Social Housing in London
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Love
Jeremy Corbyn
Absolutely, and I endorse what my hon. Friend said. The average for Tower Hamlets is £248, but if it is assessed on an extremely local level—housing around Canary Wharf or at the edge of the City of London around Spitalfields—rent will become astronomically expensive and there will be rapid social cleansing.
What happened with Lady Porter in Westminster some years ago was regarded as appalling and disgraceful, and was social cleansing. People are coming to me for advice—and I am sure this is true for all London MPs—in desperation, frightened after what has happened, scared of where they are going to go and worried about the disruption of their children’s lives as they are forced out of private rented accommodation. We cannot sit back and watch the private rented sector grow rapidly in London without a greater sense of responsibility and intervening to protect people living in that sector.
What is the solution? Clearly, it ought to be the building of more homes for rent. I remember the halcyon days when my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) and I were members of Haringey borough council, and we berated the council leadership—we did a lot of that; they probably deserved it—for not building more council housing. However, I take it all back and apologise. In 1979, Haringey council built 1,000 council house dwellings. Other boroughs did broadly the same. A lot of that building was very good; a lot of it was homes with gardens; a lot has become very nice properties which, because of right to buy, have been sold on and have become very desirable properties indeed. I do not have a problem with people living in desirable properties—I am glad that they do—but I want everyone to be able to do so, with some security, and I want children to grow up with enough space, preferably with a garden. The achievements by many London boroughs at that time are something that we should applaud and seek perhaps to repeat, because there is a desperate need in London.
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend mentioned 1979, which has a resonance for many of us, because it was the year in which Mrs Thatcher was elected. If we look at the history books, we see that in 1980 she made massive cuts to housing investment programme capital funding. Does that have anything to do with the problems suggested by my hon. Friend?
Jeremy Corbyn
The cuts in the Budget are even greater than those made by Margaret Thatcher’s Government in the 1980s. I remember very well the points that my hon. Friend made, because at the time, I watched housing demand rise and new build virtually disappear. The only surviving new build for affordable rent was undertaken by housing associations. I was disappointed that the Government who came in in 1997, who invested a great deal in improvements to existing council stock and who did a lot about homelessness and housing rights, did not in the early days do anything like enough to invest in new house building. I hope that that is something that we will not repeat when we return to office in 2015, because I want to see a process of new build.
It is difficult for local authorities to undertake new building at present, but I want to pay tribute to Islington council and James Murray, the executive member for housing, as they have managed, despite all the difficulties, to squeeze £10 million a year out of the council budget to invest in new build for rents at existing levels—not the 80% level. I applaud them for doing so. I want other boroughs to do so, and I want the Mayor of London, whoever it is—this Mayor or, hopefully, Ken Livingstone in future—to use his powers to return to building for social housing need, which has a huge benefit for people across London.
Mr Love
We are waiting to see. As I understand it, there is not complete clarity on how people in work will be dealt with, how “work” will be defined and whether part-time work will be taken into account. I rest my case in the hope that the Minister will respond to some of my concerns.
Jeremy Corbyn
I want to follow up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford). I was recounting the figures earlier; there are at least three London boroughs in which the 80% rule on rent levels is higher than the average income of people in work and who live in council housing association properties. There will be 100% social cleansing of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and perhaps some other boroughs as well. I am talking about people in work, not on benefits.
Mr Love
Absolutely. That reinforces the message that we are looking for flexibility and a recognition of the reality that people face in inner London. As has been mentioned, there are areas where rents are so much higher than anything suggested in the Government proposals. Unless the Government recognise the gap that will open up as a result of their policies, my hon. Friend will be absolutely right—the cleansing of social tenants will occur. That cannot be good for community cohesion or the economy of London; it is certainly not good for the people affected. I hope that the Government will recognise that, even now.
What are my local housing associations saying about the situation? It is early days, and they do not have firm enough data. However, they have been asked to submit proposals to the HCA. What they have come up with is that the 80% may be viable for one-bedroom accommodation. There is much more of a judgment in relation to two-bedroom accommodation, and for accommodation with three bedrooms or more, the figure is simply not economically viable. In other words, no family accommodation will be built at a time, when the real need in the social sector, because of overcrowding, is for accommodation with three bedrooms or more. There is an acute shortage of large family accommodation for those on the housing waiting list.
If we stick to the rules outlined by the Government, we will find that we are not building any large family accommodation. My housing associations suggest that there should be a target rent, rather than whatever the definition of an “affordable” rent would be. That would be intermediate between what we have generally known as affordable social renting in the past and the new so-called affordable rents suggested by the Government. The housing associations will put that suggestion to the HCA, and we shall see what eventually emerges. Anything the Minister can say about it will be helpful.
To respond to the invitation given by the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth, what housing associations tell me is that there must be flexibility on the £500 cap. There are different ways of doing it. The Government could separate the housing element from the rest of the universal credit, or they could give more universal credit in parts of London that are adversely affected, which would in fact include most of London. Flexibility is the key.
Another issue is increased capital investment and one way of providing that is through a bank bonus tax, as I said earlier. That investment is incumbent on the Government. If they do not want their Mayor of London to have egg on his face over his so-called target for affordable accommodation during his time in office, they need to do something about it. The system will not work as it stands. A sensible and pragmatic Government would be flexible in adapting it so that they could achieve what they claim to want—a significant increase in the supply of affordable accommodation.
