Social Housing (Regulation) Bill [Lords]

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

We do need to look again at the position. I have to be careful because the Home Office is a separate Department and I am not the Secretary of State there, but I do know that the new Home Secretary and the new Minister responsible for fire safety appreciate and understand the need to look closely at the concerns that tenants expressed on the previous position. I have to say that the previous position was taken in good faith, but we need to pay attention to the concerns expressed.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am sure that we all want social landlords, and indeed all landlords, to be held to account when they fall short. Does the Secretary of State accept that there may be a problem with some financial penalties? We may end up punishing tenants twice: once for having a bad landlord and again by having funds withheld. I can give a specific example from my constituency. A social landlord is failing financially so is penalised by not being able to bid for the building safety fund, with the consequence either that fire safety works do not get done, or that properties are not sold or developed and new properties are not built. Will he look at that specific instance and see whether we can avoid penalising tenants in that way?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman makes the fair point that there are lots of pressures on registered social landlords and housing associations. The Bill is there to ensure that all emulate the best, but I appreciate that with pressures to increase supply, pressures on building safety and pressures to deal with the poor-quality stock that many have inherited, we need to be sensitive. I am sure that the regulator will be, in the application of any fines, if the correct action is not being taken.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

May I be the first to welcome the right hon. Gentleman back to his place. I very much enjoyed sparring with him over the Dispatch Box last time. I also particularly enjoy these very rare moments when the House can come together in political consensus to deliver on something of enormous importance to people outside this place. I look forward to working with him and the team to make good on the promises that we made to people all those years ago.

Apparently, when the right hon. Gentleman arrived back in the Department, he told civil servants that he was getting the band back together. The Department has now had seven line-ups since the Bill was first promised—amazingly, that is officially more reinventions than the Sugababes. I look forward to us going “Round Round” again. The Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison), is shaking her head. I gather that she is a Taylor Swift fan, so I promise her that I will try to get some Taylor Swift references in next time.

The Secretary of State will know that since he last held office, the job has got much harder, but the Bill, which the Labour party strongly supports, has got much better, in large part thanks to Baroness Hayman and our colleagues in the other place, who have worked together in genuine cross-party spirit to strengthen the hand of social housing tenants.

For 120 years, social housing has provided the foundations of a decent, secure life for millions of people across Britain—a home for life, handed back into common ownership to be passed down through the generations. Labour believes that that is part of our inheritance and an ideal—one that empowers people to live the richer, larger and more dignified lives that they deserve—worth fighting for.

It should, then, shame a nation that in 2020 one in seven social homes in London, along with many others across the country, do not even meet the Government’s decent homes standard. As the Secretary of State knows —he paid tribute to the incredible work of Dan Hewitt at ITV—the reality is one of children growing up in squalid, damp and overcrowded homes that would not be out of place in the Victorian era.

When people in social housing have tried to sound the alarm, they have too often been completely ignored. Nothing has brought that into sharper relief than the appalling tragedy at Grenfell Tower and the treatment of the residents who—along with many others—tried to sound the alarm over many, many years. Today, we remember the 72 people who lost their lives on that day, and those whose lives were changed for ever and who live with those memories. We pay tribute to the work that they have done to get us this far. But they want more than remembrance; they want justice and a lasting legacy. That includes setting right a system that has failed them and failed many, many others. It is a system where concerns were repeatedly ignored, where the value of lives was weighed against the value of profits on a balance sheet and could come out the poorer, and where, in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, just a few miles from the centre of power, those concerns could be rendered completely invisible by decisionmakers just a few miles away.

For far too many people in this country and for social housing tenants, the reality is that they too often hold none of the cards. That is simply wrong. When they challenge bad practices, they should not have to fight the system. They should feel the whole system pulling in behind them.

