Andy Slaughter
Main Page: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth, although it is a shame that not a single Conservative or Lib Dem MP from London is present. I share all the sentiments that have been expressed so far and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this debate.
I am going to talk about Hammersmith, which shares the problems that have been mentioned but where they are more extreme for two reasons. First, the average price of any property in Hammersmith is now £700,000, renting a three-bedroom house on the open market would cost almost £800 a week, and last year Hammersmith saw the largest increase in property prices anywhere in the country—25%. A survey done by London Citizens some years ago showed that the only housing in London that is affordable to anyone on the London living wage—not the minimum wage—is social housing. The myth that new definitions of affordable housing are in some way affordable is simply wrong. We need more social housing to address the housing crisis.
The second reason why Hammersmith is in a particularly pernicious state is that the Conservative-run local authority—David Cameron’s favourite council, although most commentators would agree that it is on the extreme edge of the Conservative party—sets out deliberately to exacerbate the situation. It began as a simple Porterite gerrymandering exercise. An article on the Conservative Home website from 11 February 2009 detailed an analysis by the then leader of the council based on figures supplied by the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands). The article identified the fact that many Conservative target seats for the 2010 election—such as Hammersmith, Westminster North and Birmingham Edgbaston—had high percentages of social housing. It cited figures of 36% for Hammersmith, 30% for Westminster North and 29% for Birmingham Edgbaston, and said that as a consequence of those percentages, such target seats did not fall to the Conservatives in the way that they should.
The article specifically stated:
“Today social housing has become welfare housing where both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement predominate…Conservative principles of freedom, self-reliance and personal responsibility run counter to this culture. Calling for the state to provide a “hand up instead of a hand out” is unlikely to resonate.”
It then went on to analyse the boroughs across London, finding that those with less than 25% social housing were likely to return Conservative councils and that those with more than 30% were likely to return Labour councils. It was as simple as that at that stage—it was all about fixing the result of elections by not building or reducing the quantum of social housing. It has now gone much further. The new buzz phrase is “sweat the asset,” which means demolishing low-rise affordable social housing and building high-rise luxury flats sold off-plan to developers abroad. That is currently happening across my constituency. We have also heard cod sociology about how any subsidy of housing somehow encourages this thing called dependency culture.
I am not making this up—it is all in a document called “Principles for Social Housing Reform” that asked for four things from an incoming Conservative Government: no capital subsidy, no security of tenure, no duty to house people in need and no subsidised risk. The authors have almost everything that they asked for. They do not have no duty to house people in need, but they do have a duty to discharge people into the private rented sector, and the benefit caps and cuts have meant that, of course, that is often outside London—certainly outside inner London. All the other requests have become true within very few years.
Hammersmith council, however, has gone much further. It is part of Hammersmith’s planning policy that no new social housing units can be created. Where there is any affordable housing—there is a target of 40% on any single development, but it rarely exceeds 10%—it is typically a discount market sale, so it costs 80% of market rent or sale, meaning that it is, of course, completely unaffordable.
Across the borough and my constituency, there is area development of which Albert Speer or Ceausescu would be proud. In the north of the borough—at Old Oak, the Earl’s Court opportunity area or White City—hundreds of acres of land have been redeveloped. Over the next 20 years, 50,000 new homes are to be built in one of the most overcrowded parts of the country. Under Conservative policy, not one will be a new social home. On any particular development, typically 70% to 80% are sold off-plan abroad and will stand empty to hide or put away money, or be used as a profit-generating scheme.
Such matters are not only exacerbating the current housing crisis; we are losing for a generation, possibly for all time, the idea that there will be affordable housing in London. I am getting signs, even from my colleagues, that I should wind up—they know that I could go on for a considerable time. We are seeing whole council blocks and estates being emptied out, demolished and sold to private companies for luxury housing. If that is not social cleansing and social engineering, I do not know what it is. This is an absolute scandal.
