Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate and I congratulate my noble friend on securing it. There have been so many really interesting proposals and ideas to come out of this long debate.

I come to this from a building and engineering background. I am stuck on that figure, which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also told us, that one in 20 houses in this country are empty. Where are they, who owns them, and should they be empty? Of course, the reasons are very varied. Spending a lot of time in Cornwall, I see all of the second homes and wonder, well, people like second homes, and some of them may be unsuitable for owner-occupiers, some of them may be totally unsuitable for being what we like to call affordable, but on the other hand, they could be rented out for half the year when the owners are not there, so people who live in these villages—of whom I know many—would have somewhere to live. There needs to be some financial incentive to achieve that.

There is another issue that worries me. My next-door neighbour when I live in London had a flat but, sadly, died two or three years ago. The flat is owned by the council and has been empty ever since. It is damp and it could do with a refurb, but it is a flat, and it could be made affordable but is not because the council is doing nothing about it.

My worst example is from spending a lot of time in the Isles of Scilly, where I see a number of people who do not have proper accommodation. They are there because they are working; they have jobs to keep the economy going. They quite often try and rent their accommodation from the Duchy of Cornwall, and I pay tribute to Prince William—or the Duke of Cornwall—for what he is trying to do to improve housing, particularly in Cornwall. However, he is not doing so well in Scilly, because there are, I think, seven empty houses on one island which are waiting for builders to come in. Unsurprisingly, you cannot get builders on islands. You can get a few of them on the mainland, but you have to accommodate them, because they cannot commute by sea every day. The obvious thing is for some of these empty houses to be allocated for builders to come there, certainly in winter. But it is not done, so these houses remain empty, and you cannot even get builders in there to do whatever has to be done. I do not know what the answer to that is. The Duchy of Cornwall makes a profit of £22 million every year, and you would think that they could invest some of that into the houses that the workers there need.

The other problem which one comes across is the lack of tradespeople to do this work. It is very easy to say that we have not got any carpenters, bricklayers or anything else, but unless we train them—through our education system, particularly in the countryside, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans—we cannot use them. It is really important that we have a good stock of tradespeople in all parts of the country, so they can do this work and hopefully improve the stock of housing.

To conclude, I congratulate my noble friend on her wonderful introduction to this debate. With all the ideas we have heard, let us hope that the Government, in the next year or two, can develop some of them, so that we can deliver affordable housing to those who want it. You meet many of them and they are all on the council list, but we need to do something for them.