Alex Cunningham
Main Page: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
I join the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) on his maiden speech, which I thoroughly enjoyed—it certainly made me laugh. I wish him well as he tries to follow in the steps of St Paul. I do not mean Paul Goggins, although for many of us he was a bit of a saint, but St Paul of the Bible, who took on many people in government before his premature demise.
I worry that I am treading on old ground when I say that we are currently in the midst of the biggest housing emergency in a generation, but it is worth repeating that we continue to build less than half the number of homes we need to keep up with demand, if only to hammer home the severity and scale of the problem. All the while, private landlords, many of whom leave much to be desired in the caring and service department, continue to hike rents, often at the expense of the taxpayer, who has to foot the bill for many people forced by the failures of Government to claim housing benefit.
I am therefore pleased to welcome the Communities and Local Government Committee’s report and its conclusions, which cover: simplifying the law; promoting rights and responsibilities; proper enforcement powers for local authorities; better regulation; a crackdown on unfair charges; longer and more secure tenancies; and a renewed effort to boost housing supply in order to increase choice, quality and affordability.
Sadly, I cannot say the same for the Secretary of State’s response. He writes of burdensome red tape hampering private landlords, proportionate regulation that will let them off the hook and measures that will give tenants the know-how to demand longer-term tenancies, stable rents and better quality accommodation, to avoid hidden fees when renting a home and to demand better standards, but all without any real requirement on landlords to agree. He also writes of the
“small number of rogue landlords”
who need to be dealt with, and optional model tenancy agreements that no one needs to adopt. It is not exactly a charter for the sector—certainly not for tenants. I welcome the funds to encourage more people to build new properties for rent and the compulsory redress scheme, although it is not clear how vulnerable tenants will take on the might of landlords.
However, none of that will deliver the house building revolution we need. A great concern is that the housing crisis is not a problem that exists in isolation—quite the opposite. A failure to build is but one link in a chain reaction that is having damaging effects for many people. With housing costs increasing, real wages falling and energy bills rocketing, not to mention the other bills that we must all factor into the cost of living, the chronic shortfall in building is driving that crisis.
Hard-working people across the country are being left unable to afford the homes they need. The average home now costs eight times the average wage. It took just three years for an average family to save for a deposit on a home in 1997, but today it will take the same family 22 years, if they are able to do so. But the number of affordable homes built over the past year dropped by more than a quarter.
As I sit on the bus each evening going to my Battersea flat, I am amazed by the number of apartments being built along Battersea Park road, each a tiny box costing several hundred thousand pounds. On behalf of the people of north-east England, I envy London the thousands of jobs and—in this apprenticeship week—the hundreds of apprenticeships that have been generated on those sites. It is just a shame that the vast majority of Londoners will never be able to buy and live in those apartments and will have to rely on the private rented sector instead. I could advise those people to move north, even to my constituency, where they will be able to secure a family home for a fraction of the cost of some of the box-sized apartments in London. The cost of living and quality of life are better, too. But why would I advise them to move to a region starved of housing investment, despite the efforts of our local authorities, and where unemployment continues to rise in most parts?
I would offer a solution. The Government could work to restore the north-east by encouraging some of the multi-million pound investment in housing and industry we see in the south-east to move north. Do that and build on the region’s successes, which include being a huge exporter of manufactured goods, including petrochemicals, steel, cars and a whole range of other goods. If houses could be delivered across the north-east at just a fraction of the rate in the south, we could have our own boom time.
What is most alarming about the shift away from home ownership is the simultaneous shortage of affordable and social housing. That extends far beyond the scarcity of one-bedroom properties that is blighting the socially rented sector as a result of this Government’s malicious bedroom tax, and reaches past the confines of London where rents are increasing by as much as 10% a year. Across England, 5 million people are on local authority waiting lists for social housing. As a result, the private rented sector plays and will continue to play an important role in meeting our housing needs. However, all too often private renting is unaffordable, unstable and subject to poor conditions and bad management.
The recent English housing survey for 2012-13 has shown that, for the first time, the private rented sector has grown larger than the social housing sector, with 4 million households compared with 3.7 million. The trend towards growth in the private rented sector is self-reinforcing, driven by the combination of factors that confront aspiring buyers looking to get on the housing ladder. People want to buy, but cannot do so as little affordable housing is available. They cannot even save a deposit while renting because of the shortage of low-cost social housing. To make matters worse, that all comes at a time when real wages have fallen at a rate of 2.2% a year since 2010—the longest such period in half a century.
