Council and Social Housing

Lord Cryer Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Ms Clark. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) on securing the debate. Both he and my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) have said a lot of what I intended to say, so I shall be brief. I intend to speak purely on local issues, and how my constituency and borough are affected.

Six wards of my constituency are in the London borough of Waltham Forest and two are in Redbridge. The borough of Waltham Forest has a housing waiting list of about 13,000. The Redbridge waiting list is probably not much short of that. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby mentioned that about two fifths of people in the country cannot afford to buy a home. I do not have the figures to hand, but my suspicion is that, certainly in the four wards of Leyton, and almost certainly in Leytonstone ward as well, that figure will be much higher.

We are getting back to the sort of levels of overcrowding that probably were last seen during the Victorian era. Like my hon. Friends the Members for Great Grimsby and for Lewisham East—and other hon. Members in the debate—I sit in advice surgeries week in, week out, taking up housing cases, and I know there is little I can do about the vast majority of them because, as my hon. Friends pointed out, it is simply a matter of the relationship between supply and demand. That relationship is out of balance because of the failure, over a very long period—since 1979—to build council houses, and the partial failure to build social housing.

Yesterday I met a group of GPs from my constituency, mainly based in the Leyton area. We were talking about methods of preventing the sorts of illnesses that are common in my constituency—engaging in programmes of prevention rather than cure. Those GPs are perfectly honourable people, with perfectly good intentions, but the fact is that an awful lot of the problems that they deal with have to do not just with health but living conditions. When entire families live in single rooms—and I have met many who live in those circumstances, which as I said takes us back to almost Victorian levels of overcrowding—it will not be possible to deal with the illnesses, including psychological illnesses, that stem from those conditions.

When siblings must share not just rooms but beds; when there are many people in one room; or when people are in overcrowded social housing, or are tenants of cowboy landlords, in badly maintained and overcrowded properties, those people will not enjoy the best of health, or perform to the best of their ability at school. They will also encounter problems with work—and there are problems at work in any case. All those circumstances together bring things to a critical pitch, and I suspect that if we continue down the path we are on, with overcrowding, and bad living and working conditions, there will be an explosion in many of the illnesses that we associate with those conditions, and serious public health problems.

[Martin Caton in the Chair]

The number of home starts is now the lowest since 1923, whatever hon. Members on the Government side say. That is a pretty appalling record. I am the first to admit that the Labour Government should have built more council and housing association homes, but in reality an awful lot of money was ploughed into the decent homes standard. Many homes in the social sector—whether belonging to councils or housing associations and trusts—had fallen to such a low level of maintenance that there had to be investment. That is leaving aside the fact that investment was necessary in education and the fabric of schools, and in hospitals and GP surgeries. There was investment in housing, to bring the existing housing stock up to the decent homes standard.

However, in the last two years of the Labour Government some progress was made. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) was Housing Minister, there were council housing starts in many boroughs, including London boroughs, for the first time, in some cases, in 25 or more years. If my right hon. Friend had had more time he would have emerged not just as a good Minister but a great one, and he would certainly have had an enormous impact on the lives of my constituents and many others.

A figure from the history of housing that I always remember is that in 1951, Winston Churchill, who was leader of the Conservative party, stood on a platform of building more council houses than the then Labour Government—the Attlee Government. We were building 200,000—it might have been more, but I think it was about that. It seems extraordinary now that a Conservative leader would say their Government would build more than 200,000 council homes a year.

The house building programme in the council sector peaked under Harold Wilson’s Government, at about 1 million homes a year, in the mid to late ’60s. If we could have even a fraction of that situation today it would make an enormous difference to my constituents, who struggle, day in and day out, with appalling housing conditions. At the moment we are in a vicious circle of cuts, resulting in more people being unemployed in the construction sector, less investment, and more people unemployed and claiming benefits. Since the election alone—in just under two years—65,000 people from the construction sector have joined the dole queue. If we were to invest in housing we could get into a virtuous circle. At the time of the election—this is not a party political broadcast—the deficit was falling, and so was unemployment. We were in a virtuous circle of investing in the public sector. We were building homes, among other things—council homes. We were starting to see a rise in the number of people employed in construction. Getting back to that position would have a great effect on the indigenous industries, the numbers of people employed in the construction sector and those whom I represent who live in appalling housing conditions.