Social Housing

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Whitty]

That this House takes note of the case for a long-term commitment to increased provision of social housing to help to reduce housing costs, homelessness and housing benefit expenditure.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Addison Act of 1919, which first gave general powers for local authorities to build and manage council housing. For decades, council housing was the ambition of millions of families in all walks of life, and for many it still is.

For my main text I have taken the recent report from Shelter’s Social Housing Commission. It starkly sets out how we got here, what are the consequences, and makes proposals for drastic and strategic action to restore the central role of council housing in our housing provision.

I am of course grateful that such a large number of speakers wish to speak in this debate, but I am particularly pleased to see a member of that Shelter commission: my noble friend Lady Lawrence. I look forward to her speech, as well as to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Osamor.

It is still the ambition for millions of people in the often exploitative and squalid private sector to obtain social housing provided by local authorities and housing associations. That is why 1.1 million households in England—about 4 million people—are on council waiting lists and desperate for a council house. In London, the ratio of those households on the lists to available property is over 20:1, and in central London it is even higher. Lest this is seen as a purely urban issue, the CPRE estimates that at the present rate it will take 133 years to clear the current waiting lists in rural counties of England.

In the last few decades, from the 1980s onwards, social housing—council housing in particular—has been first disparaged by Governments and media, then curtailed, and then directly attacked. Successive Governments share some of the blame, but the inheritance of the 1980s has done the greatest damage.

Building of social housing has fallen from an average of 126,000 per annum to a few thousand a year—fewer than 7,000 last year. Originally, the Thatcher Government’s right to buy saw 3 million council homes lost, without the proceeds being used to provide for their replacement. Stock transfers and allocation of management to ALMOs has also often removed councils from their housing management role, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Successive Governments have championed the growth of home ownership, and I do too, but that growth has reached saturation point and gone backwards. It has fallen from 70% to 63% in recent years. In the private rented sector, renting privately often means unaffordable housing costs. Indeed, even within the social housing sector, the insistence on “affordable rent”—which in practice works out at up to 80% of rapidly rising local private rents—has meant that housing costs have been too great for many families. In the private sector, it has meant multiple tenants in overcrowded rooms or even, in some cases, in sheds and outhouses. At the end of this line, it means the tragically burgeoning number of homeless on our streets, which has doubled over the past few years and, as we have seen in the figures today, has gone up again. Those figures are regarded by almost everybody as an underestimate.

Meanwhile, from the Government’s point of view, over the past three decades, state support for housing has not diminished but has shifted dramatically from subsidies for building, improving and managing homes to providing welfare benefits for tenants. Instead of the Exchequer investing in building for the future, state spending goes on an escalating benefit bill, a large proportion of which is now going to private landlords, increasing housing shortages in town and countryside alike.

I often feel angry about this, and the last time I intervened in a housing debate, I just had a rant because I had only four minutes. Colleagues today have only three minutes, so I expect some more of those as well. I was blaming successive Governments, but also the overconcentration of housebuilding and developers, so that their ability to evade any social housing targets has grown. The difficulty that arises for local authorities and housing associations when dealing with private developers is that developers are in a position of strength to argue for a diminution in social housing.

Many simply blame the right to buy; I do not completely. In principle, the right to buy gave the possibility of home ownership to a lot of people who would not otherwise have had it, but local authorities need the right to suspend it and, as noble Lords will know, in Scotland and Wales it has been abolished. The main opposition to right to buy as it has been practised has been because of the failure to use the proceeds to develop new social housing. If we had ploughed all that money back, we would have thriving mixed tenure communities, instead of which we have monolithic areas and misery in the private rented sector.

We often talk about social housing in terms of individual tenants and families, but homes also form communities. I am in favour of mixed tenure communities, but I am not in favour of new developments and regenerations drastically reducing the provision of social housing. For three decades, provision of housing overall in all forms of tenure has been inadequate; the Government acknowledge this, as do all political parties. We have created homes at only about half the rate of the creation of new households, but the social housing sector has suffered most, particularly council housing. Of course, other forms of housing provision ought, in a progressive policy, to play a significant part. Housing associations have a key role to play, as do the various schemes for shared ownership, and there is some scope for bringing back empty homes into use and conversion. But unless we have a strong and clear commitment to a long-term programme of building and converting for new social dwellings at social rent, we can solve neither the housing crisis, nor the social crisis, nor the problem of escalating housing benefit, nor ultimately the problem of homelessness on our streets and of hidden homelessness in many families up and down the country.

The recent Shelter report sets this problem out squarely and comes up with some proposals. In recent months and years, the Government have shown some recognition of the need to build more council homes, particularly in their recent document with a foreword by the Prime Minister herself, but the reality is that the number of homes being brought into being by councils has continued to diminish. The Shelter report calls for a major long-term programme; it envisages 3.1 million social homes being built, mainly by councils, over the next 20 years. That requires a drastic shift to capital and management investment in council housing, away from the growth in housing benefit now caught up, regrettably, in the difficulties surrounding universal credit.

