Housing

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

On no issue save housing is the chasm more evident between the platitudes we heard from the Dispatch Box and the reality that MPs experience every week in their constituencies. One in seven homes in my borough is overcrowded, and housing conditions are the worst I have seen in 30 years, in particular in the private rented sector. That is why we needed the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018 of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), to call out those absolutely disgusting and appalling conditions in which families are living every day in my constituency.

As for affordability, for the bottom quartile of homes—that is, the ones that should be most affordable—the average price is more than £500,000 in my constituency. Average monthly rent is over £2,000, and the ratio between house prices and earnings is over 20:1. And yet, because of the way in which the Government implement policies like the benefits cap, the reality is that people simply cannot afford to live in areas where they, their families and their communities have lived for decades. The only remedy is the sort of radical programme that my right hon. Friend the shadow Housing Secretary has set out.

It is possible to make a difference locally. We do not have local elections in my area this year, but for those who do, I will just outline the difference between having a Labour council and a Conservative one. My council was Conservative until 2014. In its last four years, it sold off more than 300 empty council properties because they had become vacant. That included three and four-bedroomed houses, and many two-bedroomed houses and flats. These properties were sold off on the open market, putting them out of reach of families forever and a day. Cynically, that council then took a housing waiting list of over 8,000 families and reduced it to over 1,000, simply by knocking families off the list. In many cases, the council did not even have the courtesy to tell them. That degree of cynicism and that type of social engineering has gone on not just in my borough, but in many boroughs across London and elsewhere—and it is a moral crime, not just bad policy.

I contrast that situation with the position of my council under Labour. This issue is one of the reasons that Labour was elected in Hammersmith and Fulham, and was then re-elected with a landslide last year. Labour-run Hammersmith and Fulham Council stated this month that it

“has recently secured more than 1,600 genuinely affordable homes in the borough at zero cost to taxpayers after negotiating a series of deals with developers.”

That is the difference that Labour makes in local government, and I believe that in national Government—with this sort of programme of housebuilding, and the crackdown on poor landlords and poor conditions—we can actually tackle this crisis. It is not just that this Government are complacent; as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) said, they simply do not care to solve the housing crisis in this country.