Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill

Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts

Friday 19th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). I congratulate the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who has worked closely with Government to be able to bring this Bill to a really strong position of cross-party support so that we can all really stand up for what it does.

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a private landlord. As a landlord myself, this Bill has my wholehearted support because it changes the status quo by empowering tenants to take action with legal backbone if their landlord is failing them and their family. The Bill empowers those living in social housing and private rented accommodation to take charge of taking on their landlord to enforce housing standards for their home that has fallen below standard, making it unfit to live in due to serious and immediate risks to their health and safety.

The Bill is an excellent example of something that we should try to use more often than we do—the philosophy of “nudge” politics. I am genuinely hopeful that, because it means that a tenant can compel a landlord to fix these housing failures, the vast majority of landlords will start to discover the satisfaction of proactive property maintenance. Everyone deserves a decent and safe home to live in. Every child should be able to grow up in a home free from damp. Properties both old and new can fail to be properly ventilated, thereby leaving children in conditions that aggravate or indeed create skin and breathing health difficulties.

My constituency extends over a vast area of north Northumberland. It is the most beautiful and rural of constituencies. It consists of over 150 villages, many of which have old, stone-built cottages as the backbone of the housing stock. These bring their own challenges to meet modern heating standards. However, many local landlords have shown creativity by investing in sustainable and renewable heating methods that have given their tenants a greatly improved day-to-day living experience. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) mentioned, a good landlord knows and acts on their responsibilities to provide and maintain a good standard alongside their right to collect rents. Sadly, some private landlords have not been as speedy in making long-term improvements in such old properties, leaving tenants with rotten window frames, which ensure that no amount of heating will keep their home warm, or with poor and degraded provision, which means that entirely avoidable health risks are still in the mix.

One of my frustrations is that the recently built or refurbished social housing for my constituents, mostly in Berwick and in Alnwick, still fails to meet the standard, despite investment for improvements. A family living in Berwick have a daughter with respiratory problems who cannot live with her mother and sisters in their council property. So-called ventilation improvements simply sealed up the property and created such dampness and health problems that the child cannot spend more than an hour in the house before suffering an asthma attack. In fact, I have sat in the living room several times, and each time I have felt a constriction in my breathing airways caused by the damp air.

The so-called improvements have completely failed to do what the family asked for, but we are continuing to battle on, and the housing association wants to fix this problem. It is an example of poor installation—the builders who did the work failed to meet the requirements they were given—that needs to be sorted out. This is a huge frustration to all those involved, but we have to find a way to fix the problem. If we cannot find a different house to which to move them, the Bill will empower my Berwick family—with an amazing mum, who has been fighting for her daughter’s health and for her right to live with her mum—to enforce the improvements. My local authority cannot do so, because it cannot take enforcement action against itself.

The Bill will give thousands of tenants in my constituency a new empowerment to get the home they deserve—from repairs that landlords refuse to complete to a properly ventilated home, free of dampness, with a good and reliable water supply, effective drainage and sanitary systems, facilities for cooking and waste disposal, and good internal arrangements that mitigate and eliminate fire risks. For colleagues with high-rise blocks, the Bill will help with the absolutely key issue of fire risk. We have the chance to support our constituents, who are newly empowered to get homes to live in of which we can all be proud.