Social Housing Occupancy

Catherine West Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social housing occupancy levels.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I shall be speaking about an important issue that my constituents raise weekly—one that I have been campaigning on for many years as a Member of Parliament and a London council leader before that. It is about overcrowding in social housing, and indeed the housing crisis. I hesitate to use the term “crisis” because that would imply that the problem was sudden, unexpected and appeared out of nowhere, but no, the housing emergency intensified after the global financial crash of 2008-09 and in ensuing austerity years under consecutive Conservative Governments.

The generation born at the end of the second world war grew up in a world where people from a range of backgrounds had the opportunity, rightly, to live in an affordable and secure home. However, that completely changed after Mrs Thatcher’s privatisation, which created a property boom, and for the first time ever, homes became a barrier to social mobility. Over the years, the right-to-buy policy has led to the depletion of high-quality social homes. Nowadays, people are more likely to own a home if their parents own a home.

In England, there are now 1.2 million families waiting for social homes. In my own borough, 13,343 households are on the housing register. To date, over 2 million council homes across the UK have been sold off, with only 4% of them replaced. The Chartered Institute of Housing found that, as of 2021, 40% of the homes sold under right to buy were owned by private landlords who could charge as much rent as they wanted. Rather than subsidising rents through millions of pounds of housing benefit, surely it would be easier and cheaper to build council homes.

In my constituency of Hornsey and Wood Green, the average house price is £630,000, way above the national average of £285,000, according to a Library briefing from March 2023. Home ownership is an impossible dream and council homes are in short supply. Young people growing up in my constituency are forced to move away, or to live with their parents, or to spend up to 60% of their monthly income on expensive, insecure and often poor-quality privately rented housing.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. Will she take the opportunity to congratulate the London Mayor on trying to tackle part of the problem by building homes? In my own borough of Southwark he has built 926 homes, including on the Manor and Rennie estates in Bermondsey, in Rotherhithe, and, in partnership with the Leathermarket Joint Management Board, off Long Lane.

[Catherine West]

My hon. Friend is right that this issue takes political will. If people cannot afford to save while privately renting, they are not able to save for a deposit, so it is a Catch-22 situation.

Since becoming a Member of Parliament in 2015, I have campaigned for the building of social and affordable homes. I am particularly concerned about the level of overcrowding and its long-term impact on children and young people.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing forward this debate. It is not just an issue on the mainland; it is an issue for us back home as well. Although we have a smaller population of 1.9 million, there are still some 38,000 applicants on the social housing waiting list. There are around 127,400 social homes across Northern Ireland, only 18,000 of which are located in rural areas. Does she agree that although the figures are exceptional for the mainland, they are also exceptional for Northern Ireland, and that there is a need to build social housing not only in urban areas but in rural areas?

[Catherine West]

As ever, the hon. Member makes an extremely important point. I am aware from reading in the press that Northern Ireland also has a shortage of the correct sorts of homes. Perhaps the right number of bedrooms are available, but not in the right configuration.

In Haringey, 1,053 individuals are estimated to be living in overcrowded or severely overcrowded council homes, and 871 private sector tenants in the highest social housing priority band are overcrowded or severely overcrowded. We know that no local authority wants to place a household in unsuitable or overcrowded accommodation. However, the severe reduction in the number of homes available to let through social housing and the changes to the local housing allowance mean that councils are forced to use the dwindling private rented sector, bed and breakfasts, low-quality accommodation, and hotels.

Sadly, constituents get in touch with me all the time who are exhausted with living in overcrowded, damp and mouldy homes, waiting years or even decades for suitable social housing. Last summer, one constituent told me she lives in an emergency one-bedroom studio with her 16-year-old teenager and six-year-old severely autistic son. As well as the cramped conditions, she told me,

“the roof has collapsed, and our bulbs keep going out as there is some electrical fault here, the fridge doesn’t work, I keep feeling constantly ill because there’s no windows that work either”.

