Social Housing Standards

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, this is such a horrible tragedy. I join the Minister in sending sympathies to Awaab’s parents. To lose a two year-old child is just about as bad as it gets, and I feel very strongly about that. I know that the housing association itself is deeply troubled and upset by what has happened on its watch. The coroner said that this should be a “defining moment” for the housing sector. I spoke today to the chief executive of the housing association, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, and there are some important lessons that the housing associations and we in Parliament and government can learn from this tragedy.

First, the Statement from the Secretary of State explains that the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill, which we greatly welcome in this House—we have completed its stages here—will enhance regulation of social landlords and the role of the Housing Ombudsman. This new legislation is important, since I suspect that in this case there was no knowledge at all of the Housing Ombudsman. There was an opportunity to make a complaint and be listened to a lot earlier, but I think that opportunity was simply not known about in Rochdale at the time. We now have legislation that will strengthen the ombudsman, but we need to promote that ombudsman service really quite energetically, and I believe that this process has started.

In my ignorance, I did not understand that mould can actually kill a small child—it is as bad as that. Mould is a horrible thing to have in your house, but the fact that it can lead to death really brings home just how awful this plague is in so many houses where ventilation and heating in combination are not achieving a balance, and where condensation is causing this horrible mould. The urgency of doing something about this has now been magnified by this event and it means that all housing associations have to give priority to this. When they hear that a place has mould on the walls, they must take that very seriously. When a visit is happening for any other reason, staff need to be told, “Look out for mould as well; report that back to base. That is a serious issue”. Now that housing associations are very large enterprises, communications within them need to be good enough so that people share all the information and understanding they bring back from a visit or telephone call. That sharing of information needs to identify where mould is a problem so that something can be done about it.

My next point is that fuel poverty is also behind this. People are not putting the heating on and not making the place warm enough. They cannot be blamed for that; the cost of fuel is a major part of the house- hold budget. This will get worse with the current energy crisis and we will have more of these cases, not fewer. I am afraid that a lot of properties owned by housing associations—including pre-1919 street properties and 1960s and 1970s concrete buildings—need serious attention. They need insulating in a modern way that will cut those energy bills and mean that the lack of heating does not create the condensation that leads to the mould that leads to tragedies like this. We are going to have to invest in these older properties. We are ready for decent homes round 2; I hope the Government are up for this. These things are not just a matter of regulation; they are, as the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, said, also about investment. We all agree on that. The social housing decarbonisation fund coming through will be really helpful. The levelling-up funding should target the insulation of older properties. We can see where the priority really lies in terms of the resources we are going to put into properties: cutting down on fuel bills.

There are some important lessons here. There are lessons for government as well as for the housing associations. Let us hope that some real value can come from this miserable tragedy of poor little Awaab, and that this is indeed a defining moment for the housing sector.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

It is indeed a defining moment. The Secretary of State has made it very clear that he thinks that this is a defining moment and that he is not going to let this go.

I was also surprised by how dangerous mould can be. I have concerns about the sharing of information in these cases, because a health visitor and a visiting midwife both noticed this mould. They put forward a report to the council, which did not seem to go as far as it should have. Sadly, communication is often an issue in these cases and we need to make sure that those problems are dealt with as well as the issues of the housing.

Obviously, this case was two years ago, but I am concerned about fuel—of course I am. However, I am mostly concerned about whether some of these tenants know what they can get from the Government to help them. I am not sure that they do. Through wearing my other hat as a Faith Minister, I am working very closely with the faith communities to make sure that when they talk to their communities and have their warm hubs and so on, they ensure that everybody knows exactly what the Government are offering to help them, because that sometimes is not the case. This case was not so much about heating but about ventilation, but that is another issue we need to look at across the sector, because mould often grows when ventilation is not correct.

Lastly, the noble Lord is absolutely right that not enough people know about the ombudsman. We had the Make Things Right campaign, which reached millions of social housing residents. This family obviously did not know about that, but I would then ask: where was the housing association to say that the family could go to the ombudsman when they first complained? There is more that we need to do, both the Government, in telling social housing residents about what they can get, and others who have contact with these families, by suggesting to them that the ombudsman is there to help them.