Housing Benefit

Bob Russell Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Hodge]

I bow to the huge experience and knowledge of my right hon. Friend and I agree entirely with his analysis of the likely impact of the changes that the Government are proposing to make.

In my constituency, all 3,810 households that currently receive local housing allowance will already lose out because of the housing benefit cuts that will come into effect next year, so they will experience additional hardship as a result of those cuts. Because rents in Barking and Dagenham are currently lower than in the inner-London boroughs, private tenants in the borough will not be hit as badly as those in central London, where rents are the highest in London. but as inner-London private tenants are forced to find a home in outer London, rents will inevitably be driven up in the outer-London boroughs. More demand on limited supply will be a double whammy for the people of Barking and Dagenham. Has the Minister commissioned any research to understand better the potential impact of his proposals on rents in outer-London areas such as Barking and Dagenham? If so, will he place that research in the Library?

We know from anonymous quotes in the press that civil servants are telling Ministers that the proposals, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) said, will lead to the biggest population movements experienced since the industrial revolution. Even at her worst, Shirley Porter deported only 1,000 people out of Westminster, yet this Liberal Democrat Minister is deliberately forcing tens of thousands of families out of inner London, in a shameful act of social engineering and political gerrymandering that will damage our communities irreparably.

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

The right hon. Lady rightly draws attention to the problems. Does she agree that the provision of council housing is one way to address supply and demand, and can she inform us how many council houses were built during the 13 years of Labour Government?

[Margaret Hodge]

I accept the point that insufficient priority was given to the building of council houses under the Labour Government, but we must deal with the situation in which we find ourselves. Making the position worse by deliberately forcing the poorest families out of the only homes that they can find is an outrageous and cruel act of public policy.

Does the Minister accept or even understand that if the reforms proceed, inner London will become a no-go area for the poorest people in our communities? What will be the further impact on my constituency? He knows well that changes in housing tenure over the past 20 years, since the introduction of the right to buy, have created deep social tensions in Barking and Dagenham as new people have moved into the borough and established residents have become unable to secure homes for their sons and daughters. The extreme right and the British National party tried to exploit people’s legitimate frustrations for divisive and evil political ends. We saw them off, but this Government’s housing benefit policies will inevitably reignite those tensions as private tenants from inner-London boroughs compete for homes with established residents of Barking and Dagenham. Has he considered at all the implications for social cohesion of his short-sighted reform proposals?

Has the Minister also considered his policies’ impact on local authority services? If Barking and Dagenham suddenly experiences an influx of literally thousands of families, what will that do to local schools and hospitals, to special educational needs provision and to child protection services in the borough? The proposals will place an unacceptable strain on local authorities in the more deprived outer boroughs—authorities that are already struggling to meet their communities’ needs in areas such as housing and education while planning to meet the 25% to 40% cuts that will be forced on them by the comprehensive spending review announcements next week.

In education, for example, Barking and Dagenham is already facing the huge challenge of keeping up with the pace of demographic change. Demand for primary school places is a particular problem not only for my constituency but across London. As it is, the local authority is having to create hundreds of new reception places every year—337 extra primary school places are needed in 2011 and 247 in 2012—and does not have sufficient funding to meet projected demand. The borough simply cannot cope with further significant levels of inward migration.

Barking and Dagenham council already has a housing waiting list of more than 11,000. That waiting list will only grow longer as more people move into the area and more households seek to be housed by the local authority because they have been priced out of the private sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) on securing this debate. I am not here to defend the proposals, but I will be consistent with my position during the 40 years of my public life, the past 13 of which I have spent as a Member of the House. If only the present Opposition had been consistent with the views that we are now hearing during their 13 years of Labour rule, perhaps we would not be in this situation.

The right hon. Lady and her colleagues might wish to know that in 13 years of Labour Governments, 6,470 council houses were built. In the first 13 years of the previous Conservative Governments—I am using the same number of years—the figure was 507,200. Labour’s total, as I said, was 6,470.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

How many social houses were built?

