They expect hundreds of thousands will need help after the ban on bailiff evictions imposed during the pandemic was lifted last week.
Official stats say 268,385 homes are empty for over six months.
And there were 280,000 people in temporary digs such as hostels and B&Bs even before the pandemic, according to Shelter.
The Local Government Association wants to move families into homes that have been empty for six months or more.
Its spokesman David Renard said: “Lifting the ban on evictions will leave some households on a cliff edge of becoming homeless.”
Ben Beadle, of the National Residential Landlords Association, added: “A quarter of those in arrears face court orders and damage to their credit score, which makes it harder for them to access new housing.
“We need an interest-free, government hardship loan for tenants.”
The Ministry of Housing said: “We have given councils tools to tackle empty homes, including the power to increase council tax by up to 300% on these properties, and take over the management of homes that have been empty for a long period.”
Some time before midday on Monday, quite a lot of English MPs will start getting distinctly twitchy. It is then that they will first see the results of a major redrawing of parliamentary boundaries, with a number of seats set to change, even disappear.
The report by the Boundary Commission for England is the latest development in a decade-long process which has previously failed to change the parliamentary map. This time the expectation is it will go ahead, with new constituencies finalised in 2023.
The key difference is that rather than reducing the Commons to 600 seats, as planned in since-abandoned reviews from 2013 and 2018, this version keeps the current 650. It will instead reflect population changes by giving 10 more seats to England, with Wales losing eight and Scotland two.
Within this framework, the respective boundary commissions for the four UK nations will work out details, followed by long months of consultation, argument and wrangling. England is announced first, with proposed maps for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – which keeps 18 seats – due by July.
The plan is based on trying to make every constituency within 5% either way of the average number of electors, just under 73,400, apart from a handful of “protected” seats.
These include the Scottish Western Isles constituency of Na h-Eileanan an Iar, the smallest by population, with just under 21,000 voters, and the Isle of Wight, which has 113,000 but will be split into two.
The overall picture is deeply complex and, especially for Conservative MPs, brings mixed news.
According to an analysis by Robert Hayward, the elections expert who is also a Tory peer, the new boundaries would have given his party between five and 10 extra seats at the 2019 general election, since most of the new constituencies are in Conservative-friendly areas such as England’s south-east, south-west and east – although Labour-dominated London will get two more.
But gaining a swathe of new seats in 2019 has created a bigger problem for the Conservatives than was the case, Hayward argued: “Having won seats in the north and the Midlands, and particularly in Wales, they now represent seats which are substantially smaller than seats they previously held.”
Labour had significant worries about the last boundary review, both the reduction in total seats and the plan to base it on a relatively old electoral register. This time the template will be the register from March 2020.
Cat Smith, Labour’s shadow Cabinet Office minister, whose brief covers electoral issues, said one worry was that the flexibility over populations had been set to 5% of the average, rather than 10%.
“That means less flexibility to keep communities together,” she said. “What we don’t want to see is new boundaries that cut across what people see as their community identities. It’s why the consultation process is so important.”
Such issues are likely to dominate the consultation process. In a media briefing this week, Tim Bowden, secretary to the English commission, said one possibility was a new constituency straddling the River Tamar – meaning it would include parts of both Devon and Cornwall.
While the proposed new boundaries will not be publicly announced before Monday night, MPs can collect information about their own area from Commons officials at midday. With many MPs still not in Westminster due to Covid, the information will also be emailed at 3pm.
The process was likely to be less tumultuous now the plan to trim 50 seats had been dropped, Hayward said: “Yes, up to a point – but redistribution always is contentious. Even an MP who has a majority of 20,000 gets neurotic if they might lose 4,000 of that, as they immediately assume it will be 10,000.”
Did he mislead the prime minister over care homes?
In perhaps the most explosive allegation made during his seven hours of select committee evidence, Dominic Cummings said Hancock had assured Boris Johnson that all hospital patients heading back to care homes would be tested. He then said that, at a disputed meeting in May, the prime minister had demanded to know why this had not happened. Hancock has already denied these allegations and suggested that he only pledged to test all discharged hospital patients as soon as testing capacity allowed.
Did he interfere with the testing programme to meet his own targets?
