Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Karen Buck and Sarah Newton(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Sarah Newton
Of course I would be more than happy to meet the hon. Lady urgently, because she raises a terrible case. [Interruption.] Let us remember that the vast majority of people claiming ESA or PIP get a really good service and get the benefits to which they are entitled.
Homeless Young People
Debate between Karen Buck and Sarah Newton(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
When I have made this particular point, I am happy to do so.
The Conservative party has a long tradition of campaigning on homelessness. In the 1970s, MPs Iain Macleod and William Shearman were in favour of the first legislation to be introduced to protect homeless people. My right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young) introduced the rough sleepers initiative, which cut dramatically the numbers of people sleeping on our streets. More recently, Boris Johnson has made tackling rough sleeping in London a central part of his mayoralty.
Sarah Newton
I will give way when I have finished making this point.
As a Cornish MP, I have seen first hand the coalition Government deliver real improvements in services for homeless people. Before I was a Member of Parliament—I came into the House in 2010—for a great deal of my life I volunteered in charities looking after and seeking to help homeless people, whether in New York, where I lived in my 20s and ran a shelter for homeless men, or in my home town of Truro, where I volunteer with Truro Homeless Action Group and help with the excellent work of St Petroc’s Society.
Before I was elected, I participated in the rough sleeper counts. However, the guidance given by the Government of the day made it so difficult to count the number of homeless people that Cornwall was deemed to have a rough-sleeping population of two. Since the coalition came in and properly opened up the rough sleepers count, we have been getting much better data on the scale of the problem. Sadly, although it is no surprise to any of us who live there, Cornwall is now deemed to have the second largest homeless population outside London. Without that honest collection of data, we will never be able to take the steps needed to tackle these issues.
Those reforms were brought in by this Government, which underlines the fact that the issue has all-party support. We all understand that nothing could be worse than being homeless. We may not always agree on every measure, or on how to tackle the issue, but turning it into a party political football does no service to the debate.
Sarah Newton
I am not going to lower the tone of the debate and further let down the young people who are watching it by responding to that personal attack. As I have said before, I have volunteered throughout my life on the issue of homelessness—I still volunteer now, and I am well into my 50s. I do not know how many hot dinners the hon. Gentleman has had, but it is silly and demeaning to start personally attacking hon. Members’ motivations. I am in no doubt that hon. Members from all parts of the political spectrum care deeply about homelessness and have been personally committed to dealing with it as volunteers or in other appropriate ways. I really want to carry on with the debate.
I am proud to stand on my record and on the record of what the Government have delivered to help homeless people in Cornwall and prevent homelessness there. One person sleeping rough in my constituency, one person sofa-surfing or one person living in unacceptable accommodation is one too many, and I will continue day and night to do what I can, but there has been significant improvement. Once we had better data from the rough sleepers count, the money followed, and Cornwall council has received considerable sums, which have been fed into really good third sector organisations such as St Petroc’s and Glen Carne, voluntary organisations such as the Truro Homeless Action Group, the statutory sector and the NHS. I could speak for half an hour about the different activities that are going on to prevent homelessness and to help homeless people, so I will stand on my record.
Sarah Newton
I am going to make a little progress.
That is not to say that I am complacent or that much more does not need to be done. I very much welcome the Crisis report, and I support a lot of its recommendations. The ones I would like to discuss today build on the need for a better evidence base for local planners and those making housing decisions.
Under the Government’s planning reforms, each local authority must do a local housing need assessment to make sure its local plan meets the unmet housing need of the people it represents. Having gone through that process in great detail locally, I know that some groups of people, such as young homeless people who are sofa- surfing, are difficult to pick up in the statistics used to form the local housing needs assessment. Assessments must be robust and data-driven, using data from the Office for National Statistics and others, but it would be useful—this is one of the recommendations from Crisis—to look at the guidance given to local authorities as they plan their local housing needs assessment to make sure that those young homeless people are picked up on and that their needs are met.
