Budget Resolutions

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Commons Chamber

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

It has been my privilege to represent Dulwich and West Norwood for almost nine years. Prior to my election to this place in 2015, I had served since 2010 as a local ward councillor in the constituency, having been elected on the same day that the coalition Government came to power.

For my entire time as an elected representative so far, I have seen Conservative-led Governments making my constituents poorer, and undermining and diminishing the services on which they rely. As a newly elected councillor in 2010, I remember how shocked we were to receive the local government budget settlement that stripped millions from the council’s budget. We worked through it creatively and prioritised the services that mattered most to our residents. We protected libraries, ensured the streets remained clean and continued delivering services for vulnerable children and adults.

We had no idea just how much more was to come. Both the local authorities that serve my constituents have lost more than 60% of their central Government funding. Those losses are in no way adequately replaced by the increases in council tax—a regressive tax that takes proportionately more from residents on lower incomes—that the Government forced our councils to make.

The single biggest practical issue affecting my constituents is housing. I have far too many constituents living in temporary or overcrowded accommodation, unable to access the genuinely affordable homes they need, or in accommodation that has damp and mould, with profound implications for their health.

This Government’s political decisions have deepened the housing crisis year on year for more than a decade. The coalition Government’s decision to slash two thirds from the budget for building new social homes stymied the development of exactly those homes that make the biggest impact on the housing crisis. Their decision to impose unfunded restrictions on social rents has taken £1 billion from the budget of Southwark Council alone over 30 years, funding that would have been spent on repairs, maintenance and delivering new council homes.

The decision to change the definition of an affordable home—making a mockery of the term “affordable”, because 80% of market rent in London is nowhere near affordable for residents on average incomes, still less so for those on the lowest incomes—meant that far too many of the homes that have been built in London on this Government’s watch have made no impact at all on those who are suffering the worst effects of the housing crisis. The Government’s failure to ban section 21 evictions, even though they had promised to do so, leaves thousands of my constituents at the mercy of their private landlords and without any security at all. The Conservatives’ political decisions on housing are unconscionable. They are also contributing to the pressures on other areas of our public services.

The Government want to talk about productivity, so let me set out the impact of the housing crisis on productivity. GPs working in my constituency tell me about the mental and physical health impacts of the housing crisis. Hospital doctors tell me about the impact of poor housing on discharges. Youth workers tell me about the impact on the ability of young people to do their homework or to relax at home, and how that drives them out of their home to places where they are less safe. Social workers speak about the intolerable pressures on families created by the housing situation, and how hard that makes it for some parents to care for their children safely. Across the country, people are looking at their own lives, at the state of their town centres and neighbourhoods, and at their ability to access the services they need. It is as plain as day that after 14 years of Conservative-led government, nothing is better than it was in 2010.

I turned to the Budget in search of any sign that the Government understand just how bad things are—the terrible state of things on their watch—but there was just one brief announcement on housing: £20 million for community-led housing. There is nothing wrong with community-led housing, but that public investment amounts to less than £140,000 for every housing authority in England, or less than £16 for every household on the housing waiting list. It is not a plan to solve the most pervasive and pernicious crisis in housing since the second world war. It does not touch the sides. It simply reveals how out of touch the Conservatives are with the day-to-day reality of life for millions of people across our country.

My constituents have had enough of their lives getting worse under the Conservatives. They have had enough of a Government who do not understand their lives and have no ambition for our communities. It is time for them to step aside and make way for a Labour Government who can begin the work of rebuilding the appalling damage that has been done.