Non-commissioned Exempt Accommodation

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Eddie Hughes)]

I think it goes without saying that the matter we are here to discuss today is one of the utmost seriousness and utmost importance. It has far-reaching implications that go beyond the housing benefit bill and impact on the lives of hundreds of people who are among the most vulnerable in our society. There is no greater priority for any Government than protecting the welfare of our citizens and, wherever possible, preventing people from finding themselves living in accommodation that is poor in terms of quality and security.

During my years working for YMCA Birmingham, I saw first-hand just how tough and life-limiting it can be for people living in these kinds of homes, but I also saw the transformational difference that genuinely good-quality supported exempt accommodation makes to people, so, to put it mildly, I have a strong personal interest in us getting this right.

[Kerry McCarthy]

The fact that this debate is about non-commissioned exempt accommodation goes to the heart of it, because in an ideal situation Bristol would be able to commission all the supported housing that it needed to look after people in need within its own city boundaries. The situation we are getting now is suppliers moving in and buying up housing in inner-city areas, with other councils not taking responsibility for their own residents. If the Minister speaks to the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), he will find that there is a massive issue with people being sent there. Does he agree that this housing ought to be commissioned, if possible, rather than leaving it to the private sector?

[Eddie Hughes]

I strongly suspect that during the course of my speech there will be many interventions that I find myself in agreement with, and that is one example. Speaking personally, I have heard of people parking up outside prisons waiting for prisoners to leave and then taking them off to non-commissioned exempt accommodation. It is beholden on all of us to try to make sure that there is good-quality accommodation, that people are appropriately signposted to it, and —the hon. Lady is absolutely right—that wherever possible it is commissioned rather than non-commissioned accommodation.

I guess my job, and the job of this Government, is to improve the life chances of people living in these kinds of situations, and that is one of the main reasons that I came into politics. However, poorly conceived quick-fix answers are not going to help us to solve this problem. We are all in agreement on the urgency of the issue and we all share a determination to change things for the better, but if we want to tackle the problems that plague this sector, then the way to do it is through considered and meaningful reforms. What the sector needs is not sticking plasters but more support for the high-quality supported housing providers who are delivering services that are genuinely changing people’s lives. The whole country is facing difficult economic headwinds, and those providers who are fulfilling their roles and helping to protect people by keeping a roof over their heads during this time of difficulty need support. I am therefore glad that this issue is drawing considerable interest from parliamentarians. Every single Member of this House will have constituents affected by it, and I am certain that through our collective efforts and collaboration we can work together across the House to solve these problems.

This kind of accommodation often acts as a safety net for people who have fallen on hard times. It helps them to get back on their feet and gives them the platform from which they can rebuild their lives. Its importance is difficult to overstate. Despite that, however, there are flagrant examples of rogue providers who are abusing the system and misusing taxpayers’ money by not providing anywhere near the right standard of services for their residents. This failure is intertwined with the harsh reality of the concentrated proliferation of exempt accommodation in specific areas and cities. That is bringing its own set of challenges, with pockets of neighbourhood issues, antisocial behaviour and criminal behaviour, which is completely unacceptable.

We are not sitting on our hands. We have introduced a range of curbs to stem the growth of these organisations in areas right across the country, including in Birmingham. The Housing and Communities Research Group have combined with the Birmingham Safeguarding Adults Board to play a pivotal role in highlighting the growing number of shoddy, second-rate units that have been allowed to develop unchecked in Birmingham. Off the back of that, officials in my Department have worked tirelessly with Birmingham City Council and local charities to unpick these issues and to enhance our understanding of them. That work is already beginning to bring to light the full scale of the problem, its underlying drivers and, more importantly, the impact it has on residents and their communities.

[John Redwood]

Has the Minister made sure that all future contracts are properly set up and policed at the beginning, so that the Government know what they are buying?

--- Later in debate ---

[Eddie Hughes]

My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point, but we leave those decisions to councils that are commissioning locally. I guess it is up to us to try to ensure appropriate standards against which such accommodation is measured and then to give them the necessary powers to enforce that. Personally, I think that councils already have a considerable number of powers. I am not disagreeing with Opposition Members about what powers are required; I am just saying that I would like to see the existing powers used to the absolute max before we necessarily go reaching for others. If people feel they do not have the necessary powers, I would consider it not inappropriate for the Government to legislate, but we need to consider that carefully.

