Supported Housing: Benefit

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Marie Rimmer) and my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen). I am sure the hon. Lady agrees with me when I say that housing in Cambridge is now fearsomely expensive. The price of a terraced house in Cambridge is almost £500,000, and the average rent is twice that in the rest of England. The Office for National Statistics tells us that house prices in Cambridge have risen faster than anywhere else in the country since the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed their unholy alliance.

People are increasingly locked out of the housing market and the private rented sector, and it is against that backdrop that the brave people trying to provide sheltered housing in an expensive city such as Cambridge have to operate. They do not pull their punches when asked about the current situation. I went to see one of the excellent Metropolitan’s housing schemes a few weeks ago, and it was inspiring. It was exactly the kind of scheme that every Member of the House would be proud our country is promoting. What did it tell me? It told me it could not do it now—it could not do something similar again—because of the uncertainty it faces.

The hon. Lady has already mentioned the excellent Cambridge Housing Society Group. It has a scheme just up the road from where I live in Cambridge, and I was there at the weekend to celebrate 25 years of its excellent nursery scheme. It runs supported housing schemes as well, and its brilliant chief executive, Nigel Howlett—he will have had the same conversation with the hon. Lady as he has had with me—is absolutely clear about the impact: schemes it wanted to implement are on hold. As has been said, the potential loss to the Cambridge Housing Society is over £500,000, with four schemes absolutely at risk.

I was very impressed by the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who is no longer in her seat, and I suspect the local authority of every Member in the House has the same set of examples. Cambridge City Council manages more than 100 units of accommodation for homeless households, including three hostels, 22 units of move-on accommodation for adults recovering from mental health conditions, and 13 sheltered housing schemes for older people, with more than 460 tenancies. The council tells me that all those rely on this income. In a high-cost city like Cambridge, the inevitable consequence of the changes is that it will have to make more cuts. As has been said, that means fewer wardens, less support and less preventive work to stop people going to the national health service, which is of course tremendously overburdened.

As we have heard from Members on both sides of the House, there is a problem, and I urge the Government to think hard about it. We have a new Prime Minister, who has made her point about social justice, and she has a very early opportunity to turn those warm words into action. It really does not have to be that difficult. Please just do it.