Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab) [V]]

On the cladding crisis, I regret that there was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to protect leaseholders from having to pay to fix faults that are not of their making. When the Building Safety Bill comes before us, Ministers will find that amendments are tabled to provide that protection to leaseholders. We are not giving up and there are a growing number of Members of this House, including on the Government Benches, who are determined to do right by our constituents, because they have run out of patience and are running out of time. As their lives remain on hold, their flats remain worthless, they face monthly bills for waking watches and insurance premiums, and the demands are starting to arrive for sums of money that they simply do not have.

As the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), rightly pointed out, offering to solve half the problem will not work, because there are other fire safety defects. As the recent fire at New Providence Wharf reminded us, living in an unsafe building is not a theoretical risk; it is an actual risk. I know it is difficult for Ministers, but believe you me it is nothing like the difficulty that our leaseholders are living with. The only solution is to make loan funding available to the blocks to fix all the problems and then to pay back the cost of that loan over the long term by levying the house builders and developers.

My second concern in the context of this debate is for all those in rent arrears because of covid. As the moratorium on evictions comes to an end, what is the Government’s plan to stop lots of people being made homeless? I am not aware that there is one. At the beginning of the crisis, the Secretary of State said, as we heard earlier, that

“no renter who has lost income due to coronavirus will be forced out of their home”,

yet when the Government recently announced that the bailiff-enforced eviction ban would be extended to 31 May, their own press notice said:

“This will ensure residents in both the private and social sector can stay in their homes and have enough time to find alternative accommodation”.

Those two statements do not square. Either my constituents will be able to stay in their own homes or they will have to find alternative accommodation because they have been evicted. Which is it? And by the way, where is the alternative accommodation that they can afford?

This brings me finally to the planning Bill, which I think will have a rough ride. I do not think it will fix the problem that it is trying to address. Ministers have announced many changes to the planning system in the last decade or so, and all of them have tried in one way or another to remove power from local communities, because it is argued that they are the main obstacle to house building. I think that analysis is wrong. A growing number of people contact me as an MP because they live in unsatisfactory and overcrowded accommodation. They bid with hundreds of others for a council property, they cannot afford to buy and they cannot afford to rent privately. There simply are not enough council houses, so local authorities need the means and the funding to build them.

We are never going to have enough homes if we just rely on the volume house builders, because they will build only the number of properties they think they can sell at the price they want to get for them. That is why we have planning permissions unbuilt, which is hardly a sign of a planning system that is working. I read that Ministers are contemplating a “use it or lose it” levy, and I think that is a very sensible idea. Indeed, we proposed it six years ago. Even where local communities come forward to designate sites, they do not have the power to ensure that that is where the new homes are built. Community after community can tell the story of sites being identified locally, whereupon the house builders come along and say, “I’m really sorry, that doesn’t work for us, but what about that greenfield site over there?” And even if their planning application is refused, they are pretty confident that they will win on appeal.

I cannot think of a system less likely to encourage local communities to take responsibility than one in which the final decision is removed from their hands. That is why local communities should have the power to determine exactly where the new homes are built, what kind of homes are constructed and who gets them. It is not surprising that we see resistance to new homes if the community knows that no one on its waiting list and no one living locally who is hoping to buy their first home can have any chance of affording them. How many more planning Bills will it take before we come to the realisation that in the end local communities have in every sense to take responsibility? I believe that if we give them all the tools, they will do the job.