That is why we welcome and support the Bill. It is also why we believe that tenants deserve the strongest legislation that this House can provide. Let me take three areas where we know the Bill can be improved and strengthened. We welcome the establishment of an advisory panel, but tenants should be at the centre of that, setting the agenda, not just responding to it, and we will bring forward measures in Committee to seek to ensure that that is the case. We welcome, too, the progress that the Secretary of State referred to that was made in the other place on the professionalisation of standards in the social housing workforce, but we know that that could be further improved and further strengthened. I was genuinely interested to hear the Secretary of State raise concerns about the impact that that might have on smaller providers. It is a very different reason than the one given in the other place for why the Government felt that it was not possible to strengthen those provisions. Perhaps that is something that we can work together on to resolve. Finally, rights are no good without the means to enforce them. The regulator must have the resources necessary to do the job, and we will be bringing forward measures in Committee, which we hope the Government will support, in order to ensure that that is the case.

Most of all, we want to see the Government get on with the job. It has been five years since Grenfell, four years since the Green Paper, and three years since promises were made in the Conservative party’s election manifesto. How can it possibly be the case that we are approaching the end of 2022 and we still do not know when the measures in the Bill will come into force? This is a short Bill addressing an area of clear political consensus. We have a Secretary of State in post again who has a reputation for getting things done when he sets his mind to it. It took him seven months to scrap court fees, six months to ban microplastics, and three months to pass the entire Academies Act 2010, using powers normally reserved for passing anti-terrorist legislation. It has been well over a year since he was first appointed to this post. Why is this less of a priority?

The Bill is an important part of solving the housing crisis, and we need to get on with it, but it is only one piece. It seeks to address the imbalance of power in social housing and the appalling conditions in social housing that too many people have to endure, but there are 1 million people languishing on the social homes waiting list, struggling with those same power imbalances and squalid housing conditions in the private rented sector and watching their rents soar completely out of control. The only way to deal with that is to build more social homes, but the record has been indefensible. Every year since this Conservative Government took office, an average of 12,000 social homes have been lost from our housing stock. The Secretary of State knows it, and, to give credit to him, he has acknowledged that we need more social homes.

“The availability of social housing is simply inadequate for any notion of social justice or economic efficiency.”

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. As she has correctly said, the biggest problem with social housing is that there is not enough of it. The past 12 years have seen under-investment in the social housing grant and many properties being lost to the system—many associations are selling off properties because of the multiple demands of having a development programme that they cannot fulfil, of having poor conditions of properties and of having overcrowding in their stock. That means that, increasingly, they are looking at more and more desperate measures. Although the measures in the Bill are welcome, what we really need is to see social housing restored to its pre-eminence as the first port of call, rather than the last port of call, for people in housing need.

[Lisa Nandy]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and for the work that he has done over many years to highlight the housing crisis in this country. He is absolutely right; it is not just that we are not building enough, but that far more social homes are being lost from the social housing stock. I pay tribute to the many Labour councils that are seeking to do something about that, even in very tough times. In Salford, Ipswich, Southwark and Doncaster, house building has continued and the social housing stock continues to grow. When Labour was in Government we built double the amount of social homes than are currently being built. When we come back into Government, whether in a few months’ or a few years’ time, we will finish that job and restore social housing to the second largest form of housing tenure, where it belongs.

The Secretary of State acknowledged the problem in his speech. I agree with him, but that was back in February and still very little has been done. That is why I press him on the urgency of passing the Bill and getting this done. There is much more to turn our attention to. He sat in the Cabinet in 2010 that cut the budget of the affordable homes programme by 60%. He has served multiple Prime Ministers who cut local authorities’ budgets to the bone and imposed social rent cuts that have hampered their ability to build and invest. It is time to finally get this legislation on the statute book so that we can turn our attention to tackling the housing crisis.

Nothing matters more than a home. Security in your own home, the right to make it your own and the right to live somewhere fit for human habitation are non-negotiable. Housing is not just the market—it is a fundamental human right. Any Government worthy of the office would take action right now to mend that deliberate vandalism of our social housing stock, restore it to the second largest form of tenure and finally get developers to sign fire safety pledge contracts. The deadline for that passed months ago.

