Temporary Accommodation

David Lammy Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right.

Currently, 22,000 households face such a “last resort” and are placed in temporary housing outside their borough. Under the Housing Act 1996, when a local authority undertakes its housing duty to people by placing them in temporary accommodation in another borough, it should notify the receiving borough that it has done so. That notice should be in writing and made at least 14 days before the household is placed in the area. Is the Department confident that each household is accounted for in their new, temporary home?

I have received a letter from the chief executive of Thurrock Council, which had 183 placements from London boroughs between April 2016 to February 2017. She said:

“Unfortunately, our experience has often been that the notifications are either not sent or sent to the wrong contact within the Council.

Over the past couple of years housing departments have noticed an increase in the number of cases who report that they were placed in another borough from London without the formal notification being received.”

Housing outside a borough is not unlawful, but councils are legally obliged to ensure that relocation is suitable and appropriate to a family’s circumstances, taking account of potential disruption to education, medical needs and employment. Does the Minister agree that processes must be put in place, and enforced, to ensure that a receiving local authority is fully aware of a family’s arrival and that they can receive the healthcare, education and welfare support to which they are entitled once they are there?

Let us consider the enforcement of legislation. In 2004, the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2003 came into force, providing that homeless families with children should not be placed in a B&B except in an emergency. If such an emergency were to arise, it could last for no longer than six weeks. In June this year, 6,660 households were being temporarily housed in B&Bs. That was twice as many as in 2011, and three times as many as when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. A deplorable 2,710 of those households trapped in B&Bs include children. For 1,200 of those families, their living hell has gone on for far longer than the six-week legal limit. The local authorities that are housing them are, quite simply, breaking the law.

One of these families joins us in the Gallery today. Kelly’s family were evicted earlier this year, making them homeless. Sutton Council placed Kelly, her husband and her two young children in a single room in a B&B in Wimbledon. They had so little space that Kelly’s stepson had to leave the family home. For 10 weeks, the family were left in one tiny room, hidden from society in a B&B. No one told Kelly when the nightmare would end. After 10 long weeks, Kelly is now finally out of the B&B, although her temporary home is not much better. Kelly tells me that she simply does not feel safe there, and I completely understand why. The oven does not work, the electrics are precarious, and the flimsy door is a precarious barrier to the outside world. Only yesterday, Sutton Council’s planning department knocked on her door to tell her that there was no planning permission to allow the flat she lives in to exist.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the manner in which she is leading this debate. In the sixth richest economy in the world, does she think it is an abuse of human rights that we have so many people living in these Dickensian conditions?

[Siobhain McDonagh]

It is an abuse of human rights. There is a moral duty on us all to bring a resolution—this is possible—to the situation.

Kelly’s daughter is old enough to question but too young to understand the situation. When she returns from school, she queries why none of her friends have to share a room with their parents. Both Kelly and her husband hold down good jobs, but she tells me that she simply does not know how to get out of this situation. If she complains, will she be moved far away from her job and her children’s school?

Kelly is not alone, however. Birmingham City Council currently houses 85 families with children in B&Bs for longer than six weeks, while Croydon, Harrow, Redbridge and Southwark local authorities have all housed hundreds of families with children in B&Bs for longer than the legal limit of six weeks over the past year alone.

Take Renee and her sister Jade, two young brave girls whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Parliament just a fortnight ago. After living in their friend’s house for over a year, Renee and Jade’s family became homeless and had to move to temporary accommodation in Acton, away from their friends, family and school. A double bed, single bed and a bunk bed filled their tiny room, with their bathroom and kitchen shared with another family. They tell me that they felt brushed under the carpet because they were unseen by society, too ashamed to open their curtains to the outside world. This makes Renee’s recent GCSE success even more remarkable and I congratulate her on her well-deserved achievement. Does the Minister agree that a B&B is no place for Renee—in fact for any family—for longer than six weeks, and that a law against that is superfluous if there is no way to enforce it? What tangible changes would he suggest to ensure that local authorities abide by the laws that this House has agreed?

