Social Housing

Darren Jones Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House recognises that there is a housing crisis with too few genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy; further recognises that the number of new social rented homes built in recent years has been too low; notes that the Government has set a target to build 300,000 homes a year, which is unlikely to be achieved without building more social homes; further notes that Shelter’s recent report, A Vision for Social Housing, concluded that 3.1 million new social rented homes need to be built over the next 20 years; and calls on the Government to adopt a target of building 155,000 social rented homes, including at least 100,000 council homes, each year from 2022.

It is an honour to rise to discuss one of the most critical issues facing us, and I thank the Backbench Committee for affording me the opportunity to do this today. Sadly, looking round the Chamber, I see surprisingly few people here to share the debate. I thank those who are here, but I am surprised at how few there are, given the very real and pressing crisis that we face in this country. It is the foremost of all the crises that we face.

The housing market is fundamentally broken, and it is the social housing sector that has been the casualty. As a result, homelessness is up 50% and rough sleeping has risen 160% since 2010. Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of people are living in homes that are not fit for human habitation, yet this is the fifth wealthiest country on the planet. Despite that apparent national wealth, we are impoverished by crushing personal debt, large mortgages, high private sector rents, student loans, significant unsecured debt as great as it was in 2007 and stagnant wages that have failed to keep up with the cost of living. It is no wonder that the UN rapporteur has observed us as a country in crisis where the social fabric is not just frayed at the edges but badly torn.

This week marks the second anniversary of the terrible tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire, and we are reminded of how recent and current policy on social housing has failed and continues to fail our society, so how is it that the market and the policies that govern that market are not delivering the much-needed housing? The social housing report commissioned by Shelter in January estimates that the UK needs to build 155,000 social homes a year for the next couple of decades. That is the scale of the crisis. If good housing is fundamental to the quality of our lives, why is it not the basis for everything in our society? Lord Porter put it succinctly when he said that, with a housing problem,

“you haven’t just got a housing problem, you’ve got an education problem, you’ve got a health problem, anti-social behaviour problem, whatever.”

It is clear that we need to reset the market and restore the principle that a decent home is a right owed to all, not a privilege for the few.

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the market has failed in constituencies such as mine, where it is getting more and more expensive to either rent or buy, and that we therefore need to build council houses to provide security for people and their families, including accessible housing, given that more and more people with disabilities cannot find homes?