Homelessness

Callum McCaig Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I want to talk about the issues facing young people today and then about complex cases of homelessness and the related problems.

At Prime Minister’s questions on 23 November I mentioned Aberdeen Cyrenians, a charity in my constituency. In fact, I think it may be in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig), but it is in my city anyway.

[Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

Our city.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Our city; I am sorry. I mentioned that charity and asked the Prime Minister about how austerity is increasing homelessness. The Prime Minister’s answer included the phrase “living within our means”, which is unfortunate phrasing. Homeless people do not have any means to live within. They do not have a house or other things. Today’s debate has been much more considered and measured and a lot less political than that exchange at PMQs.

I have heard young people today—as in people under about 35 or 40—being described as the precariat. They have precarious jobs. The gig economy is increasing and they do not have the long-term jobs that people used to have. They are subsisting on zero-hours contracts and do not have the same level of security as previous generations, who could walk into a job and have it for life. They do not have security in housing. They live incredibly expensively in the private rented sector, where not enough safeguards are in place to ensure security of tenure. As has been mentioned, people can come home and find that their locks have been changed, and their private sector landlord feels that that is the way forward. A huge number of landlords are not like that, but enough are to make it a problem.

Young people today are in precarious situations, and the risk of homelessness is real and one that we have not seen in recent generations. A study published in September found that 40% of families have less than £100 in savings. Much has been said today about so many of us being just a step away from homelessness, but that bears repeating—40% of families have less than £100 in savings. People do not have the extra cash in their pockets to deal with an unexpected change in situation, so homelessness is perhaps a bigger risk than it has been previously.

With austerity, benefits sanctions and the changes to the benefits system, the people with the most complex, chaotic lives are being disadvantaged the most. The Government cannot easily get them back into work, and they represent a figure that a few weeks of jobcentre intervention will not change. They need months of intervention—some may need years—due to their complex problems, including mental health issues, homelessness and being unable to hold down a job in recent years. They require huge amounts of intervention before they will be able to get back to being tax-paying, working members of society. It is quite easy, if the Government say they are not going to provide intensive support for those people, for them to fall between the cracks. Allowing that to happen in those complex cases is one of the worst things that this Government have done, and that causes a real issue of homelessness.

A huge number of other things can lead to homelessness. Domestic violence has been talked about a lot, and we have a debate on it on Friday. It can lead to women or men—in the main it is women—fleeing and finding themselves homeless or in an insecure tenancy. That is a real problem that they have to deal with at a time when they are going through a huge number of other problems too. Again, that problem is sometimes being left alone because it is too difficult to tackle and it is not an easy statistic to change—the Government cannot easily get people back into work and back into a secure place.

As someone who was elected to a local authority in 2007, I am a passionate advocate against the right to buy. I saw the damage it caused to our communities and the number of people who do not have a permanent roof over their head as a result of it, and the Government need to change their plans on it.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

We have had a well-informed debate. I appreciate the contributions from Members on both sides of the House and respect their passion and sincerity, but nothing that has been said has distracted from, let alone contradicted, the three stark statistics in the motion, which indict this Government’s record on homelessness. Those are a 44% increase in statutory homelessness since 2010—there is an absolute duty to the most vulnerable and those in the most need—a doubling in street homelessness, which is the most obvious and insistent evidence of our failure as a society to provide all our citizens with basic necessities of life, and 120,000 children being homeless this Christmas.

We have heard 17 Back-Bench speeches in this short debate, which shows the degree of interest in this subject. We have heard from the hon. Member for Northampton South (David Mackintosh), my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft), the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond), my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff), the hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight), my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan), my hon. Friends the Members for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman). We have heard from every part of the British Isles. I apologise if I do not have the time to comment on each of those speeches, as they all had much to recommend them.

I will not do the speeches justice by summarising themes, but I have to say that what I heard in a number of speeches by Conservative Members—I exempt the hon. Member for Harrow East from this—was real distress at individual cases in surgeries and in the streets, but no real appreciation of the link between those cases and their own Government’s policy. I credit the hon. Gentleman, as he acknowledged the scale of the problem and how it has risen.

A number of my colleagues made the point about where the blame lies, and although I am being invidious by singling anyone out, I do single out my hon. Friends the Members for Lewisham East, for Westminster North and for Birmingham, Erdington, whose experience over many years and indeed decades in areas of very high housing stress enabled them to put the blame where it lies: with Government policy, with local government cuts and with the persistent failure to build social housing and relieve the pressure.

The Government’s amendment does them no credit. It is a nit-picker’s attempt to sidestep the central causes of the homelessness crisis, which this Government and their coalition predecessor have caused. What is beyond dispute is that the measures the Government rely on in their defence are not working. If they were, we would not have seen a year-on-year worsening in the plight of homeless persons. No one says it will be easy to resolve issues that are now chronic and endemic across the UK, particularly in London and other areas with high demand and a poor supply of affordable homes. The Minister could at least begin to tackle the worst aspects of homelessness by signing up today to the proposals to tackle rough sleeping set out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) and tackling street homelessness through an extension of the clearing house scheme, which both Labour and Tory Governments have supported in the past. There is nothing inevitable about homelessness. The record of the last Labour Government showed that with a two-thirds drop in statutory homelessness in the 10 years to 2010 and a three-quarters drop in rough sleeping in the same period.

