Homelessness

Debate between John Healey and Karen Buck

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[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.

Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry

Debate between John Healey and Karen Buck

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about that. He speaks with a special authority, as a neighbouring MP who has spent a great deal of the past four weeks in the North Kensington community, working alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad) to try to support and give voice to the concerns of survivors.

Let me move on to the issue of safety testing. It is totally unacceptable, four weeks on from the Grenfell Tower fire, that Ministers still do not know and cannot say how many of the country’s other tower blocks are unsafe. The Government’s testing programme is too slow, too narrow and too confused. This is a testing programme in chaos. Only 224 tests have been done, yet an estimated 530 tower blocks have the same cladding and we have a total of 4,000 tower blocks across the country. That means that 24 days after the start of this testing programme, which we were told could test 100 buildings a day, we find that tests have been done on only half the highest-risk blocks and on fewer than one in 20 of the total number of tower blocks around the country.

[Ms Buck]

Last week, the Secretary of State said that there was “no backlog” in testing and that tests would be processed within a matter of “hours”. Given the continuing shortfall in the number of high-rise buildings that have been subject to testing, does my right hon. Friend share my bafflement that the Government do not appear to know where any of this material actually is?

[John Healey]

Yes, I share my hon. Friend’s bafflement entirely. I also hear of councils and housing associations that want to test their buildings, which may not have the same type of cladding, but simply cannot get the tests. I note, again, that the First Secretary’s speech was entirely free of any facts or figures that can update the House on the chaos of this testing programme.