Another key accusation from Cummings was that Hancock was telling officials to “down tools” on the test and trace system so that they could focus on meeting his target of carrying out 100,000 tests a day by the end of April 2020. “It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm,” said Cummings. Hancock has said that building capacity was critical to achieving the ability to test, among others, returning care-home residents.
Was he too slow to react on PPE?
Cummings said he was astounded to find that Hancock’s department had accepted that crucial personal protective equipment would take time to arrive because they were still shipping it from China, rather than making use of aircraft grounded as a result of the collapse in international travel. He also said Hancock had falsely claimed PPE funding was blocked by the Treasury.
Did everyone who needed treatment get treatment?
Hancock said publicly that everyone who needed treatment for Covid would receive the care that they needed. That this happened has been disputed, with Cummings stating that people were left to die “in horrific circumstances”. The Cummings claim is that Hancock knew that not everyone had received the care they required, because he had been briefed to this effect internally.
Was Hancock complacent about having the right plan?
It has become clear that when Covid first emerged, the government thought its plans to deal with a flu pandemic would form the basis of its response, but the disease proved to behave very differently. Cummings said Hancock gave reassurances that plans were in place, stating: “We’ve got full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepared and refreshed, CMOs [chief medical officers] and epidemiologists, we’re stress testing now, it’s our top-tier risk register.” Hancock has called all Cummings’s claims of dishonesty unsubstantiated and untrue.
Today lawyers acting for openDemocracy and five other claimants have challenged the British government’s controversial plans to extract the medical records of everyone in England from their GP without proper consultation or informed consent – just as the doctors are reeling from coping with COVID-19.
openDemocracy has joined forces with Foxglove, a tech justice start-up, and other campaigners to issue an urgent legal challenge to the Department of Health and Social Care over its scheme to harvest the personal medical data into one massive database, which private corporations will be able to access.
The coalition’s legal letter to the government warns that unless the health department pauses the GP data grab – due to go ahead on 1 July – and seeks transparent patient consent, we will seek a court injunction to halt the scheme.
It’s the thirdtime that openDemocracy has teamed up with Foxglove to protect patients’ rights to know – and have a say – about their data being shared with private corporations. This time we have joined forces with other campaigning organisations – Just Treatment, Doctors’ Association UK, The Citizens, and the National Pensioners Convention – and with David Davis MP.
The Conservative MP warned: “My constituents don’t expect when they sit down with their family GP that their sensitive health data is going to be able to be accessed by all and sundry. I support a future-fit NHS, but it’s got to be done in a way everyone can trust. The government must involve and inform patients so they have a meaningful chance to opt out before they progress any such policy.”
Unconvincing reassurances
Health data is both hugely sensitive and immensely valuable – to our health, and to big business. The UK’s NHS data has been valued at £10bn. And our GP data – with details of everything from diagnoses and medications to depression, abortions, sexually transmitted infections and addictions – is the most detailed, valuable and sensitive of all.
Back in 2013-14, openDemocracy was the first non-specialist news site to cover a similar, though less ambitious, project to upload and share GPs’ patient records – the care.data project – which was abandoned after two million people opted out amidst concerns about confidentiality and business use.
But on 12 May this year, health secretary Matt Hancock quietly issued a legal direction to every GP in England, instructing them to upload their patient records to a central database, with patients given just a few weeks to find out about the plans.
NHS Digital insists it’s not selling patient data – but then tells us that the data will be made available to third parties for a fee
During COVID, much health data was shared under extraordinary powers – including with private companies. But the government looks set to make this the ‘new normal’.
An NHS Digital spokesperson sought this week to justify its plans by arguing that “NHS data was vital in managing the response to COVID” – but relevant health data can already be shared in a public health emergency. Phil Booth of campaign group medConfidential told openDemocracy it was “very cynical for the government to be pointing to COVID purposes and using that to justify a data grab”.
The government says the data will be used only “for health and care planning and research purposes” as well as for “the development of health and care policy” – and that it will be used only “by organisations which can show they have an appropriate legal basis and a legitimate need to use it”.
The problem is, they’ve told us next to nothing about what would count as “research purposes” or a “legitimate need”.
Instead they’ve put out a succession of vague and inconsistent reassurances from NHS Digital, which give little confidence.
NHS Digital insists it’s not selling patient data – but then tells us that the data will be made available to third parties for a fee.
