Housing Bodies: Accountability

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the accountability of housing bodies.

You and I have known each other for a long time, Mr Hollobone, and I am not sure whether this is the first debate I have been at that you have chaired, but nevertheless, it is welcome to see you in the Chair.

I want to examine a number of core issues in this debate before giving some recommendations to the Government. First, I want to look at the adequacy of the assessment that is currently in place to examine the quality of the design and build of new houses. I also want to consider the accountability of housing organisations when they have made mistakes or are mistreating customers, as it is my opinion that currently, they are not adequately held to account. Lastly, I want to address the way in which data regulations apply to Members of Parliament. That issue has arisen in relation to a housing organisation through my casework, and I know that many other Members have encountered similar problems in their own casework.

We have had numerous debates on the urgent need for more, and better-quality housing. I support efforts to increase the number of houses being built, and that should be happening at a faster rate. It is also vital that those homes are council-owned—I have always believed in that, and the privatisation of housing since 1980 has contributed to the issues that I will be addressing.

In Coventry, we have had several problems with housing organisations’ unhelpfulness when responding to their residents’ concerns. A quick search of our casework database has shown that dozens of constituents have contacted me this year about their housing situation. Housing organisations seem to be particularly unhelpful when responding to complaints, and the same names of problematic housing organisations keep coming up.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing this important debate before the House. Many of the concerns that he has cited, and those I am sure he will be citing later, have been represented to me by my constituents who face similar issues, especially Robert Taylor from the Camden Federation of Private Tenants. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is high time that a Select Committee inquiry takes place, examining the accountability of housing associations and their lack of oversight by both tenants and Members?

[Mr Cunningham]

I could not agree more. Such a review is long overdue, as even the data protection people do not give us clear answers about what information we are entitled to. They seem to forget that at the end of the day, we are the last line of defence for tenants—and anybody else who has problems, for that matter.

Housing and Home Ownership

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered housing and home ownership.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I recently published an 80-page report for the think-tank Onward. Members will be relieved to hear that I do not intend to read it out today, but I want to talk about some of the themes in it.

This is a short debate, so I want to ask the Minister just two questions. First, will he update us on his thoughts about how we can increase home ownership by rebalancing things between the private rented sector and home ownership? Building more homes is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of reversing the decline in home ownership. Over the past decade, the private sector has built about 165,000 extra houses every year, but home ownership fell because the private rented sector has expanded by 195,000 homes every year. Multiple property ownership has been squeezing out home ownership for individuals. Private landlords are not doing anything wrong, but we have to ask ourselves as a country whether we want so much of our housing stock to flow into renting, rather than owning.

To rebalance things back towards ownership, we could do a number of things. We could introduce a capital gains tax break for those who want to sell their rented property to their existing tenants. For future rented properties, we could change the tax treatment to encourage people to put their investments into stocks, shares and businesses, rather than just into bidding up the price of housing. Rebalancing in that way could make a big difference. To give a sense of the magnitude, I should say that if we had kept the ratio of privately owned to privately rented homes the same between 2000 and 2015, 2.2 million more homes would be in ownership. That would make a huge difference—at least as big a difference as we could make by increasing the rate at which we build homes.

We know that tax can be effective. The changes brought in by the then Chancellor in 2015 saw the first substantial increase in home ownership for a decade in the following year. I hope that the Minister and his colleagues at the Treasury are thinking about ownership. If we only think about the supply side of the market in challenging the housing problem, we are effectively fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.

The second thing I would like the Minister to update us on is his and the Government’s overall vision for what, where and how we build. The ultimate constraint on how much we build is public consent. If we want to build more, we need to tackle the underlying reasons why people oppose so much of what is built today. For me, there are three underlying reasons. First, too often we build in the wrong places and we lose the green spaces that people value the most. Secondly, we build without the required infrastructure. Thirdly, there are too few benefits for existing residents.

How can we solve those problems? That requires different things in different places. It means building more in the centres of our great cities—densifying them and regenerating more land. Outside our cities, it means more stand-alone, planned new communities and fewer tacked-on developments stuck on the edges of all our existing villages and towns. Everywhere, it means sharing more of the benefits of development with existing residents so that they can see those benefits.