[Bob Russell]

The hon. Gentleman has asked how many social houses were built. If we factor those figures in, the number is still considerably lower than that achieved during the 13 years of the previous Conservative Governments. Presumably, the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) can give us chapter and verse about how successful the housing association sector is, an issue on which the Government in whom he served failed so lamentably.

[Mr Raynsford]

Will the hon. Gentleman tell hon. Members about the state of the social housing stock in 1997, the condition of the properties in which people were living, the extent of the backlog of disrepair that had to be dealt with and the scale of the renovation programme—the decent homes programme—that was put in place by the previous Government, which has improved the living conditions of millions of people in this country? Why is he being so churlish about that?

[Bob Russell]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct about the inheritance of the new Labour Government, but that makes their concentration on one aspect of housing just as bad. I am not saying anything new; these are points that, as Hansard will confirm, I put to the then Prime Ministers Blair and the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), as well as to Prescott when he was in charge of council housing—or rather non-council housing.

In the years of plenty when the economy was thriving, new Labour should have emulated what Clement Attlee did in 1945 after six years of war: introduced a house building programme to house the poorest people in the land. It did not do that. The poorest people were among those the party turned its back on, which is why it lost 5 million votes at the last general election.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

I agree that we should have built more houses—I have always said that—but is the solution to this problem to introduce changes to housing benefit that will affect current tenants and will not result in any more houses being built? The savings generated by the cuts will not be ploughed back into building housing, which might have made such cuts more tolerable, so how can these changes be justified on the basis that not enough houses have been built?

[Bob Russell]

If the hon. Lady had been paying attention, she would have noticed that I opened my remarks by saying that I am not speaking in defence of the coalition Government’s proposals—anything but. I am just setting the scene by pointing out that the problems are inherited. I do not agree with how the matter is being dealt with, but Her Majesty’s official Opposition should not come here today and pretend that they are the saviours of the social housing market, given that the record shows that they built only—let me repeat the figures—6,470 council houses in 13 years, in contrast with the previous Conservative Government, who built 507,200 in their first 13 years.

Let me now say that I do not agree with the proposals on housing benefit. I know that the Minister will be aware of them, but I draw his attention to the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke—particularly Matthew chapter 19, verses 13 to 15, Mark chapter 10, verses 14 to 15, and Luke chapter 18, verses 15 to 17, which includes the phrase “suffer little children.” I do not want this coalition Government to make children suffer, but that is what will happen as a result of the proposals on housing benefit. I wish to put it on the record that I have already initiated one debate on child poverty in this Chamber since the general election. Another record for the previous Labour Government is that they left 3.9 million children living below the official poverty line. What an appalling legacy. I do not want that figure to increase; I want it to be eliminated.

I am grateful to the Local Government Group, particularly Mr Ben Kind—the public affairs and campaigns manager—for sending me a briefing in advance of today’s debate. That document states:

“The housing benefit measures announced in the June 2010 budget, including capping local housing allowance rates, paid to tenants in the private sector, and setting them based on the 30^th percentile of local rents, are likely to increase homelessness costs, since they will diminish the willingness of private rented sector landlords to let to housing benefit customers. This will have hugely variable and disproportionate effects on different parts of the country.”

On the local housing allowance, the briefing points out:

“Councils will continue to have a duty to house those who are homeless and this will be a challenge to council homelessness budgets. Although the precise extra cost is still hard to estimate, temporary accommodation costs seem certain to be higher.”

I know that from my own constituency of Colchester. It is a relatively prosperous town in a relatively prosperous part of the country, but there are pockets of deprivation. The simple fact is that housing a homeless family is far more expensive for the public purse than putting them in a proper, decent house.

I refer colleagues to the full debate that I had on child poverty, in relation to which I was contacted by the Child Poverty Action Group. In that debate, I pointed out that it is no good for any Government, either this Government or the previous Government, to come up with wondrous schemes and policies for the betterment of people if the basic pieces of the jigsaw—the framework and the corners—are not in place. Such a basic building block is a house. If children do not have decent housing, the rest of the Government’s proposals are almost meaningless.

