Few politicians have looked more pleased with a joke than Oliver Dowden did with his first offering at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He was deputising for Rishi Sunak, who is in Berlin, while Angela Rayner stood in for Keir Starmer. Labour’s deputy leader decided to address the police investigation into whether she broke electoral law on, telling the chamber: ‘I know the member opposite is desperate to talk about my living arrangements. But what the public wants to know about is what this government is doing about their living arrangements.’ She asked about when ministers were really going to ban no-fault evictions.
Dowden then produced his joke, with a very excited smile. ‘To begin with, it is a pleasure to have another exchange with the right hon. Lady in this house, our fifth in 12 months. Any more of these and she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence.’ He added that MPs are in fact voting on no-fault evictions later today.
As a fact check, MPs are indeed voting on the Renters (Reform) Bill this afternoon, and while it does abolish section 21 evictions, which are better known as ‘no-fault’, the ban will not come into place until the courts have the capacity to deal with cases. Rayner summarised this by responding that Dowden clearly hadn’t read his own government’s bill, and pointed out that Michael Gove has said it won’t happen before the election (he hasn’t quite said that, either: he said the timetable depended on the Lords, as well as presumably when the election actually is). Anyway, Dowden insisted that ‘I’m confident that in line with our manifesto we will deliver on that commitment.’
Rayner then moved onto leasehold reform, criticising the failure to introduce wholesale reform of leaseholds, particularly given most leaseholds are on flats, not homes. Dowden argued that the government was driving down social housing waiting lists and building more social homes.
The pair obviously enjoy scrapping (though not as much as Rayner and Dominic Raab did when he held Dowden’s post), and Rayner is always able to bring a different set of questions and angles to PMQs than Starmer is. That she was able to turn the investigation into her living arrangements into a set of questions was impressively artful. She also referred to Dowden probably being distracted by ‘3am calls with a “bad man”’, a reference to the Mark Menzies allegations.
Given the proximity of the local elections, it was a surprise that the two only moved onto local government in their final few questions. Labour-run Birmingham is becoming almost as much of a PMQs favourite as the NHS in Labour-run Wales, and the Deputy Prime Minister brought it up again today. He insisted that ‘it’s only the Conservatives who deliver more’. Rayner told him he ‘really shouldn’t throw stones’ because Tory councils were also facing bankruptcy. Backbenchers went into far more detail about the local political issues in their areas, including a scrap over Teesside, praise for Andy Street’s mayoralty in the West Midlands, and attacks on the Tory London candidate Susan Hall. By the end of the session, Dowden was quoting a former Labour councillor in Hastings, who had said ‘Labour are no longer providing us with the policies, the support or the focus on local government’. Sunak and Starmer would have been making similar comments, too, and will likely do so next week when they return.
All MPs wanted to pay tribute to Frank Field, whose death was announced this morning. It is always striking when a former member passes away and MPs from across the spectrum praise not just their character but also the impact that their campaigns had on people across politics. Field was a particularly rare politician in that respect.
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