“This week the housing minister said there is no solid date for banning no-fault evictions, the housing secretary says it won’t happen before an election."
Angela Rayner took apart the Tories during PMQs today, over their failures to tackle no-fault evictions and the housing crisis.
The Labour Deputy leader stepped in for Keir Stamer and faced Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden at the despatch box, where the Tories tried to attack her over her living arrangements, using the police investigation into Rayner’s tax affairs as a deflection strategy. Greater Manchester Police is looking into claims Rayner may have broken electoral law in the early 2010s.
The MP for Ashton-Under-Lyne was registered on the electoral roll at her Stockport council house from 2007 until 2015 and says this was her principle property. Her husband was listed at another address around a mile away. Tory critics have claimed that she may have broken electoral law by declaring her own home, Vicarage Road, to be her main residence rather than her then husband’s home and have also alleged that she may owe capital gains tax on the 2015 sale of her Stockport home. However, Rayner has insisted that she has done nothing wrong and has received legal advice that no rules have been broken.
Anticipating the Tory attack lines, Rayner began PMQs by telling Dowden: “I know this government is desperate to talk about my living arrangements, but the public wants to know what they’re going to do about theirs. When will he get a grip and end no fault evictions?”
The much watered-down renters reform bill, in which the government has made concessions to landlord groups and “pro-landlord Conservative MPs”, bans no-fault evictions in name only.
The bill does not give a date for when no-fault evictions will end.
Rayner went on to add that Dowden hadn’t even bothered to read up on his own government’s bill: “The reality is he caved in to vested interest on his backbenches.”
She added: “This week the housing minister said there is no solid date for banning no-fault evictions, the housing secretary says it won’t happen before an election.
“So, if he can give us a date, can he name it now.”
Rayner then turned her attention to leasehold, asking Dowden why the ban on new leaseholds doesn’t apply to flats – when it is mostly flats that are leasehold. She added: “Their ban on leasehold won’t apply to the majority of people… it’s like banning non-doms, but exempting Tory Prime Ministers..”
It’s now been over five years since the Conservatives promised to get rid of no-fault evictions and the failure to do so has put more than 80,000 households at risk of homelessness over the last five years.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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