Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, Part 2 of the Housing Act 2004 repealed Part XI of the Housing Act 1985 and introduced a new definition of a house in multiple occupation and, in April 2006, a new scheme for controlling and licensing such houses that were deemed a high risk. Houses in multiple occupation include bed-sits, shared houses and hostels but not self-contained flats. They share one or more of the basic amenities, such as the toilet and the washing or cooking facilities. Those properties which met certain conditions had to be licensed. These conditions included the building being three storeys or more high and occupied by five or more tenants, in at least two households. The regulations have worked well but more needs to be done. The private rented sector is increasing, as we have all heard, and so are houses in multiple occupation. We need to provide protections to this growing group of tenants, who are particularly at risk.

The purpose of Amendment 19 is to go further and bring more properties into scope. To be part of the mandatory licensing scheme under my amendment, the only two conditions which would need to be met are that the property has to have five or more people living in it and in at least two households. As I have said, houses in multiple occupation pose the greatest risk to the tenants living there. It has been established by research undertaken that people living in bed-sits are six times more likely to die as a result of fire than people living in an ordinary house. A number of factors can be at play here, from a vulnerable person living in the accommodation to the quality of the construction or conversion of the property. The time has come to extend these provisions and I hope that we get a favourable response. I beg to move.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

I do not wish to detain the Committee but I simply want to say that this is an extremely interesting proposal, which I hope the Ministers will look at very carefully. We have a lot of experience in recent years of HMOs and the legislation about having three storeys. We need to look carefully at this because the proposal as outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, seems to be one meriting some further close attention.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, if I may briefly intervene, I remember having great discussions about this matter on previous Housing Bills a long time ago. When the Bill with this provision in it originally came forward, we flagged up that there would be problems on it. I urge the Government to look again at this. They can look back at the discussions we had in those days about how to describe an HMO and the issue about the three storeys. Some of us have been in this House and doing housing over a number of years. I do not think that there is anybody else in the Committee right this minute who would have done this when I did, but there will be Members of the House who remember it very well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, although my name is not shown on this amendment, I should like to support it because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, it is very important.

There are two reasons why it should be reasonably straightforward for the Government to fulfil the proposal in this amendment. The first is that local authorities have health and well-being boards that are charged with a duty to assess the general health and well-being of their area, so a structure exists. The second is that a wealth of research has been undertaken connecting well-being with poverty. The amendment talks about the impact of rent arrears, for perfectly good reasons. Of course, the issue is more generally debt and rent levels, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has drawn attention; this is clearly an important contributory factor. However, it is not just a financial issue. Too often, Governments look at the question of well-being and think it relates to rents and to the financial issues surrounding the payment of rents. There is a huge wealth of evidence that suggests that it is a well-being issue. Governments have to address the matter from that perspective. Citizens Advice has produced statistics on payday loans and the rise in the work of loan sharks, which it says has gone up 10 times since 2008. This matters. Politicians and Governments have a duty to ensure that the population are not exposed to higher levels of mental and physical ill health, driven by poor diet because money does not exist in the household, to ensure that their health and well-being is being protected.

This is a perfectly reasonable amendment. Delivering it is the kind of thing Governments exist for. If Governments do not do it, I am not entirely sure who should. In my view, Parliament has a duty to examine this on an annual basis and to assess whether health and well-being is being impacted upon negatively by the fact that debt levels and rent arrears are rising.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I warmly support Amendment 23, to which I have added my name. I hope your Lordships will forgive me for making this point but when I think of my formative political years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when we had such clear aspirations for our society, I find it almost inconceivable that here we are, still one of the wealthiest nations in the world, having to discuss whether or not, as a result of policy, we are facing a deteriorating situation in the nutrition, health and mental health of people in this country. I find it appalling. I can hardly believe that this is happening and that this is the reality, when we had all those aspirations—which broadly went across political lines in those years. I think it is disgraceful and I hope the Government take seriously that, at the day of reckoning, they will have a lot to answer for.

I had an inner-city constituency when I was a Member of Parliament and I saw then the clear connection between poverty, educational attainment, health and mental stability. I also saw the impact as families—which we keep saying are so important in our priorities—with totally inadequate means tried to cope with mental breakdown and mental illness in their midst.

In policy-making we need to proceed on sound evidence. The anecdotal evidence, the evidence of practical experience, is overwhelming. I keep being disturbed by the reports I read about teachers seeing children coming to school hungry and undernourished—how can we possibly hope for advancement in educational achievement in this situation? Teachers are now out of their own pocket on occasion, financing breakfast for the children concerned. We need all the hard evidence we can find. As a society, we are increasingly concerned about mental illness, which seems to be increasing by disturbing dimensions. Of course, mental illness is related to the basic issue of the security of a decent home.

I have mentioned my experience as the MP for an inner-city area but I saw this issue arising in another context, when for nine years I had the privilege of being the president of the YMCA in England. The YMCA has a very big housing programme, and I could see that it was just ridiculous to regard administering a housing programme as just managing it. There were always huge social dimensions attached to that housing programme. Why were people there, needing our support? Why were people in the state they were in? These questions were constantly before us.

We need the maximum amount of real evidence of what is happening on the front line, and it is altogether sensible and encouraging that the noble Baroness—not for the first time, I might say—is challenging us to do something practical to see from the front-line evidence what the situation is.