Housing

Baroness Maddock Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Maddock]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for introducing a housing debate, which we have far too infrequently in the House of Lords. Twenty years ago when I entered the House of Commons, I devoted considerable time in my first or second year there—I am not sure which it was—to the Housing Bill which was then proceeding through Parliament. We focused a lot on the duties of local councils to the homeless. Not long before that, one of my colleagues who was at that time the MP for the Isle of Wight, had, successfully introduced a Private Member’s Bill to establish some of the first duties to be imposed on local authorities with regard to homeless people. But here we are, 20 years later, still facing a situation in which we are unable to provide sufficient housing for people in our country. I find it even more amazing that for many of those years our economy was doing very well, yet we did not address the need for more affordable homes. We were raking in huge amounts of stamp duty. At the beginning of the previous Labour Government’s term of office, less than £1 billion was received in stamp duty; by the end, it was many billions of pounds. I said at the time that we should have used some of that money to address the shortage of social housing. If a fraction of that money had been spent on social housing, we would be in a much happier situation today.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, described the housing crisis. I agree that when the coalition came to power in May 2010, we inherited a housing crisis. Some 1.5 million homes had been lost from the stock under previous Governments since 1979. Those Governments continually failed to build enough homes to cover the social housing that was sold off. We saw social housing waiting lists soar from 1 million in 1997 to 1.8 million in 2010. Housing targets were routinely missed. Even the top-down regional spatial strategies of the previous Labour Government consistently failed to meet that Government’s targets and, in the last year of that Government, they fell short by 78,000. We find ourselves with not enough affordable homes to go round and a difficult task for the coalition to address when we are also trying to address the effects of the economic crisis we are still going through. The coalition announced in the comprehensive spending review that it would build 150,000 new social homes during this Parliament, and it now expects to exceed that. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will give us a little more detail on that when he replies to the debate. The coalition has also committed more than £160 million to bringing empty homes back into use as social and private housing—another issue on which I have campaigned for the past 20 or so years. A total of 11,200 homes will be brought back into use as part of this fund. This comfortably exceeds the target that was set of 3,300. However, another 5,000 homes will be brought back into use as part of the £300 million capital programme, taking the total to over 16,000.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, rightly discussed how we deal with families living in temporary homes and in bed and breakfast for rather longer periods than anybody would want, and asked what the Government were going to do about that. Local authorities have a duty to provide temporary accommodation and it is up to them how they meet that duty, although it is, of course, subject to central government guidance. There are two main reasons why we need to deal with this. One, of course, is the human cost, which has already been mentioned. It is not only the awfulness of not having a home of your own to imagine living in for a period but the effect on children’s education and so on. We would all agree that human misery is one of the most important reasons why we have to deal with this.

At the same time as trying to alleviate human misery, one spends money, and therefore the financial cost of putting people in temporary accommodation is huge, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said. A recent report stated that the 12 largest cities spent nearly £2 billion on temporary accommodation in the past four years. That is enough to build 72,000 homes. In the past year, the cost of bed and breakfast has risen by more than 25%. If you look at the financial benefits of building more homes, it is clear that the money should be focused on this because we get a benefit of around £2.84 for every £1 spent.

As I intimated earlier, part of the action and a lot of the solutions have to be local. I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, and I am grateful to it for some of the information that I will mention about how local authorities are dealing with this. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, it is clear that the way local authorities deal with those in bed and breakfast and temporary accommodation varies hugely. In December last year, the worst offender was, amazingly, Conservative-run Croydon which had 156 households in bed and breakfast for more than six weeks, followed by Labour-run Barking and Dagenham which had 69 households. Some of the councils run by Liberal Democrats have very low numbers, but I shall not labour that point.

The picture is emerging for a variety of reasons. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, pointed out the changes to benefits and so on, and there are new pressures on councils. Even councils that have a very good record on dealing with people in this situation are finding it very difficult. I asked the Local Government Association for some information about what the best local authorities are doing in this respect. One thing is very clear: if local authorities maintain a balanced portfolio of accommodation, they are in a much better position to spread the risk and to respond when markets and funding change. The other key thing is having an efficient housing benefit service that landlords who are taking people can rely on. Councils that work very hard to maintain good relationships with providers by not messing them around and being very responsive do better at keeping people out of bed and breakfast.

There are two particular things I would like to highlight about the London Borough of Sutton which, as noble Lords will know, is run by the Liberal Democrats. My noble friend Lord Tope was the leader of the council for many years. It was considering closing a local authority-owned care home, not an easy thing to do, because of the way care was changing. It decided to use the building for temporary accommodation. The path was quite tricky because it was closing a care home and the stereotypes that people discuss when homeless families are coming to live in their area had to be overcome. It has been a long process, but the council envisages that the converted property will provide accommodation for between 40 and 43 families that would otherwise face the dislocation of living outside the borough for several months. That backs up the other point that I made about the importance of councils working with private sector providers to find tenancies for families. They have worked very hard to attract landlords, keep them and deal with them. I particularly noticed that they prepare a helpful and innovative welcome pack for landlords, and they have been advised that they value this very much. That way, they have been able to keep a pool of landlords that help them to meet their statutory responsibilities.

I hope that my noble friend will be able to enlarge on some of the issues that I have talked about. It is important that we deal with this, because, as I say, the most important thing is the human misery for families who have to live in these conditions. My mother left my father when I was 11, and we went to live in a small town on the south coast. We lived in private rented accommodation and never stayed more than nine months in any place. I am pleased to say that, in my grown-up life, I have not had to do that—so I can say from first-hand experience that this is not satisfactory. We are a wealthy nation, we have known about this for 20 years, and we still have not managed to do anything about it. We all need to work to try to spread best practice. We are where we are with the money and benefits and so on, and I hope that the Government will work with local authorities to help to spread best practice to try to reduce the misery for families in these conditions.