Decent Homes

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tom Brake]

I thank the Minister for that intervention, and the right hon. Gentleman may want to consider that point.

I want now to focus on the position in the London borough of Sutton and to run briefly through some of the history. Sutton’s ALMO, the Sutton Housing Partnership, was one of the ALMOs that achieved two-star status only very late in the day under the previous Government. It had achieved one-star status and was on track to achieve two-star status when the previous Prime Minister announced that his Government were going to build 20,000 new homes. As Members may recall, it then emerged that that would be achieved by reallocating funds from ALMOs that were about to receive funding for the decent homes programme. When Sutton Housing Partnership achieved two-star status under the previous Government, it found that it would not get decent homes funding because of the previous Prime Minister’s announcement. Let us not say, therefore, that everything that is happening now is wrong, while everything that happened before was acceptable, because it was not. Under the previous Government, some ALMOs did not receive the funding that they had been offered.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

A number of London ALMOs were in the same situation as Sutton, including one I know in Redbridge. It is my understanding—I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman accepts this—that certain funds were forthcoming from the previous Government. They may not have been the amounts, or provided as quickly as, the hon. Gentleman would have liked, but funds nevertheless actually made their way to Sutton’s ALMO.

[Tom Brake]

Indeed. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and that was going to be my next sentence. I was going to say that £5 million—a limited amount of funding—was to be made available from April 2010 onwards. However, there was no guarantee about what would happen to the remainder of the £112 million that Sutton Housing Partnership was seeking under the decent homes programme. She is right that limited funding was made available after heavy lobbying, but that was all that was on offer to Sutton Housing Partnership.

I like to think that I am reasonably fair in these debates, and I do not want to give Opposition Members the impression that everything will now proceed apace under the coalition Government. Clearly, we face many of the same funding challenges as the previous Government. Sutton Housing Partnership has had to adjust its bid downwards to £84 million. As the hon. Member for Sheffield South East said, it is a two-star ALMO, and it worked hard with tenants, councillors and Members of Parliament to achieve two-star status. It made the necessary investment, thereby demonstrating that it has the capacity to deliver its programme. It is now bidding with ALMOs that do not have two-star status, and its tenants and I feel uncomfortable about that, given that it put so much effort in over so many years to achieve two-star status.

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[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the thoughtful speech of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal). It is probably one of the most thoughtful contributions that I have heard from a Government Member in my time here. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) on his thoughtful and knowledgeable opening remarks. I have the pleasure of serving under his chairmanship on the Communities and Local Government Committee, and I am pleased to be able to make a contribution to the debate on “Beyond Decent Homes”, which was published before I joined the Committee.

I am also pleased to be taking part in today’s debate because, precisely eight months ago today, when I spoke for the first time in the House of Commons as the newly elected MP for Lewisham East, I pressed the Government on when we would have the chance to debate the future funding of the decent homes programme. I did not think that it would take eight months to get to this stage, but I hope that it will be worth the wait.

For many of my constituents, having a decent place to call home is still more of an aspiration than a reality. Many people in my constituency—in places such as Catford, Downham, Grove Park and Blackheath—live in homes that do not meet the decent homes standard.

Thanks to the previous Labour Government, thousands of properties in my constituency are in the process of being upgraded by housing associations, such as London and Quadrant, and Affinity Sutton, and thousands more are benefiting from improvement works being carried out by Phoenix, a new community-led housing association.

However, many of my constituents, particularly those who have remained local authority tenants, are still waiting in the hope that, at some point, it will be their turn to see their flats, houses and estates turned into places where they feel proud to live, and where decades of under-investment can be put right. I want to focus on how we can achieve a decent place to live for those who are still waiting, not just in my constituency, but in the borough of Lewisham as a whole and in London more generally.

Having a decent home is something that many of us take for granted. It was rightly the ambition of the previous Government to ensure that everyone had a decent home and that those organisations delivering huge housing investment programmes were fit for purpose— efficient, well-run and well-managed organisations that could cope with the complexities of multi-million pound capital projects.

