Rachel Blake MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 29 Jan 2025 · Growing the UK Economy · Hansard source

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  I thank the Chief Secretary for his statement about investment and growth. Does he agree with me about the role that new towns will play in tackling our country’s housing crisis and how important it is that, alongside the homes in the new towns, we see the delivery of new social infrastructure? Can he outline how those plans will work?

• 28 Jan 2025 · Finance Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am confused as to why a party that brought in the proposals is now arguing so vehemently against them—perhaps it is still attached to its chaotic approach to government. What I am not following in the hon. Gentleman’s remarks is the argument that the equalisation of the taxation could have negative consequences. Has the hon. Gentleman interrogated the evidence that has been brought forward by those people who are letting out their holiday lets, and does he really think that there would not be an economic benefit to supporting a change in use of those homes?

• 23 Jan 2025 · Relations with the EU · Hansard source

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  The end of this month will mark the anniversary of Brexit. Will the Minister assure me that we will not return to the appalling divisions of the past, and does he agree that the forthcoming summit and reset negotiations are a vital opportunity to discuss growth, not just for the diverse communities and businesses in my constituency, but for our nation?

• 23 Jan 2025 · Relations with the EU · Hansard source

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  19. What steps he is taking to improve relations with the EU.

• 16 Jan 2025 · Hyde Park Estate · Hansard source

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  I have been working for months with residents of the Quadrangle, the Water Gardens and Connaught Village on the scale of their service charges. They have managed to reduce their service charges by 10%. Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating them on their hard work and agree that they should not have had to work that hard? Will she join me in a meeting with the Church Commissioners to improve the transparency and monitoring of service charge levels?

• 16 Jan 2025 · Hyde Park Estate · Hansard source

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  3. What steps the Church is taking to improve the maintenance of the Hyde Park Estate.

• 14 Jan 2025 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I will come on to some of the incredible work that advice agencies do in my constituency. Funding will need to be met with an active approach by local authorities to recruit the right individuals with the appropriate skills to act as inspectors for the regime. Additional funding may be needed for the immediate recruitment and upskilling of inspectors, and to deal with a backlog of cases related to enforcing existing regulations. Most importantly, landlords must have as many points of potential accountability as possible. That means that reporting on enforcement activity should be published publicly, with the naming and shaming of poor-performing landlords. The Bill marks not just an era of rights for the millions of private renters across the country, but a step change in the necessary enforcement activity by councils and by renters themselves. The campaigning groups and advice agencies that have stood up for renters for years, including Generation Rent and also Z2K, which operates in my constituency, deserve a mountain of praise for their work in keeping this issue on the agenda of parties and actors across the political spectrum, and I pay tribute to them for their work. The scale of support that this Bill has from Members on the Government Benches demonstrates the significance of this issue. It is important that we work together across Government and civil society to enforce this new rights framework and provide renters with their long-overdue protections.

• 14 Jan 2025 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I must declare an interest: my husband works for an organisation that funds the Renters’ Reform Coalition, which has been referred to today. It is a privilege to speak in this debate after serving on the Bill Committee, which took a thorough approach to each element of the Bill. This topic is of great importance to me, I having worked in housing for my entire working life and representing 27,000 private renters in the Cities of London and Westminster. I speak today thinking of those constituents and their experiences. One landlord revoked a promise to provide free heating for their tenant’s home, leading to it becoming infested with mould. The landlord later refused to respond to repeated reports of pests in the property, before subsequently charging that tenant £1,500 to fumigate the house. I also bear in mind my constituents who were evicted under a section 21 notice, are now living in temporary accommodation with three children and have been on the social housing waiting list for nearly 15 years. After being let down by dither and delay from the Members on the Conservative Benches when they were in Government, renters such as my constituents have been denied the crucial powers to hold their landlords to account in even the most basic fashion. If those Members had delivered on their promise and tackled the dissenters in their midst, renters would already have the protections that we are introducing in this legislation. Yet the Opposition have the audacity to claim that the legislation and principles that they had tried to introduce when they were in power will, mysteriously, not work now. On the amendments, the Opposition claim that the legislation will lead to landlords exiting the market, but they repeatedly fail to suggest where the homes owned by landlords would go. Even in his case for new clause 20, the shadow Minister started talking about where the homes might go, so I take the opportunity to ask him directly whether he thinks the homes would disappear. Would he have rather let a home lie vacant than let it out or sell it if it were unprofitable? And if a sale took place, would the mysterious buyers not live there? I will happily give way if he wants to answer—okay, he does not. To continue on to my main point, I want to focus on the parts of the Bill that consider local authority enforcement and the new clauses that address that. Current regulations in the private rented sector have suffered from a lack of enforcement by local authorities due to a lack of knowledge about private rented stock, limited enforcement capacity and the range and complexity of laws relevant to enforcement. The legislation goes a long way towards addressing those issues. The Bill puts local authorities clearly in the driving seat in enforcing regulation, cleaning up the confusion of the past regime. It expands the range of civil penalties that can be used by local authorities to crack down on poor behaviour. Importantly, it introduces mandatory reporting for local authorities’ enforcement activity, ensuring that councils are accountable to their constituents and to central Government. The introduction of the private rented sector database will also fill a key gap in the existing regime: a lack of knowledge of the location and nature of private rented properties. The remaining gap in the regime will be funding, and it is essential that fees for the private rented sector database are sufficient to fund the enforcement measures in the Bill. It is therefore encouraging to see that recognised by Government amendment 40, which I am happy to support.

