Covid-19: Poverty and Mass Evictions

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bird, in his unique way of introducing this debate, has drawn to our attention the fact that many of the invisible victims of the pandemic are private sector renters. They have been hit badly. They are twice as likely to have lost their jobs; they are twice as likely to have reduced income, and most of them have never been in serious arrears before. He was right that this could become a new phenomenon if we do not prevent some of these evictions.

The Government of course recognised the plight of these people and introduced a block on evictions, but they did not block the deeply anxiety-inducing process of notice that can eventually lead to eviction. Generation Rent estimates that nearly 700,000 Section 21 processes have been started over this last terrible year. That means that, when the protection ends, a potentially huge number of people will for the first time in their lives face homelessness.

Of course many of the solutions mentioned today are necessary. We will need to extend the ban on evictions beyond the end of next month and to provide legislation which changes the ease with which people can be evicted. We also need to address the problem of their short-term and long-term security through our social security system.

However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, hinted, there is also a longer-term problem here, and that reflects the colossal strategic failure of housing policy in general over the past few decades. We have reverted to a situation which existed at the beginning of the last century, when a large proportion of the lowest-paid, lowest-income families lived in private rented accommodation. With the lack of access to owner-occupation and the loss of so much council housing, this is likely to increase. Unfortunately, though there are very good landlords and very good institutional landlords, there are also serious problems in respect of small landlords who do not really have the resources to provide decent homes and decent accommodation for those several hundred thousand people. The landlords face a problem themselves, in that they are operating at the economic edge brought about by this pandemic.

Unless we see this issue as part of a longer-term problem, the short-term fixes will not help. We need to restore the security of tenure that proper social housing used to provide, yet we have cut the net number of council homes and the net amount of social housing and reduced access to it. We need to address the immediate problems, but also to reverse the direction of much of the development of the wider housing market—and to do so now.