We must get on with this and release people from the misery of not knowing whether they live in a safe home. Leaseholders face appalling charges and uncertainty, trapped in homes that they thought were forever homes but have become a prison. We must abolish the feudal, archaic leasehold system and replace it with a commonhold system fit for modern Britain. We must make good on the promises to hand power back to private rented tenants, starting with abolishing section 21 no-fault evictions and proper, decent home standards fit for the 21st century.

Families across this country are desperate to escape their housing conditions. Many are desperate to get on to the housing ladder, but a few weeks ago their Government crashed the economy and mortgage payments were sent through the roof. For hundreds of thousands of people, the dream of home ownership has gone up in smoke.

Surely, the absolute bare minimum that any Government worth their salt ought to deliver is for every single person in this country to have a decent, safe, warm home and the power to drive and shape the decisions that affect their lives—and nowhere more so than in respect of the housing that they inhabit. The Government have recognised the need to empower social housing tenants and to improve safety and standards in social housing, and they will get no complaints from us about that.

There is, finally, political consensus that the scandalous conditions in which far too many families are forced to live are not just unacceptable but a stain on modern Britain. We welcome that recognition, even though it has taken too long to get here. There is so much more to do. We need to now get on with the job.

Social Housing (Regulation) Bill [Lords]

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 1st March 2023 Commons Chamber

We were not convinced by these arguments, and we remain concerned that the Bill, as drafted, will not meaningfully empower tenants. We have therefore tabled amendments 36 and 37 and new clause 6, which taken together would ensure that tenants are adequately represented on the advisory panel established by clause 2 and able to influence how it operates; that the panel would have the ability to provide information and advice directly to the Secretary of State in circumstances in which it feels that is necessary; and that tenants and others have the right to access information held by providers on a range of key issues of concern, including fire safety and health hazards, beyond what they might secure as a result of any information and transparency scheme that might be—I stress the word “might”—established under clause 22. I commend them to the House.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. On new clause 6, he knows that I have an interest in freedom of information, and I introduced a private Member’s Bill to do just this. The Freedom of Information Act applies to housing associations in Scotland, the Information Commissioner supports that, and there were endless examples in what the Campaign for Freedom of Information gave us in preparation for this debate of housing associations just refusing or ignoring requests from tenants about fire safety, damp and mould and other issues. Why should they be treated differently from council tenants, and why will the Government not adopt the FIA, which is designed exactly for this purpose, rather than use their own scheme, which would do a pale reflection of that in trying to enable tenants can find out basic information about their own safety?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention; I could not have put it better. We are seriously concerned that clause 22 does not have the same effect as bringing providers within the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. We think that tenants, and tenant representatives and those acting on their behalf, should be able to enjoy those rights, so that they can get information of the kind that, as he rightly says, providers regularly refuse to give to tenants.

Before turning to the Government amendments that have been tabled since the Bill left Committee, I wish to speak briefly to new clauses 7 and 8, which stand respectively in the names of my hon. Friends the Members for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) and for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). I turn first to new clause 7, or “Georgia’s law”, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood has named it, in reference to a constituent of hers who was forced into temporary accommodation for an extended period as a result of her teenage son being threatened by gang members at their family home.

In our view, new clause 7 is a sensible and proportionate amendment that would make a real difference to a small but significant minority of tenants in England who find themselves in the exceptional circumstance—I must stress that fact—of a police referral as a result of being subject to the threat of serious violence. Its effect—the protection of existing tenancy rights in the case of a forced move linked to a threat of violence and greater co-operation between registered providers to rehouse those affected in a social home—is clearly not unduly onerous, and the Government’s argument that such a measure would cause insurmountable problems with local authority allocations policies is entirely unconvincing.

The Minister gave a guarantee in Committee that the Government would work with my hon. Friend

“to see what more can be done in this area to prevent any more cases like that of Georgia and her boys emerging.”––[Official Report, Social Housing (Regulation) Public Bill Committee, 29 November 2022; c. 66.]

