Housing

Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Dubs for initiating this debate. I am delighted to be back on the same stamping ground with the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock. For quite a long time, she and I shared many debates and exchanges on social housing, and she is a great stalwart of it. Indeed, she has worked for a long time in it, so I am delighted to see her name on the speakers list.

My noble friend has dealt with the subject of the housing shortage. It might seem quite a crass statement to make, but I believe that the people out there could not care less about political policy or about who is dealing with it and who is right or wrong. They care about having a home, which provides so much to the rest of their lives. It brings stability, a feeling of well-being, security, and the opportunity for them to bring their children up in the family environment that they want. At the other end of life, for older people who may be occupying accommodation that we may agree is rather larger than they need, it is nevertheless where they have been for years and years—and it provides the opportunity for their daughter or son, or another member of their family, or even a carer that they may need from time to time, to stay with them. So the housing shortage is not just about housing; it is about the whole of our lives.

The bedroom tax, as it has been christened, is not a new idea. It was something that was discussed and sought to be applied—and was applied, in some respects—many years ago. But then it was concentrated on students going off to university and the family having affordable rented accommodation from a housing association or local authority, when it was said that the bedroom was no longer needed. So I do not want this to be a party-political debate, but let us put one or two things straight. With the new affordable homes budget, the money available from central government to the provision of affordable housing has been cut by 60%. The previous Government allocated £8.4 billion for the three-year period from 2008 to 2011, under the last comprehensive spending review that they applied. The current Government have allocated just over half of that, at £4.5 billion for the four-year period 2011 to 2015. The Homes and Communities Agency has announced—and the agency knows, because they are the people who allocate the funding for affordable homes—that it is down 68% year on year. That figure meant that in 2010-11 just under 50,000 new-build, affordable homes were started. It was the first year of the new coalition but the last year of the previous Government’s comprehensive spending review. That was the number of new homes in the first year of this Government but in 2011-12 it dropped substantially to 15,700 homes. So here we are with a housing shortage, and it is going to get worse rather than better.

The Minister, Grant Shapps, announced that the Government claim that by 2015 170,000 new homes will have been provided under government funding. However, what he did not say was that 70,000 of that 170,000 were started by the previous Government. So let us get the facts straight: the previous Government were not an utter failure. They did not build as many homes as I would have liked and I would have been critical of the policy, but it is not all down to the previous Government. In any case, even if there is a part of you that feels it was and you want to rectify the situation, you do not do it by cutting the budget by half or, indeed, by claiming that you are building houses that you did not actually commence.

Many of us are old enough to remember the television film “Cathy Come Home”. Not only was it searing for people who were homeless and interested in the subject; it really shocked the country. The day after the programme was shown, everybody was saying, “We didn’t know it was as bad as this and we need to do something about it”. Something did then start to be done by the then Conservative Government. If you talk to Shelter and housing providers who deal with homelessness, they will say that it is now time for another “Cathy Come Home” film to be made because we are going backwards as a nation—we are not making any progress.

I started by saying that housing affects whole lives and that it is not just a matter of where people stay. That is true. It was certainly brought home to me when, as chairman of the Housing Corporation, I went to a lot of areas. It was the simple statements that brought home to me the difference that housing could make. I remember one mother standing up at a local conference that we had organised. She said, “Since we’ve moved into this council flat, it has made two key differences to my kids. One is that one of my children was always off school with colds and being unwell. Now we are in a decent home, I’ve suddenly realised that they’re going to school regularly. Their health has improved substantially. But also their attention at school has improved because they have somewhere to sit and do their homework. Yes, they do it in the kitchen—we don’t have a spare room—but there’s a homeliness there and there’s peace and quiet for them, and it’s made a substantial difference to our family’s quality of life”.

I agree that with the bedroom tax and housing shortage we concentrate on areas of biggest need—London and the periphery of London—but we should not forget the provincial cities, which increasingly also have problems with homelessness. Nor should we forget the rural areas, as many people tend to do. They think that they are sublime areas in which to live, but some of the greatest housing poverty in this country is in those areas and we must not forget that.

Housing is at the centre of our lives and impacts on our lives, and where it impacts negatively, society picks up the bill further down the line, whether it is a bill relating to health problems or children not concentrating or getting the attention they need at school. Therefore, it has an enormous impact on their life chances, as I think we all recognise.

There is one other factor, which is the overall medium and long-term impact on registered social landlords. If they are not getting the money to build, obviously they will not build, so what are the long-term prospects for the prosperity of these organisations? If the registered housebuilding sector, such as housing associations, is diminishing, what does the future hold? What will happen if we start to dilute or reduce their ability? Remember that, although they are called housing associations, one great asset they bring to housing is that they do not just build houses. Until recently, I was a non-executive director of Taylor Wimpey. We were not in the regeneration game; we were in the game of building houses. Housing associations are great regeneration agencies. They look at the whole community and provide services that other organisations cannot or do not provide. If because of their balance sheet they are restricted on their investment, and therefore on their overall strategic policy and have to draw back—and remember that they are also substantially funded by the private sector through bonds and other means—when we come through the Government’s austerity measures, we will not have the facilities to pump-prime the massive housebuilding programme that we need.

I am not saying that this Government are responsible for the serious housing shortage, but they are actually ensuring that we do not get out of the housing problem. Their policies are regressive rather than progressive in this whole area. I ask the Minister to address how the Government are going to deal with this growing problem—the social scars and the homelessness that we see, with people begging on our streets. We need to have an incremental policy that will reduce those problems in our society.