Construction Industry

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, as someone who is something of an outsider to this debate, I hesitate to comment but, having listened to it so far, it seems that what is needed is to find a Minister or a Prime Minister who is prepared to stand up and say, “This is vital to the success of our nation. This is vital to our future. We need to address housing supply. We have let it fall for far too long”.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling this important debate. I declare an interest as the owner of land with potential for development in London and Nottinghamshire. I am also treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children. I rise to speak because, to my mind, this issue has blighted the lives of generations of children and continues to do so. This debate is about the contribution that the construction industry makes to the UK economy, and I should like to highlight how we shoot ourselves in the foot by not meeting the housing needs of our people, particularly our poorest families, pregnant mothers and mothers with infants in the first year or two of their lives.

I draw noble Lords’ attention to a report published just this week. It was commissioned by the Maternity Mental Health Alliance and authored by the LSE, the Centre for Mental Health and one other organisation. It was funded by Comic Relief. The report tells us that we spend about £8 billion each year through failing to meet the needs of, or provide adequate perinatal care for, women who are pregnant or are about to give birth. That is equivalent to about £10,000 for each birth in this country because we do not meet the mental health needs of mothers.

Nearly three-quarters of those costs relate to the adverse impact on children of not meeting those needs. The average cost to society of one case of perinatal depression is around £74,000. Between 10% and 20% of women develop a mental illness during pregnancy or within the first year of having a baby. Suicide is a leading cause of death for women during pregnancy or in the year after birth. Although there are of course many factors in that, one important factor is the poor housing that we allow many of our mothers to live in.

At the launch of the report, Andrea Leadsom MP, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, spoke about her long desire, gained through working with the Oxford Parent Infant Project, to see that pregnant women and mothers with very young infants have a secure attachment to their child. More recently, with Frank Field MP and two other MPs she set up a parliamentary group to look at children’s first 1,001 days, covering the period from conception through the first two years of life. Graham Allen MP has been a huge champion in recognising the vital importance of nurturing that first bond between mother and child. The right honourable Iain Duncan Smith has also shown great support for this area, as has my noble friend Lord Northbourne. It is vital to the later success of our children that a good, strong bond is built between child and mother at the earliest possible time but, if a mother’s mental health is poor, that bond is thrown into question.

Barnardo’s used to run a project—it no longer has the funding to do so—for mothers in temporary accommodation. Visiting mothers living in temporary accommodation in London, I have had an opportunity to talk to them about the challenges of that experience. What has particularly come out in those conversations is the isolation that they experience because of the shortage of housing. In his opening speech, the noble Lord referred to the importance of proximity to labour, but it is also important to have proximity to one’s family, one’s friends, one’s community and one’s faith group.

I am currently in contact with a mother whose daughter is about to give birth early—she is seven months pregnant. The mother is spending all her time with her daughter, as of course is bound to happen. When I speak to mothers who need to take two buses to get to see their family and friends—because in London they are just scattered around wherever the housing is available—it really brings home to me that we need to think much more carefully about supplying housing so that people can be in the community they need to be in. When I visit parents in Sure Start children’s centres I hear from them how important it has been to have coffee regularly with other parents and to build relationships with other parents. They say how important it has been for their own mental health to break down the isolation they have experienced. More and more we need to be sure that there are communities available, with housing available, to make these things happen.

I have had the privilege of visiting with health visitors in Redbridge in east London and Walthamstow in Waltham Forest. There I saw families—often mothers quite possibly on their own—in private accommodation which was overcrowded and unhygienic, with the walls dripping with damp. One family showed me their basement, which had been flooded for a long while but the landlord had been unprepared to do anything about it.

We cannot afford as a nation to keep on shooting ourselves in the foot by not providing the stable base that families need to make a good and successful start. I really am encouraged by what I have heard in this debate about a growing cross-party consensus that something needs to be done. I hope that we may find a Minister or Prime Minister who is prepared to stand up, to put his head above the parapet and say, “This is an issue we need to address as a nation. It concerns us all. It concerns our children and families. We need to provide adequate homes”. That is what we need to do.