Housing

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I am delighted to be part of this debate. There was a very impassioned debate earlier this week in this House. When 538 people voted on Tuesday, I was not able to because I had to attend a rather important and long-standing event in the north of England. However, the passion that I heard on Monday and the sense of urgency expressed again and again from all the Benches around this House is something that I would wish to conjure up for the issue before us. I wish that we could sense the passion that is invested in this question of housing and feel the urgency for meeting the needs that are undoubtedly there.

I am aware that in speaking in such a debate, I am surrounded by people who are experts in their field, who have been or are in government and who have run big organisations and the rest of it. I come to most of the debates in which I speak in this House simply as a hands-on operator—a street-level worker. I work in communities with people; in their surgeries, Members of Parliament frequently refer some of the cases to which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has just mentioned to people like me. I must thank the noble Lord for bringing this matter to our attention today on two grounds. The first is that he gave me a respectable excuse for leaving the conference for which I was in the north of England, since I prioritised being here, and the second is the importance of the issue before us.

Over the years, I have been involved in meeting housing need in a variety of ways. I have served as director of two or three housing associations. For a while, I was responsible for a day centre in west London at the time when, as some Members of the House may remember, local authority housing was being exchanged and dealt with for political purposes in the City of Westminster. An awfully long shadow fell from that. I was also part of the London homelessness network of organisations meeting housing needs, largely but not entirely for the street homeless. One-to-one referrals have also been part of what I have done.

The economy, they say, is starting to build up again. What do I see in the part of London where I live? There is lots and lots of building going on. From the roof of my house, I think I have counted eight large cranes, busily building for the future. Someone is investing in the future, which they think is rather rosier than the present. What kind of building am I talking about? First, obviously, there are premises to house the burgeoning businesses coming to what they call Silicon Roundabout. It is happening all around us with the start-up companies and their technology, and it is good to see that business in this sector will bring new life to the community I live in. Then there is student accommodation. There are large amounts of it with, we have to say, its limited usefulness. Nevertheless, I am glad for the students. Then there are hotels of various kinds. The final category is that of luxury flats.

I am the chair of an education foundation. We sold a piece of land at Old Street roundabout and could not believe the figure. We thought that if we got £20 million, we would really be doing well; we got £41 million. There have sprung up these great big sails—that is what they look like—on the roundabout, with these luxury flats in them boasting at street level that their prices started at £750,000. A building that once belonged to the Methodist church just the other side of the roundabout, and which we sold in 1989, is selling its luxury flats at roughly the same price. I see all that building and none of it would I really object to as long as there were certain other things happening in the world of construction. What I do not see is a real and systematic programme to build affordable and social housing, although there are some units. Do not get me wrong: there is a policy in the inner city to make it a requirement on developers to put a certain percentage of the units into what are called affordable categories. However, even that does not begin to scratch the surface of the need of which I am aware.

Within the church community that I look after, we have some truly outstanding young people. They are all British-born and mainly from ethnic minority backgrounds. Our work is intended to widen their horizons and raise their aspirations to help them see that one day they might become the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a leading journalist or barrister or, indeed, a Member of your Lordships’ House. Why not? We find scholarships and financial help for them at university. We try to open up some kind of new future for them. Sometimes, when I push them, asking them to consider things they had not even imagined before, they come back to me and say, “Why should I bother? Even if you help us with £1,000 or £2,000, we will still have to incur serious debts—and when we come out, how can we hope to live in these neighbourhoods where we have grown up, where our friends are and where our lives have been lived?”, and they are right.

It is impossible to imagine young people having a realistic hope of achieving that simple objective of continuing to live in a part of the world that suits them. Even if they get a job there, it will not lead easily to them getting a mortgage or an opportunity to live there and get their property. Yesterday’s Evening Standard indicated that the average price of a home in London is £421,395 and that if you took out an 85% mortgage on that, you would have to earn £96,000 per annum. Let me say that since I have never earned more than £25,000 in my life, if it were not for the fact that the church provides me with what I have to admit is a very nice house, I do not know how I would be able to cope at all. How can these children whose horizons we are widening, whose hopes we are raising and whose gifts we want to value stand a hope of getting into that sort of league when they do not have any capital behind them, or any parental wealth or clout? It really is serious.

Let me tell your Lordships about the conversations that I have had since the riots in Tottenham two years ago with these very same young people. Mercifully, they were not involved in what happened then but they are able to tell me very eloquently about the degree of alienation they feel, about the “outsideness” of their experience and about the difficulty of getting through certain doors of opportunity to which they might aspire. There is a tinderbox building up in the city centre in London. I do not want to be alarmist or dramatic but I think that there is. We saw an outburst of it two years ago. We simply have to address the needs of poor, aspiring, able and competent young people whose only difficulty is that they want to live in London.

There is some social housing, as I have said, and the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, mentioned. I do not deplore that, but these do not address the area of primary need and will not get near meeting the demand. When I left this Chamber on Monday to return home and listen to Radio 4, as I always do, a serious discussion programme was going on about how the economic circumstances in our country are leading to joblessness in the north and certain regions and provinces around the land, while there might be the prospect of jobs in London. So we can anticipate a population drift from the north-east and the north-west, where the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has his nice home in Cumbria—all those areas where, as he said, there is no housing—towards London, which the programme said would become a megacity, with all that that does to complicate a regional social development programme in which the regions, as well as London, can enjoy their proper life as part of our society.

While the qualified jobless from around the country are coming to London, certain boroughs in London are buying cheap property as far away from London as they can in order to meet their obligations to house homeless people by, basically, exporting them. That is what in cricket you call a “reverse swing”. It is moving people against the climate. I invest a lot of my time in the needs of Haiti. We have become accustomed since the earthquake of three years ago to seeing pictures of people living in tented villages; there were 1.5 million of them at one time, although there are now only 250,000. We call them IDPs—internally displaced people. There are going to be an awful lot of IDPs in the United Kingdom if present trends continue.

I shall tell noble Lords what one of my young people who dropped out of university, although he got three As at A-level, said when I asked him, “Why on earth have you done that?”. He told me the usual things that I have already shared with your Lordships about the burden of debt and the inability to get into the housing market and start a life properly and with dignity, but went on to say that at street level the talk was that you did not go down the conventional routes to career-building but looked for quick money in order to bypass a lot of the painstaking work that normally goes into building a career and the shaping of the future. What are those quick paths? Crime, drugs, music, football and fame—all of them, according to the argument, capable of producing quick fixes and rapid promotion into the world of haves, as opposed to have-nots.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, that as our economy needs a lift, a serious attempt should be made to prioritise the creation of infrastructure for the building of homes. It just seems to make sense. The construction industry gets on with things, homes are built and, within homes, security, well-being and health automatically flow. I do not see why we cannot see that; it is a no-brainer. The eight millennium development goals have preoccupied me for the past 15 years or so, and I have always wondered why housing—a shelter, a roof over your head, somewhere you can raise your family with dignity and create an environment that is yours—was not one of them. The noble Lord does us a great favour by bringing this matter to our attention just now.

I began by referring to Monday and Tuesday’s debate, when 538 people went through the Lobbies. I might have been the 539th if my wretched conference had not got in the way. However, the words that I heard repeated most frequently in the speeches that I was party to while in the Chamber were “justice” and “equality”. If ever there was a subject where those ringing words needed to be heard again, it is on the question of addressing the housing needs of ordinary people, whose only hope is that they have somewhere to live their lives with dignity with their families and contribute to the society around them. It does not seem much to ask. Where, ask I with no political background at all, is the will of Governments to address this in a focused and systematic way?