Social Housing

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

May I add my thanks to my hon. Friends the Members for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western), and for Stroud (Dr Drew)—the real midlands engine behind this debate? The fact that we have had speeches from Members from around the country shows that this is a national crisis. The problems are different, but housing supply goes to the heart of them.

In high-value land areas such as my constituency, the problem is particularly intense. House prices are more than 20 times earnings, and the average rent of all properties is more than £2,000 a month. The lowest quartile of house prices, which are the properties we would perhaps expect people on low incomes to be able to afford, reaches well over £500,000. Indeed, the only type of accommodation that is affordable to anybody on the London living wage, let alone the minimum wage, is social rented housing. That is why I am very pleased we are having a debate specifically on this issue. Yes, we need a greater supply of many different types of housing, including in the private rented sector, of good quality and at affordable rents, and we obviously need owner occupation, but the real crisis that has developed over the last 30 or 40 years is in the supply of affordable housing.

I do not want to talk too much about statistics, but there are two or three that I find particularly pregnant. One is the 165% increase in rough sleeping since 2010. There is no good reason for that to have happened, other than Government policy and neglect. Another is the number of social rented homes being built. I think the number was about 6,500 in the year for which figures are most recently available, compared with 40,000 in the last year of the previous Labour Government, but in the decades after the war, the figure was regularly 120,000 a year, year after year. Those disparities show exactly why it is no surprise that we have a crisis.

I would add another statistic. It is slightly more esoteric, but it is an indication of how Government policy has gone off the rails. The London Assembly member Tom Copley did a very good report recently on permitted development—in other words, the conversion, without the requirement for planning consents, of office blocks to residential accommodation, or the slums of the future, as they are now being called. I suppose a silver lining to that cloud is that none of those will actually be social housing slums, because not one of those properties is likely to be a social home. Of the 300 converted in Hammersmith since the policy changed five or six years ago, not one will be a social rented home.

That is one method by which the Government ensure that social housing is always the poor relation, and is never delivered. It is why, rather than talk about the statistics, I will talk in the few minutes I have about the politics. Unless we confront the political differences between the two parties, we will not deliver on social housing. There are obviously big differences on other areas of public policy—the NHS, education and so forth—but there is deeply ingrained in the post-Thatcher era Conservative party an antipathy to and a manipulation of social housing, which has ensured that it has declined over those 40 years.

It is interesting that we now hear Conservative politicians—I do not know whether these are the beginnings of an apology—talking about the stigma of social housing. I have never felt that there was any stigma attached to social housing. That may be because it accounts for a third of my constituency, so it is prevalent. It may also be because it is absolutely in demand, because of its affordability. There has not been such a thing as a hard-to-let property in Hammersmith since the 1970s, and there are long waiting lists for any particular type of home. That is also because, as in the case of many London boroughs—I do not know about the situation outside London—a large proportion of our stock is what are called acquired properties. These are on-street properties that are now very valuable—Victorian and Edwardian houses that were bought up when they were cheap in the 1970s and 1980s—and they are giving life to the mixed communities that we enjoy in London, and which have been imperilled, as I say, by Conservative Government policies.

We heard the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) refer to the policies of the Thatcher Government and the right-to-buy policy. However, if that had been just about home ownership—about enabling people to buy their home, which is a popular and perfectly justifiable policy—we would have had the replacement of those homes. The demand for social housing did not suddenly go away overnight in 1980s; it continued. However, that replacement has never happened, and it does not happen now. Even now, despite a lot of attention being drawn to the issue, only two social homes are replaced for every five that are sold off.

The policy was actually about politics and social engineering. It was about trying to outwit the Labour party through what was perceived to be a part of its own electorate, by saying to people, “We will give you a very valuable asset for way below the value of it”, and that is perhaps why in Basildon it became popular on all sides. The policy was about something else as well. It was about saying—going back to the point about stigma—“You can do better than that,” and, by implication, “If you don’t buy your own home, but stay in a council house or housing association property, there must be something wrong with you.” The policy was taken up and developed in a more and more aggressive way, particularly in London, by Conservative politicians in the 1980s and 1990s.

I am thinking of the era of Shirley Porter—that was about straight political advantage as well, but it was not just about that—and about what Wandsworth Council did, as well as what was later done with my own council houses and those in Fulham. These cases are prime exponents of how to manipulate what should be the most important asset in people’s lives for political, social and, in some cases, moral purposes. People were told that council housing created a dependency culture, and that people should be paying market rents. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) said in an intervention, we saw that extraordinary and damaging shift from subsidising land and building to subsidising private landlords, primarily through the extraordinary increase in housing benefit, with billions of pounds every year being wasted in that way.