That target is ambitious but it is shared by almost every housing commentator. I was slightly surprised to find, for example, the Centre for Social Justice—normally seen as a right-wing organisation—coming out with not quite the same but rather similar targets and propositions on land reform. Most experts in this field realise that we cannot reverse the current problems in the housing market without councils playing a major role in the building programme. Since the 1920s, they have not: council building has fallen drastically and is now close to zero. The problem has got worse and other solutions, such as the growth of home ownership, are now grinding to a halt.

The situation has been aggravated by two other aspects. The Government have started to address one: the absurd restriction on local authorities building and investing in social housing. That was partly reduced in the recent Budget but it will take some time for that to have any effect. The other dreadful consequence of austerity has been local authorities losing a lot of expertise in their housing, architecture and planning departments, meaning that they are less able than they were in the past to commission new builds and improve their existing estates. That also needs to be reversed; the Government need to see that the money provided to local authorities is there to do just that.

This issue requires a long-term strategy, as Shelter and others have recognised, but the Government and everyone involved in the building industry and housing provision must ensure that the strategy starts now so that we build enough homes for the next generation—homes that families can afford and in which they can be safe and create effective and functioning communities. I will give other speakers an extra four minutes because my voice is going but I hope that they will support the provisions of the Shelter report and my speech. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this debate. I particularly appreciated the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Osamor.

Until the Minister spoke, I was going to say that we have a wide consensus in this House. I know the Minister’s heart is with that consensus but he felt obliged to read out—unusually for him—large chunks of his report to defend the Government’s position. However, all Governments have failed on this front and we are faced with a colossal problem. We are in the midst of an enormous housing crisis in general and we will not get out of it without a substantial contribution from council housing.

Yes, that has to be afforded and directed towards the priority areas. The noble Lord, Lord Fraser, asked where the money was coming from. There is a huge amount of money effectively being wasted in housing benefit, which, over a 20-year strategy—if the Treasury was slightly more strategic and intelligent—we could begin to transfer back into building and improving the fabric of housing available to everyone.

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, reminded us that social housing has to be sociable and the right reverend Prelate said that this is all about community, which it is—absolutely. This is not only about individuals but about community. For social housing to meet the needs of people and to become a community, it must be available to more than those who are emergency and urgent cases. That used to be the case and should be again.

Some words have changed their meaning. The word “affordable”, in relation to rent, rapidly needs replacing. I do not disagree with some of what the Minister said but it means that the exorbitant rents that exist in the private sector are now reflected for new tenants in the social sector as well. That is not going to solve any problems.

Finally, as my noble friend Lord Sawyer, said, we are in danger of exacerbating the gap in our society between those who own and those who rent. I would remind my noble friend Lord Sawyer that the most important football result was Millwall 3, Everton 2. However, he makes an important point.

There are wider issues than bricks and mortar in housing—wider even than the safe and secure conditions we seek—because housing has an impact on health, our society as a whole and the dreadful scourge of homelessness. I remind the House that Nye Bevan was Minister for Health and Housing and it may be that a broader remit for the Ministers and the civil servants involved in this field is necessary. For the moment, I thank everyone who has participated and broadly supported the recommendations of the Shelter report. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.

Democratic Political Activity (Funding and Expenditure) Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

Well, my Lords, I suppose I should thank the noble Lord, Lord True, for his totally non-partisan intervention on this issue and for being the only member of the massed ranks of the Conservative Party to come here to defend the totally unbalanced status quo which exists in political funding, which largely favours the Conservative Party, whatever anomalies there may be elsewhere.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, if only on his perseverance. He has many times attempted to put this rather important issue before the House, and has again produced a detailed Bill. I suppose I have to declare an interest: I am in a very small way a donor to the Labour Party and in a past life have been both a collector and a receiver of rather large affiliation fees, which are relevant to this area.

The Bill is another attempt to clean up what most of the public regard as an appalling state of affairs in political funding. It is not that I agree with every aspect of this Bill; there are some provisions that I do not agree with, and some that I have reservations about—and I may come on to those. But it is important that we debate these issues. The public are concerned about who pays for our politics, how that is disclosed and what those who pay get in return for their donations. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, takes as his template for this proposal the report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life under Sir Chris Kelly back in 2011. Again, while I support the overall thrust of that committee, I do not necessarily agree with all its recommendations. However, the reality is that successive Conservative-dominated Governments have not taken on board what was the central thrust of that report—namely, that the public do not trust the structure of political funding within this country. That needs to be addressed.

