Homelessness

John Healey Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes with concern that the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of England has more than doubled since 2010 and that the number of homeless children in temporary accommodation has risen to 127,000; further notes that the number of people dying homeless in England and Wales has risen to 726 people a year; recognises that by contrast there was an unprecedented fall in homelessness under a Labour Government by 2010; and calls on the Government to take action to end rough sleeping and tackle the root causes of rising homelessness starting by making 8,000 homes available for those with a history of rough sleeping, restoring funding for local housing allowance, and re-investing in local homelessness services, including £100m a year for emergency accommodation to save lives this winter.

This is our first Opposition day of the new Parliament, and it is fitting that we are debating the country’s homelessness crisis. It is fitting, too, that so many Members from all parties and all parts of the country want to speak. The measure of any country is the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens. We are proud of Britain, but it shames us all that tonight people will be sleeping rough on the streets in almost every town and city. Any patriot knows that the social contract at the heart of our country means that we can never accept people wanting for something as basic as a permanent roof over their head.

Last year, 726 people died homeless in a country as decent and well-off as ours; in Britain in the 21st century. That does indeed shame us all, but most of all it shames Conservative Ministers over the past 10 years. This is a Government who are failing on homelessness. This is a Government in denial about the root causes of homelessness. This is a Government with no proper plan to fix the crisis that they themselves have caused.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for bringing this incredibly important debate to the House and for referring to the number of people who died while homeless. David Fuller died sleeping rough in Chesterfield at Christmas in 2017. Is it not the case that every single death of that sort is not only a tragedy but a travesty, and an avoidable travesty if only the Government would take the actions they need to take in building the number of houses we need and having a welfare policy that does not punish the most vulnerable people in our country?

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. I believe that Members on both sides of the House will tell this afternoon of some of the local and individual tragedies behind the national statistics. He is quite right that every one is a tragedy and every one is a travesty. Many are preventable. It cannot be acceptable for any of us in this House, in this day and age, that over 700 people died homeless in our country.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Conservatives have every wish to see the end of homelessness, just as his party does, and Ministers are now making more money available. What advice would he give Ministers on how best to spend that money to achieve our shared objective?

--- Later in debate ---

[John Healey]

Wishes are not enough. The right hon. Gentleman has been around long enough to know that it is important to will the means. He has also been around long enough to remember that in 1997, when I was elected, Labour took on a country where homelessness was high and rising, mass rough sleeping was widespread, and tent cities were common in parts of central London, directly as a result of deep cuts to social security and council programmes over the preceding 18 Conservative years.

I say to those on the Treasury Bench: do what we did before—do what was done under Labour, because we turned it round. We turned it round with groundbreaking legislation, new funding, greater prevention and a taskforce led from the top by the Prime Minister. That is what led to homelessness charities describing what they said was an unprecedented fall in homelessness by 2010, with rough sleeping down by around three quarters.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

One way we could stop the rise in homelessness is by addressing the concerns about universal credit. Just this week, Hull City Council published a report which says that rent arrears are at a wholly unsustainable level. Three quarters of tenants on universal credit are behind with their rent, and they are at increased risk of eviction. One way that the Government could deal with the homelessness problem is to address the failings of universal credit.

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I said, this is a Government in denial about the root causes of high and rising homelessness, and she puts her finger on a very important root cause. It used to be the case that government in Britain was based on evidence—we had evidence-based policy making—but all the evidence about universal credit is that it leads to higher levels of debt and higher levels of rent arrears, and of course higher levels of rent arrears lead to higher levels of homelessness.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way; he is being very generous and making a compelling speech. As he rightly says, this issue was dealt with by the last Labour Government successfully, and the reason for the return of high levels of rough sleeping and homelessness is a return to the ideology that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) favours. Office for National Statistics data show that the average age of the estimated 641 homeless males who died in 2018 was 44. The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government is 38 years of age. I wonder how we as a country can stomach that sort of statistic.

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. This shames us all—in government, in opposition and across the country. We need a new national mission to tackle homelessness, not just a new determination from Government. It cannot be done without Government. The free market solutions that we have too often seen over the last 10 years have failed—indeed, we have seen failure on every front on homelessness over the last 10 years.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

There is a real danger with political point scoring on this, particularly in venerating the previous Labour Government. In May 1997, the average home in England was worth £62,000. Ten years later, it was £188,000—a threefold increase. This is an affordability problem at root. No one is in denial about that. Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that there has been a huge and unsustainable rise in the cost of accommodation under successive Governments?

[John Healey]

Quite honestly, I do not know where to start. For the thousands of people who will sleep out tonight, the level of the housing market is a long way from their concern. If the hon. Gentleman does not like the points that I am making and regards them as political point scoring, let me give him some straight facts. Directly as a result of Ministers’ decisions over the last 10 years, 86,000 households are now homeless and in temporary accommodation—up 71%; 127,000 children have no home—up 75%—and many are placed in temporary accommodation miles from their school, their friends and their community; and 4,600 people are sleeping rough on the streets—up 165%. Of course, every charity working in the homeless field and every expert knows that this is a huge undercount of the true scale of street homelessness. Just today, in a new report from St Mungo’s, we learn that 12,000 people who were homeless last year also went without the drugs or alcohol addiction help they needed.

