Housing and Homes

Debate between John Healey and Mark Prisk

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. The number of families—now nearly 80,000—living in temporary accommodation because there are no homes available, let alone homes in their own area, is a scandal that shames us all. I am interested to hear what the Secretary of State has to say. It is not just in Newham; he has been in government since 2010, since when his own council has seen a fivefold increase in the number of families without a home living in temporary accommodation.

The Secretary of State said that we are now investing more in affordable homes, and he cited £9 billion, which of course is the figure for the rest of this Parliament. Even if that money is spent, spending will still be half the level it was in Labour’s last year. To give people a measure of it: in Labour’s last year, spending on building new, badly needed affordable homes was £4 billion; and last year, under this Government, whatever they say, it was less than half a billion pounds. No wonder we saw 40,000 new social rented homes started in 2009, in that last Labour year, and last year we saw fewer than 1,000.

The £28 million for the Housing First pilots is welcome, but let me gently say to the Housing Secretary that that is a small drop when compared with the £996 million the National Audit Office says is the annual cut in the Supporting People programme since 2010—a programme to help the homeless. Finally, the right hon. Gentleman makes the welcome argument that we need more social rented homes, but what does he say to the residents in his own area, where 6,022 are on the council waiting list and the number of new social homes rented homes built last year was zero? He has a lot to pick up on and a lot to learn.

We have seen eight years of failure on all fronts since 2010, and it is no wonder that the Prime Minister admitted that housing was a big part of why her party did badly at last year’s general election. As the Secretary of State has said, as the Prime Minister has said and as I have argued, the housing market is broken, and housing policy is failing to fix it.

I say to Conservative Members that at the heart of Tory policy is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Ministers talk big about total house building targets, but what new homes we build and who they are for is just as important as how many we build. Simply building more market-priced homes will not help many of those who face a cost-of-housing crisis, because that can influence prices only in the very long term. We have to build more affordable homes if we want to make homes more affordable, and the public know that. It is why eight out of 10 people now say the Government should be doing more to get new affordable homes built.

The public expect much more of Ministers—more urgency, more responsibility, more investment and more action to fix this broken housing market. That is why Labour has set out a bold, long-term plan for housing. It is what people need from their Government. We have made the commitment, with the plan to back it, that under a Labour Government we would see 1 million new genuinely affordable homes built over 10 years: the largest council house building programme for more than 30 years, building those new affordable homes at a rate we have not seen in this country since the 1970s. The very term “affordable” has been so misused by Ministers that it is mistrusted by the public, so Ministers should drop it and replace it with a new Labour definition linked to local incomes, not pegged to market prices.

We must build for those who need it, including the most vulnerable and the poorest, with a big boost to new social homes built as part of the programme, but we should also build Labour’s new affordable homes, both to rent and to buy, for those in work and on ordinary incomes, who are priced out of the housing market and being failed by current housing policy. These people are the just-coping class in Britain. They are the people doing the jobs we all depend on—IT workers, delivery drivers, call centre workers, teaching assistants, electricians and nurses. They are the backbone of our economy and the heart of our public services. This is the same Labour aspiration that led Aneurin Bevan to talk of the “living tapestry” of mixed communities as he led the big house building programme after the second world war.

[Mr Mark Prisk (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman’s leader is a keen fan of rent control to cap the total level of rents. Although that may superficially sound attractive, the right hon. Gentleman will understand the impact it will have on the prospects for that market; we may see people leave that market, so there will be fewer homes. Is he too a keen advocate of rent capping?

[John Healey]

I am surprised if the hon. Gentleman has not already done so, but he should read the housing manifesto that I launched with the Labour leader during the election campaign last year. It pledged longer tenancies, with a cap on the rent increases during that period. I shall come to the Labour plans for private renters in a minute. This debate is about differing views and very different visions of the housing problems that people face and the solutions that the country requires.

Our determination to get built the new genuinely affordable homes that are needed in this country was redoubled after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire. When the Grenfell survivors who contributed to our review say that

“tenants were victims before the fire”

and

“we’re treated as second class citizens in social housing”,

it is clear that radical, root-and-branch reform is required, so we will build more and we will build better, as the public sector has always done in housing. We will have leading-edge standards on energy efficiency and smart-tech design, so that Labour’s new affordable homes will be people’s best choice, not their last resort.

A huge majority of us in Britain aspire to buy our own home, yet the dream is currently denied to millions, especially young people facing a lifetime locked out of the housing market. We set out in our Green Paper a plan for Labour’s living rent homes, which would have rents set at no more than a third of average local household incomes and would be aimed at ordinary working families, young people and key workers—those who need to be able to save a bit for a deposit or who need a bit more to spend on the other things they need.