It tells us that it’s assessed the impact of its plans on our human rights and privacy – but that we aren’t yet allowed to see that assessment, less than three weeks before the data transfer is due to happen.
It tells us no data will be shared for “solely commercial reasons” – but few companies, particularly those operating in healthcare, claim to be motivated “solely” by their bottom line. The government itself has been generally sympathetic to companies’ claims of loftier goals. So that reassurance is a long way from watertight.
The government tells us that the data will be “de-identified” but acknowledges this process can be reversed and individuals re-identified “in certain circumstances, and where there is a valid legal reason” to do so. And it hasn’t made clear what those circumstances or reasons would be.
It tells us that companies accessing the data will be contractually banned from using other data sources to re-identify people, but we know companies don’t always play by the rules. Which is why new guidance just published by the Information Commissioner’s Office makes clear that de-identified data is still personal data, and can’t be shared with anyone else without meaningful, informed consent. Which is exactly what the government – so far – seems determined to evade.
It tells us it’s “engaged with the British Medical Association (BMA) [and the] Royal College of GPs (RCGP)” – but those organisations have pointedly not endorsed the current plans. The RCGP chair Martin Marshall said whilst the organisation supports improved data sharing in principle for “important healthcare planning and research”, it was “critical that this is transparent and that patients have confidence and trust in how the NHS and other bodies might use their information”. He added that they were “continuing to lobby NHS Digital to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place for how the data collected is used”.
The ‘mad rush’ for health data
GPs have pointed out that there’s a ‘safe setting’ for the medical data they hold that means researchers can access it without copies of our records being sent out to third parties – but the government is choosing not to use it. Why?
We know that access to NHS data is a key prize for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, as well as for the artificial intelligence firms. The latter, the Financial Times reported this week, are now a “mad rush” for health data, having seen their stock boom during the pandemic.
It’s also of interest to US health insurers and providers, who, as openDemocracy exposed, are already boasting of how they are “planting seeds” in England’s NHS. These firms are already advising the NHS on how to deal with more “expensive” patients, and what services could be cut. And openDemocracy has also covered how unfettered access to British data, including health data, is also a key demand for US trade negotiators.
Diarmaid McDonnell of medical campaign group Just Treatment said: “For many patients this is not just about their data – it’s about the future of the NHS. We’re sleepwalking into a health system where profits are prioritised over patients, with big tech and pharma corporations at the helm, shaping every decision about the care NHS patients receive.”
The largest public sector union, Unison, has called for the data upload to be delayed until there is greater transparency and consultation. The union called on the government to “harness the value” of our health data so that it can be “reinvested in health and social care”, rather than allowing access for next to nothing.
The government does not appear to have built in effective safeguards to protect the intellectual property arising from this precious data, meaning that the products and services corporations build from it could be sold back to the NHS for eye-watering sums.
Health data is extremely useful in the hands of medical researchers. But any involvement of private companies should be open to public scrutiny and debate. Without it, trust is damaged to the extent that legitimate researchers will be denied the kind of comprehensive data that could be most of use.
Indeed, mounting concerns about the government’s approach led to NHS Digital’s call centre “melting down” under the numbers of people calling them this week to request opt-out forms, with over half a million already having opted out, according to Phil Booth of medConfidential.
Meanwhile GPs – who are the legal guardians of patients’ confidential information – are deeply unhappy.
Rosie Sharpe, a GP at Doctors’ Association UK, said: “GPs were barely informed of this major change – how are patients expected to know about it?” and warned that the government’s approach made doctors’ lives “impossible”.
A growing number of GPs are refusing to hand over the data on 1 July, even if that means breaching a legally binding order from Matt Hancock.
Jan Shortt of the National Pensioners Convention said that the government’s approach had “excluded older people” and added the organisation was “very concerned about the lack of consultation and publicity about this except a lone government website. Most of our members have never heard of this.”
The race to get the scheme rolled out while the public and medical profession is still reeling from COVID means that there is little time for journalists and members of the public to use Freedom of Information laws to find out more about what’s going on – including how the government thinks its actions can possibly be compliant with the laws on data protection.
The government is hiding behind secrecy and ambiguity as it runs down the clock to 1 July.
So we’ve had no choice but to issue an urgent legal warning. Because we think the public urgently needs to know what the plans are for their personal information, and have the opportunity to consent – or not – before it’s too late.
East Devon Watch 