Following the success of the “No Second Night Out project”, which has done very well in Cornwall, we have much more information about young people and people of other ages who are homeless, but we now need, as part of the planning process, to work out how we can build more appropriate housing for their needs. People have all sorts of complex needs—they may have mental health issues or substance abuse issues, or they may be fleeing domestic violence—and they need supported accommodation, and the Glen Carne charity in my constituency provides it so well.
Ms Buck
On data, the hon. Lady made specific reference to London. Since Boris Johnson became Mayor of London, rough sleeping has increased every year. In the summer of 2014, it was 19% higher than in the six months over the summer of 2013. Is the hon. Lady honestly saying that that year-on-year increase in rough sleeping is a consequence of better data? If so, what is the point of having better data and failing to do anything about it?
Sarah Newton
Speaking from personal experience in my constituency, I can absolutely say yes. Now we have the tools to go out there and try to get as accurate a count as we can. We will then have a far better understanding of the underlying reasons why people—we are talking not just about numbers, but about people’s lives—are homeless so that we can put in place the appropriate services to help them into accommodation. The money follows the problem, and having those tools has brought extra resources into my constituency. It is vital that we carry on gathering data so that we can better plan to meet the needs of people who are currently homeless and prevent more people from becoming homeless.
The other recommendation from Crisis that I would like the Minister seriously to consider is that we go back to local authorities to see how well the legislation we created in this place is implemented. A key finding of the Crisis report was that the legislation was not implemented consistently. Contained within that was another recommendation—that we come up with an inspection regime. We have done that very well with the Care Quality Commission, which we have asked to inspect providers of health and social care services. Given that a decent home is essential for people’s health and well-being, it would be a good idea to think about how we can extend the CQC’s remit so that it can inspect providers of housing for vulnerable groups and the sorts of accommodation we have heard about today, which take people off the street, providing accommodation that is often supervised in some way, as well as a package of care for a couple of years. That would be really good.
Associated with that, I would like it to become common practice for people in councils and organisations responsible for preventing homelessness and supporting homeless people to be part of health and wellbeing boards, because decent housing is important to health and well-being. Some local authorities have included such people on their health and wellbeing boards, but that is not common practice. Including people on those boards will really help those providing joined-up services locally to understand the complexity of the issues confronting people who face the prospect of homelessness or who are experiencing homelessness. It will also enable those providing services—whether social, housing or health services—to better meet the needs of the particularly vulnerable group we have been discussing.
I know that colleagues want to speak, so let me conclude by saying that the Government have made huge progress, and I have seen that in my constituency. However, I urge the Minister to take seriously the recommendations made by Crisis, which it presented in a non-party political way. We can then take them forward, review what is working, understand what is not working and bring in necessary reforms in the next Parliament.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Karen Buck and Sarah Newton(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
Surely the hon. Lady is going to acknowledge that all this is because of a very important step that this new Government have taken. We are honestly collecting the data on the number of homeless people. It was shameful that under the previous Government the whole system of counting homeless people was so rigged. It is no wonder we have seen this rapid rise, because we now have an honest appraisal of the situation and we can start to tackle the appalling legacy that we have inherited.
Ms Buck
I will be very interested to see the evidence for the hon. Lady’s assertion. Although I know that our two parties have differed in the past on their interpretation of “rough sleeping”—on street homelessness—and that there is a genuine debate to be had about how that is measured, I was not aware, and I stand to be corrected, that there has been a shift in the data set for the measurement of the number of people approaching local authorities as homeless and being accepted as such. Nothing on the DCLG website indicates that, so I dispute her definition and it seems to me that we are facing a genuine problem.
Even more worryingly, rent arrears and mortgage default were to blame for a growing share of the number of people who were approaching local authorities as homeless; although not the main cause, that is a growing cause of those applications. It gives me no satisfaction to see that; I do not want people to be made homeless. As we discussed in Committee, homelessness is one of the greatest traumas that any household can possibly face. The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) and other Government Members must face up to the fact that the statistics show a growing trend just as the cuts in housing benefit begin to be flagged up and as people react to the changes in the incoming benefits.
