Lord Dubs
Main Page: Lord Dubs (Labour - Life peer)Housing
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Lord Dubs
My Lords, I am delighted to have this opportunity to open this debate on what is in effect the whole range of housing policy. Unmet need means people without homes, as I shall develop. Far too many of our people are badly housed, homeless or struggling to pay their high rents and avoid becoming homeless.
We have a real housing crisis in this country. There are currently more than 1.8 million households on waiting lists in England. There are currently more than half a million households living in overcrowded conditions. In 2012-13, 108,000 homes were completed in England. The evidence from Shelter, which has been very helpful in providing information for this debate, is that we have an annual need of 240,000 new homes to meet current and future demand. We are building at less than half that rate so the problem is going to get worse.
For far too many people in our country, their housing situation leads to misery and damage to health; it holds back the education of children, damages family cohesion and generally causes a great deal of human unhappiness. Anybody who has been a Member of Parliament or local councillor and has had a constituency surgery will know about the number of people who come along seeking help on one aspect or another of their housing difficulties.
I will turn briefly to private rented housing, which has had to increase. One-third of private renters are now families with children. What is alarming is that for so many of them, short-term tenancies are the norm and they keep having to move. Government research shows that renting families are nine times as likely to have moved in the past year as families who own their own homes. We know what sort of dislocation there can be for families with children if they have to move, and how it affects their schooling and their general well-being. Rents in the private sector are rising and eating savagely into household finances. Perhaps even more damaging, one-third of privately rented homes fail to meet the Government’s own decent homes standard.
Surveys of public opinion show that the public would welcome more borrowing if it led to better housing and more housing being built. The surveys I have seen say that supporters of all parties believe that this would be a good idea. Of course, more building has other economic benefits, which I shall come on to. At the moment we have too few housing starts and virtually no social housing. There has to be a better way of managing our affairs.
I was given a number of examples. Let me just cite one. Oxford City Council is a Labour council and an example of good practice. It has a planning application for the development of about 900 homes at Barton West, which is in the Oxford City Council area. That will produce much-needed housing in an area where there are housing shortages. However, Oxford City Council has also identified land outside the local authority area in adjacent local authorities, which are mainly Conservative-controlled. It is finding it very hard to get the go-ahead to develop the land because the Conservative authorities do not want more housing there. Perhaps the Minister will have more information on that, but that is a rather sad state of affairs.
Although some people say that there are shortages of land, there are also allegations that developers in this country have large land banks which they are holding off until they can make more money than they can at the moment. Does the Minister know the extent of the land banks? I am not talking about developing the green belt, I am talking about land banks that the developers have, on which they could legitimately build if they decided to go ahead.
I want briefly to mention the difficulties of under-occupation. Yes, of course, there are people who are under-occupying their homes. For owner-occupiers, it is easy. They sell and move to a smaller property, make money in the process and someone else gets a larger property. That is easy for owner-occupiers, but we have an entirely different system for those who are in public housing. Now that they have the bedroom tax, families will have to move, but they have nowhere to move to because there are not enough smaller units available for them to move to—at least, not without a move, let us say, out of London into the suburbs or even further. That is hardly a humane way of dealing with under-occupation. There has to be a method to deal with that.
I remind the House of the dislocation to families and children if they have to move to different areas and different schools and have to make different friends. It can be very upsetting and can damage schooling and the happiness of the family. It is not surprising that there has been a rise in homelessness. Statutory homelessness is increasing, and local authorities are under pressure to find temporary accommodation to stop families having to sleep on the streets. Of course, that is a temporary measure, and councils have had to put homeless families in hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. We know that a number of them are breaking the law because they are leaving families there for longer than the six-week legal limit. A large proportion of local authorities are now in that position.
Of course, the benefits cap is aggravating that. Without getting into a long debate about social welfare at the moment, the benefits cap should surely take account of differences in housing costs from one region to another. We know the enormous differences between London and the south-east and other parts of the country. Shelter has demonstrated that local authorities which cannot source emergency housing in their areas are increasingly having to send homeless families further away.
I turn briefly to the situation of young people looking for housing. It is bleak for them. There is a massive housing shortage in properties that would be suitable for young people. They are increasingly priced out of buying or renting a home of their own. That is a struggle for people from all walks of life and particularly difficult in London and the south-east. From personal experience, I talk about mortgages and easy or difficult lending. Many years ago, when I got a mortgage before the first house that I bought, my wife and I had to demonstrate that I was asking to borrow only two and a half times my salary, I could borrow up to only 70% of the equity of the house and I had to produce an employers’ reference that I was good for my salary and was not likely to be fired quickly.
What has happened in more recent years? Mortgages went up to 120% of equity and 10 times the salary. It is no wonder that we had the terrible crash and the housing bubble. The danger is that we are moving back again. If borrowing money to buy houses is too easy and there is no increase in housing stock, it does not take an idiot to realise that prices will go up. That is what has happened in Britain over many years. Unless there is an increase in supply, making borrowing easier does not help. It may help the lenders of the money, but it does not help the people who want to be housed. That is why I am worried that the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Help to Buy scheme—it has gone through a number of different names—will be no help at all if there is no significant increase in supply, but it will help some people who want to be second-home buyers. That is a sign of inequity.