I noticed how, in opening the debate, the Minister for Housing and Planning tried to minimise Labour’s achievements and talk up his own party’s achievements. I suppose that that is his job, but independent audit has a different view. I hope that he and the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), who will be replying to the debate, have read the “Green Book”, which was published this month by Shelter to mark its 50th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of “Cathy Come Home”. It says:

“The numbers of households living in temporary accommodation and the numbers of people found sleeping rough on a given night have risen for the last five years. The number of households coming to their council and being found to be homeless and in priority need is over a quarter higher than five years ago. The number of households accepted as homeless started to rise in 2010. Even more striking is that this followed a period of six years when the level of homelessness appeared to drop sharply. The sharp turn that the homelessness statistics made after 2009 is a striking trend”.

[Callum McCaig]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that developer contributions are an important way of attracting additional funds for local authorities to build affordable housing to help tackle the problem of homelessness? Does he share my disappointment that my local council has forgone £30 million in developer contributions for student accommodation that could have helped to alleviate homelessness in Aberdeen?

[Andy Slaughter]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I am not an expert in planning gain in his own local authority area. There are a number of ways of funding affordable homes, and I will come on to one or two of them in a moment. He is right to identify that matter as being the root cause of the problem.

I turn to the Homelessness Reduction Bill, which we were considering in Committee this morning and which the Government pray in aid in their amendment. A number of Members who are on the Bill Committee have mentioned it. That Bill is the brain child of Crisis and is supported by St Mungo’s Broadway, Shelter and the consensus of opinion across the housing sector. Those excellent organisations have been on the frontline against homelessness for decades. Like many Members, I have been proud to work with them in my constituency.

More importantly for the Bill’s chances of making it to the statute book, it has the support of all parties and of the Government, and has been ably promoted by the hon. Member for Harrow East. It is no exaggeration to say that it will make a sea change in homelessness law, both through the emphasis it places on prevention and through the changes that it imposes on local authorities to assist non-priority groups, particularly single people, in finding accommodation.

In promoting the Bill, Crisis is also making the statement that it can no longer be expected to pick up the pieces of the failure of much of the apparatus designed to help the homeless. I welcome the Bill both for the signal that it sends and for the detailed requirements that it places on the Government to tackle this growing crisis, but—this “but” has dominated our discussions on the Bill—legislation alone will not solve the problem. Indeed, it may, in the first instance, make it worse. Let me give three reasons why I say that.

First, local authorities, especially those in metropolitan areas, are struggling to deal with their responsibility to those who are in priority need. Members who have seen the Mayor of London’s briefing—I welcome the Mayor’s personal commitment to tackling London’s housing crisis—will know that the number of households in bed and breakfasts in London has risen by 234% since 2010. The figure is 157% elsewhere. The telling statistic for London Members is this: in 2010, 13% of families were placed outside their local authority area, but that has now almost tripled to 35%. Every one of those families is a tragic story of people displaced from their communities, their schools, their jobs and their family support. If we are not careful, one consequence of putting additional burdens on local authorities for the non-priority homeless when they cannot at the moment cope with the priority homeless is that the latter will suffer.

Secondly, there is a general pressure on local authority budgets, with cuts of 40% to 50% —by far and away the largest in any part of the public sector. Those pressures extend everywhere, and I imagine that tomorrow we will hear quite a lot about that and about social care. Because of those pressures across the board, it is absolutely vital that the measures in the Homelessness Reduction Bill are fully funded. I hear what the Government have said about that, but we are still waiting. The Under-Secretary has promised that we will have details of the funding before the Committee reports. It is important that that pledge is honoured and is not just a paper promise. We must clearly see that the measure will be fully funded, otherwise it simply will not work and local authorities will again carry the can for central Government’s mistakes.

The third and most important issue is the effect of the Government’s general policies on housing and homelessness. In the area of housing finance, the benefit cap has just been further reduced, which has had an attritional effect on my authority and many others. The freeze on local housing allowance, the introduction of the bedroom tax and 45% cuts in the Supporting People budget in the last Parliament are unprecedented cuts, and the net effect is to destabilise the people who are most vulnerable and most at risk of homelessness.

In the private rented sector, rent increases and the ability for private landlords to charge higher rents to make more profit mean that evictions are at a high. Some 40% in London—30% nationally—of people presenting to local authorities cite the serving of a section 21 notice, or the no-fault eviction process. We have heard it argued that as a result we need the Bill to put more responsibility on local authorities, but what about the responsibility of the Government to legislate for longer tenancies and, as we would do, to legislate for rent control to combat rent rises during a tenancy? That would have a much more salutary effect in preventing homelessness.