It is therefore incredibly disappointing that the Government have not been willing to bring forward an amendment of their own to ensure that others do not have to experience what my hon. Friend’s constituents were forced to go through. As such, if my hon. Friend pushes her new clause 7 to a vote, we will of course support it.

We also support new clause 8, because while we recognise that the Government are taking steps to address the issue of unscrupulous providers of supported accommodation by means of the Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill, promoted by the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), we are in full agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden that the regulator should have the ability to inspect temporary accommodation. There is statutory guidance designed to ensure that existing minimum standards are met for all temporary accommodation, but we know that in practice bed and breakfasts, hotels and shared houses used by local authorities across the country to house homeless families are frequently substandard and often hazardous, because that guidance is rarely adhered to.

The truth is that with almost 100,000 households, and now more than 125,000 children, living in temporary accommodation, according to the Department’s own figures, local authorities have little leverage when it comes to deciding what standards they are willing to accept. A huge amount needs to be done to decrease the demand for temporary accommodation across the country, most of which is well outside of the scope of this Bill. But in the short term, stronger regulation and inspections could make a real difference, and in the most extreme cases they could save lives. On that basis, we support new clause 8.

Finally, I turn to the Government amendments that have been tabled in recent weeks. The bulk of them are uncontroversial and largely technical, and we support their incorporation into the Bill. I do, however, wish to touch upon Government new clause 1. Awaab Ishak’s untimely death from prolonged exposure to mould in the house his parents rented from Rochdale Boroughwide Housing should never have occurred and the fact that it did, frankly, shames our country. The coroner was right to call it a “defining moment”, but it falls to this House to ensure that it truly is. It is therefore essential that we legislate to compel landlords to act quickly to remedy hazards of the kind that ultimately killed Awaab.

The regulator’s initial findings on damp and mould in social housing, published on 2 February, estimated that up to 160,000 social homes have notable problems with it, and a further 8,000 have hazards so severe that they pose a serious and immediate risk to health. Given the scale of the problem, landlords who fail to proactively review the homes and buildings they manage or lease for hazards, who deal with tenant complaints relating to such hazards ineffectively, or who blame damp and mould on lifestyle choices and myriad other factors, rather than taking responsibility, cannot be tolerated.

Government new clause 1 is a laudable effort at amending the Bill to ensure that social housing providers are forced to investigate and deal promptly with hazards that are a danger to the health of tenants. As the Minister said, it would allow the Secretary of State, by regulation, to set timescales to which social landlords must adhere in respect of remedying hazards or be in breach of a tenancy agreement, as well as specify what kinds of action must be taken. Enforcement will, of course, depend on access to legal representation, and in many cases legal aid, Government new clause 1 nevertheless provides an enforceable right that enhances the provisions contained in the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck). We commend the Government for tabling the new clause and we support it in principle.

However, we are convinced that Government new clause 1 could be strengthened in several important respects, and to that end we have tabled amendments (a) to (f). Taken together, they would set out on the face of the Bill the location of the relevant prescribed requirements at proposed new section 10A(2); make clear the extent of their application; detail the circumstances in which any provision of a lease or any agreement relating to a lease is void; and clarify where courts may order specific performance of certain obligations. We believe those changes would improve the clarity and functionality of Government new clause 1 and thereby make it stronger, and we hope the Government will give serious consideration to accepting them.

To conclude, this is without question an important and urgently needed piece of legislation, and we are extremely pleased it will complete its passage today. Everyone has a basic right to a decent, safe, secure and affordable home, and it is our sincere hope that by overhauling the regulation of social housing by means of this Bill, we will better protect the health, safety and wellbeing of social tenants across the country. We welcome the numerous concessions that the Government have made throughout the passage of the Bill, but we believe it is not yet the most robust piece of legislation that this House can possibly deliver, the achievement of which has been our objective from the outset. We will shortly have the opportunity to amend it further so that it is, and I urge the House to come together to that end.