When I first became a councillor in 2004, Lewisham’s housing service, as it was then, could not be described in that way. I represented a ward in which 70% of the population rented their homes from either the council or a housing association, and day in, day out, I came across an attitude that can only be described as, “The computer says no.” I sat in evening after evening of tenant and resident association meetings, being told by people that they were ashamed to invite friends round to their flat, not because they did not have a reasonably modern kitchen or bathroom, but because they were embarrassed to ask their friends to walk up eight flights of foul-smelling stairs when the lift had broken down. They were embarrassed by the broken communal doorways, the peeling paint in the corridor, the broken windows and the leaking roof.

Although Lewisham’s new ALMO has got to grips with the culture of the old housing services and, indeed, with some of the housing management challenges, I am ashamed to say that some of the conditions on estates in my constituency resemble what I have just described. It is not right that people in the 21st century have to live this way. Sometimes, a new kitchen, a new bathroom or new windows are not going to make the sort of changes that are needed. Heathside and Lethbridge is a ’60s estate of nearly 600 properties on the edge of Lewisham town centre, and the only real answer is to knock it down and start again. However, Government cuts to the Homes and Communities Agency budget put the future phases of that redevelopment in doubt. The council has been working hard with its development partner to get the regeneration programme started, and the new Government must step up to the plate and find the funds to ensure that future phases can be built out. If they do not, they will condemn hundreds of residents to a life in completely substandard accommodation. The situation is the same with Milford Towers and Excalibur, which are smaller estates in my constituency, but whose needs are no less pressing or complicated.

Although regeneration funding is incredibly important for many areas of Lewisham, so too is the amount of money that the Government will make available to local authority landlords to carry out decent homes works. That was an issue that my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) raised earlier, and it is the issue to which I will now turn.

I have already touched on the transformation that has taken place in our local ALMO. It has been a long, hard slog for the board, and I pay tribute to the resident chair, Julia Cotton, and the chief executive, Andrew Potter, for bringing about that change. However, as a result of the Government’s announcement in the comprehensive spending review, Lewisham Homes finds itself facing increasing uncertainty about the amount of money that it will receive to carry out desperately needed works. Of the ALMO’s 13,000 tenanted homes, 7,300 do not meet the decency standard.

In March 2010, the previous Government indicated that £154 million would be made available to Lewisham Homes to carry out the decent homes programme if it met the two-star rating, which, I should say, it achieved last summer. However, last October, as part of the CSR, this Government insisted that local authority landlords would have to fund 10% of all outstanding improvement works themselves. Lewisham’s bid has therefore been reduced to £126 million, to be spread over four years from April this year. Like many other ALMOs and local authorities throughout the country, we are waiting to hear the outcome of our bid.

My biggest fear—my right hon. Friend touched upon this—is that Lewisham Homes will not get anywhere near the amount of money that it needs. In the CSR, the Government announced £1.6 billion to meet the outstanding decent homes requirements of local authority landlords. London local authorities alone estimate that their outstanding investment need is £2.5 billion. London has 46% of the 150,000 homes identified by the Government last year as eligible for that funding. Therefore, even if London gets 46% of the overall sum, £736 million is a long way off £2.5 billion. I must therefore question whether Lewisham will get £126 million of that money.

Lewisham Homes has also received scant recognition for its work in achieving a two-star rating from the Audit Commission. As the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) has said, the Government’s current approach does not seem to take account of all the hard work put in by ALMOs that have achieved the two-star status. I think that that says to those people, “Tough luck—you’re now lumped back into the mix, just like everyone else.”

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I understand what the hon. Lady is saying about the two-star rating and, listening to this debate, I can see both sides of the argument on the two stars. However, I represent part of the borough of Charnwood, in which Charnwood Neighbourhood Housing is the ALMO. It has struggled for a long time to get to its two-star rating. Under the previous Labour-controlled local administration, it had no stars. We are now up to one star, and are trying very hard to get to two. The difficulty with the hon. Lady’s argument is that the tenants, through no fault of their own—the problems with management are not their fault—have lost out on any investment over the past 13 years in relation to decent homes. Now they are in round six and still face receiving less money. Does she appreciate that point?

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[Heidi Alexander]

I do appreciate the hon. Lady’s well-made point. The ability of organisations to deliver complex capital projects is an issue. Although the assessment process for two stars may not be perfect and although the hon. Lady’s ALMO may be completely capable of delivering such a programme, we have to be careful about where money goes. I appreciate that times are difficult for her tenants and that she would like to see investment in their homes as much as I would like to see it in those of my constituents.