In a more general sense, I say this about owner-occupation. Owner-occupiers in our country have managed to make enormous capital gains through holding a property. I have benefited in that way. It is quite unfair that the process of owner-occupation in our housing market has led to an enormous increase in inequality in this country. Okay, I cannot sell my house and move into a tent, but, at some point, somebody—a family or whoever—will benefit from that. It seems quite unfair that that has happened. It has happened partly because financial services have made it so easy to borrow, and the danger is that we are going back there. Of course I want people to be able to borrow money for their homes, so there has to be a balance, but the danger is that if the money is too easy to come by, there must be more houses, otherwise prices will rise.
Of course, we all know that on top of that there are significant north-south differences in this country. We have much greater housing stress in London and the south-east than elsewhere. The trouble is that in the parts of the country where houses are incredibly inexpensive, there are no jobs. There is no economic base, so there is no demand to live there because people cannot earn money. I know that because I am lucky enough to have a home in Cumbria, but looking at the property prices on the Cumbria coast in places such as Workington and Maryport, I can get you a three-bedroom house for less than £100,000—in fact, for quite a lot less than that, but there are no jobs.
The north-south differences are important because they affect our perception of housing and what should be done to help. There is another problem, particularly in London and the south-east. If it will be increasingly difficult for relatively poor or not very well paid people to live—I am talking about the C2s and Ds; about people who keep many of our public services going; about local authority workers, cleaners, nurses, other NHS staff and teachers—or they cannot find anywhere to live, how are those services to be continued? It will be very damaging. It is all very well saying that you can get these people at the moment, but it is getting harder and harder for them to find somewhere to live. They do not earn enough to buy into the housing market, and they cannot get accommodation. I find that a very serious situation indeed.
The future for London and the south-east will be even bleaker if we do not do something to make more housing available so that we have a proper social mix, and so that various jobs can be filled. I know that we have people from other EU countries who come here, but some of their housing conditions are intolerable and they do it only temporarily while they try to keep their families going in their home country. That does not mean that the housing is there; it means that they are willing to accept standards in which one would hope that they did not have to live.
We have to build more homes. I do not believe that doing nothing is an option. We have to change our policies dramatically. The lack of housing construction is holding the whole economy back. We know that an active construction programme has knock-on benefits throughout the economy in jobs, further investment and so on. However, at the same time, we are seeing a generation who are finding a decent home of their own out of reach. As I said earlier, we are building about half of what we need.
Lending more and more is not the answer unless there is an increase in supply. Whereas I welcome, up to a point, making the planning system more efficient—there are arguments against it as well—that will not open the doors to a great deal of building. We need to look forward. Fundamentally, I believe that we need to get local authorities building again—and if not local authorities, then local authorities in tandem with housing associations. We need to ensure that we can develop a proper public housebuilding programme. That would give people an opportunity and boost the economy. I am afraid that I missed some of the discussion in Questions today about garden cities—I apologise, but I was working on this speech and I did not switch my screen on in time to hear what the Minister said about it—but that certainly has to be an option when looking at ways in which we can deal with the desperate housing situation.
To cite a well-known Conservative to support my argument, in the 1950s Harold Macmillan said that he would build 300,000 homes a year. He said he would ensure that there were that many built in the country, and he did it. If he could do it, that is a lesson to us all. Mind you, he is a different sort of Conservative from the ones that they have nowadays but he knew that housebuilding was important. It was important then and it is important now in terms of the economy, jobs and human happiness.
I believe that we need real political will on housing. Frankly, if the coalition will not provide that political will, the next Labour Government will. I very much hope that housebuilding and increasing housing will be a key feature of Labour’s manifesto, with which we shall win the next general election.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, I thank all Members of the House who have contributed to the debate. It has been characterised by contributions made on the basis of knowledge and experience. I thought that it was a particularly well informed debate, and I hope that it has added to the thinking about and understanding of the housing difficulties that we face. I do not want to take time in mentioning individual colleagues. That would not be appropriate in what should be a very short contribution at the end of a debate.
I will just say this: the tone of the debate has been utterly reasonable, and the Minister has been utterly reasonable in the way that she has sounded. I always feel that the harder the policy is to defend, the more reasonable the Minister you put forward to defend it, and the Government have chosen just the right Minister on this occasion. I felt that, with one of two minor exceptions, everyone who spoke agreed. All of us, even the Minister, agreed on the difficulties and the problems. The Minister also put forward some solutions but they were very small solutions, couched in the most moderate and reasonable language—almost persuasive but not quite.
We face a serious housing crisis, and the Government have a bit of a policy for each bit of the housing difficulty, but the trouble is that they are not going to make enough difference. My fear is that in two or three years’ time we will be having a similar debate with the same absolutely charming and reasonable contribution from the Minister and will not be any further forward. I fear that the Government have a policy for this, but there is not enough of it and it does not have enough impetus, commitment or money.
I hope I have not added too discordant a note to what has been a very even-tempered debate. I thank the Minister for her reasonable way of putting it over. All I would say is this: if I were in her position—it sounds arrogant of me—I would go back to the department and say, “Go through this debate. There must be more we can do”.
Motion agreed.