Housing (London)

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I am very pleased that we have secured this debate on housing needs in London. There is a feeling of déjà vu about it, although the cast is smaller than usual for debates on housing in London. We have had many such debates and discussions and I suspect there will be many more, because the biggest single issue facing constituents of London MPs is housing problems, which affect just about everyone in every sector. I remain acutely disappointed by the Government’s policies in this respect and the response they have offered so far to the deepening crisis that people in London face.

Homelessness has returned to the streets of London and is increasing fast, as anyone walking around London late at night will quickly observe. I am talking about the numbers of desperate and destitute people sleeping in shop doorways, hanging round outside tube stations and sleeping over central heating exhaust vents. Indeed, the Evening Standard reported that a number of people had been found sleeping in rubbish chutes in west London. That is not a good advertisement for what is a very large, multicultural and diverse city in the 21st century—a city that sees itself as a world-class leader.

Other issues, which I shall go through in my remarks, include the costs of housing for people living in the private rented sector, the enormous shortage of council housing, and what I believe is something of a democratic deficit in the administration and development of housing associations.

Later today, a housing lobby will take place outside the House and probably also in Committee Rooms here. Many people who are council tenants and others will be making the very strong point that the desperate housing shortage in London and the rest of the country must be dealt with, that the market alone cannot solve the problem and, indeed, that the Government strategies, far from solving the problem, are making it considerably worse.

I shall say more about this later, but within the mix of housing in London, the difference with the rest of the country is that the national average for home ownership is about 70% and declining, whereas in London it is declining much faster and, in constituencies such as mine, the proportion of people living in and owning their own home hovers at about the 30% mark and falling. For my constituency and for most of central London, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) will testify—similar figures will apply in his constituency—the difference is the very large numbers of people living in private rented accommodation.

Let me first deal with the issues relating to home ownership in London. For the majority of people on anything approaching an average income, the idea of owning one’s own property in London is a pipe dream. They may have a chance of purchasing on a part-rent, part-buy basis—a shared-ownership scheme. However, in central London constituencies such as mine, people would need to have an income well above the national average—indeed, we are talking about an income of £40,000 or more—to get anywhere near meeting the mortgage requirements, if they can get a mortgage and if they can raise the deposit required. For the majority of people in London, unless they have a degree of inherited wealth from their parents or someone else, or access to the very large deposits required by banks and building societies, home ownership is an impossible dream.

Many people have opted to buy into leaseholds or shared ownership with housing associations, and there are deep concerns about the service charges imposed by housing associations and other holders of freeholds who sell on leases in their properties. There is a need for even greater transparency on capital works undertaken to improve those properties. Those of us who represent constituencies where there are a considerable number of leaseholders who have bought in on the right to buy, or bought from people who bought their flat under the right to buy from the local authority, know that there are constant disputes about the costs of capital works and the repayments required. Indeed, they leave some people in a penurious state.

I suspect that many people, when they buy into leasehold properties, are completely unaware of the implications of lease ownership in relation to capital works and vastly and rapidly increasing service charges. I look to the Government to be prepared to be much more transparent and much tougher on regulation in this respect. It is an area of inquiry that the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government ought to be looking into.

The Government’s normal refrain in any debate on anything is that everything that is a problem in our society is the fault of the previous Government. I want to place on the record a couple of points about the previous Government’s record. First, I strongly praise them for the work they did on the decent homes standard, and for the huge and very necessary investment that was made to deal with the repair backlog in council and housing association accommodation. It is a joy to see estates that have been transformed with new kitchens, new bathrooms, new roofs, new windows, new entrance areas and common parts, improvements in the community facilities and improvements in community centres. That creates a sense of pride and well-being in a community that it is hard for anyone to appreciate who has not been through the misery of living on badly run council estates with run-down common areas and high levels of vandalism. I am talking about the sense of pride that comes from the improvements and the reductions in vandalism and antisocial behaviour that result from them. By and large, the decent homes standard work that has been done has been a very good experience. I regret the way in which the so-called choice was put to tenants—that they had to go either to an arm’s length management organisation or for a stock transfer in order to receive central Government money for that. Fortunately, those policies were eventually changed so that all tenants, irrespective of the quality of management or otherwise of their local authority, could receive the central Government money that is so necessary and valuable.