Of course, in London, we all live with the shadow of the terrible tragedy of the Grenfell fire. Another constituent told me that she lives with her elderly parents and two children aged 17 and two. She tells me she has been waiting for her own social home since 2012. She says:

“my parents are elderly, they love me and my children, but due to being overcrowded and being in each other’s space every day, it has caused a major communication breakdown and arguments. I am a single mother with 2 children trying to build a bright future for my children”.

Another constituent currently lives in two-bedroom temporary accommodation with his wife and two children. He has been bidding for a permanent three-bedroom property for eight years with no success—and the list goes on.

London’s housing catastrophe has been 14 years in the making. When London Mayor Sadiq Khan arrived at City Hall, the number of new genuinely affordable homes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) said, had fallen to the lowest levels since records began. The previous Mayor left the cupboard bare and changed the definition of affordable housing to make it even harder for working families. However, things are gradually changing. The Mayor of London is leading a renaissance in council housing development in London. Thanks to Labour, London has seen more new homes completed during Sadiq’s tenure than at any time since the 1930s.

In Haringey—a Labour authority—the council is on track to deliver 3,000 council homes by 2031 and will continue to improve the existing stock. Last year, council house building in London was higher than in the rest of the country, built almost entirely in Labour-run authority areas, where members are pragmatic and tend to agree planning applications where they fit best-practice recommendations, and get on with it over the four years of their term.

[Neil Coyle]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Southwark Council is the biggest landlord in London, but it also has the biggest council house building programme in the country. Does she agree that it is only with Labour working in partnership with the private and social housing sector that we will address these problems fully, and that we need a Labour Government to do that?

[Catherine West]

I completely agree. The combination of a Labour Government and Labour authorities at regional level would have a huge impact on house building. We know that it needs to be scaled up to a national level, and regional leaders need the power and backing to build more homes. Imagine the difference that a Labour Government could make.

[Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes some really important points on an important debate that has impacted my constituency. The Conservative- led council in Darlington embarked on a 10-year programme to build more council housing and is delivering 1,000 council homes over 10 years, but that is still not enough. Social housing providers are also building homes. I want to return to one of the points she made on the cause being the right to buy. Is it her view that the right to buy should be ended?

[Catherine West]

No, it is not, but we do need to stick to a pledge—regardless of which political party is in government—to replace every single home that is sold off; otherwise, we are depriving people in future of opportunity. Social housing makes it possible for working families to save, opening up other opportunities. If they pay 60% of their income in rent, they cannot do very much, whereas if they pay a third—approximately the level of social housing rent—it gives them so much more opportunity to do all sorts of things with their lives. I was pleased to hear the examples from Darlington, an area that has deep pockets of disadvantage.

According to the National Housing Federation, as of December 2021, an estimated 8.4 million people live in unsuitable housing affected by overcrowding, unaffordability, disrepair, damp and mould. For 4.2 million of those people, social rented housing would be the most appropriate tenure to address that need. Most significant of all, overcrowding is the largest problem nationally, affecting nearly 3.7 million people. What is the impact of overcrowded conditions? I have spoken to many children and young people living in overcrowded homes who struggle to concentrate on homework and exam revision. Some are forced to work on the floor while sharing their room with young siblings; others try to study in libraries, but we know that some libraries are struggling to keep their doors open due to cuts in central Government funding. According to the National Housing Federation, almost 2 million children—one in six—live in overcrowded homes. What is more, 310,000 children in England share a bed with parents or siblings because of overcrowded homes. Children having to share a bed with their parents can have quite a negative impact on being ready to go to school and study in the morning. It is something we need to look at in detail and understand its long-term impacts.

One constituent recently wrote to me, saying:

“My family and I have been living in severely overcrowded conditions in a one-bedroom flat since 2016. Our children need their own space for learning and playing, but we cannot provide that for them. The severe overcrowding affects us and our children greatly, both socially and psychologically. The five of us are forced to share a bedroom just to separate our ‘living room’ from our ‘sleeping space’.”