Behind the facts and figures that I have described today are real homes, real people and real families—and, in my constituency of Mitcham and Morden, one very real building named Connect House. At my advice surgery, the name Connect House has become an increasingly regular feature over the past year, with constituent after constituent calling me for help, desperate to escape what they describe as their living nightmare.

It is incredibly difficult to summarise the conditions at Connect House without visiting it in person. I therefore invite each and every right hon. and hon. Member in the Chamber to join me in Committee Room 9 after the debate, where I will be releasing a video so that each of them, as well as the general public, can see with their own eyes the appalling conditions that the 84 families living inside Connect House find themselves in. For now, however, I will do my best to find the right words.

Willow Lane industrial estate is home to a plethora of successful businesses in my constituency. With its businesses ranging from the manufacturer of timber windows to motor works, and from scaffolders to joiners, it is one of the busiest industrial estates in south London. Almost two years ago, however, there was a peculiar change on the estate. The businesses began to notice prams being pushed past their front doors and children playing while their lorries and vans raced through. They began to notice hundreds of residents using their working industrial estate as a home.

Connect House is at the heart of Willow Lane industrial estate. It houses 84 families who have been placed there by four local authorities: Bromley, Sutton, Croydon and Merton. There is little collaboration between the authorities as to who is placed in Connect House, which heightens the danger of vulnerable residents being placed among completely inappropriate neighbours. To reach the nearest amenities, the residents have to walk through the industrial estate itself. Cars line the pavement, forcing families with prams or wheelchairs into the lorry-filled road. It is fair to say that local workers simply do not expect 84 families to live within their industrial estate.

Waste surrounds Connect House because its industrial bins are ill equipped for the needs of the residents inside. This naturally attracts rats and foxes, and litter is strewn across the adjacent car park. Litter is also found throughout the building itself, causing considerable damage to both the building and its few facilities. The building is not staffed at evenings or weekends, and one resident found herself locked out in the middle of the industrial estate when she arrived back at night. A single key fob is allocated to each room, but additional fobs come at a deposit of £20. It is no wonder that young children have escaped into the dangerous industrial estate outside.

As for those who are able to enter, one resident told me of the danger that she and her daughter were in when a man was able to follow her right to her front door. Incidentally, the doors have neither a spy hole nor a door chain for safety. For a vulnerable family, their security is nothing more than the thin door separating their room from the industrial estate outside. Importantly, there is no communal room in Connect House, and neither is there anywhere for children to go, other than their tiny bedroom, where they are so often forced to share a bed with their parents and/or siblings. Residents complain of children running through the corridors at night, while the car park outside the building has been described as a playground in the evenings. Does the Minister agree that an industrial estate car park is no fit playground for the hundreds of children inside Connect House?

Residents and businesses have described Connect House as an “accident waiting to happen” and a “death trap”, yet this is a property that Bromley Council has not even visited, despite placing families there. It argues that there is simply not enough time or resource to do so, and that in its own words:

“This is compounded by the fact that a significant number”

of properties

“are out of the borough”.

The building’s remote location means that there are no immediate shops or amenities for the residents. The location is so remote, in fact, that even an ambulance was unable to find it when called by a heavily pregnant lady housed there who had to have her baby in the car park outside. It truly fills me with sadness to tell this Chamber that the baby is no longer with us.

The property provides the landlord with an estimated—and simply staggering—£1.25 million to £1.5 million of taxpayers’ money each year, with the local authorities charged between £30 and £40 per room per night. Connect House is therefore a 21st century, multi-million pound death trap in the middle of my constituency. In the Gallery today sit dozens of residents from Connect House. They have joined us here to have their voices heard, to find out why the Government consider Connect House to be a suitable place for them to live, and to listen to what changes the Minister will propose before this death trap takes its next victim. From down here in the Chamber, I would like to tell their experiences, their challenges and their stories. Take Laura. She shares a room with her teenage daughter, despite having a spinal disability. Her room is so small that she had to move items out just to show me inside. She sleeps in her bed in the day so that her daughter can sleep in a bed at night.