The second set of data to come out in the past week of which we need to be cognisant was a survey released on Friday by the National Landlords Association. It found that 58% of all private residential landlords plan to reduce the number of properties they let to tenants on local housing allowance. Some 80% of landlords expressed concern about the reduction in local housing allowance rates from the average market rents of the bottom 30% and the same number were worried, as I shall discuss in the context of the relevant amendment, about the future local housing allowance increases being linked to the consumer prices index rather than true market rents. The survey also found that 90% of landlords stated they cannot afford to reduce their rents to absorb changes to the local housing allowance as the large majority are faced with mortgage repayments and rising running costs.
The worrying picture is that our discussions are put in context by the cuts in housing benefit that have already been through the House and were opposed by the Opposition, which are feeding through into the concerns of landlords. One point of concern is that when the Government assert that 30% of properties will remain available to tenants on local housing allowance, they ignore the fact that not all the properties in that threshold will be available to tenants because it will not necessarily be the landlords within that cohort who are prepared to let in the first place.
We will have to wait and see, but it is entirely reasonable for alarm bells to ring on the impact on homelessness when we look at those two sets of statistics. If we find either that households are in an affordability crisis or that landlords simply pull out of the housing benefit sector, particularly in those areas where the demand for private rented accommodation is greatest—that is, London, the south-east and some of our cities—we will have a severe problem and many the assumptions being made by the Government about savings are unlikely to be realised. Homelessness is an expensive process and places considerable pressure on local government.
Ms Buck
I am not going to be drawn into debating the advantages and disadvantages of an argument that has just been thrown into the air by the Minister. In some circumstances, the idea may work. Some individuals of working age will actively want to downsize and will say, “We are in a three-bedroom property and it is too big for us. We have been waiting for years to get into a one-bedroom property.” In the real world, we all deal as constituency MPs with people with a huge number of different needs. There are people in all different circumstances, and these different options will work for some people.
The point, surely, in discussing this amendment is that there are 101,000 to 108,000 households in properties that are specifically adapted for their needs who, despite the slightly more sympathetic noises coming from the Minister, in just over 18 months will lose up to 23% of their housing benefit. I am not sure that the vague and general ideas being thrown out by the ministerial team are doing anything to help us deal with that reality.
Sarah Newton
Does the hon. Lady agree that what we are talking about is treating people like people? All people have their individual circumstances and the decision makers are best placed to use their discretion to tackle these issues. Within housing benefit, there is discretionary funding so that people can be treated like humans. Finally, to reassure the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson), pensioners are of course excluded from the concerns that she raised.
Ms Buck
Pensioners are excluded. As I have argued, the attempt to move people of working age in order to avoid the disability penalty is likely to stop registered social landlords from moving pensioners who want to downsize voluntarily, because there simply is not enough flexibility in the social rented sector to allow that to happen. The hon. Lady is making my point for me: there is no discretion. The 670,000 social housing tenants who will be subject to the housing benefit cut, and the 101,000 to 108,000 people in specifically adapted properties, will be subject to a benefit cap. There will not be any discretion. All that the Government can say, apart from mentioning the possibility of people taking in a lodger or moving to an alternative property in a few cases, is that the discretionary housing payment will sort it all out.
Ms Buck
There is the remotest chance of the property that such a person is leaving being occupied by someone who requires the same level of adaptation. It is like playing three-dimensional chess—it will be almost impossible to fit all the people into the properties that exist. At the moment there is supposed to be a flood of people who will leave under-occupied properties in the north-west of England and swap with people in London and the south-east. Then when all the individuals who need adapted properties are considered, it becomes a literal impossibility to ensure that properties match people’s needs properly.
Sarah Newton
The hon. Lady is being very generous in giving way to me.
I imagine that there are a great number of vulnerable people who are sitting at home listening to this debate, or who will read Hansard. For the sake of clarity, I think it is incredibly important to go back to something that was said earlier and remind the whole House that people who are disabled are not subject to the benefits cap.