John Healey
Main Page: John Healey (Labour - Rawmarsh and Conisbrough)
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
This powerful and moving debate is testament to the importance of the introduction of the Backbench Business Committee and its debates. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) on securing this debate. She told me previously that there were 44 Members from both sides of the House behind her bid for it, and she has led it very effectively. However, this important debate has been very badly squeezed for time this afternoon.
My hon. Friend gave a speech that those of us who know her well have come to see as characteristic: it was passionate, practical and laced with the personal commitment and care she gives to her constituents. At one point, she said she was worried she might not find the right words to convey the anguish of some of her constituents; she did, however, and in doing so she did her constituents proud and this House a real service. In a country as decent and well off as ours, it should shame us all that 120,000 children this Christmas will have no home and will spend Christmas day in bed and breakfast-style accommodation, hostels and in some cases private rented accommodation that is not fit for human habitation, as we have heard this afternoon.
This has been a very important debate. As a number of contributions have underlined, temporary accommodation is too often not temporary but can last up to a decade and more. It is too often substandard and sometimes downright dangerous, and is too often not available in people’s own areas.
Some of the solutions have been set out for the House today. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) argued for tougher planning obligations. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and my hon. Friends the Members for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) and for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) recommended building more new social rented homes and council homes. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) said we should back private landlord licensing. The hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) argued that we should end out-of-area temporary housing. The hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) said we should replace all right-to-buy sales with new council and social rented homes, and the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) called for longer tenancies and an end to six-month assured shorthold tenancies.
Homelessness is both highly visible, with the rapidly increasing number of people we see sleeping rough on our streets, but also hidden, and the homelessness crisis is essentially a hidden crisis today. The figures for temporary accommodation, which are in the motion before us today, are just the tip of the iceberg. Our councils across the country are, irrespective of political party leadership, doing their best, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) said about his own in Redbridge. As well as the 60,000 families accepted as statutorily homeless in the last year by our councils, together they helped prevent homelessness and helped house 215,000 more families. But they are doing their best at the same time as the numbers and the pressures are rising, and the options available for housing for councils are declining. That is why the number of people accepted as statutorily homeless has risen by nearly 50% since 2010, and it is why we are seeing the number of rough-sleeping homeless more than double; it has gone up by 50% in the last two years alone.
The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, promoted by the hon. Member for Harrow East and on which my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) led for Labour in Committee, is a good step. It had all-party support, including from our Front Bench, but it comes to something when the one stand-out piece of housing legislation and policy from a Conservative Government in the last seven years has come from the Back Benches, not the Front Bench.
I pay tribute to the Minister, however. I am well aware of how hard he worked with colleagues behind the scenes, first to get backing for the Bill and then to get some financial resources behind it. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood has said, there is very much more to be done. She was also right to say that the Homelessness Reduction Act was modelled on the Housing (Wales) Act 2014. That legislation was introduced four years ago this month by Carl Sargeant. Today, the House will want to pay its deepest sympathy to Carl’s family, his wife and his close friends. He was a passionate politician who put community at the heart of all his politics, and his Act was the first ever piece of housing legislation to be passed in Wales. Today we mark his legacy, because every month hundreds of families in Wales are helped to avoid the trauma of homelessness because of what he did.
The reason why the Homelessness Reduction Act offers some remedies but no solutions is that it does not deal with the root causes of rapidly rising homelessness. Many of those causes are now being driven by the decisions taken by this Government over the past seven years. They include: the big cut in investment in new affordable homes; the ending of all Government investment behind new social rented homes; crude cuts to housing benefit; the introduction of the roll-out of universal credit, unreformed; the reduction in funding for homelessness services; and the lack of action to protect private renters. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden that Connect House probably exists only because of the changes in the planning regime that our Government brought in to prevent councils from being able to withhold permission for that kind of development.
We know what works because we have done it before. The Minister is sometimes guilty, when responding to questions about rapidly rising homelessness, of saying, “Oh well, it was higher under Labour.” And he is right. When we came into power in 1997, the level of statutory homelessness was already over 100,000 and rising. It peaked in 2003, but the critical question is the action that we took then. After that, the independent Joseph Rowntree Trust and the Crisis homelessness monitor described what happened as an unprecedented decline in statutory homelessness, and the level of rough sleeping homelessness went down by more than 75%. So it can be done. We know what works, so let us do it.
This Government have no majority in the House and no real mandate in the country, and they have no domestic policy programme because that is not covered by the deal with the Democratic Unionist party. In the spirit of a Backbench Business Committee debate, let me offer some actions that the Government could take to start to get to the bottom of the issue and deal with the homelessness crisis that we are facing.
The Government could overhaul how we measure rough sleeping so that we know how many people are sleeping rough on the streets; transform capacity and get people off the streets for good by making 4,000 homes available now for people with a history of rough sleeping; halt their plans to change how supported housing is funded, which could still lead to the closure of homelessness hostels; protect the housing cost element of universal credit; and, above all, build the tens of thousands of new affordable homes, homes for social rent and council homes that are needed to fix the housing crisis. They could also increase the security for private renters, make three-year tenancies the norm, and cap and control the rise in rents. In that way, we will start to tackle the homelessness crisis.
Bob Blackman
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and also for his support for the Homelessness Reduction Act. While I am on my feet, Madam Deputy Speaker, may I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests? I inadvertently forgot to do that when I made my speech.
Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what the Labour party’s policy is on the local housing allowance? The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) has drawn our attention to that issue, but so far in the right hon. Gentleman’s speech he has been silent on the matter. I think the whole House would be quite keen to hear the Opposition’s view on what should happen on the LHA.
John Healey
That is a disappointing intervention to take right at the end of this speech at the end of this debate, but I will send the hon. Gentleman the Labour housing manifesto. We have committed to ending the bedroom tax; the Conservatives brought it in. We will restore housing benefit support for 18 to 21-year-olds; they cut it. We will review the whole housing benefit system, including the local housing allowance and the lack of link with rising rents, which they brought in.
Problems in the system are directly driving the rapid rise in homelessness and the need for the temporary accommodation that this debate has been about. I hope that this debate will give the Government a lead. Accepting that there are problems and agreeing with the concerns is not enough; action is needed now. Let us hear from the Government that that is what they will take.