead an initiative to crack down on Russia’s shadow fleet of sanctions-evading ships, which is helping to generate dirty money to fund Russia’s war machine. Will the Prime Minister continue to make sanctions enforcement a priority, and update the House on the state of international negotiations on using frozen Russian assets, including those in Kensington and Bayswater, to support Ukraine now?

• 19 Jul 2024 · Covid-19 Inquiry · Hansard source

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  Module 1 of the report finds that pandemic planning did not take pre-existing health inequalities into account. In my constituency, those inequalities are particularly wide, as we saw at Grenfell Tower. I welcome the Minister’s statement that the Grenfell inquiry recommendations will be incorporated into the Government’s response. Does he agree that in that response we must have a far better plan for protecting the most vulnerable in our society, who are often the most disproportionately affected?

• 18 Jul 2024 · Foreign Affairs and Defence · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke), and the excellent maiden speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) and for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher). It gives me great delight to address this House as the new Member of Parliament for Kensington and Bayswater. I doubt that, for any of us, the last seven weeks have been easy. I know that many hon. Members will still be catching up on their sleep after the campaign trail, but having our twins born in the first week of the general election campaign took things to another level. If timing is everything in politics, that is certainly not a combination I would recommend anyone repeat—but my children will obviously have a great story to tell when they are older. I want to take a moment to thank the team at Queen Charlotte’s hospital and across the Imperial College NHS trust for their incredible care. Our NHS staff deserve our utmost respect and support, and I hope that in the future St Mary’s, Hammersmith and Charing Cross hospitals will finally get what they need to become the first-class premises that patients and staff in our community deserve, including the delivering of plans for a brand-new St Mary’s hospital. I pay tribute to my two predecessors in this new constituency. Felicity Buchan worked hard for the residents of Kensington over the past five years, and I particularly commend her for her work on the Homes for Ukraine programme. Some issues are central to our national and international security, which transcends party politics, and supporting the struggle for a free Ukraine is one of them. I am grateful for her work on this issue. In Kensington and Bayswater, we have a Ukrainian cultural centre, the Ukraine embassy and a substantial Ukrainian population. Having personally worked to support democracy and anti-corruption in Ukraine for many years, I will make sure that our Ukrainian community continues to have a strong advocate in Parliament. I was also fortunate enough to inherit part of Dame Karen Buck’s former constituency of Westminster North. Under previous boundaries, she represented north Kensington for many years. I know from experience that tens of thousands of residents have been directly assisted by Karen and her staff with expertise and empathy. I hope I can emulate even a small part of her unwavering focus on tackling poverty and our housing crisis, whether that is by holding our social housing landlords to account, by protecting private renters, including by abolishing section 21 no-fault evictions, or by finally ending the outdated feudal leasehold system. Karen did a monumental amount of work to advance those causes, and I am sure she was absolutely delighted with their inclusion in the King’s Speech. She has always exemplified public service over self-interest. I will do my best, along with my other colleagues who are inheriting her constituency, to live up to her legacy. I know how grateful we are for her 27 years of service in this House. Kensington and Bayswater is an incredible part of London, as many hon. Members will already know—indeed, I canvassed many of them during the campaign and have already been picking up casework in the corridors. We are an amazing community, with fantastic campaigners and organisations, businesses, entrepreneurs, charities, heritage, music, parks and schools. There is so much going for it, but there is also a deep inequality that has widened in recent years. There is now a 19-year gap in life expectancy between a woman born in Notting Dale in North Kensington and one born in Holland Park, only a third of a mile away. That gap has increased by five years in the past decade alone. Over 6,000 children are living in poverty and over 3,000 families are on a growing housing waiting list. We are rightly proud of our contribution to the nation’s economy in terms of growth, talent, innovation and finance in so many different industries, and we celebrate the tourists who come to visit our museums, Portobello Road and our parks, but we must also tackle the underlying causes of the inequality that prevents too many people in my constituency from reaching their full potential, whether they are housing, education or employment opportunities. I know from the thousands of people I have met across our constituency that far too many feel like government is not working for them. They see too many politicians putting political party before country and self-interest before community. I know that trust in government and politicians has plummeted as a result, but it does not have to be this way. I have spent my career working to make democracy work better in dozens of countries around the world by supporting reformers in government to work with civil society to be more transparent, more inclusive and more accountable and to deliver for people on the priorities that they care about. In Kensington and Bayswater, that means, for example, getting a grip on the dirty money in luxury property that still stains our community. Despite recent progress in legislation, and despite the leadership that Baroness Hodge, the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and many others have shown on this topic, we still have in our constituency one of the highest numbers of anonymously owned properties registered in tax havens, with loopholes allowing autocrats and kleptocrats to continue shielding their ownership. Many of those properties sit empty, hurting our local businesses and schools and hollowing out our sense of community. I agree that those that are frozen under sanctions should be utilised as soon as possible, so I am determined to build on our Kensington Against Dirty Money campaign and continue advocating for London to end its reputation as the dirty money capital of the world, and instead become the anti-corruption capital of the world. There is no worse example of what happens when government stops listening to people and when transparency and accountability are discarded than what happened at Grenfell Tower over seven years ago. Seventy-two people lost their life in an entirely preventable tragedy, yet we still do not have truth, justice and change for the bereaved, survivors and affected community. These are people whose lives were changed forever on 14 June 2017 and who have had to wait far too long for justice and for those responsible to be held to account. In the coming weeks, the second phase of the public inquiry will report. I know that hon. Members here will join me in looking to those recommendations to ensure that a tragedy like Grenfell can never happen again. I warmly welcome the inclusion in the King’s Speech of the duty of candour law for public servants. I applaud the effective campaigning of those affected by Grenfell, Hillsborough, infected blood and Windrush, and of others who have suffered because of an unacceptable defensive culture across many of our public institutions. I hope we can look at further measures to ensure robust oversight of the implementation of the recommendations from those inquiries. Kensington and Bayswater is a special place making a huge contribution to our national life in so many ways. My hope is that, under this Labour Government, we will become a fairer place too, building on our strengths and addressing the inequalities that have held us back. It will not be easy and it will not happen overnight—as a QPR fan, I have learned over many years to be realistic—but we have an opportunity now to restore faith and trust in government and democracy, and to restore our reputation internationally too.