Homelessness Reduction Bill

James Berry Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 28th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)]

May I begin by extending my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on using his place on the ballot to introduce a Bill on such an important subject? I am delighted it has achieved Government support. I also want to place on record my thanks to Crisis and St Mungo’s, which have worked so hard to put this Bill together. I know a little about Crisis because my mother volunteered with Crisis at one of its London centres over Christmas last year, an experience she would thoroughly recommend to hon. Members.

I have had a huge number of letters and emails from constituents asking me to attend this debate. The one letter which particularly stood out to me came from my constituent Nathan May, aged 12, who explained to me how he had been helping with a number of local homelessness outreach projects through his church. He told me that he had seen homeless people sleeping rough in all weathers and was upset that they had nowhere to go in the cold and the wet. He could not understand how this could be possible in Britain in 2016 and urged me to do something. Well, Nathan, I hope that, with all my colleagues here today, we are doing something with the passage of this Bill—not ending the problem, but taking an important first step on the road to ending the misery of homelessness that either causes or contributes to so many other social problems from family breakdown, to mental illness, to alcohol and substance use, to children being unable to fulfil their potential because they do not have a stable home environment.

I want to speak a little about homelessness in Kingston. When people think of Kingston, they probably think of a leafy borough next to Richmond; I believe that is what Lord Prescott said when he stood at the Dispatch Box in 1998 and changed the funding for places like Kingston in a very negative way. But such opinions come from looking at the average prosperity in my borough, which masks some areas of real social deprivation with all the problems any urban constituency has, including homelessness.

The type of homelessness that I am most often contacted about is street homelessness: people who are either sleeping rough, or begging on the streets, or street-drinking during the day. This is something that we should not be seeing anywhere in 21st century Britain, but it is only a very small proportion of the overall homelessness problem in Kingston. It is a problem I am determined to tackle in my time as an MP, and I am aware that my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) announced a sizeable homelessness fund in his last Budget. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister today to update the House on how that fund might be accessed for projects like wet shelters for people with drink and drug problems in places like Kingston, so they can be built and put into operation, because many of my constituents are clear that one person sleeping rough is one person too many.

But in terms of scale, the far bigger problem is what we might call technical homelessness, which this Bill addresses. I have completed over 5,000 pieces of constituency casework since I was elected, and over 40% of them relate to housing or homelessness. Typically, a family are living in a flat in the private rental sector. The landlord seeks to increase the rent beyond what they can afford or, more commonly, serves them with an eviction notice because he wants to renovate or sell the property. The family want to stay in the area, perhaps because they work there or their children go to school there, but they cannot afford anything else in the private rental market so they become unintentionally homeless and are owed a duty by the local authority.

The next step is temporary accommodation, but unfortunately for many families in Kingston, that accommodation could be in Ealing, Hounslow or Croydon. That means that their children have to be transported to and from school, often involving a two-hour round trip each day. Others have an equally long trip to reach their job, and this is very disruptive. I find these cases particularly sad to deal with because even if I tell the family that I will write to the head of housing for them, I know what the answer will be. I will be told that they will just have to wait because there are 173 other households that have been in exactly the same situation even longer. The council will tell me that it wants to help, but it has no more temporary accommodation in Kingston.

The housing waiting list in Kingston stands at over 9,000, and some people have been on it for more than a decade. The straightforward answer might be to build more homes, but even before we take into account the high land values in Kingston, we have to ask ourselves where we are going to find the space for 9,000 units. The Conservative council in Kingston is currently working on a plan, with funding from the last Mayor of London, to rebuild and increase the density of the Cambridge Road estate, but even if that and other projects take place, it will not solve the problem. That is because house prices, and therefore rents, in Kingston are rising sharply, and more and more people are going to find that they cannot afford to pay their rent. I am therefore pleased that the Minister for Housing and Planning, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell), who no doubt has similar problems in his own area, is realigning the focus of his Department from buying to renting. I am also pleased that the Bill includes a number of robust measures that will help to solve the problem. I want to touch briefly on the matter of funding. It would be remiss of me not to say that my borough’s head of housing, Darren Welsh—a man not prone to exaggeration—welcomes the duties set out in the Bill but estimates that without additional funding there will be a shortfall in Kingston of around £500,000 per year.

In conclusion, I want to thank all the excellent charities in Kingston that do so much to combat homelessness. Without them, we would be nowhere. They include the YMCA, the South West London Law Centres, Kingston Churches Action Against Homelessness, the Joel Project at St Peter’s church, and Kingston Churches Together, which provides winter night shelters. I am genuinely grateful, as are all Kingston residents, to those organisations and to the volunteers who support them day in, day out. I thank them for all the work they do. That work will be supported by the Government, through this Bill. I thank the Government for supporting the Bill, and I thank all the hon. Members who have come to the House to support it today.