Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Karen Buck and Clive Efford

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

rose—

[Clive Efford]

rose—

Housing (London)

Debate between Karen Buck and Clive Efford

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that some of the conditions that people are living in are shocking in their squalor. That is particularly offensive, given what was in a superb report produced a few weeks ago by Tom Copley of the Greater London authority. It showed that a third of former right-to-buy properties in London are now in the private rented sector.

I have said many times, in Westminster Hall and elsewhere, that it appals me that we can have two households living next door to each other, one in a local authority property where the rent is, say, £110 or £120 a week—allowing people in that household to work and thereby improving their incentive to work—while next door to them is a former right-to-buy property. Many such properties are rented back to the local authority for emergency accommodation, and the rent for them can reach £500 a week. I have been in some of them and seen water pouring down the walls and black fungus growing in the bathroom, including in the toilet. Even for a rent of £500 a week, it is impossible to ensure that such properties are anything other than a slum.

The coalition Government—and, indeed, the Mayor of London—want to see that process intensify; they want to see social housing sold off in central London. They want to see us flogging the last of the family silver, even though these properties are enormously important.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that at the moment London’s housing market is being turned into a Klondike for wealthy foreigners to make money? There are examples such as those my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) has given; there is also the Ram brewery in Wandsworth, which has just been sold to Chinese developers who will build 600 exclusive high-development houses with no social housing whatever.

[Ms Buck]

I agree. In fact, what we are seeing are two types of new build in London; I simplify, but that is broadly true. One type is high-value properties that are frequently being sold off-plan and internationally. Indeed, last week we heard that only 27% of central London properties are being sold to domestic buyers. As the ITEM Club said of the London housing market:

“Arguably, it would be more appropriate to treat it as an investment market rather than a residential market”.

That is an absolute outrage and a betrayal of Londoners. It also leads to the second type of new build, whereby the affordable social rented housing being built—supposedly to balance the first type of new build—has only Kafkaesque “affordable” rents, charged at up to 80% of market rents, so it is not “social housing” in any sense at all that we have ever understood.

Unsurprisingly, we saw the Office for Budget Responsibility in December uprate its estimate for expenditure on housing benefit by an additional—I stress “additional”—£6 billion. That is the cost of failure: the cost of having to keep families and individuals in private rented and high-rent “affordable” properties, which they cannot afford whether they are working or not.

My hon. Friends have said that there is an alternative, and I completely agree with them. The money being poured into benefits and the pockets of private landlords should instead be spent on building genuinely affordable, decent homes for people to live in and bring their children up in, while maintaining their incentive to work.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) said, we also have to do something to tackle the trend of all the other new build properties being sold off-plan and to international investors, so that those young people who want to have a home of their own have a realistic chance of owning one. Everything that the coalition Government are doing is taking us in the wrong direction, whether we are talking about the interests of people’s homes or the interests of the public purse.