However, as the Minister will know from a recent debate on this subject, a number of local authorities in London did not do very well or did not get any decent homes standard money. They and their tenants desperately need those improvements. I am thinking particularly of Camden and Lewisham, but I suspect they are not the only examples of authorities that need that special attention to achieve improvements in their properties.

The other great step forward that the previous Government made was on homelessness and the rough sleepers initiative, increasing the number of hostel places and encouraging the various charities that run hostels, or local authorities, to provide, as a priority, transfers from those into long-term, permanent, affordable accommodation. That was an important step forward, as was giving priority to people who have come out of prison—long-term offenders who need to be rehabilitated into society. Forcing them into homelessness and poverty is not a way of rehabilitating them and is no good for society as a whole. I am constantly and increasingly shocked by the number of homeless people one meets who are either ex-service people—usually ex-servicemen—or ex-prisoners and convicts. It does not do our society any good to ignore those people and force them into homelessness.

I realise that the Government’s general strategy on housing allocation policies is to leave the issue to local government and to walk away from it entirely, but I ask Ministers and local authorities to think carefully about those policies. We have rightly emphasised the needs of families with children, the vulnerable, those who suffer illnesses, including mental illness, and vulnerable elderly people. Obviously, they are all a priority, but we seem completely to ignore the needs of youngish single people when it comes to providing reasonable, publicly accessible local authority or housing association properties.

It is depressing to have such young people come to see me in my advice bureau, and I am sure other colleagues have had the same experience. The person in front of us will usually be a young man, who will often be in a reasonable job. They will be earning £18,000 or £20,000 a year, but they simply cannot get anywhere to live, because they cannot afford the deposit on a private rented place. In any event, the rent would be very high—possibly £250 or more a week. These people cannot access local authority housing because they are not deemed to be in priority need. One therefore comes across people—I am sure colleagues can bear this out—who hold reasonable jobs but who have no permanent home. They are sofa-surfing or, in some cases, even sleeping in cars, which is tragic. When we look at housing allocation, we need to address the needs of not only families and others, but single people.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I accept that the onus cannot be entirely on local authorities, and that point is well made. However, there is a lot that the local authority can do to place empty homes back on the market. My constituency covers Richmond and Kingston, and there are up to 2,000 empty homes in each of those boroughs. By that, I do not mean homes that have been waiting to be refurbished or homes that cannot be sold, but empty homes by any standard. If, for starters, we multiply the 4,000 homes in those two boroughs by the number of boroughs across London, we have an enormous number of empty homes that could be brought back on to the market and used. Does the hon. Gentleman think that the Government could do more to empower local authorities to get such homes back on the market?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Local authorities have powers in this respect, if they care to use them, and some authorities do. Indeed, the local authority in my area is extremely proactive in pursuing empty properties and trying to bring them into rented use or have them taken over by a housing association or somebody else. Typically, these are places such as flats above shops. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: there is something criminally wrong about large numbers of good-quality homes being deliberately kept empty across London. Some owners see them as long-term, reserve places that they might live in at some distant point in the future. Some see them as an investment and will wait for property prices to go up. In a society where there is so much homelessness and housing stress, it is simply immoral for places to be kept deliberately empty. I would therefore support effective measures to bring those homes back into use by people who are in desperate housing need.

Where the previous Government did act rather belatedly was on the construction of housing association and council properties. There was an increase in housing association build, most of which came about under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and planning agreements on particular local sites. However, there was not enough intervention, and the previous Government were not proactive enough. Only rather belatedly did we start building council housing. I am pleased to say that my local authority is now building council housing again. That started during the latter period of the previous Government, when the then Liberal-controlled council brought the programme into being. That programme has continued and is being expanded under the current Labour-run administration in Islington. However, the authority lacks the capital that it requires from the Homes and Communities Agency. When the Minister replies, therefore, I hope he will understand that housing and building costs are high in London, that housing need is desperate and that the only long-term, efficient way out of the housing crisis is to construct council housing at fixed rents and with permanent tenure, which gives people a sense of security, a decent home and an environment in which to grow up.