Then there is Alice. She has a three-hour return journey to collect her children from school, finishing at the tram stop outside the industrial estate. It is dark by the time they return and so, before making the final walk home, Alice and her children pause to pray that they will make it safely. Finally, there is Sarah. Her two children are not yet of school age, so they are confined—day in, day out—to the industrial estate. It is no wonder that when Sarah’s baby boy was taken to the doctor’s with a wheezy cough, the doctor put it down to the constant fumes he was inhaling from the factories outside the window.

There are Connect Houses in so many of our constituencies, and today is our chance to shine a light on them. So what can be done? If there are tangible actions that should be taken from this debate, let them be as follows.

First, does the Minister agree that if a local authority is forced to house residents temporarily in another local authority area, it is fundamental that a designated officer in the receiving authority should be clearly informed of those people’s arrival so that their safety and welfare can be ensured? Secondly, I cannot help questioning why we have laws and regulations on temporary accommodation if they are simply not enforced. Does the Minister agree that local authorities should be held to account under the regulations on which the House has decided? Assuming that he does, may I ask how he proposes to ensure that families like Kelly’s are no longer illegally housed in B&Bs for more than six weeks?

Finally, do the Minister and colleagues agree that there should be a minimum standard for temporary accommodation, and that the conditions that I have described are simply not fit for purpose? I encourage anyone who is in any doubt about that to join me in Committee Room 9 after the debate.

The 78,180 families who are in temporary accommodation are hidden from our society, whether in a hostel, in a B&B, or lost in an industrial estate. Today many of those families sit proudly in the House of Commons. Today their stories will be hidden no more, and I urge each of us to be their voice and to call for change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak and to have supported my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) in calling for this important debate—her opening speech was fantastic. I hope that the Government are listening, because what Members across the House are seeing in their constituencies amounts to a serious crisis.

It is no longer accurate to talk of “temporary” accommodation; in the past three months, I have represented two families in my constituency who have been living in so-called temporary accommodation for over 10 years. Temporary accommodation is becoming permanent accommodation. If we look at the broader context, that is happening due to a huge shortage of social housing across the country.

One family in my constituency have been living in temporary accommodation for 14 years. Another family have been there for 17 years. That family have seen their children grow up in temporary accommodation—the only home that the children have ever known, from their first day at primary school to their first day at secondary school. Next year, the 18th birthday of the eldest child will be celebrated in this so-called temporary accommodation. Another of my constituents has been placed in temporary accommodation with her son, who suffers from cerebral palsy. The room is too small to accommodate the equipment he needs. Another two cases came into my postbag this month involving two households who have lived in temporary accommodation since 2010.

There are 3,140 households living in temporary accommodation in my borough of Haringey, and let me be clear about the conditions in which people are being housed. If the Minister has not visited an emergency accommodation hostel, I would be happy to facilitate a visit. In the past couple of months, I have asked the Department about the state of temporary accommodation, but it seems unable to answer me. I hope that the Minister can tell the House today what he failed to tell me last month. How much of our temporary accommodation stock is unfit for human habitation or is in disrepair and requires refurbishment? How many children are living in inappropriate accommodation? What is the average length of time that a household spends in temporary accommodation? How many households have spent more than a year in temporary accommodation—or more than two years, or three years? How many households in temporary accommodation are being moved into a permanent social home? In my borough of Haringey, the wait for social housing is around 10 years even for those families in the direst need of a home.

What will be the impact of the freeze in the local housing allowance? As night follows day, households currently renting in the private sector will become homeless as they fall into rent arrears, and the number of homeless families whom councils will need to house in temporary accommodation will increase. Some 92% of councils fear that the freeze will cause a surge in homelessness, yet the Minister for Housing told me in an answer to a written question last month that the Government have not even carried out an impact assessment.