We are making it very clear to children living in social homes that they do not deserve their own space: space to study, decompress and play—space to be children. According to Barnardo’s, more than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their landlord has failed to replace broken frames and poor-quality homes have turned linen mouldy. I received recently a video of a mum holding up a garment—her toddler’s favourite purple jumper—that was covered in mould and had to be thrown away. The replacement cost of clothing and linen is high for people on low incomes. I have lost count of the number of parents who have contacted me to say they can no longer use the bedroom due to excessive mould on the ceiling, walls and bedding, so it becomes safer for children to sleep on a sofa with a sheet than in their own bedroom in a comfortable bed.

Last year, I visited Mind in Haringey, a mental health charity of which I am a patron. Staff told me about the different issues they were experiencing on the frontline, including speaking to more and more patients whose mental health difficulties were caused or made significantly worse by poor housing. I want to put on record my enormous gratitude to the Haringey Mind team, as well as the other fantastic organisations that support my constituents every day, including Shelter, Citizens Advice Haringey, St James’s Legal Advice Centre in Muswell Hill, Wilton Road and Wood Green, Haringey Law Centre, Haringey Connected Communities, and lastly London Councils for their continued advocacy for the people of London.

According to the Times Health Commission, poor-quality housing costs the national health service £1.4 billion a year—proof that health and housing are integrally linked. Often, when I am out in the constituency and ask a group of children, “Who here has an asthma pump, or has a friend in class who has an asthma pump?”, all the hands go up. We need to tackle poor-quality air not just outdoors, but indoors.

When Nye Bevan, as Health Minister, founded the NHS in 1948, he also had a vision for council housing. He wanted to create a housing service similar to the national health service, because he knew that good-quality, affordable homes were crucial to people’s physical and mental health. We know that those living in overcrowded homes are more likely to face problems such as damp, vermin and lack of outdoor space. According to the 2022 Marmot review for the Greater London Authority, overcrowding is associated with higher rates of tuberculosis transmission, stress and depression. Scurvy is coming back into GP clinics. All this puts more pressure on our NHS, and means that people are sicker for longer.

A house is not just a roof over one’s head, but a home that we decorate and personalise. It is a place to go after a hard day’s work to laugh, cry and make memories for life; it is somewhere we feel safe and warm. The rights to security in our home, to make our home our own and, most of all, to live in a home fit for human habitation are non-negotiable. Housing should not necessarily just be a market, but a fundamental human right.

More recently, commercial properties, such as vacant shops, restaurants, gyms and offices are being converted into houses. Those buildings, which were never designed for human habitation, are being used up and down the country as emergency accommodation while residents wait years for their social home.

The Government shamefully voted through a planning loophole, known as permitted development rights, that allows changes to be made to an existing building without planning permission. It has resulted in thousands of buildings being converted without proper checks on quality, minimum space standards, fire safety, ventilation and energy efficiency, and of course it gets around the requirement for an element of that particular planning application to be social homes. The Government will do almost anything but put shovels in the ground and build more homes. The extension of permitted development rights is not just damaging but a missed opportunity to tackle Britain’s housing crisis and produce high-quality homes. It is clear that we must prioritise council housing, council housing and council housing.

This Government can no longer be trusted to build council homes, or any homes at this rate. Fourteen years in power and they have nothing to show for it. Only a Labour Government will bring about the biggest boost in affordable homes for a generation. With social and council housing at the core of our plan, we will also ensure that developers honour their commitments in full to provide new social and affordable homes, which is something that the Government have turned a blind eye to. Last week’s spring Budget was a missed opportunity to help people on to the housing ladder. Whether they have the money to have a mortgage or not, there was nothing for them. Whether it was to tackle growing private rents and their unaffordable nature, or the long queues for social housing, the Chancellor missed a trick.

As I have outlined, social housing provides long-term stability that enables people to get on with life. Whatever a person’s situation—whether they are studying, working, have a young family or are living alone—social housing can help them to put down roots and can create community. I am proud that it was the Labour party under Clement Attlee that undertook the most ambitious housebuilding programme ever, and what is so different now from 1945? Is it that different, given all we have been through with the covid pandemic, with the war and with the energy crisis in Europe? Is that that different from the 1940s? Now is the moment and the Labour party plans on restoring social housing and ensuring that no one is left behind.

[Sir Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

I remind Members to give the Minister adequate time to wind up—at least eight minutes.