Before I come to housing benefit, let me say one thing. If we go to any primary school, secondary school, police station or social worker in London and ask what the biggest problem is that we face, we will be told that it is related to housing in one way or another. Young people are growing up in small, overcrowded flats, with two or three siblings sharing a bedroom. That is no way to grow up. Young people in those circumstances cannot bring friends home and they cannot do their homework. There are fights over the television, there are fights over when the lights should be switched on and off—there are fights the whole time simply about space. Anyone who goes into a flat where three teenagers are sharing a room will see the arguments that go on and the stress that is caused to the whole family. What happens as a result? The teenagers do not stay home of an evening; they go out. They do not have a lot of money, so they get into bad company when they go out, and problems result from that. These teenagers underachieve in school. Illness runs rife throughout the whole family. The family breaks up. There is a huge cost to us all in terms of wasted lives, underachieving children, broken families, divorce and everything else. We must recognise that unless we provide all our young people with decent, secure, clean, dry and properly repaired accommodation, it is very unlikely that they will achieve their full potential in school, college or university. We are wasting a whole generation as a result of our failure to address the housing crisis in London.

Local authorities have great difficulty fulfilling their statutory housing obligations to house homeless families or those in desperate need. They do not have enough council or housing association allocations to do that. Incidentally, there is a whole science around allocation, with people looking at the choice of bidding or desperately looking on internet sites and reading newspapers to find out how many points they need to get which flat, how many steps are involved and all the other details, which are so important. However, most of those people, most of the time, will be desperately disappointed because they will fail even to be selected to look at a place, never mind to be shortlisted for possible allocation. For thousands and thousands of people, it is like losing a lottery every week, but the consequences are desperate. We therefore need to address the issue.

Local authorities often place families in private rented accommodation. I do not blame them for that; they have no choice. A whole industry has therefore grown up around the housing shortage, with letting agencies and private landlords charging as much as they can get away with. The housing benefit system will usually pay the rent. Although it varies slightly from borough to borough, the rent for a typical two-bedroom local authority flat in central London is of the order of £100 a week. A two-bedroom flat in poor condition in the private sector costs at least £250 a week, and £300 is quite common. For a house, we are looking at £500 or £600 a week. The difference is paid through housing benefit, so we are all paying the exorbitant profits made by letting agencies and private landlords; they are the people who are living off the housing benefit system.

When the Government say, as the previous Government did, that they have to address the problem of the cost of housing benefit, particularly in London, I absolutely agree, because pouring money into the private sector in this way simply is not a good use of public funds.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

A two-bedroom flat in the private sector in my constituency would actually be about £350 a week, so it is even more perplexing that the Government insist that the rent in new social lettings will be 80% of market rent. That means that the rent payable by new tenants will be three to three and a half times what it would be in existing social tenancies. That, of course, will have to be covered by housing benefit in many cases.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a good point and is extremely experienced in dealing with those issues, both as an MP and as the former leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, where he did a great deal to try to improve the quality and quantity of the housing stock.

We all do advice surgeries and hear sad and difficult cases. I was talking last week to a lady in my constituency who has discovered that her private sector rent has gone up from £315 a week to £475 a week. I do not blame the local authority, because the housing benefit that she is paid is fixed by the Government through the local housing allowance. My constituent is not in work and receives benefits, and she has been told that she must contribute £145 a week to make up the shortfall between what the local housing allowance will pay and the rent that is expected or demanded from the landlord. She is expected to pay more than the rent that she would pay if she lived in equivalent council accommodation. It is clearly impossible for her to find £145 a week, which is more than her benefits. She would have nothing to eat and nothing for the children, so the only solution is to move away.

What effect will moving away from the area have on my constituent, her family and all the rest of us? She will lose her place and will have to try to find, if she can, a two or three-bedroom flat, probably in the far suburbs of London or outside London. She will lose her family network; her children’s education will be disrupted; she will not have access to the doctors, hospital or community network and support that she is used to; her whole life will be completely uprooted. Wherever she goes, she will have no security of tenure. She will have six months, or perhaps a year if she is lucky, before the landlord decides to allow her to stay or increases the rent because it is possible to get more in the private sector, in which case she will have to up sticks and move on again. Imagine how that feels for the children—the insecurity, changing schools, mum and dad moving the whole time and nowhere permanent to stay or build up a network of friends. It is that sense of insecurity that is so bad for the children of many families living in London.

