Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Main Page: Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
Why on earth should we be pleased that the Government will allow local authorities a reasonable proportion of their costs to be reimbursed? The whole of any profit will go to central government. Yet apparently the costs of raising that money may be divvied up in whatever proportion the Secretary of State judges reasonable. That is unacceptable. If we are supposed to be raising money for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he should pay the full costs of so doing.
Lord Kerslake
I am grateful for the Minister’s assurance on covering the costs. I would have thought, therefore, that putting “must” in rather than “may” would not of itself cause any particular issues, given that that is the Government’s intent here. What would be helpful is if we could, when the Government firms up the taper, have a clear analysis of the potential income that is likely to be raised and the likely costs of collecting that income.
Lord Stunell
I thank the noble Baroness for what she said about taking serious note of the possibility that in some areas there is not a viable level of market rent to support action, and I urge her to take that back to the department and think it through carefully. Clearly quite an important consideration is the calculation of the market rent in a particular area. As I mentioned in my attempted intervention a few minutes ago, at the moment there is a Department for Work and Pensions assessment of market rent for the purposes of the payment of housing benefit, which I believe is something like the lowest quartile of the property available in the local reference area. Certainly, that causes real difficulties in some areas such as my own in Greater Manchester that have higher local market rents. That illustrates a problem I think the department will have in assessing this. If the ceiling were taken at the DWP level it would mean that plenty of areas would not be as viable as they might be if a higher level were taken. Correspondingly, if a higher level is taken you will have the paradox of those on housing benefit being limited to one market value in the area and those who are paying higher rents as a result of this being judged by a different market level in the same area. I just want to alert the Minister to some of the problems that could lie ahead, certainly in my own borough of Stockport and, no doubt, in many other places as well.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I want to follow up my noble friend’s well-spotted point that I had not picked up on. Clause 84(5) says:
“The regulations may provide for assumptions to be made in making a calculation, whether or not those assumptions are, or are likely to be, borne out by events”.
Likely to be borne out by events? Can I just ask the Minister a very simple question which I think might allay our fears? If the Government have got it wrong, do they reimburse local authorities?
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
I have already given the answer to the noble Lord. I will write to him.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I am sorry but this is a subsection of Clause 84 and we do not know what it means and what the implications are. This Bill has gone through the House of Commons at great length and Ministers cannot tell us what it means?
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
We fully intend to reimburse local authorities for reasonable costs and need to establish which costs are relevant. We would not expect the Government to write a blank cheque. We expect that some local authorities may be more efficient than others. To reiterate, we will reimburse all reasonable costs.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, Serco, Capita or Liberata, the companies that I was citing earlier, are currently administering housing benefit. That is because, to some extent, the tenants seek housing benefit. But the Minister seems to be saying that, when it comes to pay to stay, they cannot have that information and that only local authorities can. Yet, as we know, particularly where household income is dependent on the second earner, tenants will move from a position of claiming HB, which protects them from pay to stay, to not needing HB, whereupon they may be exposed to it.
Secondly, it will produce huge problems in the role of universal credit. Some people on UC will be claiming HB, and that information from the local authority side may be run by Serco. Other people will be claiming UC but not claiming HB, but that information will have to come presumably only from the local authority back to DWP. I really cannot see how that can work.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Baroness will accept that if someone is in receipt of housing benefit, this will not apply to them anyway, so I am not quite sure what she is driving at.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, tenants on housing benefit may have that benefit administered by Capita, Serco or Liberata. When those tenants seek housing benefit, they know that their finances will be scrutinised. I have never known it to happen that HMRC information is needed to do that. But when instead you are dealing with pay to stay, you have got to go to HMRC to get reliable information. What that means is that people who move between HB and pay to stay or those who are claiming UC with HB at some points and at other points not will be moving between both the private companies collecting information and local authorities which, as the Minister has said, will exclusively hold HMRC data. It cannot work.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I am not sure that I entirely follow the noble Baroness, but that may be my deficiency rather than hers. Local authorities hold vast swathes of data about various things. I know also that the holding of data is tightly controlled, particularly in terms of sharing. I would say therefore to noble Lords that to share data more broadly than is allowed is already a criminal offence.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I also support my noble friend’s amendments. Like him and many others in this House, I have been a local authority leader. Many of us have been housing chairs, possibly on the way to becoming local authority leaders. Whenever we went round on what we used to call site visits, we could tell the stable community estates. They were the ones with no graffiti and no litter; in which people had carved out gardens around the base of flats or had put carpeting down on the public stairways. In those flats, there was no petty level of criminality; there were no rent arrears and no yobbing youths setting fire to mattresses in the garages. The community policed itself, and that was because there were people of a wide age range, a wide income span and a wide set of occupations and retirement. Those estates worked, and were the core—the heartbeat—of my city. As Nye Bevan said, they were part of the,
“living tapestry of a mixed community”.
That is what we all want.
I, and perhaps the Minister and other people in this House, have been around the inner-city estates in Detroit, the outskirts of Washington and so on. I saw areas there where, if you get a job, you leave your home; so nobody gets a job except recycling the drugs economy or working on the streets. In these estates, children are in families that are broken and damaged in all sorts of ways; young men go around in groups and gangs, intimidating those who wish to stay. There is a permanent, transient population of the down-and-out, the derelict, the destitute and those with mental health problems. I have been there and seen it: I did not work in it like Obama, but I have spent time there.