However, this is not about the numbers, as awful as they are. This is about the reality of life for hundreds of thousands of people in this country—one of the wealthiest in the world. The hostels in which people are being placed are not acceptable places for vulnerable women escaping abusive relationships or for parents to bring up their children. Clearly, there are real problems in the system when vulnerable people are being left in temporary accommodation for many years. What steps will the Minister take to improve the system of assessing vulnerability and the needs of families placed in temporary accommodation? Over the years, I have heard horror stories of needles in stairwells, of young children sharing bathrooms with strangers and of vulnerable women being abused and exploited. Ultimately, the story comes back to the chronic problem of the decimation of our social housing.

Local authorities, stretched to breaking point after years of austerity and budget cuts, spent £845 million on temporary accommodation last year. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has been at the centre of the Grenfell storm, has built just 10 new council-funded social homes since 1990. Only 1,102 social homes were built with Government money in England in 2016.

We have a serious, serious crisis. The Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that by 2020 nearly 250,000 social homes will have been lost in just eight years. We have to grip the issue of houses sold off under right to buy. It is criminal for the state to give people a subsidy to take even more houses off the market and to see the sorts of people we are talking about today in even direr circumstances as a result.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making an extraordinarily powerful speech. Manchester City Council is currently having to buy back ex-right to buy council houses to cope with the demand of homeless families presenting at Manchester town hall. Does he agree it is a disgrace that councils are being put in that position?

[Mr Lammy]

It is shocking and appalling that councils are being put in that position. Many councillors across the country are having to make the hardest of decisions on behalf of people—frankly, as Members of Parliament, we are all pleased that we do not have to make those decisions. We now have a ridiculous situation in which we are spending almost £10 billion a year of taxpayers’ money on housing benefit that goes straight to private landlords. Slashing social housing funding is a false economy. This is dead money. Instead of lining the pockets of private landlords, it should be used to build new social homes.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I worked out last night that we could build 88,000 prefabs with the money we are giving in one year to the private rented sector in housing benefit.

[Mr Lammy]

Absolutely. We have to find new ways of building homes. We would be better off giving people a home for what may be 40 or 50 years by building those prefabs than handing out money in the way we have.

The state grant available for social landlords to build social homes was slashed to zero in the 2010 spending review. In its place we got new categories of homes: homes for affordable rent, and affordable homes for first-time buyers. It is important to place on the record that the crisis will not be solved by building affordable homes that cost £400,000 to £450,000 in London. It is time almost to banish the word “affordable” from the lexicon, as it means nothing to ordinary people when it comes to housing policy. We have already heard that the Government are not building social homes, but they are spending 80% of the total housing budget on subsidising private homes through Help to Buy and discounted starter homes. The Government are not even really serious about their own affordable homes programme.

The dire situation we are seeing in temporary accommodation is symptomatic of the intrinsically linked shortage of homes and housing crisis. We will get to grips with the crisis only through a mass social housing building programme. The Government are beginning to recognise that, and I welcome the Prime Minister’s promise of a council house building “rebirth” in her speech last month.

The crisis will not be solved by further overheating the housing market by offering Help to Buy loans to first-time buyers, who have help from the bank of mum and dad anyway. The crisis will not be solved by building 5,000 homes each year. That is a drop in the ocean given the scale of the problem—it is only half of the households waiting to be housed in the London Borough of Haringey. Some 1.2 million households across the country are waiting to be housed, according to Shelter.

I hope the Government are listening and, on behalf of the 3,000 families in Haringey, I hope they will finally act.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) on his speech and thank him for reminding me to bring Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) for her speech and for securing this important debate.

The situation in my home borough—Newham—is dire. The local authority reports that more than 5,600 people approached the council last year, worried about homelessness. In total, 4,725 Newham households are in some kind of temporary accommodation, and more than half of those are currently in the least stable form of nightly paid accommodation. I hope that hon. Members across the House will agree that those statistics drive home the scale of the problem we are discussing. As we know, temporary housing conditions can massively damage families’ wellbeing and opportunities. To illustrate my point, I will talk about just one case out of the hundreds that I have received recently.