We are committed to finding the right approach to this issue, and we invested £5 million in a number of pilots in recent months to support the worst-affected areas, including Birmingham, Blackburn with Darwen, Blackpool, Bristol and Hull. Through the injection of those funds, we have been working with local authorities to test approaches to improving the quality of this type of accommodation. We chose these specific areas partly because of the existing commitment to tackle these issues, and I pay tribute to the local authorities, which have worked collegiately and collaboratively with us during the pilots.

To take Bristol as an example, it has been conducting thorough assessments of new schemes and providers for some time. The council was able to use its funding to complete its work in summer last year. Meanwhile, Hull’s supported accommodation review team was implemented in 2019, and the council has already shown a strong commitment to making the changes needed to solve the problems besetting exempt accommodation. Through the pilot, it was able to fund a large part of its programme and to take its approach to that programme one step further. As the House would expect, we know that the need stretches beyond these pilot areas and that local authorities in other parts of the country want to invest in tackling these problems, too.

[Lisa Nandy]

This is a little frustrating, because there is a strong sense that we agree about this, yet it is difficult to work out why nothing yet has been done. The pilots were initiated in October 2020, so why have they not concluded and reported, and why have we not got a timetable by which action will be taken? Perhaps the Minister can give us that today.

[Eddie Hughes]

I have a horrible feeling that I will mention this point now and repeat it subsequently if I am not able to recalibrate in the course of my speech. We have the report from those pilots, and we are working with authorities and officials in my Department to unpick it and to ensure that we completely understand what the information we have gathered is telling us and that any changes we deploy in the future are appropriate. I completely accept and understand the hon. Lady’s frustration. I am keen to see that report published as quickly as possible, and I am sure I will repeat that point later in my speech—my apologies for the duplication.

Some places have taken their inspiration from the work of those pilots and have set up teams bringing together different expertise, including housing benefit and environmental health officers, to focus on emerging issues. We have heard of, and been inspired by, the initiative shown by local authorities such as Nottingham, which have implemented multidisciplinary approaches to supported housing within the council and with key external partners that have a critical role to play in the experience of supported housing tenants. That set-up enables local authorities to keep a constant stream of information going about rogue providers and to conduct consistent and thorough assessments of those organisations and their ability to deliver good support and good outcomes for tenants.

My Department has also been speaking to local authorities in Derby, Cannock Chase and Staffordshire, and to councils across Greater Manchester and Lancashire on those issues. We are engaging with them on how they are progressing. On top of that, I am delighted that work is taking place across boundaries as we are encouraging councils to share good practice so that others can apply it. For example, in Blackburn, housing benefit officers have been working closely with other local authorities in Manchester and Lancashire, discussing and learning from each other’s experience while sharing their knowledge on the common issues that they are encountering locally.

The local pilots have been critical to helping us to understand how the issues are playing out in different places, but we know that they will not solve the issues on their own. At a national level, the Government have continued to act and to raise the bar on the standard of accommodation across the board. In 2020, the Department published the “Supported housing: national statement of expectations”, which was vital in setting out the Government’s vision for better ways of working in supported housing and for introducing much higher minimum standards in accommodation.

The guidance gave providers and councils a clear vision from the Government of exactly what good looks like while highlighting where providers and councils are working in a joined-up fashion to drive up quality. Ministers and officials have also engaged with councils, housing providers, the regulator of social housing and other regulatory bodies to help us to improve our understanding of the issues and to refine our approach.

Although I have not yet received the report, I assure hon. Members that the work of the pilots has already delivered, and is delivering, real results by creating the kind of models for best practice that councils will be able to adopt. In Birmingham, a charter of rights for residents of supported housing has been developed along with a programme of support reviews and scrutiny of housing benefit claims. In Blackpool, the council has carried out a review of the support provided in accommodation for victims of domestic abuse to ensure that it is sufficient and tailored. We have seen great examples in other pilots of local government and the community working together to improve supported exempt accommodation.