At a time when perhaps some of the old certainties in politics appear to be in flux, one thing is certain and one thing remains true: the legacy of every Conservative Government is high homelessness, and the job of every Labour Government is to fix the problem.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend also believe that the rise in homelessness is connected with the continuing fall in the number of social housing properties, which actually fell by a further 17,000 in the last year alone?

[John Healey]

I do indeed. The Government published statistics yesterday that, in a sense, show the very scale of the point my hon. Friend rightly makes. When I stood on the other side of the Chamber as Labour’s last Housing Minister in 2009, 120,000 more social rented homes were let in that year than last year. That is an indicator of how short social housing is and how chronic the crisis that we face is.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Healey]

I am going to make some progress now because so many hon. Members on both sides want to speak.

Our homelessness crisis now, as it was in the 1990s, is the direct result of decisions taken by Conservative Ministers over the previous decade. There have been 13 separate cuts to housing benefit, including the hated bedroom tax, and the breaking of the link between the level of housing benefit and rents for private renters. Some £1 billion a year has been cut from local homelessness services. There are almost 9,000 fewer homeless hostel beds now, at a time when they have never been needed more. We see £2,200 extra a year for average private rents, with no action from the Government to protect private renters either from eviction or from huge rent hikes.

Only 6,287 new social rented homes were built in this country last year. That is the second lowest year since the second world war, with the lowest being two years before that. If anyone doubts the significance of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), in Labour’s last year in government, we built nearly 40,000 new social rented homes. If the Conservatives had only kept building those homes at the same rate as Labour did, we would now have in this country an extra 200,000 social rented homes, which is more than enough for every household homeless and in temporary accommodation; more than enough for every person sleeping rough on the streets; and more than enough for every individual in every homeless hostel across the country.

After 10 years, the hard truth is that homelessness is high and rising, and what the Government are doing is not working. Based on the Government’s own statistics, at the current rate of progress, Ministers will not end rough sleeping in this country before 2082. On current progress, they will not even bring the level of rough sleeping back to the level it was in 2010 for nearly 40 years. Meanwhile, the number of households that are homeless and the number of children who are homeless continue to rise.

[Janet Daby (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

At my surgeries, homelessness and housing dominate among the issues people come to see me about. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that, as well as building social homes, the Government also need to increase the local housing allowance?

[John Healey]

I have bad news for my hon. Friend. I hope she was not listening to Ministers recently when they said that they are ending the benefits freeze and that housing benefit will rise again. In April, housing benefit will rise at the level of the consumer prices index, which is 1.7%. In my hon. Friend’s constituency, many people, both in work and out, who rely on housing benefit in the private sector—the local housing allowance—will have seen over the past two years the Government putting in rises of 3% through their targeted affordability fund. However, instead of a 3% rise next year, people will get a 1.7% rise; instead of an end to the benefits freeze, they will get rises at a lower rate. What the Government will not say is that that fund goes with the end of the benefits freeze, and in areas such as that of my hon. Friend, where rental pressures are highest, people in private rented accommodation will feel the tightest pinch. At best that is underhand; at worst it is simply dishonest.

The bad news for all new Government Back Benchers is that their Ministers and Government have no proper plan to fix the homelessness crisis. The good news, however, is that there is a plan that would end rough sleeping within a Parliament and start to fix the causes of the homelessness crisis: our Labour plan. It is radical, credible, fully fledged, and fully formed—you could even say, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it is oven ready. It is based on what works because we know what works; we have done it before.

I hope the Secretary of State will take our Labour plan and make it a national plan to tackle homelessness. First, we must establish a new taskforce, led by the Prime Minister, to end rough sleeping for good. Secondly, we must make available an extra 8,000 homes from housing associations for those with a history of rough sleeping. Thirdly, we must place a levy on second homes that are used as holiday homes, and use that to fund a new duty for emergency support in every area during the winter when it is cold. Fourthly, we must relink the housing allowance to rents, so that people do not end up on the streets because they cannot cover the growing shortfall. Finally, we must make good the £1 billion a year cuts to local homelessness services over the past decade. Those are radical, common-sense steps to solve our homelessness crisis.

The Secretary of State will soon say, no doubt, that the Prime Minister has pledged that the Government will end rough sleeping within five years. We have heard that before from the Prime Minister. Some of my hon. Friends, particularly those from the capital, will remember that when he was elected as London Mayor, he said:

“It’s scandalous that, in 21st century London, people have to resort to sleeping on the streets, which is why I have pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012.”

He did not, of course—in fact, rough sleeping in London more than doubled during his time as Mayor. He has a long history of making promises and letting people down. If the Prime Minister means what he says, if he does what he says, and if he wants to lead a one nation Government, he must deal with the national shame of homelessness. I say to him this: make Labour’s plan the country’s plan, and personally lead a new national mission to end homelessness for good.