The Government have decided to address excessive housing benefit costs, and I agree with them. There are two ways of doing it. One is to let the market sort things out, and the other is to bring in some form of regulation, so that there is permanency of tenure and greater security, and so that we spend less money. Unsurprisingly the Government have decided to go for the market option, so they have set local housing allowance limits. I have some figures from James Murray, who is the executive member for housing in Islington and does an extremely good job in difficult circumstances. Bizarrely, Islington falls into four broad rental market areas—inner-east London, central London, outer-north London and inner-north London. The figures for a two-bedroom flat vary. In inner-east London, the figure is £300 a week; in central London, it is £500 a week; in outer-north London, it is £230 a week; and in inner-north London, it is £329 a week.

James Murray also makes the point that in the past 10 years

“demand for private rented accommodation in the borough has gone up by about 20%”.

My observation is that it continues to rise very quickly.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I apologise that, for several reasons, I cannot be here for the whole debate. The hon. Gentleman knows that I always want to be involved in these issues.

When I asked the Secretary of State to consider re-examining the broad market rental area boundaries, I received a positive and encouraging response in the House. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will join me and London Conservative Members in trying to win that argument, so that when people are considered for alternative accommodation in the private sector—if they have to go there—it should be within the local authority boundaries where they start, unless they choose otherwise. Their links—their schools and usually their families—are in those places, and it seems that that would be a sensible and good social policy. I hope that we all agree that that would be progress, if we can bring it about.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Absolutely, because the less distance people must move, the better. That change would ameliorate the policies, and I, and I am sure other colleagues, would be more than happy to support it. We want to minimise disruption.

I do not want to say too much more, because other hon. Members want to speak. I want to conclude with some points about overcrowding in Islington, which is a small borough in comparison with many others. There are 3,096 families living in overcrowded homes, and of those 355 are in severe overcrowding, which means that they lack two or more bedrooms relative to their need. Clearly, there is a need to build council properties. The council is a major provider of housing in Islington, and in its budget, which is due to be debated this Thursday, 17 February, it has managed to present a significant increase in money to go into council house building:

“Despite the difficult times, we have been able to raise the investment in new build housing from £1.6 million”—

planned under the previous council administration—

“to a new total of £10.1 million for 2011/12. This will go towards work on-site this year for 86 new council homes, with plans in progress to continue and increase this programme.”

I applaud what Islington is trying to do, which is to meet housing needs. Where is central Government’s contribution to meeting those needs? The Government tell local authorities that the only way in which they can build new council properties is by raising council rents to 80% of market rents. That means that for many people it will be impossible, in work, to pay a council rent. We are presented with a vista where people will not be able to accept a council nomination, because they will not be able to afford the rent, which will be too expensive. They will have to go somewhere else and try to find somewhere small and overcrowded, where they can at least afford to stay. That is a monstrous way to fund new building—to say that those in great housing need must pay for people in even greater housing need to be provided with somewhere to live. Why can we not have what we have always had, namely central Government allocation of money through the Public Works Loan Board or any other appropriate arrangement, so that we build our way out of the crisis? I hope that the Minister at least understands that point.

I want to add some brief thoughts. We have experienced the sadness of homelessness and witnessed the health problems and disasters that come from it. London is a strong, thriving and vibrant city in many ways, but if it is left to the free market to deal with the issues that it faces, it will begin to take on some of the worst aspects of cities in the United States: the poor will be driven out, because of the housing benefit system, and the private rented market will take over entirely, bringing all the insecurities that go with that. Young people who move to London, who are in work and who manage to get into the private sector pay a vast proportion of their income on housing costs—probably the highest level across Europe. I have talked to people, some of whom work in this building and are on reasonable salaries for their age, who pay 50% to 60% of their take-home pay in private rent for a shared flat or house, which is a huge burden. There is no possibility that they will ever save enough money to buy a place. We must recognise that without public intervention and investment, the housing crisis in London will get worse and worse.

