Housing Benefit (Withholding of Payment) Bill
10:45 am
Mr Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby, Labour)
I share the disappointment of my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth). Here we are with a Bill before us, debating a basic issue of principle, yet we have just heard two contrasting points of view being expressed. We are being bombarded with mail from all sorts of groups, and the Government are in effect saying, ''Go away and mill around a bit while we get our heads straight.'' It is a disappointing response.
We have had five years of initiatives, action, statements, and declamations of ''We're going to do this, we are considering doing that, we have done so and so.'' That sort of thing gets in the newspapers and the public think that something is happening. People visit our surgeries and tell us horror stories about the way their neighbours are behaving; they say that their lives are hell and ask us what we are going to do about it now that the Government have come up with so many initiatives. I then ring up the people at the local council to find out what is being done to seize those initiatives and they say, ''Um . . . they won't work.''
The same is true of some of the Government's other initiatives, such as those that are designed to enable education authorities to deal with truancy. People come to my surgery and say that there are kids hanging around town, making a nuisance of themselves and misbehaving, and their kids want to follow their example and walk out of school. I ring up the local education authority and ask what it is doing, only to find that it is doing nothing and that there is
nothing that it can do. This is after five years of initiatives. The Government are all fur coat and no knickers in this respect.