Affordable Housing

Baroness Wilkins Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilkins (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Whitty for securing this debate. We hear time and again how this country managed a major housebuilding programme after the war despite our devastated finances. We could do that again now if we were determined to do so.

I grew up with pictures of the devastated City of London on my father’s office walls. He spent his civic life working to rehouse Londoners. In June 1950, as chairman of the City public health committee, he won approval for the Golden Lane Estate, which rehoused everyone on the City of London housing register at affordable rents. Later, as chairman of the Barbican committee, he ensured that thousands more would find a home—these were rental homes—in that war-devastated area. I am proud to say that Eric Wilkins was called the unsung hero of the Barbican in David Heathcote’s book about the scheme.

It was war that devastated London then and made a wasteland of it. Now it is short-sighted, selfish financial greed. As we have heard, house prices are soaring way out of the reach of ordinary Londoners. However, there is one area where London has been leading the country for the good, which is the mandatory requirement on developers to build to Lifetime Homes and wheelchair standards.

This Government are putting all that at risk. It is not only the supply of affordable housing that is important but the quality of it, and I want to focus on that issue. Last year, Leonard Cheshire Disability published No Place Like Home, its research into the state of the country’s housing as it affects disabled people. It found that only 5% of homes in England can be visited by someone in a wheelchair; that one in six disabled adults and half of all disabled children live in housing that is not suitable for their needs; and that 300,000 disabled people are on waiting lists across Great Britain.

The impact that this lack of disabled-friendly housing has on individual lives can be catastrophic: people being unable to reach their bathroom, having to strip wash at the kitchen sink, or no longer having visitors because they have to use a commode in the living room. Making all new homes disability-friendly is an obvious solution, and one that comes at no cost to the Exchequer. Lifetime Homes provides just that. When all developers are required to build to these standards, as has been the case in London, they are all in the same boat. In 2008 the Labour Government committed to building all new homes to Lifetime Homes’ standards by 2013, but now things are going backwards for disabled and older people in this as in so many other areas.

The Government have just introduced a new housing standards policy which has put accessible home building at risk. From 1 October this year, category 2 of the standards, which equates to Lifetime Homes’ standards, and category 3, the wheelchair standard, have been made purely optional. What is more, additional hurdles have been put in the way of councils wanting to build disabled-friendly homes. They will have to prove “clearly evidenced need” for them against a narrow viability test that is weighted in favour of the developer. The Leonard Cheshire research clearly shows that councils do not have that evidence in place. Given their squeezed finances, they are unlikely to have the time or the money to collect it now, so disabled-friendly housing will not get built. This is at a time when we have a rising population of disabled and older people. More than 5 million people in Britain have a mobility problem. Every year, more than 800,000 people become disabled.

Across the UK, disabled people are facing a growing crisis in finding suitable accommodation. This hits them hard, but it also drives up totally unnecessary costs in the NHS and in social care. Together with the lost employment opportunities that they face, it is costing the Exchequer millions of pounds every year. Delayed discharge from hospitals due to inaccessible housing costs the NHS more than £11 million a year. When people are prevented from being independent in their own homes, the costs of social care are driven up, or costly residential care becomes necessary. One week’s residential care for one person equates to the extra cost of building a house to Lifetime Homes’—now category 2—standard.

The Government’s current policy of optional accessibility standards and viability testing is economic folly. If we weaken requirements for accessible homes, disabled and older people will continue to be disadvantaged in the future, as they are now. The Lifetime Homes standards, or their new equivalent, need to be mainstreamed for the good of us all, not treated as a solution for a small section of the population. Someone in each of our families will be immobilised at some point in their lives, but instead the Government have decided to favour the short-term profits of private developers, for which not only our generation but future generations will pay the price.