Temporary Accommodation

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) on securing this important debate and her powerful and moving speech. It is pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting).

My constituency covers part of the London borough of Lambeth and part of the London borough of Southwark. Both councils have among the most ambitious council house building programmes in the country. They are doing everything possible to deliver new, genuinely affordable homes, to prevent households from becoming homeless, and to source temporary accommodation within or very close to the borough, paying as much regard as possible to people’s support networks and where children go to school. However, they face an impossible task with the current policy and funding environment.

In 2015-16, Southwark Council placed about 3,400 households in temporary accommodation. In Lambeth there are currently about 1,500 households, including 5,000 children, in temporary accommodation. Southwark’s spend on temporary accommodation has gone up fivefold since 2011-12. Temporary accommodation is funded from a council’s general fund, and the increase in expenditure has come at exactly the same time as the Government have cut more than 50% of the direct support grant of both councils.

Across the country, more than 78,000 households, including 120,000 children, are living in temporary accommodation. The figure is up a shocking 60% since 2011 and continues to rise at 7% a year. Each one of those households is placed at greater risk of physical and mental ill health, and children in particular are more likely than their peers to have respiratory problems.

Across the country, expenditure is going up, and about £845 million was spent on temporary accommodation nationally in 2015-16. This increase in expenditure, both locally in the boroughs that cover my constituency and across the country, is not money well spent to deliver better outcomes, but money spent in a situation of last resort, delivering distress and instability for the households concerned.

Responsibility for that growth rests squarely at the door of the Government. According to the National Audit Office, Government policy is directly driving the increase in homelessness. It was the Government who imposed an arbitrary cap on the local housing allowance, which has caused an exponential increase in the number of people becoming homeless because they are unable to afford the cost of a rent increase that the LHA rate falls behind. The impact of the LHA cap could not be more stark than in Southwark, where the capped rate is just 38% of the average private sector rent. Average rent in the borough for a two-bedroom home is £694 a week, but the LHA is capped at £265. Soon, residents who are reliant on the LHA will be able to afford no private sector accommodation at all. The situation forces hundreds of households who would not previously have needed help with their housing to seek support from the council, because they find themselves facing homelessness. Temporary accommodation, much of which is both more expensive and of a much lower quality than general needs housing in the private rented sector, is often where such households are placed.

It is the Government who are refusing to listen to the overwhelming evidence that the six-week delay in receiving a universal credit payment is directly contributing to an increase in homelessness in the areas where that has been piloted, including Southwark. It will certainly continue to do so as it is rolled out, unless the Government decide to take notice of the evidence and pause the roll-out so that the problems can be addressed. It is the Government who have presided over a 95% drop in the number of social homes to rent funded by central Government grant since 2010.

I was proud to have supported the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which emerged from the Communities and Local Government Committee’s inquiry on homelessness. The Act, which places an emphasis on providing support for people facing homelessness to prevent them from becoming homeless, comes into force next year. However, preventing homelessness is labour-intensive work and there are grave concerns that the funding that the Government have committed to the Act’s implementation will not come close to fully resourcing councils for its implementation. The Act was largely based on legislation already in place in Wales, but the scale of the challenge in England is completely different. Southwark, for example, made more homelessness application decisions last year than were made in the whole of Wales over the same period. The Act must be properly resourced if it is to be effective. If it is not, the Government will have missed an enormous opportunity to take meaningful action to prevent homelessness.

I want to say a word about the personal consequences of living in temporary accommodation for my constituents. Every week in my surgeries, I see families who are at their wits’ end, living in accommodation that is overcrowded, damp and sometimes shared with strangers. Their experiences are among the most harrowing and distressing I hear. I think of my constituent who lives in a single room with her two-year-old daughter, sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities with other residents she does not know, some of whom cause disturbance and smoke cannabis on the landing outside her room. I think of the woman who, while she was pregnant, was placed in a studio flat with no running water, where she remained after the birth of her child, with the only alternatives available at the time for a mother and new-born baby being a mixed-sex hostel, or accommodation a long way from her family and support network. I also think of the couple who live with their three children, two of whom have sickle cell disease, in accommodation that is damp, cold and mouldy—conditions that precipitate frequent sickle cell crises and make it impossible to manage this painful condition effectively.