If first you have a bedroom tax that forces tenants with larger homes to move because they cannot pay the rent and have to downsize, and disabled people lose their community networks of support; and if secondly you have pay to stay, so that those who could be an aspiration and an inspiration for the young people in the community, who have the knowledge of where jobs may be, and who could help those young people into the labour market, will have moved on; and, if thirdly, on top of that, we are going to have five-year tenancies—and, as my noble friend said, parents who worry would start planning their move with their children in advance, to ensure that their child goes to school—in the process we will strip out the support networks for disabled, older and frail people, and the support networks where people understand the problems that a family with an autistic teenage daughter or son would have. Either they will be sent on their way or they will voluntarily have to move.
Is this what we want? Behind it, as far as I can tell, the thing that is motivating the Government seems to be that council housing is a scarce resource; it is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer and therefore, if at all possible, we should move people on and out, irrespective of the damage to the communities, to make way for those on the waiting list who might be in even greater need because we are not building enough social housing for those other people to enjoy.
This is the wrong solution to a description of the wrong problem. We need social housing and stable communities. When it suits the Prime Minister he talks about the value of civic society—I congratulate him when he does so—and of communities on our estates. He talks about the value of the knowledge economy of those in work helping people to come into the labour market. As we know, most jobs do not go through the jobcentre at all but through networks of local knowledge. Strip that out and I promise that you will send those estates spiralling down until in a decade or 20 years you will look at our equivalent of Detroit’s inner city. You will wonder how this happened and what we now do about it.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My noble friend in the first part of her contribution reminded me of the work done by Lewisham Council. In Crofton Park we have the Ewart Road Housing Co-op. That is just the sort of estate that my noble friend talked about at the start. It is a wonderful place that is well run by the tenants. There are people of different ages living there. People have lived there since they were first moved on, there are new people and there is a long waiting list. It is clean, well run and an absolute pleasure to walk round. It is wonderful—and just the sort of place put at risk by the policy we are debating today.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
They may be immaculate for five years or seven years and then when you go round the estates you can see the houses that were bought by council tenants, which were then sold on into buy to let. So there are two stages, and I can assure the Minister that in many estates the buy-to-let running down of property infuriates not only council tenants who did not buy but council tenants who did and stayed.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I just cannot agree with that point. I believe that people who have bought their own homes take great pride in them. But on that we shall agree to differ because it is 10.15 pm.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
But the stats are available to the Minister. This is not the progression of a personal view. We know that over 40% of council housing that was sold under right to buy has been cycled into buy to let. We know that, and in some places—
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The point I was making is that I can tell a house that has been bought because generally these are in very good condition. I am not starting to make the argument about houses that are then sold on through subsequent sales, I was just making a comment to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, about people taking pride in their homes. I am sorry to restrict the noble Baroness but I do not want to be diverted on to that point.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I am grateful that the noble Lord is grateful. I do not believe that providing social housing on a long-term basis to households that may experience only temporary need is a good use of scarce social housing, and I do not think it is likely to lead to strong and cohesive communities.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I am not going to give way. If the noble Baroness wants to come back later, she can, after I have finished.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, talked about protecting the rights of those in most need. Local authorities will be able to provide an appropriate level of stability to those with longer-term needs, such as the disabled and older people, through the granting of further social tenancies, whether in the same or a different, more suitable, social home. I have outlined how the provisions in the Bill will restore a sense of fairness to social housing, ensuring that it is properly focused on those who really need it.
Amendment 82GAE, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Beecham, seeks a published review of the effect of the policies on income and rent-setting and restricting lifetime tenancies,
“on levels of homelessness and rough sleeping in each local authority area”.
I thank the noble Lords for their amendment and for raising the issue of homelessness. I agree it is important that the Government do all they can to reduce the number of homeless households. The Government have always been clear that we are committed to supporting the most vulnerable people in our society and one person without a home is one too many. That is why we have maintained and increased both central and local government funding over the next four years. However, while I sympathise with the intention behind the amendment, I believe it may be unnecessary because local housing authorities already record and review the incidences of and prevention of homelessness and rough sleeping, and must produce a homelessness strategy.
Lord Young of Cookham
As we have heard, the local authority can renew the tenancy at the end of five years if it wants but there will be a conversation and options will be explained to the tenant, such as low-cost home ownership opportunities. I do not accept that the modest increase in mobility that may come from these measures will dramatically change the nature of local authority estates, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam. A few people may take up the options when their tenancy is reviewed and move on but, as we heard, many of these estates are very popular, with long waiting lists, and the implication that those who move in will dramatically alter the nature of the estate does not bear examination. We are looking for a balance between the legitimate expectations of those with tenancies to have those tenancies for life with the legitimate aspirations of those on the waiting list living in desperate circumstances to have an opportunity to move on. The local authority will have discretion at the end of the fixed-term tenancy to renew if it wants to but there will have been a break point, an opportunity for conversation, and I think this accurately reflects the changing role of social housing today.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the noble Lord has described very well the competing pressures on social housing and I do not disagree with his analysis, but does he not accept that the reason he and the Minister are so concerned to ensure that social housing is available for the neediest on the waiting list is a function of the shortage that they have constructed? But for that shortage, whether it is council house sales or the proposed sales that will fund our housing association discounts or whatever, the problem will get worse because nearly half the housing that was in the social rented sector has left it. The noble Lord, Lord Young, accurately describes what is happening but, none the less, the problem lies not in tilting the balance from one to the other but in remedying the underlying problem of the shortage of social housing.
Lord Young of Cookham
As we have heard in earlier debates, every house that is being sold by a local housing association is being replaced and every house that is being sold by a local authority is going to be replaced so I simply reject the thesis the noble Baroness has put forward.