[Kate Hoey]

On the question of cost and complex projects, one of the things that residents on many of our estates continually comment upon when they see the capital projects is the number of hugely expensive consultants that seem to be employed on ridiculous salaries. On the cost of doing some of these quite small projects on small estates, does my hon. Friend think that the new coalition Government should look at new ways of getting the money to get the windows on an estate done in a way that does not involve these grotesque salaries that seem to go to everyone?

[Heidi Alexander]

I completely share my hon. Friend’s concerns about that and I press the Government to look at new ways of making sure that public money is used in the best way possible. My experience on Lewisham council—indeed, I was also a member of the Lewisham Homes board for a year—showed me that the right skills need to be in place to make sure that programmes are delivered effectively and efficiently. I am not saying that things cannot change in that respect and that money cannot be saved, but clearly people need to have the right clienting skills to get the most out of the contract.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I understand the point that my hon. Friend is making, and I pay tribute to those ALMOs and councils that are well run, deliver good programmes, have got their two-star rating and are obviously improving things. The point made by the hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) is, nevertheless, important: by restricting ourselves to investing where there is a two-star rating, we are actually punishing the tenants and the residents. There needs to be some thought about how one can still deliver a programme either by some other means or by forcing the authorities to be more efficiently run and so on. I am not advocating throwing money away or bad management; I am advocating recognising that our duty as public servants is to the tenants and to the residents. We need to ensure that public money is invested in them and think carefully about the matter.

[Heidi Alexander]

My hon. Friend makes some good points, and I am sure that he will appreciate my role as a representative of Lewisham. I know what effort has been put in by my local residents, by the members of the board and by the staff who have worked incredibly hard. They feel very disappointed by the fact that although they have put in a huge amount of effort, that will not necessarily give them a greater chance of accessing funds.

If I can move on, I shall say something about the particular situation that we face in London. In the capital, we have the potential problem of higher unit costs—by that, I mean that it would perhaps cost more to bring an individual property up to standard in London than it would elsewhere in the country. That is because of the cost of construction labour in the capital and the fact that a number of homes are of a non-standard construction type. Anyone who looks at the skyline in London will see a large number of high-rises. Such buildings can cost a lot of money to bring up to the decent homes standard. I am hoping that the Minister appreciates those regional subtleties and that he will give me some assurance that such issues will be taken into account when the applications are considered.

Before I finish, I shall touch on the importance of the proposed reform of the housing revenue account annual subsidy system. The way in which historic debt is allocated to local authorities is very important and must be addressed as part of the reform. The ability of ALMOs and councils to meet the decent homes standard and to continue to meet those standards as some homes fall out of decency—as mentioned earlier—will be determined by how we allocate that debt and resolve the issue of HRA reform. I do not claim to be an expert on the matter and I can only begin to imagine how incredibly complex it must be to try to reform it but, for areas such as mine that have significant investment needs and a large amount of housing stock, it is too important to get wrong.

I could say much more on the matter—not least about standards in the private rented sector, which now accounts for a third of all households, as it does in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn)—but I am conscious of the time and the fact that other hon. Members want to speak. In conclusion, I urge Ministers to reconsider the amount of money that has been allocated to the future programme. I ask them not to forget the importance of comprehensive estate regeneration schemes—new kitchens and bathrooms are all well and good, but sometimes the problems of an area cannot be solved by such things alone. Finally, in moving beyond decent homes, my plea is this: do not walk on by areas such as mine, where significant need so blatantly exists and where investment can really change people’s lives.

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[Simon Hughes]

That is a real issue. When the London Docklands Development Corporation was developing Rotherhithe and Surrey docks, it contracted with a consortium of six housing associations to develop the place at the end of the Rotherhithe peninsula. That was fine in practice, and all the housing associations were very interested, but when it came to delivering the management of that bit of the borough, it was hopeless because problems arose over the common parts and the public roads. In the end, the housing associations had to agree that one of them would take over the management of all the areas owned by the other five.

My friend, the hon. Member for Vauxhall, argued strongly in favour of tenant-management organisations, which I support and which are often small, bottom-up organisations. Ways must be found of allowing such organisations to retain that degree of autonomy, but within a federation of local housing associations. That may be the way in which we can bring together the small specific housing associations without being draconian and say that they must pass a specific threshold.