Labour’s low-cost home ownership home would be a new type of low-cost home, called first-buy homes. Again, they would be discounted, so that mortgage payments would be no more than a third of average local incomes. Crucially, the discount on those homes would be locked in so that it could potentially benefit not just the first first-time buyer, but future first-time buyers.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between John Healey and Mark Prisk

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

It is quite the contrary. I was a strong supporter of the affordable homes programme, and I negotiated with the rest of the Government an unprecedented switch of £1.5 billion from other Departments so that we could build more genuinely affordable rented homes to help bring the country through the recession. If the hon. Gentleman looks at his Government’s record, he will see that eight out of 10 of the affordable homes for social rent that they claim they have built were started and funded through decisions that I made as Labour’s last Housing Minister.

[Mr Prisk]

Given the ownership that the right hon. Gentleman claims on this issue, does he regret the loss of 440,000 affordable homes under the previous Labour Government?

[John Healey]

I regret that—just as in the last five years of this Government—we did not do enough to ensure that when council homes were sold, there was enough funding to ensure that they could be replaced fully, one for one, like for like, and in the area in which they were lost. That big flaw in this Bill will become more and more exposed in every area, including in the constituencies of Conservative Members, in each of the next five years.

Letting Agents

Debate between John Healey and Mark Prisk

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Prisk]

People will be encouraged if that is confirmation that the Labour party, were it to be elected in some strange manner in a couple of years’ time, will have rent controls. We will see how that develops, but perhaps I should persist, because other hon. Members have raised questions.

Targeted, effective regulation that is carefully thought through, of a statutory nature or otherwise, has a role to play. That is why we have made a particular effort to crack down on rogue landlords, for example, in the case of beds in sheds, which is a dreadful scourge. Frankly, too little has been done in the past. It is an area where people are genuinely exploited and where we want to use the law. That, in a sense, comes to the second question.

Various people have asserted in this debate that letting agents are completely unregulated, but that is not true. That is a myth, which it is important to dispel. We should not be telling tenants that they have no controls and that there is nothing there to protect them and no one to turn to to help them challenge someone who is behaving badly. Whatever our political perspective might be, there is a genuine interest in getting the message right.

Letting agents are subject to regulation. It is important to flag that up. The hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) highlighted a specific issue around students and the fact that they were being told incorrect things about market conditions. The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 offer protection against someone who is deliberately misleading and pulling the wool over people’s eyes, enabling individual tenants the opportunity to challenge them.

Also, the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 protect tenants from unfair conditions. Several hon. Members mentioned the way in which tenants can find themselves facing unfair restrictions on the way in which they can use a property. We have seen—several hon. Members have mentioned this—that trading standards bodies can and will prosecute letting agents. I mentioned a case in West Bromwich in a previous debate and we have heard about a case in Rotherham. In Oxford, a letting agent had to pay £300,000 in fines and costs for consumer protection-related and money-laundering offences after failing to return tenants’ deposits—which several hon. Members have mentioned—letting properties without the authority of their owners, and not passing on rent. So action can be taken. There was a similar case in Plymouth, where the letting agent was jailed for two years for spending client money on foreign holidays—again, that was mentioned by one hon. Member—and propping up his business. That individual may yet face further action to seize his assets. So, serious sanctions are in place, which our constituents can now use. It is important to flag that up.

[John Healey]

That is a statement of fact, not an argument against proper regulation. The overwhelming evidence mentioned by everybody in the debate is that what is in place at the moment is not successful, not sufficient and not satisfactory to protect tenants and landlords. A statement of fact about the general consumer protection that is in place is not sufficient.

[Mr Prisk]

It is important to recognise that we need a number of elements to deal with the different problems that have been raised. We need to make sure that we use existing consumer protection legislation now and that enforcement is put in place effectively. I want trading standards bodies to take action not just in the serious cases, such as those that I have flagged up, but in the less serious cases. We have a problem with enforcement. The right hon. Gentleman is right. We cannot mandate trading standards bodies to act in individual cases, but I am determined to encourage those national bodies to ensure that they tackle these issues right across the marketplace. It is not good enough at the moment. We want to make it stronger.

As the hon. Member for Rotherham said, many letting agents who provide services do so quite well and within the law. Several hon. Members have highlighted the Which? report, which showed that one in five tenants are dissatisfied with their agent. That is still too high, but I think that if it is one in five, people will realise that the vast majority—four out of five—seem satisfied with the service that they get. The Which? report is a pretty independent and extensive survey in that context. However, there remain too many agents whose service is poor and unacceptable. Several hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington, mentioned the fact that this is the second lowest of consumer markets.

Our view has been that regulation should not be the first option. Although we recognise that there might be a case for it, the challenge is to make sure that existing law works properly. There is a temptation among all of us as politicians to believe that passing new legislation will deal with people who currently ignore existing regulation. I am sceptical that the changes we make, of a statutory nature or otherwise, will actually catch the rogues that Members of all parties have highlighted. That is the challenge. I am open to consideration. We are looking carefully at what the Office of Fair Trading has said. There are some strong and positive elements there. However, if we are to do this properly—if we are to catch the rogue agents and landlords who perfectly happily flout every other law—we need to make sure that if we change the rules and change the law, we do so in a way that will deal with the individuals in question.