I hope the Minister will be able to pick up those points. There is great concern, not just in inner London, which is mainly affected by the proposals, but in outer London too. These matters relate specifically to London; they do not apply in most other parts of the country and I hope the Minister will communicate the message to the Government. They need to be flexible about London. We all hope that things will improve in the future.
Housing Need (London)
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew LoveWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I am very pleased that we are having this debate, although I am sorry that it will last only an hour and a half. I am sorry that the previous debate collapsed, but we could well have used three hours to discuss housing in London, so it seems that a monumental parliamentary opportunity has been lost. I hope that the hon. Members concerned will reflect on the situation because we are sent here to represent the people and to try to deal with their problems.
I am resuming the debate on housing in London. There is a slight feeling of déjà vu—the actors in the theatre have changed only slightly—because we have discussed housing needs in London many, many times before, and I suspect there will be many more debates on the subject. London Members know that there is no bigger issue, no greater stress and no greater problem that faces all our constituents than housing, whether that relates to people who are trying to buy, people who are trying to get social housing, people who are going through the problems of being a leaseholder or people who are living in private rented accommodation.
The levels of housing stress with which MPs deal are absolutely enormous, but I need not go over that in too much detail because hon. Members in the Chamber will be well aware of it. The levels of stress associated with problems of overcrowding, and of uncertainty and insecurity of tenure, lead to ill health, underachievement in school, family break-up and unemployment, and they have a wholly corrosive effect on our society. I am not asking for something special because we are talking about London. I am asking for recognition that the whole country faces serious housing problems and that they are even worse in London than throughout the rest of the country.
One could quote many relevant statistics at great length. I shall not cite a vast number of figures, but I would like to run through some information that was helpfully provided to me by Crisis. Reading across the piece, the average house price in London is £362,000, which is £140,000 higher than that in the rest of the country, and the average income is £26,000 a year, which is £6,000 more than in the rest of the country. The gross annual income needed for a mortgage in London is £93,000—it is £109,000 in my borough—so we can easily see the disconnect that exists.
Total local authority stock in London is 432,000 and housing association stock is 350,000. The number of new lettings by local authorities was around 23,000 last year, with 22,000 lettings by housing associations. Some 353,000 families are on the waiting list for social housing in London, of whom 52,000 are in temporary accommodation, while the number of households accepted as homeless is 12,000, although that relates to the last year for which figures are available. All that information shows that buying anywhere is unaffordable, that there are huge waiting lists for social housing and that the number of homeless people is rapidly increasing. The 12,000 London households accepted as homeless represent about a fifth of the total for the whole United Kingdom.
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I apologise that I will need to slip out of the Chamber part of the way through it, but I hope to be back at the end.
I want to raise with my hon. Friend—and indeed all hon. Members present—the human tragedy behind those figures. People are living in temporary accommodation for four, five or six years. They move constantly and are unable to settle anywhere. The children of such people are really badly affected by continually having to up sticks to move to other accommodation. Should we not be most concerned about that situation?
Jeremy Corbyn
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I recall that in the halcyon days when I was chair of housing for Haringey council, we were able to build a large number of council houses, some of which were very good properties. We were determined to build good-quality properties not because we had a desire to spend vast sums of public money, but because we had a desire to conquer the problems of housing shortage and the stress that goes with it. Three quarters of the people in this country who are in temporary accommodation are in London, and my hon. Friend is right to point out the effects that that has.
All hon. Members have seen people in our advice bureaux who are living in their third or fourth piece of temporary accommodation and whose children have had to move schools or make very long journeys to stay in the same school. Those people are unaware of what will happen to them because of the lack of security that surrounds such a situation. We have a very serious problem indeed. I mentioned the corrosive effects of housing stress in London. One such effect is overcrowding, a second is uncertainty, a third is the problems of private rented accommodation, and a fourth is very high cost, which is the matter that I want to move on to.
If someone secures a council or housing association tenancy in London, the rent for a two-bedroom flat will be, broadly speaking, £100 to £120 a week. That is a reasonable rent—it is an economic rent, not a subsidised rent—that allows people to live somewhere reasonable, secure and safe. However, this country’s very bad record on building social housing over the past 20 years or so means that the number of people re-housed by local authorities or housing associations is low. Most local authorities say, “We cannot possibly house you; you’ll have to go into private rented accommodation.”
Councils therefore assist people to get private rented accommodation and have, in some cases, an over-close relationship with various letting agencies. The rents in such accommodation are often very high. They can be £250 or £300 a week, but I have even come across rents of £400 a week or more. If the people concerned are unemployed or on benefits, those rents are largely paid through housing benefit. For them, having a private rented place with the rent paid initially sounds like a reasonable option, but two problems can emerge. One is that such people are left in an enormous benefit trap, because if they succeed in finding a job, they will lose all or most of their housing benefit, and they therefore cannot possibly take a job unless it is incredibly well paid. One needs an awfully large salary to be able to pay £400 a week in rent. I suspect that that figure is far more than hon. Members in the Chamber pay for their mortgage monthly.
As a country, we are therefore pouring billions of pounds in housing benefit every year into the pockets of private landlords who do not give security and often provide inadequate accommodation. It is often very difficult to get them to carry out repairs, as I am sure that all Members in the Chamber who have corresponded with private landlords to try to make them carry out repairs have found. We must bear in mind the benefit trap and the huge cost to the whole country. It is fairly obvious, as a point of principle, that it would be far better to invest our precious national resources in building homes for affordable rent through councils and housing associations, rather than pouring the money down the drain by putting it in the pockets of private landlords through the housing benefit system. None of that is particularly new.