• 14 Jan 2025 · UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue · Hansard source

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  May I thank the Chancellor for raising the case of my constituent, Jimmy Lai? I know it will mean a lot to him and his family. Does she agree that it is because of the profound differences that it is vital we maintain this strategic engagement?

• 6 Jan 2025 · Frozen Russian Assets: Ukraine · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) for securing this debate. I speak today as the constituency Member of Parliament for many of the assets we are discussing. It is easy to throw around the many billions of Russian-owned wealth across the country; for that reason, when referencing the luxurious wealth of Putin’s cronies, all of my calculations today are going to be in the unit of Storm Shadow missiles, each of which costs £800,000. These are the weapons of war that we talk about when we discuss funding the conflict in Ukraine. In total, 28,375 Storm Shadows’ worth of Russian wealth is sanctioned, with profits from that wealth used to repay the extraordinary revenue acceleration funding the UK’s support of Ukraine. To put that in perspective, the UK’s total stock of Storm Shadows was estimated in 2023 to sit between 700 and 1,000. In Westminster alone, according to research by Transparency International, 537 Storm Shadows’ worth of property is owned by Russians accused of corruption or with links to the Kremlin, property that stretches from Belgravia to St James’s and St John’s Wood. Indeed, the most valuable home in the UK, Hanover Lodge, was sold last year for 141 Storm Shadows by Andrey Goncharenko, a former Gazprom executive with ties to the Kremlin. A great deal of that property is owned by or connected to sanctioned individuals, including former Deputy Prime Ministers Igor Shuvalov and Vladimir Potanin. The existence of this property is not just an economic issue; its impact also reaches into the very hearts of our communities. Our buildings and neighbourhoods are weakened when they are used for profit rather than purpose. A strong community is one in which neighbours can be the ones who look after your kids when you have a job interview. It is those communities that are undermined when we let towers of vacant investment properties propagate and turn a blind eye to foreign wealth emptying out British homes. Most recently, these communities have opened their arms to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing from Putin’s illegal invasion. I am the constituency Member for a number of those refugees, and it is thinking of them that gives the overwhelming majority of us in this House the resolve to use every tool at our disposal. That brings us to today’s topic: the seizure of sanctioned assets. As we heard earlier, the significance of this step and the precedent it would set should not escape us as legislators. The first ever permanent seizure of frozen assets occurred only last year, when the National Crime Agency confiscated the assets of Petr Aven for suspected evasion of sanctions. To set out an intentional policy of seizing those assets would be a bold step, and one that would doubtless lead to legal challenge. However, it must be worth us considering every option available for sanctioned assets, particularly when there is a clear argument that it would be justified to use them in supporting the Ukrainian people. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is in complete contravention of international law and violates the sovereignty and self-determination of the Ukrainian people. Furthermore, as has been confirmed by the UN’s independent international commission of inquiry on Ukraine, it has enabled a string of other war crimes, including indiscriminate attacks, violations of personal integrity, including executions, torture and ill treatment, and sexual and gender-based violence. As was made clear during the application of the original sanctions, the sanctioned individuals are playing a direct part in this war. They range from propagandists spreading disinformation about the conflict to garner public support, domestically and across the globe, to industrialists manufacturing the chemicals used in Russian weapons, and military and security personnel directly contributing to the invasion. When the war in Ukraine is over, questions will remain about what we do with the 28,000 Storm Shadows of sanctioned wealth belonging to those who funded, championed, and even fought in Putin’s illegal invasion. We must take this opportunity to consider what sort of country we want to be when it comes to that dirty money, and to ensure that we do not let our economy be complicit in the forces that fund evil across the world.