The final thing I will say is that the latest thing the council has done is to refuse to answer freedom of information requests from me on housing matters, which of course is contrary to law. That is a matter that I will be taking further. I am at least glad to see that the council is embarrassed about what it is doing. It may just be that, because we have local elections in May, it is concerned about those. I hope that the message will go out loud and clear, not only to my constituents but across London, that Conservative councils are about exacerbating housing need and not about solving the housing crisis.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I begin by saying what a shame it is that for the past five years the Mayor of London has refused to meet the leader of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, that we have a strike on today, and how difficult it must have been for London Members to arrive in time for this debate. Presumably—the Hansard writers can put that I am being mildly sarcastic here—that must be why we have no Tories or Liberals in Westminster Hall to speak in this debate.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this debate, which is on one of the most important issues that any Londoner faces. Indeed, for London and the south-east, this seems to be a pivotal point, in terms of how housing impacts on people’s lives. Politics ought to be about what impacts on people’s lives, so politics in London and the south-east probably starts with housing; I know it does in my constituency. In fact, when I was first selected as a candidate for Islington South and Finsbury, my predecessor, Chris Smith, asked me, “What do you know about housing?” I said, “I don’t know anything.” He said, “Well, you will, because it is your duty to reflect the interests of your constituents, and politics begins and ends with housing in Islington.”
There is the smugness of Islington dinner parties where people sit around and talk about how much their properties have gone up in value; indeed, the property I live in has gone up eight times in value in the 22 years I have lived there. It was nice to start with—people look at the price and think, “Gosh, I’ve made all this money”—but then their children grow up and they wonder, “Where will they live? How will our family be able to ensure that our children live near us?”
We are the privileged ones. Imagine what it must be like to be a third or fourth-generation working-class family from Islington, looking at their children and wondering not whether they will live in Islington, because obviously they will not, but how far away they will have to live. Will they be able to help look after mum at the weekends? Will the family essentially be split up completely? We have seen too many families in Islington split up, and that trend is accelerating. We see the little amounts of land that we do have being used for developments that are sold off-plan and kept empty.
We need to look with clear eyes at what kind of London we want. I accept that London is the best place in the world to live. Of course if someone had any money, they would buy in London, but they should live here as well, and not just invest in London and keep the properties empty. There are plenty of Londoners and London families who want to stay in London. We want to protect the sort of city that we have, and not have an empty shell of a place where there are no lights on in the evenings, no one votes and no one gets involved.
It is not even as though my constituents come out and vote Tory. The gerrymandering that may be happening in my constituency is a hollowing out of engagement in the community. People have a pad in Islington as their second home, whether they normally live in the country or in Singapore, having bought a property for their baby daughter who might do a degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 20 years’ time; they keep those properties empty until that time. They might rent them out, but not to people who become engaged in the community.
In the meantime, I have constituents coming to me day after day on these issues. Whenever I speak about housing in Islington, to ensure that I can never be accused of exaggerating, I only ever speak about my last housing case. I suggest that my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) does that. My last housing case was a young woman called Sarah. She has two children: a four-year-old and a six-month-old baby. She came with her mum, who lives about a quarter of a mile away and helps look after the four-year-old, because of the baby. Sarah is in temporary accommodation; her rent is £500 a week. She gets a discretionary housing payment of more than £160 a week from the local authority to help pay her rent and to keep body and soul together, but that assistance will run out, and she will be hit by the benefit cap. That means that she will be getting £500 a week in benefits and paying £500 a week in rent. What does she do?
Her family has lived in Islington for generations. Her mum and the rest of the family are up in arms about it. She is on the housing waiting list in Islington, but so are 17,000 other people. Where does she go? How far away is she expected to move? She cannot work. It is all very well for the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to say, “People like that ought to work.” Sarah said, “If I was working at the moment, Emily, I would be on maternity leave. I’ve got a six-month-old baby.” Can the Minister tell me where she is supposed to go when the money runs out at the end of March?
Mr Slaughter
There used to be almost 12,000 people on the housing waiting list in Hammersmith, but the council abolished the waiting list. That gives a lovely cover for selling off council homes as they become empty. I have a letter from one of my constituents who has been told that the flat next door is being sold by auction by Savills next Monday. Hundreds of empty properties are being sold by the council when there is chronic housing need.
Emily Thornberry
The Mayor of London’s solution to this problem is affordable rents, which gives us all a hollow laugh in areas such as mine, where a three-bedroom flat would be £600 a week. If the rent was genuinely affordable, we would say, “All right then, pay housing benefit on it.” If we paid housing benefit at 80% of market rent in Islington, we would blow the Department for Work and Pensions budget within a few months; that would simply not be affordable, unless someone was a banker or in charge of an investment fund. I looked today on Rightmove, and the cheapest three-bedroom flat has a rent of £370 a week. A family of five living in that three-bedroom flat would have £130 for the entire family to live on.