There is a document that I often refer to, and will go on referring to until it is better known. It was written about 10 years ago by the then Conservative leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, and it had wide currency and gained a lot of favour with the coalition Government. In effect, it proposed the end of council housing based on four principles. The first was that we should have near-market rents, and not have below-market rents. The second was that we should have no subsidy to allow the building of social housing. The third was that there should be no security—no more lifetime tenancies, only fixed-term tenancies that were renewable. Finally, there should be no legal duty on local authorities to rehouse people, as there is under the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 for those who fall into vulnerable categories.

The explicit aim was to reduce over time the volume of social housing to about 5% to 10% of what it currently is. That may sound like fantasy, but three and a half of those four principles were quickly adopted by the coalition Government, and we have seen the effect of that in the 10 years since then. There are now affordable rents that are 80% of market rents, and short-term tenancies that mean that families grow up in insecurity, not with a home, but with temporary accommodation for that period.

The cut in subsidies that my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) referred to cut away at a stroke the ability of councils to build new homes, and led to the massive decline that has been mentioned. We did not quite get no duty towards homeless people, but we got a duty that could be discharged in the private rented sector. The effect of benefit cuts and other measures introduced by the coalition Government was that people were placed in temporary accommodation or in the private rented sector and were often—because of the cost of renting in high-value areas—sent a long way from home. Those policies may have been dreamed up in policy forums in west London, but they got the ear of the then Minister of State for Housing and Planning, now Chairman of the Conservative party, and quickly became policy, and that has led to the parlous situation that we are in.

Let me be a little more specific and concrete by describing what happened in my area when there was a change of political control. We had eight years of the Conservatives running Hammersmith. Social housing was not only a low priority, but was sold off as it became vacant. More than 300 council homes, which tended to be the larger, more expensive three and four-bedroom street properties, were sold off, so that they were no longer available to rehouse people. In most cases, there was no requirement on developers to provide any social housing. There was a policy not to build any more, and to reduce the quantity of social housing in an area that had more than 10,000 people on the housing waiting list—a problem that was resolved by abolishing the housing waiting list.

Let me contrast that with the current situation in Hammersmith under a Labour council whose first and clearest priority is to resolve those problems, and whose second priority is to provide decent-quality, affordable social housing for a new generation. In partnership, it is building 440 new affordable homes, with the possibility of another 300 on top of that. Through development deals, and as a result of the council pushing developers hard to ensure that a large proportion of new housing is affordable, there could be another nearly 2,400 homes. Over the current four-year planning period, we expect more than 3,000 new affordable homes to be built in a borough that has some of the highest land prices in the country. At least a quarter of those will be new social homes—the first to be constructed for many years in the borough.

That development will make a profound difference to the lives of my constituents. The difference between living in insanitary, overcrowded and insecure housing, and having a proper, secure, assured tenancy of a property that is well constructed and maintained, cannot be overestimated. That should be a priority for this Government, but it simply has not been a priority for Conservative—and indeed Liberal Democrat—Governments over the past few years.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman’s point about safe, decent housing goes to the heart of the concerns of my constituents in Deans South. Decades ago, they were sold substandard housing by West Lothian Council, and many of them have had to live there for many years. They include a constituent who has bronchial issues, as does her son. We are close to a resolution, but it will take the will of the council, the developer, social housing, and local politicians. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when there is an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past, we should work across the political divide and do everything we can to do that?

[Andy Slaughter]

I agree, and it is good to hear that message coming from different parties, regions and countries. I hope that we will also hear it from Conservative Members. Hon. Members might have gathered that I am not entirely persuaded of the bona fides of the Conservative and Unionist party on this matter, but if it genuinely wishes to change its spots there is now an opportunity to do that. That must, however, involve a large-scale building programme of social housing in this country. Frankly, I do not see that aim among the current incumbents responsible for the job, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.

Even in the past few years, the Housing and Planning Act 2016 attempted to allow the sale of housing association homes; I am glad that attempt has been abandoned. The prospect of means-testing for council tenants created more insecurity and led to the treatment of social housing as second-class housing. That idea has also been abandoned. We have seen a change in recent years, in that the Government are less willing to take up extreme right-wing and radical policies, but we have not seen any alternative. I am sure that when the Minister responds to the debate, he will have statistics prepared by his civil servants, but such statistics never persuade anybody. We will believe there is a commitment to social housing when the Government start to build it, enabling and motivating local authorities and housing associations to build houses at an affordable rent. Without that, everything else is rhetoric.