I have four brief points to make to the Government. First, they should look at the way the benefit changes are operating, and in particular at their perverse effects on families living in inner London. Secondly, they should bring about some degree of security and regulation in the private sector, to avoid the continual merry-go-round of people having to leave private rented flats after six months or a year, and to create some long-term security and certainty. Thirdly, they should build council housing, providing local authorities with the wherewithal to do so. The virtuous circle of taking building workers out of unemployment and putting them into work to provide housing for those who need it is a major and a beneficial form of income regeneration. Finally, the Government should speak to the banks about the difficulty that so many people have in getting mortgages because of the large deposits that are required.

If the Government and local authorities were to consider such intervention, we would all benefit. The benefits would be better health, fewer family break-ups, better educational achievement and a happier and more cohesive society. I hope that the Government understand that many building companies fear that they will go under because of cuts in house building. In its latest residential crane survey, Drivers Jonas Deloitte said that of the 28,150 homes under construction at 169 sites in London, 44% are allocated for affordable housing. Under current policies, that number will go down, and those companies and those jobs will be in trouble. Meet the social needs and solve the economic problems—the two things go together.

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[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Thank you for calling me to speak in this debate, Mr Turner. I apologise for missing the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).

[Jeremy Corbyn]

You have heard them before.

[Tom Brake]

Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) said that I had perhaps heard some of the hon. Gentleman’s comments before. I was in a meeting with the Peabody Trust and some of its residents to discuss housing, which is why I was late for the debate. I know that the hon. Gentleman has been a passionate and consistent defender of housing under successive Governments, whatever their political colour. Therefore, he is right to say that I have heard him make those comments before in the 13 years since my election to this House. Nevertheless, the fact that I have heard them many times before does not mean that they do not have great merit, and I suspect that I would not differ much from his analysis of the problem in London, albeit that we might have some differences of opinion about possible solutions.

I take a different view about the comments made by the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), whose proposals seem to exist in a vacuum. His proposals neither take into account the financial environment in which we are operating nor acknowledge that his own Government planned to examine the level of housing benefit being paid to people in London and other parts of the country. I asked him a question about that issue, but he carefully evaded answering it. He failed to acknowledge that issue, when it would have been the decent thing for him to have done.

That brings me to decent homes. The Minister will know that Sutton Housing Partnership, the arm’s length management organisation in my area, has submitted a new bid for decent homes funding. It is a scaled-back bid compared with the bid that was originally proposed. The partnership had secured a limited amount of funding in the first year of the programme from the previous Government, and I hope that, under the new bidding arrangements, it will succeed in securing substantial funding during the lifetime of the programme that it needs to implement to ensure that social housing in the London borough of Sutton benefits from that funding, as it should do. In many respects, social housing in Sutton has not benefited from the substantial programmes that local authorities in other areas have implemented to repair windows, bathrooms, kitchens and the like.

Many parts of my constituency would have benefited from those repair programmes. For example, the St Helier estate was built in the 1930s. It stretches into Mitcham and Morden and into Sutton and Cheam. It requires investment: it would be unfair to say that many of the properties on the estate have not been touched since the 1930s, but many improvements need to be made. I hope that the Minister will be able to say a little about the progress of the programme to improve that estate.

My second point is about the meeting that I have just had with the Peabody Trust and some of its residents on the St Helier estate. What those residents are trying to achieve is very much in keeping with what the Government are trying to do in relation to the big society. In other words, those residents want to take responsibility for the management of their estate. However, the difficulty arises because that estate has a mixture of tenants, shared ownership, residents and leaseholders. Therefore the structure of tenure is very complex, and I acknowledge that.

[Mr Philip Hollobone in the Chair]

I am pleased that we have someone from the Department for Communities and Local Government attached to that programme, who is working with the residents of the estate, because Sutton is one of the vanguard boroughs when it comes to the big society. That person will try to find ways to work through those problems with the support of the Peabody Trust, which is also keen to address them. The residents feel that they will be able greatly to reduce the costs associated with the maintenance of that development—the Beddington Zero Energy Development or BedZED, which many hon. Members will be familiar with—if they are able to achieve some type of voluntary arrangement to manage those properties. As I understand it, a voluntary arrangement is required to work within the complicated tenure structure that exists on the estate.