One of my primary concerns is that so many homes in the private rented sector continue to fail to meet the decent homes standard. Although the number of houses in all sectors failing to meet the required standard has fallen in recent years, one in five households—almost 5 million properties across the country—are still substandard. In the private rented sector, however, a third of all properties fail to live up to the expected benchmark, the highest proportion of non-decent homes in any sector.
Some in the private rented sector would have us believe that they have been cleaning up their act, as the proportion of private rented sector homes classed as non-decent has fallen from 47% in 2006 to 33% in 2012. That is all very well, but that statistic conceals the fact that the absolute number of non-decent dwellings did not decrease over the period. Private landlords could take a lesson from the social rented sector, just 15% of whose properties miss the decent homes standard—although that, of course, is 15% too many.
Proportionally, roughly three times as many homes in the private rented sector failed to meet the decent homes standard as a consequence of disrepair or poor thermal comfort—two key indicators of housing quality—compared with the social rented sector. Private landlords could learn much from my own Stockton-on-Tees borough council’s work on insulating hard-to-heat private properties; Tristar Homes is doing the same in the social sector.
There is a broad consensus that the reputation of responsible landlords in the private sector is being undermined by a minority of criminal landlords who deliberately prey on the vulnerable, but there are problems that we cannot overlook and sweep under the carpet. There are the “couldn’t care less” landlords, the absent landlords and the anonymous landlords who are happy to take the rent but do nothing for their tenants. Some let properties to anyone prepared to pay, and in some areas create misery for neighbours and the wider community.
Just a week ago, a distressed woman was in tears in my surgery after years of trouble from one set of aggressive and noisy tenants after another, placed next door to her by a landlord who takes no responsibility whatever. The situation is all too common. We know that when standards reach unacceptable levels, regulatory and enforcement tools are available to local authorities. However, using those tools is often a last resort, partly because of regulatory red tape, meaning that poor standards can persist for too long.
Yet of the 4 million households in the private rented sector, 25% received housing benefit in 2012-13 to help with the rent, up from 19% in 2008-09, as wage values drop, low paid part-time jobs replace well paid full-time ones and people are forced to fall back on the state. That means that the Government are, in effect, increasing subsidies for low quality homes. That would rightly be considered a scandal at any time—even more so when the money could be used to boost house building in the social rented sector and benefit some of the millions of people in need of high quality affordable homes.
Over the past three decades, in excess of 1 million council properties have been sold through the right-to-buy policy and its variants. About a third of the ex-council homes sold in the 1980s are now owned by private landlords charging rents more often than not staggeringly higher than rents in the social sector. In the social rented sector, the average household rent in 2012-13 was £89 a week, while the equivalent figure for the private rented sector stood at £163, a difference of £74 a week. In some local authority areas in the north-east, as many as 72% of those in the private rented sector are entitled to rent support through housing benefit. With 80,000 households renting private accommodation entitled to housing benefit across the north-east region, private companies are benefiting massively from the welfare system. For example, Stockton Flats has taken more than £1.7 million from councils throughout the north-east, the north-west and north Yorkshire, including £775,000 from Stockton-on-Tees and £260,000 from Redcar and Cleveland. Similarly, Castledene Property Management has benefited hugely from Durham and Newcastle councils.
Mr Speaker
Order. There is no formal time limit on Back-Bench speeches, but I am cautiously optimistic that the hon. Gentleman is approaching his concluding comments, a point that I make in the light of the fact that other hon. Members—four to be precise—wish to speak. I know that the hon. Gentleman is considerate of his colleagues and is approaching his conclusion—not his end, but his conclusion.
Alex Cunningham
I am grateful, Mr Speaker. I have a few paragraphs to go.
The companies that act as private landlords are reaping the rewards of the housing crisis that is afflicting so many people in Britain, and driving growth in the buy-to-let market while stifling the building of the affordable and social homes that so many hard-working people want and need.
I will cut short my comments, Mr Speaker. I will simply say that the report from the Communities and Local Government Committee offered the Government robust recommendations, and I am saddened that the Secretary of State is not giving them much credit.
Mr Speaker
Splendid. The hon. Gentleman may have had a few paragraphs left, but they were short, which is encouraging.