Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Hardie Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hardie (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for initiating the debate.

I also acknowledge the Library staff’s briefing paper explaining the obligations of local authorities towards those seeking help with homelessness, including tables of statistics about the number of people in England seeking such help. It is clear from these tables that, between 2020 and 2024, there has been a steady increase in the total number of applicants assessed by local authorities, which owe a duty to prevent homelessness for households threatened with it or to provide relief for those households which are already homeless. In 2020-21, the total number was 270,560; it has been increasing each year, culminating in 324,900 in 2023-24. In considering these figures, one must bear in mind that they reflect households which have sought help from their local authority and which have received a positive assessment.

The scale of homelessness is much worse than these figures suggest, because they do not include what homelessness charities define as “core homelessness”. Core homelessness includes people sleeping rough, living in homeless hostels, placed in unsuitable temporary accommodation, sofa surfing and living in other, non-conventional accommodation, such as cars, tents or boats. The number of people in this category is also increasing. In 2012, the estimated number was 206,000, and it rose to about 242,000 in 2022.

It is obviously unsatisfactory that we do not know the full extent of the problem, and I invite the Minister to consider what arrangements could be made for the inclusion in local authority quarterly returns of the number of people in its area identified by charities as being in the category of core homelessness. However, even without the inclusion of this additional group of homeless people, there is an urgent need to increase the supply of affordable housing to address the issue of homelessness.

The National Audit Office’s report The Effectiveness of Government in Tackling Homelessness identified that there was no overarching government strategy or targets for reducing statutory homelessness. It also highlighted that the then Government were falling behind on key programmes to improve housing supply. The promise in the Labour Party manifesto to develop a cross-government homelessness strategy, and to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, was a welcome response to the NAO’s report. The scale of the need was identified in reports in 2020 and 2024 by the then House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, which advocated for the construction of 90,000 new social rent homes per year. It is now for the Government to deliver on these manifesto promises. I acknowledge the steps taken by the Government already include the measures in the Budget to increase the supply of social and affordable homes and to create the cross-government task force to tackle homelessness.

I also recognise that it is intended to facilitate the granting of planning permission for housebuilding, without the delays that have hitherto blighted development. However, I counsel Ministers to take steps to ensure that housebuilders in receipt of such planning permission deliver houses without delay and do not simply add the consented land to their land banks, to be developed when it suits the housebuilder to maximise the return on investment when property prices increase. Such steps might include the need to alter the definition of the commencement of development to keep alive a planning consent.

At present, the digging of a trench might be sufficient to establish that development has commenced and does not guarantee the delivery of any homes for many years, because the five-year period of the consent has been extended indefinitely. Consideration should also be given to including agreements linked to the planning consent that stipulate the development programme that must be achieved, failing which the consent will be revoked. Such agreements should also ensure that the affordable homes are constructed towards the beginning of the site development, instead of the practice of many developers leaving their construction to the end and seeking to vary the planning consent by reducing their number or excluding them altogether.

It is also essential that the newly constructed affordable homes are available as such for future generations of lower-income families. They should remain as part of the public sector housing stock and should be excluded from the right-to-buy legislation. Otherwise, the public sector housing stock will be depleted of its most modern and attractive houses and the issue of homelessness will once again be exacerbated.