In August, I heard from Camila, a grandmother writing on behalf of her grandchildren and their mother, Lisa. Camila’s three grandaughters are 14, 11, and five. Lisa has had to live in temporary accommodation for 15 years. The children have known nothing else. The conditions in Lisa’s flat are awful and the situation is having a real impact on the family’s health. The walls are either black with mould or covered with mildew because of the damp. One of Lisa’s daughters has breathing problems and the whole family are frequently sick with infections.

Lisa and her daughters have had to move a number of times already, as we all have experience of in London. On one occasion, Lisa was moved out of Newham, and she was recently told that her family might be moved out of London entirely. Camila is really worried about Lisa’s mental health due to the stress caused by her family’s living conditions. Camila believes that having to move out of London and away from the support network of her family could push Lisa “over the edge” entirely, leaving the family in very difficult circumstances.

The problems of homelessness, debt, unstable homes and constant moves have an impact on children and families, preventing them from putting down basic roots—making friends, getting on doctors’ registers and even joining a library or a youth club. We are really storing up social problems for the future.

I often say that I was privileged to grow up in a council flat in east London. I was moved there at the age of two and a half, during the slum clearances around the docks. That flat provided me with the security to learn and to do as well as I could. My little—well, younger—sister is a well-respected solicitor. [Interruption.] She is actually both; that is true. And I am standing in this House. We could not have done that without the security of an affordable and secure tenancy—the security of a council property—behind us.

The social housing shortage requires urgent extensive long-term policy responses, but one decision is crucial and would help to continue to improve the housing conditions across the board in my constituency. The Secretary of State could today approve the renewal of Newham’s widely respected scheme for private sector licensing. The scheme has run utterly successfully since 2013, but its renewal now requires approval from the Department for Communities and Local Government and the decision is overdue. The current scheme expires on 31 December, so there is a real risk that my constituents will be left without these protections if a decision is not made quickly.

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Those of us who grew up working-class and spent time in social council homes had security. What we see so often in our constituencies is deep insecurity and the depression, mental health and other health problems that go with that insecurity. Does she agree that that is the difference between yesterday’s working classes and today’s?

[Lyn Brown]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Things were not easy at home, but my mum never let us feel that we went without. Both my parents worked in factories in Silvertown, and although there was not a huge amount of money, there was always enough to pay the rent, because it was a social rent. Now, my constituents have two jobs, and they work in very hard circumstances, but they still cannot afford the private sector rents—that is all that is available to them—in my home borough.

Let me get back to the scheme in Newham to protect residents. The scheme’s value in terms of the enforcement of housing standards is clear. It gives Newham the information and powers it needs to monitor and enforce standards in the private rented sector. All private landlords have to register and agree terms with the council, and they are held to account for failures to live up to the agreement.

Just last week, enforcement officers working as part of the scheme found a man living in a 1 metre by 2 metre space under the stairs of a property. There were 11 other people living throughout the rest of the house, and dangerous electrical and fire hazards were found as well. Through the scheme, Newham Council has helped to bring more than 1,200 prosecutions against criminal landlords, which is 60% of the London total—more than every other London borough combined.

If standards are continually driven up in the private rented sector locally, and if enforcement operations are strengthened so that there are fewer rogue landlords and there is less scope for exploitative practices such as the horrendous overcrowding I described, conditions will improve in temporary housing, and that can only be for the good of the children and our society at large.

I hope we will see some serious commitment from the Minister today to deal with the root causes of the ills of long-term, expensive, poor-quality temporary accommodation. Given that he has sat generously listening and nodding away as I have spoken, I also want to hear some positive noises from him about the scheme, and I hope he will soon be in a position to announce that approval for the extension has been granted.