Let me unpack that a little bit. There is lots of room in our great cities for growth. Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Hull and Dundee all had a smaller population in 2016 than they did in 1981. Other cities such as Manchester and Birmingham were only about 6% bigger. There is lots of room to grow in our great cities, and there are lots of reasons to densify the centres of those cities: it is greener; it means less congestion; it means more people walk to work, which in turn is healthier; and infrastructure costs are lower. There are lots of ways to make it happen. To put ideas in the Minister’s head, we could change objectively assessed need to favour inner-city development, to take into account the potential for cities to densify. We could further liberalise building upwards and amend change of use to allow empty shops to be turned into homes.

We could devolve further powers over transport beyond the mayoral combined authority areas. Mayoral authorities such as in London have powers over public transport and the buses. That means they could have denser development, because they can ensure good public transport to it. We could review sightlines in London and build upwards. We could do what the think-tank Create Streets recommends and review regulations so that we can once again build those tall, dense terraces that are so beloved by the population. We can do a lot more in our cities, but we will continue to want to build outside our cities, including in rural areas.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this debate to the House. His suggestions are good. Does he think that housing provision for people with disabilities should be improved as well? At a sitting of the Select Committee of which I am a member last week, I argued that the Government should implement approved document M4(2). It sounds a bit wordy, but that is about making new homes accessible and adaptable by default. Does he agree with doing that? That measure includes provisions for a wheelchair standard for new homes.

[Neil O'Brien]

The hon. Lady has a very interesting idea, but I am not familiar with that measure. I will have to go away and look at it.

Outside of the cities, we generally build right up to existing developments. I see that in my constituency.

Fire Safety and Cladding

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) on bringing the debate to the House, and on all the work he has done in his constituency. His constituents are lucky to have him fighting their corner; I am sure they know that.

I will mention once again Stormzy’s intervention at this year’s Brit Awards, which secured headlines not just because of his profile, but because he articulated how the British people feel about many of the issues that have been discussed today and how, nine months on, as many hon. Members have said, many questions remain unanswered and the victims of Grenfell have not received justice.

I want to talk about a case study in the Borough of Camden in my constituency. It relates to the human experience at the heart of the cladding question and the enormous financial burden being placed on local authorities in dealing with the matter. Many hon. Members will know that Camden Council took the urgent decision to evacuate more than 3,000 people from the Chalcots estate following tests on cladding. The tragedy at Grenfell prompted the tests, but it was the London fire brigade that ordered immediate evacuations following an assessment. The evacuation was carried out throughout the night, and has caused serious distress to residents. The upheaval of decamping to a hotel for several weeks was difficult enough, but cladding removal during the bitter cold of winter was even more difficult. Many residents’ heating systems are not strong enough to heat their homes, now that they are so exposed.

I raise those experiences to underline the need for action on building regulations, but also to stress the trauma that my constituents on the estate have experienced owing to cladding replacement. They live with cold and with seemingly endless construction. Compensation is missing, and there is a 24-hour security presence months after buildings were declared fit for purpose. That is not a normal way to live, but it has been the reality facing nearly 3,000 of my constituents since July 2017. I am speaking on their behalf today.

Replacement is a protracted process. According to a recent Camden housing scrutiny report, the new cladding will not be fully fitted across the estates until August next year, so it is not hard to understand why councils are begging for the kind of political will that would confront contractors and create a clearer set of standards on fire safety practices.

Good financial management means that Camden has taken on the costs without cutting frontline services. I commend its decision to stop payments to the company that put up the flammable cladding on the Chalcots and endangered residents’ lives. Camden hopes to spend the millions of pounds saved from abandoning the previous contract on safer cladding. The operation has cost more than £50 million and breaks down as £12 million for evacuation and safety management, including fire marshals; £9 million on repairs, including emergency repairs and doors; £10 million on cladding removal; and £22 million on cladding replacement. However, as my local newspaper, the Camden New Journal, put it, the council should not have had to do that. Had the Government kept their promise after the inferno at Grenfell, the council would not have had to drain its reserves and foot the bill.

At the heart of the debate is the question of how we make our constituents feel safe in their own homes. Replacing combustible cladding is an obvious and immediate place to start, but so too is addressing the reduced resources of the emergency services and local authorities. In the days following the Grenfell disaster, many promises were made about rehousing vulnerable residents and recouping the cost of new cladding, but that has not been the experience in my constituency. It is possible that the promise made by the Government has been forgotten, but proactive campaigners, MPs and councillors will not let it drop.