Homelessness

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as the directly elected mayor of Watford and deputy chair of the LGA.

I was heartened to learn that the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee published its homelessness report last month. It stated quite boldly that,

“the scale of homelessness in this country is such that a renewed, cross-Departmental Government strategy is needed”.

Hurrah—that is good news. However, will this be a strategy that leads to swift action and real change?

As we all know, homelessness legislation provides the real safety net to protect some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We know this, but we also know that the holes in the net are getting bigger. It has been evident to those of us in local government that this crisis has been coming for some time and has been exacerbated in recent years by the culmination of the rise in the number of people struggling to pay private rents, which are rising far faster than their incomes. There are fewer homes being built than are needed: a conservative estimate is that over 230,000 homes a year are needed, versus the 130,000 actually built last year. The number of social houses available has halved since 1994. Combine all that with the cumulative impact, which I am sure we are all getting through our constituency doors, of the recent welfare changes. Do the Government believe that the eventual strategy will reverse these trends?

In my own authority, homelessness has quadrupled in five years and we are having to find significant sums of money to house people in temporary accommodation. We have now accepted that the level of homelessness will never go back to the steady levels that we had five or six years ago, which we could accommodate, albeit with a squeeze, and I prided myself that we never needed to use bed and breakfast. Now we could not cope without local hotel provision on a permanent basis. We have recognised that we must build more temporary accommodation, at an estimated cost of millions of pounds. Our residents are now in temporary accommodation for up to three years, on average for 15 to 18 months—a Watford statistic that I am not proud of.

Why is that? The point I want to make tonight is that, quite simply, there are not enough affordable and social homes available, and pushing families back into the private sector, which we can legally do, is increasingly not an option. This is because they will usually be low-waged households, and the gap between housing benefit levels and private sector rents is growing exponentially. That is why getting your hands on a social housing tenancy in Watford is like winning the lottery. This is all happening at a time when local authority budgets are being cut year on year. How will the Government ensure that the new burdens are fully funded? Local government wants to work to solve this crisis. It believes it can be an active partner—that is the key word—in working towards sustainable solutions. However, simply extending the duties on to councils without the financial resources and powers to do the job may allow the Government to feel that they have done something, but in reality it will be a sticking plaster on an arterial wound.

The current system really is unfair to the single homeless. The plans to take away the current distinction between priority need, which usually means families, and non-priority need, usually single persons, are to be welcomed, but not if we do not have the means to house them. That will only make rationing the incredibly small cake of available housing more difficult.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, is right when he says that the system does not take into account the hidden homeless—those who are indeed homeless but not included in the official statistics. The current system makes the local authority act as a gatekeeper of a scarce resource, which is a miserable role for council officers—finding reasons to turn people away when in their hearts they want to help.

Any changes to alleviate these issues will be welcomed from this side, but be assured that we will be analysing these measures with a massive dose of realism, based on hard evidence from the Local Government Association and partners. At the heart of the problem is the need for more social, affordable and specialist supported homes. The current method of providing these homes by the planning system is simply not working. Any legislation or strategy that fails to address this fundamental issue will simply mend holes in the net, when in fact I reckon we need a new net.