Housing

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Griffiths for initiating this debate. When 3.5 million young people are either forced to live with their parents or are sleeping rough, we have a very serious societal problem. It applies not only to the inner cities to which my noble friend referred, but to many smaller towns and in particular to rural areas. Young people in our countryside cannot afford to live and work in the villages and towns in which they were born and brought up.

The same applies in urban areas. Not far from here there used to be communities of people who did not need an excessive income to be able to buy or rent premises. Nowadays, the new generation is having to move out and its homes are being replaced by the kind of buildings referred to by my noble friend. As I say, this is a serious societal issue.

There are some great names among past government housing Ministers, from Maxton to Bevan to Macmillan and, indeed, Kingsley Wood, but the last 30 years of delivery on housing policy by successive Governments has been appalling. Young people in particular are not able to get on the housing ladder and we have a private rented situation that is, in effect, highly exploitative in areas of great housing stress and very insecure.

The noble Lord, Lord Horam, is absolutely right about completion of new-build houses. This is a supply issue. New-build houses have been running at about half the rate of household formation for nearly 20 years. Indeed, the housing that is being built is, of course, housing where developers can make money. For the most part it is not only high-end, unaffordable and out of reach for large proportions of the population, it is also, in its physical proportions, singularly inappropriate for single people, young couples with small families, or pensioners who want to move out of larger premises and thereby make way for younger families. I include in that, of course, retiring Methodist ministers. Instead, we have so-called luxury flats, which distort the housing market in our city centres, and restrictions on building in small towns and villages.

Provision of social housing has drastically fallen over recent years. Even now, with the social housing that still exists in our inner cities, we face sell-off, demolition and exile for the tenants and leaseholders in those premises. I am not making a party-political point. Councils of all persuasions have found themselves, because of the financial restrictions, forced into engaging in activities that break up communities and disadvantage the younger generation in particular.

Local authorities need to be able to play a much more positive and effective role. They need new-build programmes. Again, here I agree to a large extent with the noble Lord, Lord Horam. They need to have the cap on their building and finances removed. They need borrowing powers. We need to regard housing as a vital part of our infrastructure strategy. We need to ensure that we replace homes that are sold off by the extended right-to-buy provisions on a one-for-one and like-for-like basis, and that we produce housing that meets the needs of single people and young families.

Only a determined and new form of housing strategy will resolve the problems of the younger people and the wider housing crisis we have. This is not only a social and economic problem, as my noble friend implies, but a moral problem. There are great and growing divisions in society; generational divisions are some of the most dangerous. Compare the young people stuck at home with their parents or living in inadequate conversions, bedsits and multiple occupation with extortionate rents and poor premises, with our generation and that immediately below us, who by and large had acquired housing, were owner-occupiers, or were secure social tenants in council or housing association buildings. That is building up significant resentment on the part of the younger generation. It adds to the resentment of them having lower incomes and lower wages and the absence of potential pension provisions, as contrasted with us and the over-50s. This resentment is only part of the effects of the failure to deliver appropriate and affordable housing to our younger generation, but it creates not only immediate problems of policy but very dangerous social divisions.