King’s Speech

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, there is no vision in the gracious Speech to remedy the poverty and injustice that blight our nation. The Minister spoke of the miscellaneous measures the Government intend to take, but they fall far short of what is needed in relation to the challenge. The plans to reform leasehold and rents will doubtlessly be beneficial as far as they go—they will not actually abolish leasehold—but they will do nothing to address the fundamental problem of supply. There are severe shortages of housing, whether to rent or to buy. The dream of the property-owning democracy has turned sour. The Government have again funked serious reform of the planning system. They have no strategy to ensure over time that everyone will be able to live securely in a healthy, safe, environmentally suitable home that meets their needs. The noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Young of Cookham, spoke about this, and it is a pleasure to follow them with their deep knowledge of housing issues.

The promise of a ban on no-fault evictions has been made before but broken. As the Government have said that it will not go ahead until significant progress has been made to improve the courts, nothing will happen soon. Ill-judged reform of the tax regime for private landlords and rising mortgage costs have reduced supply at a time when demand has been strongly increased. Local housing allowance has been frozen since 2020, while rents have soared. The provision of new social housing has been minimal. Young people seeking a roof over their head at a price they can afford, particularly in London and the south-east, are in a desperate plight.

A study for the National Housing Federation has found that 800,000 people are spending more than one-third of their net income on mortgages, 600,000 are spending an equally unaffordable proportion of their income on rent, all too often for accommodation that is in an unhealthy and even dangerous condition, 2 million people are living in homes that are not adapted or accessible for their needs, 131,000 children are living in emergency accommodation—bed and breakfast and hostels—and 270,000 people are homeless. The Home Secretary, horribly, has inveighed against rough sleeping as a lifestyle choice and has proposed to ban homeless people putting up tents and to fine charities for providing tents.

A housing crisis deepens inequality, destroys communities and undermines the economy. The physical and mental effects of homelessness or unaffordable accommodation have an impact on health. A devastating combination of economic mismanagement, hostility to local government and an ideological commitment to a small state and minimal public expenditure means that the Government have no strategy to reduce health inequality by improving the conditions in which people live. They have cut funding for public health, as the right reverend Prelate and my noble friend Lady Jay mentioned. The upshot has been that the healthy life expectancy gap between people in the poorest and the richest areas is now 18 years for men and 20 years for women. People in the most deprived areas of England are more than four times as likely to die from a health condition that could have been prevented or treated.

The regions of England and local communities within them have been denied opportunity to thrive by central government’s hoarding of power. Power has been released only, grudgingly and inconsistently, to combined authorities. In an act which exemplifies the controlling, insulting attitude of central government, the Local Government Minister the other day actually threatened local authorities with penalties if they choose to move their staff on to four-day working. Mayoralties and local authorities have been denied the powers they need to raise taxes in their areas if they are to exercise responsibility meaningfully and accountably and improve public services, and they have been impoverished by central austerity. Expensively and humiliatingly, they have been made to beg for pots of funding, some distributed according to political bias rather than objective need. Dilatory decision-making and central bureaucracy have made it impractical for local authorities to spend some of the money handed down to replace EU funding.

Well-managed authorities are now financially precarious. County councils are buckling under the rising cost of children’s services, while private providers are making fat profits. Inspectorates and charities report poor conditions in privately run children’s homes and a shortage of places. District councils are buckling under the costs of provision for the increasing numbers of homeless.

The Speech says nothing about reform of the social care system. Some 400,000 people left social care jobs in the last year, with a third of them leaving the sector altogether. Achieving a sustainable financial basis for social care, including adequate pay and career progression for care staff, as well as reforming the fragmentation and complexity of the system, are essential not only for the well-being and safety of those in need of care but to take unnecessary pressure off the NHS.

The litany of failure continues when we consider transport. We have seen the fiasco of the mismanaged HS2 project, while motorists and rail travellers have their lives blighted by gridlock and erratic services. This has been an aspect of the Government’s failure to develop a coherent strategy to address the poor economic productivity, which militates against improving our national competitiveness, incomes and public services.

Education is crucial to productivity, as well as to personal fulfilment and social flourishing, yet the Government have reduced spending per pupil in schools. School attendance has fallen worryingly. Only 21% of children from the poorest fifth of households get five good GCSE passes. The Government have also induced a crisis in our universities by freezing fees for a decade, which are now down 30% in real terms. Despite constant chopping and changing of policy, successive Education Secretaries have failed to design a satisfactory system of further, adult and vocational education, and the Treasury has starved the chaotic system we have.

As a result of the Government’s ministrations, the number of people who are destitute—unable to meet the basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed—has increased to 3.8 million, including 1 million children. Inequalities of incomes and wealth, and regional, ethnic and generational, have greatly increased. The state to which the Government have reduced our country is truly shocking.