Once published and made available to interested parties, the evaluation report will help us to tailor what action is needed and will be taken in future, but this is a complex area. It is important to take the time to consider the next steps carefully to ensure that we get them right. We must be careful to avoid knee-jerk measures that could have unforeseen consequences and only serve to make life harder for residents and the majority of good providers, who we would not wish to see inadvertently pushed out of the vital work that they do in the area.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

I hear the good work that the Minister is doing on the pilots, but what is to stop a rogue landlord, who wants to just take the cash and provide no services, carrying on as before in the pilot areas that he is talking about?

[Eddie Hughes]

The hon. Lady gives me the opportunity to make an important point. The “more than minimal” line was not prescribed in law—to a degree, one might say that it is even worse than that, because it came about through case law and legal challenge. Landlords and the services that they provide are a difficult area and are difficult for councils to challenge.

Fortunately, through the pilots, we have been able to help to educate council officers and explain best practice so that they have been able to challenge. The problem is that that needs to be focused and done all the time. Obviously, any council can challenge the support that is being provided, but that requires the council to put in the effort—perhaps to go round and visit the property and speak to the tenants to understand the support that is being provided—and determine whether it feels that meets the threshold and subsequently challenge. Part of the problem is that councils have done that, but because of the low level, they have lost such challenges. We need to ensure that we are helping those providers because there are a lot of good providers out there. We need to do our best to support and encourage them and then, I hope, signpost people to the appropriate accommodation for them. I appreciate and accept the difficult situation, but as I say, I hope that we will understand best practice better from the pilots and share it more widely. As I have said, should legislative changes be required, that is not something we would shy away from.

[Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

But this is bigger than just the regulation. What we have in the most deprived communities, such as Walton and Anfield, is property management companies in London, Milton Keynes and other parts of the country buying up swathes of property to run a supported housing racket. It needs intervention from Government.

[Eddie Hughes]

Just as a particular example, it is possible for councils to investigate such properties, and where landlords are seen to be letting out unsafe properties, they can apply for banning orders and fines of up to £30,000 are available, so powers are available—

[Dan Carden]

indicated dissent.

[Eddie Hughes]

I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman is shaking his head, but I would just say that councils need to be encouraged to use the legislation already available to them to the max before we reach for a legislative answer to the problem.

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

The Minister is well aware that, if councils make a decision not to provide housing benefit and they are challenged in a court of law, they will lose such cases because the law itself is not sufficiently tight to prevent the abuse that is occurring. I would like to push the Minister: he has implied that he does not want to move quickly on tightening up the regulations because he is concerned about the impact that would have on the good providers, which we all agree are trying to do the best they can in difficult circumstances, but what is it about tightening up the regulations that would be so onerous for the good providers and take out the bad providers? The way I see it, the good providers are doing what they should be doing anyway, and it is only the bad providers that would be targeted by tightening up the regulations. I really do want to hear from him what he thinks would be onerous on the good providers if he tightens up the regulations.

[Eddie Hughes]

I agree largely with what the hon. Lady says, but on what other burdens we may place on people to meet the barriers to entry or the conditions we set, we are talking about providers that work on very low margins, and any further legislative burden placed on them may just push them out of the market. On my reservation to act quickly, I am very keen to deal with this problem as quickly as we can, and I strongly suspect that she and I will be having many conversations in the coming weeks and months. I am hoping that progress will be made—so we will talk again.

It is interesting that the hon. Lady intervened at that point, because I was about to refer to the Westminster Hall debate she held recently. One of the things that struck me about that debate was that very well-tempered, very well-informed and very passionate contributions were made across the Chamber, and it feels to me as though the spirit of that debate will be extended today in the way we discuss this problem and tackle it in the future. I think we should continue in that tone, because this is not a political issue. It is something we all care about passionately, and we can all see that rogue landlords are taking money and using it inappropriately when we are talking about some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Finally, there are some exceptional providers out there that provide great-quality accommodation. They have very passionate and dedicated staff, and I would hate to think that they were in any way tarred with the brush of these rogue providers. As well as dealing with the rogue landlords, we should celebrate the success and the great work that is done by others for some of the most vulnerable in society. I look forward to the rest of the debate.