The conditions in which these constituents are forced to live are distressing enough, but these people also suffer the profound psychological consequences of living in insecurity without a permanent home, being unable to put down roots, and often travelling a long way to maintain employment and supportive relationships, particularly with their children’s school. The Government are perpetuating the problem, most notably by the LHA cap and universal credit. The public sector funds that are being spent on poor temporary accommodation could be used instead to sustain private tenancies and prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. This would deliver much better outcomes.

In his Budget statement, the Chancellor has an opportunity, a month before Christmas, to stem the increase in the number of families living in temporary accommodation and to take meaningful action to address homelessness. The Government must lift the cap on LHA, because doing so would have an instant impact on the ability of hundreds of households to sustain their private sector tenancy. They must commit to the full implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act, with funding at the level that councils require. They must also make funding available to councils and housing associations to address the supply shortfall in the short term.

The increase in the number of families living in temporary accommodation is to the Government’s shame. They must take meaningful action to reduce the distress and damage that their failed housing policies are causing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I will certainly do what I can on that. I expect that a decision should not be too far away on the issue the hon. Lady mentions. She also mentioned rogue landlords. We have to be clear that they form a small part of the private rented sector, but wherever they exist we must work to drive them out of the system. That is why in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 we introduced further measures, such as the power to levy civil penalties of up to £30,000 on a rogue landlord, with the money then going back to the local authority to invest in respect of further enforcement powers. We have also introduced banning orders, so rogue landlords can be banned from renting property to people or from being a property agent.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) mentioned the situation in Southwark. I was delighted to go there several weeks ago to visit its housing options team, who are an early adopter of the Homelessness Reduction Act. I was struck by the progress being made in Southwark and the positivity of the team there. They seem to be doing a fantastic job and have embraced the principles of the new legislation. It was obvious that they were helping more people earlier to stay in their home, and I was extremely pleased with what I saw during that visit.

[Helen Hayes]

The Minister is right to commend the excellent work that Southwark Council is doing as a trailblazer to implement the 2017 Act early. I hope that officers and members at Southwark also shared with him their grave concern that the Government’s commitment to funding for that Act extends for only two years, and that without a commitment to fund at the extent that is needed all that good work will quickly be lost.

[Mr Jones]

As the hon. Lady knows, we have invested £72 million in funding for the 2017 Act. The Act is coming into force in April, but we are putting a significant amount of that funding into councils earlier, so that they can gear up for the new Act. She will know, from being heavily involved in the Bill Committee and through the process of the legislation—I commend her for that—that the Government have committed to reviewing the new burdens funding that is being provided within two years of the Act’s implementation.

Time is moving on, so if I may, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will mention a point that the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne made about that Act. I assure him that we were looking carefully at the legislation that was introduced in Wales, but while we were considering it, an excellent opportunity arose when my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East came forward and the Government embraced his proposals.

It would be remiss of me not to offer on behalf of the Government my condolences following the death of Carl Sargeant, the Welsh Assembly Member who has regrettably passed away. I want to put it on record that the work he did on homelessness reduction in Wales has made a significant difference to the lives of people there, and the House should remember that.

The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne mentioned Labour’s action in 2003. When we look at what happened at that time, we should not forget that a lot of people were moved from their own areas during that period. A lot of people were moved out to places such as seaside resorts, where there was often little by way of job prospects or opportunities for people to make decent lives for themselves. In some of those areas, there are still social challenges caused by the decisions made at that time. The Government are committed to tackling homelessness, but also to an approach in which we try to do the best thing by people. Several Members mentioned people being moved out of areas; people should not be moved out of their area by compulsion. There should be a discussion between the local authority and the individual, based on the individual’s circumstances at the time.

The right hon. Gentleman also mentioned the rough sleeping data, which we have improved since 2010. I should point out to him that in 2010 councils were not even compelled to provide rough sleeper data to the Department. They are now, but we want to go further and to obtain more data, because we know that if we do, we will be able to work out exactly what the challenges are and why people become homeless, and we will be far more effective at dealing with it. He also mentioned rent controls, which I certainly do not think are a way to help the situation, as I said earlier. They would compound the situation and make it worse.

I thank the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden again for allowing me to set out the Government’s position on this extremely important issue. There is still a considerable amount of work to do. The Government are making progress, but we now need to accelerate it, and I think we will, particularly through the Homelessness Reduction Act, the additional funding that we have provided to local authorities, and the homelessness reduction taskforce that the Government are going to convene shortly.