Housing

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

Moved by

To move that this House takes note of the impact of the shortage of housing on the desire of people, particularly the young, to live in the communities where they were born, raised and educated.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity to address a subject about which I feel passionate. It is a small way to begin to discharge a debt owed by people of my generation to those younger than us. I should also like to express my gratitude to those who will speak later in this debate. I trust it will lay bare an existential need to bring imagination, compassion and resource to the housing needs of young people.

I am a Methodist minister working in London, where the City of London and the boroughs of Islington and Hackney all come together. A Peabody housing estate and blocks of flats built by our local authorities attest to the provision of social housing in earlier times. These dwellings have been inhabited by thousands of lower-income families, many of whom are reached by the ministries of our church. It is with the children of these families that I want to begin. We work hard to raise their aspirations, broaden their horizons and help them strike out towards a bright future. A philanthropist friend has contributed millions of pounds to allow a steady stream of inner-city boys and girls to take up places at the Leys School, our Methodist school in Cambridge. He has also helped us to set up a small fund that helps dozens of our young people who head off for university, where some have gained very impressive qualifications. It is what happens next in the lives of these young people—educated, talented and multi-ethnic young people—that has led to my seeking this debate.

I should put alongside those young people from my congregation the pupils of two splendid inner-city secondary schools—one for boys in Islington and the other for girls in Tower Hamlets—which together form the Central Foundation Schools of London. One hundred and fifty years ago, this foundation was set up to provide for the educational needs of middle-class children. Both schools have undergone exponential change in recent years and are now among the best-performing schools in London. They send young adults on to higher education and into the world of work, and there are brilliant mentoring schemes with local enterprises. It is what happens to those pupils when they leave school that concerns me. They were born, have grown up and are being educated in this part of London. As they begin to establish their own lives, it is becoming virtually impossible for them to root those lives in the communities they know, close to friends and support networks.

If this were a sermon—which of course is a craft I know something about—I would begin with a text by St Theresa:

“If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home”.

That is quite an opening blast from an incoming Prime Minister, especially when we remember all the experience that she gained in her years at the Home Office. So we hang on to the pledge with which she followed that declaration. She promised to make Britain,

“a country that works for everyone”.

Everyone includes, of course, young people, and it is in the spirit of that pledge that I offer my remarks today.

At this point, I suggest that there is little point in trading statistics across the Floor of the House—we must surely all be aware of the housing crisis facing us. Nor do I think there is much to gain from comparing the achievements or failures of successive Administrations. Everyone has tried to respond to the crisis but no one can honestly say that they have cracked it. This Government and their coalition predecessors brought forward their Starter Home scheme and offered Help to Buy equity loans. The Communities Secretary has recently called for 1 million new homes to be built by 2020. We can only wish him well. It is not the first time that that same call has been made—indeed, an identical target was abandoned only recently—but by all means let us have another go.

To meet the target, the maths are not difficult—just divide 1 million by four—but it has been notoriously difficult to get anywhere near the figure that results from that equation. The best that anyone has done in recent times was 10 years ago, in 2006-07, when 219,000 homes were built. Last year it was just 170,000 and the previous year a miserly 145,000. Even the 100,000 prefabs mentioned in the media this week as perhaps one way of helping to reach the jackpot would only scratch the surface of our housing problem.

A little YouTube clip that has been watched by millions of people says it all. It shows a young couple living in rented accommodation and trying hard to save up for a deposit on a house. Their joint earnings amount to £58,000 but they still cannot get enough money together for a deposit. Average rents have risen by 20% in the last five years, while average wages have risen by only 5%. Again, the maths are simple. Rent in London has now soared to a median of £1,400 per calendar month. As London First—a splendid coalition of London employers, the housing charity Shelter, the FSB and the CBI—puts it, as part of its Fifty Thousand Homes campaign:

“For workers in sales, customer service and care, median rents in Inner London and Outer London are close to or above 100% of … typical gross earnings”.

It points out that even entry-level bankers will struggle to afford these rents.

The rented sector offers little solace for young people. Evidence of that was readily available in the Homes and Property section of yesterday’s Evening Standard. It looked at the rent levels of people seeking to live in one room. The borough of Bexley offers the cheapest such accommodation at £500 per room—that is per room, not flat. It was a frightening feature article and made it clear just how the rented sector proves such an attractive arena for private landlords who can so easily exploit the housing shortage to their benefit.

In the next few months, I will be moving from my tied accommodation into the housing market for the first time in my life. Initial exploration has revealed to me the risks, the lack of security and the costs that are involved in trying to find somewhere to live, whether to buy or rent. This hits young people hardest. It really is time that people of our generation come clean about the mess we have left for our children and grandchildren.