Another issue that I hope the Minister will respond to is that, as I understand it, housing associations in the UK abide by European regulations when they advertise for contracts in a way that housing associations in other European countries do not. That means that housing associations in the UK face an additional financial burden as a result of following the appropriate EU process for advertising, which housing associations in other EU countries do not have to follow. If it were possible to remove that burden from housing associations in the UK, it would clearly reduce the costs involved from the point of view of tenants, the Government, shared owners and leaseholders. I hope that the Minister is examining that issue.

I know that the Minister cannot take any action on the final issue that I want to discuss, but he might want to comment on it. It is the issue of planning applications, and specifically the speed with which they are processed. From both a job creation point of view and the point of view of providing housing, particularly if that involves converting or extending properties, the quicker that planning applications are processed, the sooner the builders can get on with the work. I have had representations about that issue myself. I had one on Saturday from a local builder, who is waiting for the completion of four planning applications. He said that, apart from holding him and his staff back from doing their jobs, it is having an impact on the people who will occupy those properties or conversions, once they are completed. Those are the specific issues that I want the Minister to respond to.

I conclude by saying that although I did not hear—regrettably—the comments of the hon. Member for Islington North when he opened the debate, I am sure that he made some salient and pertinent points about the importance of trying to address the substantial housing deficit in London and about the potential consequences of the changes to housing benefit, of which I know that hon. Members from all parts of the House are aware. I hope that the Minister can reassure us on those points this morning.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Williamson]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. It is not really the business of housing associations to build luxury multi-million pound accommodation. Their whole raison d’être should be to provide affordable housing, which is why they came into being in the first place. They have lost sight of their original purpose when they start engaging in market-led developments, such as the one that my hon. Friend has mentioned.

I referred earlier to the difficulties that people have in raising deposits, and I have seen figures that suggest that it takes more than 14 years on average for someone to save for a deposit, assuming that they can keep pace with house price inflation. It is completely wrong that people are forced to rely on relatives to get a foot on the housing ladder, because it disfranchises tens of thousands of people in London whose families do not have the wherewithal to provide them with the deposits needed to purchase the houses that they aspire to own.

The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) said, I think, that the economic background was one of the reasons why the Government had made some of their decisions on housing and cutbacks. I assume that he was referring to the finance that has been made available for housing and the cuts being made in housing benefit. I disagree with him, because it is really important that the Government seek to invest in the housing market and in providing houses, because that is a way of addressing the very problems that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Using the construction industry is an excellent way of assisting a private sector-led economic recovery. Most of what is procured for the construction industry is sourced from the UK, which provides a huge number of jobs in areas where housing construction and other building is taking place. It is mistaken to suggest that the economic circumstances that the country faces in some way justify the cutbacks in housing.

The hon. Gentleman also referred to delays in planning, and I agree that more needs to be done in that regard. I am concerned, however, that proposals in the Localism Bill might add delays, or will certainly make it more difficult in many circumstances to provide the houses that people desperately require.

It seems to me that the biggest reason for this housing crisis in the capital is an obsession that can be traced back to the early 1980s and the introduction of the right to buy, with its emphasis on a personal subsidy rather than a subsidy on bricks and mortar. That was almost inevitably going to end in tears, which is where we are today. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North pointed out, many landlords—I accept that it is not all of them—have sought to exploit the housing benefit system and to maximise rents. That has led to rents in the private rented sector going up and up to a point at which the Government—the same Government who introduced the obsession with personal subsidies in the first place—are now reining in those subsidies and forcing the poorest people and those on middle incomes in the city to bear the burden for their policy mistake, which can be traced back 30 years.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Is my hon. Friend also aware that those who live in private rented accommodation not only pay high rents and often a large deposit, but often pay much higher heating costs, because the energy efficiency of the housing is so low? In addition, repairs are often so poor and incompetent that tenants end up paying for repairs themselves out of sheer desperation, in order to live somewhere reasonable. We need a much tougher regulatory regime for private rented accommodation.