It was good that the Labour Government set up the decent homes programme in 2000. For the record, it was sad that they fell short. I understand all the constraints that existed, but in the end the programme did not deliver on its aspiration. It was a judgment call. The result was that the new build of housing under Labour was dreadful—in fact it was more dreadful than under a previous Tory Government. Labour will have to defend that judgment call. The present Government are right in saying—the Minister and I were talking about this only recently—that they have to encourage both new build and the renovation of existing stock. We must do both in parallel; we cannot put all our eggs in one basket.

All local authorities that have social housing—apart from areas in the north-west, such as Burnley, where there is a surplus of housing and where the issues are entirely different—need both new build and renovation. I am talking about all the London boroughs and most of the rest of the country, both rural and urban.

There also needs to be flexibility in the decent homes standard. As Nick Stanton says, there are different criteria for someone on the seventh floor of Lupin Point in my constituency in Bermondsey and for someone in a cottage in a tin-mining village in Cornwall, which may still be local authority-owned. There needs to be the flexibility for that to be defined locally.

When my colleagues were leading the administration in Southwark, they always said that they wanted to apply their own standards rather than the off-the-shelf Government standards. There is also a very different view from the residents. I visited the famous prefab estate in Lewisham—I do not know whether it is in the constituency of the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander)—which is a wonderful place to go. I have not followed every twist and turn of the saga, but I think that I am right in saying that the council has decided to have it demolished. I regret that because, bizarrely, prefabs that have existed since the war were very popular homes for the people who lived in them. They will not conform to all the decent homes standards, but they were warm and had gardens. Therefore, we should be careful about not being over-prescriptive from the centre.

[Heidi Alexander]

Given that the right hon. Gentleman raised the subject of the Excalibur estate, I cannot resist making a comment. He is right to say that the council has decided to demolish and rebuild the estate, but it made that decision after conducting a ballot of all tenants on the estate. The ballot was incredibly close, with more than 50% voting for the demolition and just under 50% voting against it. The costs of renovating the properties and bringing them up to a decent standard were considered. Indeed that was something that many families who live on that estate very dearly wanted. None the less, the difficult decision has been taken.

[Simon Hughes]

I appreciate how difficult the decision was. Prefab homes are often really popular—they were in Southwark—and there are not many left. That prefab estate was the iconic last redoubt of the post-war London prefab.

I make a plea to the Minister and, through him and his colleagues, to local councils. The decent homes programme must always be re-evaluated on the basis of an up-to-date stock condition survey, but other flexibilities are needed as well. The first is the flexibility to which my friend the hon. Member for Vauxhall referred; I heard the exchange between her and the Chair of the Select Committee. It is nonsense that Lambeth has 600 empty council properties—that is the figure that I was given—because they are allegedly not decent homes, so after tenants leave, the council cannot put another tenant in. There must be a non-bureaucratic, non-municipalist way to engage people from the voluntary sector and community groups to make those homes liveable. There are always people willing to do so. We cannot allow only builders and plumbers in; there are lots of people. I can think of a mate of mine who has just retired—he worked in the bus garage in Catford, as it happens—who is a really good handyman. He is looking for things to do in his early retirement, and he has fantastic construction skills. Lots of people are willing to do it. We must engage the community and ensure that homes do not sit empty just because they are not in the council’s programme for 2011.

The other thing that is needed is decent common spaces such as entrance halls, lift lobbies and landings. It makes all the difference. Like my colleagues, whether in Nottingham or London, I can go to two tower blocks in the same borough of identical build and identical height, one of which is clean and pleasant, smells nice, looks nice and has had a touch of paint, the other of which, of the same age, is dreadful and unkempt with peeling paint. We must ensure that councils understand that they should be able to get on with the quick and easy bits of work that can improve people’s quality of life hugely for five years without massive spend: it is not about putting in new lifts or redoing the whole building; it is not about having scaffolding up to the 20th floor for half a year; it is about little things.

Much more inventiveness is needed to make homes in the public and socially rented sector the same quality as we would want our places to be. For me, the test is always, “Would I want to live here and invite my family to come into this flat?” If the flat is great but getting there is like going through a sewer, to be blunt, that is not acceptable.