Social housing is already extremely scarce—I have mentioned the failures of the previous Labour Government—and an increase in the number of people who are priced out of privately rented housing will place additional demands on housing stock. Meanwhile, the increase in the non-dependant deduction could have a negative effect on family and community stability to the extent that young adults feel that they have to move out of the family home. That could have the adverse effect of encouraging the concealment of the presence of and incomes of some family members, which will add to the level of fraud and error in the system.

I do not wish to defend the relatively small number of people in society who abuse the system. Unfortunately, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail think that everybody on housing benefit is abusing the system. The minority who do are destroying the case for genuine people who are not defrauding the system, but who are depicted as scroungers. Of course, we need to tackle that problem, but we must not alter the whole system to deal with just a few scroungers.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am interested in that point. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the biggest scroungers are the private landlords who are charging absolutely exorbitant rents for appalling properties that they do not maintain? We—the public—are paying for that. Is it not time that we got real and dealt with the issue of the conditions of the private rented sector and the rents that are charged? We should start bringing in controls. Attack the landlords, not the tenants.

[Bob Russell]

Let us put on the record that there are some very good landlords. Good landlords would endorse the points that have just been made. It is the rogue landlords—those who exploit their fellow human beings—who we need to deal with. Successive Governments have failed to address that matter.

I come back to the question of supply and demand. Thirty years ago in Colchester, there was no such thing as homelessness. People could be guaranteed a council house within six months to a year, depending on their location of choice. The right to buy was not the real problem; the real problem was the failure to replace with new stock the houses that had been sold. Successive Governments failed to deal with that.

It has been said that we must not use extravagant language and say that the proposals will result in the biggest forced social movement of people since the highland clearances because that is emotive and there is no comparison with that situation. I do not wish to give any comparisons of that sort; it would be wrong to do so. However, it is a fact that if there are benefit changes and the housing cap goes through, the forced migration of whole communities—or a large number of people from a particular community—will take place. Families, pensioners and children will be removed from the communities in which they grew up. That will have a devastating effect on their lives. I want to concentrate on the effect on children because, as I am sure colleagues have realised, I have been picking up on that angle since the general election.

[Emily Thornberry]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is unfortunate when extreme language, such as the reference to the highland clearances, is used. However, did he read in the papers at the weekend that a senior Conservative Minister in the Government described the policy as exactly that? They said that we will not have seen anything like it since the highland clearances. Such references are emotive, but they may be entirely descriptive.

[Bob Russell]

I do not think that our Scottish colleagues would accept that comparison, but the point being made is that people will be forced from their homes against their will. In the previous debate that I secured, I referred to that as economic cleansing. Of course, those families that stay put in their houses and struggle on with higher rent will have less disposable income to spend in local shops and on local services, which will have an impact on their local economies.

Children will be forced out into the suburbs or elsewhere, and it is important to remember that this is not just a city phenomenon, but one that can have an impact in rural areas. It will also have an impact on schooling, as there will be depopulated schools in some areas, because of the forced removal, and overcrowded schools in others, assuming that parents can find the places.

I know that other Members wish to speak so I conclude by quoting from one section of the excellent briefing that I was sent by Scope:

“An unemployed or low-income lone parent or couple with one child (or two children who share a room) is likely to lose around £500 a year once this reform takes effect…These reductions are likely to have a disproportionate impact on disabled people…those living in cities and urban centres with higher property costs—especially London—will be particularly affected…a reduction in the financial support that Housing Benefit provides will further reduce the number of suitable properties disabled people can afford, increasing the risk of them having to live in inappropriate housing, exacerbating their social isolation and dependence on other forms of support.”

I recognise that the coalition Government inherited serious financial problems that they need to tackle, but nowhere in the coalition agreement does it say that poor families should be forced out of their homes or that children in disadvantaged families should be further disadvantaged.