Homelessness

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I draw noble Lords’ attention to my register of interests again. I am the leader of South Holland District Council and the chairman of the Local Government Association. I am a partner in a very small business that rents out houses privately, and I am the chairman of a community interest housing company that we set up specifically to deal with homelessness.

I will expand a bit on the words of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in terms of not just dealing with this as a rough sleeping issue. We have 70,000 people in council accommodation for the homeless, nearly 1 million people sitting on council waiting lists and only about 1.6 million council houses that are still in council use. This is not just a problem for this Government. It is a historical problem that this Government inherited from their predecessor—of whom they were part—which they in turn inherited from their predecessor, whom they clearly were not part of. Homelessness seems to be a problem despite the best efforts of the best political brains in the country for the last 40 years to tackle it—we seem to have failed. It is probably time now for the Government to take a completely different tack and work closely with the local government family and the third sector to make sure that we give attention to detail that is not driven by people from the Treasury.

Now is probably the time for DCLG to be set free from the Treasury so that it is able to come up with the solution that we all know is the one we need to follow, which is for money to be put towards the supply problem. It is not about the supply of properties; as we know, councils have planning permission for more than 500,000 properties. The private sector, however, for varying reasons, not all of them simple, has failed to deliver those units. Councils have proposed a solution to the Government that would allow 500,000 new units to be delivered in the life of a Parliament, and I again extend the offer from the Local Government Association to work very closely with DCLG on making sure that we try, once and for all, to manage people’s expectations that they should be able to live in a decent, safe, secure, warm home.