There has been much talk about the need to invest in large capital projects as we face an uncertain economic future. The Crossrail project is nearing completion, the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point has got the green light, HS2 is stuttering its way into life and a new runway at Heathrow seems to have got approval. The mood music is clear, but here come my questions. Why cannot we put the provision of housing on a par with all these grand projects? Is not the need to have a roof over our heads and a decent place to live a fundamental human right? Why can we not commit to a national plan to meet the housing targets that we continue to set for ourselves? Why can this not be bipartisan? Why can this obvious social need not command the best energies of us all in a concerted effort to change things? Is it really impossible to provide more support to local authorities that want to start building again? Is it really impossible or politically inexpedient to abolish the restrictions that prevent local authorities borrowing against the value of their housing stock, especially where this would be done within prudential limits? Is ideology or a refusal to recognise past failures always going to win on this matter?

The housing market is so totally skewed in the part of London where I live. Block after block of luxury flats is being built, and five years ago, the cheapest in a development 50 yards from my home was going for £650,000. There seems no end to the demand for these flats, yet nobody seems to live in them. Speculative building is taking up all our space, driving up demand, and contributing to the increasing unaffordability of housing for local people and thereby gentrifying our community. In 2010, 50% of pupils entering our local boys school were registered for free school meals. Six years later, this year, that has dropped to 16%. If this meant that local residents were becoming more affluent, it would be fine, but of course it does not mean that at all. It simply points to local people being edged out of their accommodation as wealthier people buy into it. Social change is a weird thing when it is forced by these artificial market forces.

I see these things from my metropolitan point of view. However, I am happy to acknowledge submissions I have received from other parts of the country from charitable bodies that work across England, and from the Countryside Alliance in respect of rural communities. They offer a broad measure of support for the case I am seeking to establish. The current housing crisis should be recognised as a national emergency and treated as such.

Shelter, that admirable champion of those seeking decent housing, has worked out a formula it calls the living home standard and applied it to the needs of young people. Shelter offers this standard as a,

“housing equivalent of the living wage”.

Unsurprisingly, it breaks down the essential elements of that formula into five basic components: affordability, space, stability, decent conditions and neighbourhood. It is the lack of provision across all these requirements, especially as they affect young people, that has led me to seek this debate today.

I am currently helping an author who has written the biography of Sir Kingsley Wood, an important Conservative politician of the 1920s and 1930s. At his untimely death in 1943, he was Winston Churchill’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. His most significant government service was in the Department of Health, first as assistant to Neville Chamberlain and then, later, as Minister in his own right. In those days, responsibility for housing fell within the Department of Health. Wood worked it all out: if people are decently housed, they are likely to enjoy better health. In 1925, as a Conservative Minister, he was brave enough, as he put it,

“to take a risk .... in the national interest”,

by directing £14 million then being spent on the treatment of tuberculosis towards housing on the grounds that such an investment offered a way of preventing the progress of the disease and, in the end, would save money.

I remember the research of a young scholar in our congregation who was examining the relationship between the conditions in which people live and their mental health. He was clear that mental illness was frequently a consequence of bad housing and the social environment in which people lived. He is now a professor in McGill University, Montreal, and his skills are sought globally. In other words, proper attention given to housing is likely to show good results across the board: employment in the construction industry; dignity in people’s personal lives; well-being and good social image; protection and security for ordinary people; and a better future for our young people, who are currently in danger of being locked out of the housing market and moved out of the neighbourhoods that have nurtured them. I hope that, in some small way, people will have heard my voice articulating their concerns.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I add my word of gratitude to the Minister and to all those who have taken part. It has been a very enlightened and, I think, non-partisan debate on an issue that we all recognise as very important. It needs a degree of urgency, which perhaps has not been commanded up till now. I thank all those who have spoken. I am glad that my speech, being not quite a sermon, triggered a response from the noble Lord, Lord Horam. I am very pleased to have received his words and I thank him for them.

[Lord Horam]

I think we are all glad that, at least in the House of Lords, the Labour Party still owes more to Methodism than to Marx.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

Perhaps the noble Lord will add to that and let me have it in writing. I repeat that I am most grateful. As I conclude, I just want to remind noble Lords that it is a great privilege of the life that I live that I have the ear of untold numbers of young people from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. In presenting my remarks, I have sought to articulate the point of view that they have helped me to formulate, and I hope that will add a degree of urgency to the way that we look at this issue.

Motion agreed.