[Chris Williamson]

I could not agree more, because my hon. Friend is absolutely right. Again, research has demonstrated that the private rented sector is far and away the worst in terms of providing adequately insulated accommodation. That adds to the burden of people living in such accommodation, obviously, but it also has significant environmental implications for our cross-party commitment to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change. The private rented sector clearly has a big part to play. My hon. Friend has made a forceful point and has provided another reason why more must be done to regulate the private rented sector.

In conclusion, I return to the importance of investing in housing and of a bricks and mortar subsidy rather than a personal subsidy. We should be seeking to turn the juggernaut around and emphasising building new houses and providing subsidy for affordable housing in London in order to supply the homes that people desperately require. That would provide a huge economic stimulus and create many jobs for local people as well as, most importantly, homes.

Good quality homes would also have huge implications for educational outcomes for the many people living in overcrowded circumstances who would be able to move into more appropriate accommodation. Again, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North made that point. We could also address the health of people in inadequate housing by investing more in providing more and better affordable housing. Crime and antisocial behaviour would be reduced, because people would be living in better circumstances rather than being forced out on to the streets in the evening, where young people get into mischief. It would certainly make a big difference to the quality of personal and family life, which would have a massive, beneficial knock-on effect on the wider community.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Robert Neill)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone, as it was to see Mr Turner earlier. I congratulate the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on securing another debate about housing in London. We do not always agree on the solutions, but I pay tribute to the assiduousness and seriousness with which he regularly addresses the issue. Like other hon. Members, he has raised important points with which I will endeavour to deal. This has been a wide-ranging debate, and I will do my best to pick up the detailed points made.

I accept that housing matters to everybody. It is important politically and socially. Having a home that meets one’s needs is fundamental to achieving one’s aspirations for oneself, one’s family and one’s community. I hope that that is common ground for all parties in the House, and I want to make it clear that the Government regard it as a key objective to help people to achieve those aspirations. I will deal with general issues as well as points about London specifically.

We as a Government are committed to increasing the number of houses available both to rent and to buy. That includes affordable housing, but we must be imaginative in choosing models to use. We need to consider greater flexibility in social housing to ensure best use of stock and help people stand on their own two feet. We must also consider how to protect the vulnerable and disadvantaged and address homelessness, which the hon. Gentleman fairly and properly mentioned. We want to support people to stay in their own homes.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The Minister will be aware that homeless charities in London—particularly Shelter, but also the Mary Ward Centre and others—have serious financial problems at present. Their grant funding has been cut, although they are trying to retrieve it from London local authorities. The cut in housing advice provided to homeless people by those organisations is devastating and can lead to only greater homelessness. Is the Minister prepared to look into the matter, receive a delegation and consider whether extra help can be given to ensure that those vital agencies remain open?

[Robert Neill]

I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Local Government will happily get in touch with the hon. Gentleman. It is worth putting it on record that we are working with the National Homelessness Advice Service to ensure that front-line advice workers have the support that they need. We have established a cross-Government ministerial working group to examine the underlying causes of homelessness and we continue to invest in the Places of Change hostel improvement programme. We are attempting to address the problem, but I appreciate the seriousness with which the hon. Gentleman raises the issue, and I will ensure that the appropriate Minister is in touch with him. I will return to the broader issues of homelessness in due course.

We make no apology for saying that home ownership is at the core of people’s housing aspirations, and it should be at the core of our policy. It is a good thing. It gives people responsibility for their own needs, financial security and confidence. I think that it is good that housing wealth now accounts for nearly half of all household wealth, up from about 25% in 1980. Some hon. Members have criticised the right to buy and related issues in this debate, but I do not apologise for the right to buy. In the 1980s, I was a parliamentary candidate twice in Dagenham, which had one of the largest housing estates in Europe. I thought that it was utterly liberating for ordinary people—good hard-working families—to have the chance to own their home. Not everybody will always manage that aspiration, but we need to make sure that it is there, that we help people in that way, and that we also assist those who, for a number of reasons, will not be in a position to meet it.