Housing: Affordable Housing

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Shipley for introducing this timely debate, and other noble Lords for indulging me by allowing me to speak in what I believe is called the gap. I shall speak very briefly about those on the sharpest end of the affordability issue, who are of course homeless people and, in particular, the single homeless. They are the ones at the end of the chain who suffer and whom we need to bear in mind as we discuss the housing Bill.

I reference Homeless Link, which undertook an extensive survey and is the umbrella body for all homelessness organisations. It found that 25% of people in some accommodation projects were ready to move on. These will typically be people aged between 18 and 25—49% of them are—and three in 10 are women. They are ready to move on, but there is no move-on accommodation available for them. Of this group, 27% have been waiting for six months or longer. Forty-eight per cent of projects overseen and surveyed by Homeless Link reported that the main barrier was a lack of suitable accommodation to move to, and 14% of those projects typically cite a lack of affordable housing as the main barrier to their clients’ moving.

Any of us who have studied housing systems elsewhere in the world—for instance, in the US—would hate to find ourselves going down the route of not having multiple tenures in a community so that communities can work together. That means that single homeless people can move into areas where there is affordable rent and some kind of move-on accommodation available to them.

I simply ask that, as we continue to discuss the Bill, we continue to bear those people in mind.