We must look at having real social housing and real affordable housing in my area, but where will that come from? One place it used to come from was housing associations. They used to build in Islington and across London, and there used to be a proper subsidy from the Government to assist housing associations in building, but the social housing grant has been slashed. I spoke to the chief executive of one of my local housing associations about that last week. He said that he used to have a business plan, under which he knew that for every pound invested, he would get a pound from the Government to build social housing. He now gets about 20% of that, and the Government’s answer is, “Put the rents up to affordable rents.” So it goes on.
People on average and low incomes in Islington are being pushed out. We will simply end up with a society that is rich, semi-detached and not involved in the community, and the community will die. It is dying in front of us and we have to fight that. We appeal to the Government—although the Minister is not listening to me—to listen to what we are saying: invest in real social housing, give up on the nonsense of affordable rent and tell Boris Johnson that that is no solution. We must find a real solution and we must have a plan. The Opposition have a plan: a Labour Government will build 200,000 homes every year. The question is whether the people of Islington can wait until 2015 for that.
There is the outrage of Mount Pleasant, which is the biggest development site in my constituency. It used to be owned by the public, through Royal Mail. It was sold off for a song, and guess what: the developers are not satisfied with having got the land for hardly any money at all. They want the development to be 88% luxury flats. Imagine the killing they will make from that. The developers will provide 12% affordable housing, but who knows what that means. I know what the development means: my constituents yet again sold short by money grabbers who are allowed to get away with it. No one stands up to them, and if Boris Johnson allows that, he will not be forgiven.
Nick Boles
I have very little time, and hon. Members all made good speeches, so I hope they will understand if I do not give way further.
I want to remind the House that the number of housing starts in London from 2007 to 2010 was 70,000 units, which was around 15,000 units a year. We all agree that London’s housing need, at a time when the population was expanding quickly, was dramatically higher than that—we might say that it was 40,000 or 60,000 a year. Under the Labour Government, 15,000 units of housing a year, of all tenures and price ranges, were being built. Let us have a little recognition of the previous Government’s responsibility.
Someone listening to the speeches made by Opposition Members would have heard not only anger about the situation, which is totally justifiable, but the implication that there were some easy answers that could make things better. The first such answer one heard, in a number of different forms, was the suggestion that we should have some form of rent control or rent stabilisation. I would point out that rent controls and rent stabilisation were removed altogether by the Housing Act 1988 and were never reintroduced in the 13 years of the previous Government.
Nick Boles
Opposition Members protest from a sedentary position, but they need to ask themselves why most of them here today, who were part of the previous Government as Ministers or were elected under that Government, did not persuade their Government to introduce rent controls. I think there is a good reason why they did not persuade their Government to do so: it is unclear from the evidence that rent controls or even rent stabilisation, the arguments in favour of which we all understand, will make happen what we know needs to happen, which is to increase the number of new housing units.
If we say to investors who are going to build houses for rent that the amount they can put up rent by is going to be controlled, their ability to compete with other investors who are going to build houses for sale, which are, after all, a large proportion of the market, will be restricted. Their ability to bid at the same prices as people who are going to build flats for sale will be reduced. Then we would have to start controlling the ability of people who were going to build houses for sale to enable competition with people who would not be able to put rents up.
Nick Boles
I am not going to give way, because I have only three minutes left, and the hon. Gentleman spoke for a long time.
That is the first question. If Opposition Members truly believe in rent control, they should say so, and they should say why they were not able to persuade their own Government to implement it for 13 years, and why they think that it is the answer now.
The hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) mentioned the introduction of permitted development for changes of use from offices to residential. He raised a perfectly reasonable concern about the lack of affordable housing achieved by such changes of use. There is the principal argument that people make their contributions to the community when they originally construct a building, but I understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument, and it is a respectable view that many share.
The hon. Gentleman was good enough to say that he has no objection to the particular building he referred to being converted into flats, and he says that that could be a good use. Why was it, then, that the local council, in common with many councils of all political stripes, resisted year after year and decade after decade any proposal to convert that building to residential use?
Nick Boles
I am asking the hon. Member for Islington North a question because he asked me one. The reason why—[Interruption.]
Nick Boles
The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) was passionate, and I listened to her in silence. It would be great if she was not perhaps silent—I would hate it for her ever to be silent—but could just allow me to speak.
The reason why we introduced the permitted development right was because councils across the country were resisting the conversion of low-value, under-used offices to the houses that all of us agree are desperately needed. Since we introduced the permitted development right, it has been estimated that there were more than 2,000 conversions in less than a year of offices into homes that people are going to live in and enjoy, so that they feel that their housing need has been met. That immensely progressive reform is delivering vitally needed housing in the face of the opposition from local authorities that had no good reason to oppose it.