The scandal of the six years in between Chris Kelly’s report and now is that nothing has actually moved. Instead, the only thing that we got in the last Parliament —the first time we had had a majority Conservative Government for 20 years—was the Trade Union Bill, which actually made the balance more unfair. This is a bit of a nostalgic reunion party, because the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Wrigglesworth, and I sat on the Select Committee during the passage of that Bill, which restrained a bit the Government’s intentions. That Bill was supposed to be about industrial relations and the proper administration of trade unions but was in fact designed to undermine a very large proportion of the financing of the main opposition party—something which, if it had taken place in Belarus, would I am sure have been before the United Nations by now. We restrained it a bit, in the sense that we slowed it down. The report from that Select Committee, incidentally, was unanimous—particularly the part of it that did not propose to change the text of the Bill but called on the House and the Government to go back to the issue and reconvene the political parties to make a new attempt to address the issues raised in the original Chris Kelly report and those resulting from the attempt to change the balance that the Trade Union Bill represented.

The provisions of the Trade Union Act will still affect the long-term finances of the Labour Party. Nothing has been proposed, or is being proposed, to balance that out by an attack on what are, essentially, the main sources of the government party’s finances, which are donations from very rich individuals. That situation was compounded, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, during the referendum, when a large proportion of both sides was funded by donations from very rich individuals, with no requirement equivalent to the requirements on trade unions, which have to go through several hoops, with opt-outs or opt-ins, and have to set up a separate political fund, disclose and ring-fence it and reiterate the decision to have that political fund every few years. No other organisation or limited company, private or public, and, clearly, no individual has to go through similar hoops. The present balance—or imbalance—needs to be addressed.

There are some detailed points that I could make about the Bill, but I shall probably leave most of them to Committee. The most contentious one is that it would limit expenditure in elections and change the nature of the taxpayer-funded part of political funding, which could be a very difficult political sell. I am not sure that the Bill in present form addresses that sufficiently, although in other contexts the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has made a number of suggestions that we should take into account. I am not sure that the changes in how taxpayers’ money is given to political parties that are dealt with in the Bill would actually alter the situation. I am not sure that we should totally rely on an amount per vote, and I am reluctant to say that it should all relate to the previous general election. Indeed, I am slightly surprised that the Liberal Democrats are proposing that. Maybe a longer-term run of popular support for parties should be reflected in any public funding.

There seems little appetite from the Government to take a new run at this, to set up an independent commission, to ask the Committee on Standards in Public Life, or even to bring in the political parties again to see whether they can reach some degree of consensus on the way forward. Admittedly, there is not much enthusiasm from the political parties either, but it is the Government who have in their hands the responsibility for the integrity of and public support for our political system. There is, therefore, an onus on the Government to give us some way forward.

I had a fairly lengthy additional point on this; the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has, to some extent, pre-empted it, but the Bill does not. The Bill reads in a somewhat old-fashioned form, talking about a world of election addresses, mail deliveries, party-political broadcasts, election meetings and so forth, whereas we know that a lot of political discourse, and a lot of the most effective forms of political campaigning, now exist in the cyber world. Our present rules, frankly, do not address that. It is true that, when the election expenses for the last election come to be published, there will be a small line for the main political parties for advertising on social media—it has been reported this week that the Labour Party did rather better than the Conservative Party at that. It relates to placing adverts on Facebook or Twitter and is, as the Bill recognises, another form of media from traditional advertising, in one sense. But the reality is that political life in this country and elsewhere has been seriously affected by the existence of other forms of messages, not necessarily—in fact, not mainly—from political parties, but from influential, well-heeled individuals with nefarious but unpublished intentions throughout the world.

There are different views on whether the cyber intrusion into the political world is a good or a bad thing. Some regard it as a vast advance in democracy, others as a dystopian nightmare, but we cannot deny that it is there. It is true that, to begin with, progressives or, if you like, those on the left of the political spectrum, hailed it as a major improvement—the first Obama election, the Arab spring and so forth. The right in America regarded it as a negative thing, but then got to work. The book Dark Money, which the noble Lord has already referred to, spells out in great detail how American billionaires have greatly influenced the political weather within America, through the Tea Party, through their contacts and, essentially, not so much through advertisements and messages on social media but the intensive mining of sources of data on individuals and groups, which—without any permission from the originators of the data—were collected for commercial and other purposes. They then used that effectively to target their political message. The American right has been extremely successful. Initially, Donald Trump was not the main beneficiary of this, but he became the main beneficiary of it in the end. None of that appears in the accounts of the main American political parties, nor in the accounts of the legitimate election committees for individual candidates within America.

The noble Lord also mentioned that we had a small example of this very clearly in our referendum. This is a serious problem. If Cambridge Analytica and its related companies were using material that was not in practice declared, and if the DUP—the only political party that was party to that—was using it to campaign in Great Britain, one asks why, and also what the source of that money is. I do not know the answer to that. However, the fact that Northern Ireland has different rules on disclosure and allows, for good and understandable historical reasons, donations from outside the United Kingdom to be given to political parties, raises suspicions that that financing operates outside the normal rules for elections in the United Kingdom. Clause 29 extends the Bill to the whole United Kingdom. While we have to respect the fact that some provisions of Northern Ireland legislation are different, in general disclosure matters must be the same across the whole United Kingdom, particularly given that we are now in a situation where a party based solely in Northern Ireland is in effect part of the Government.

Some new issues have been raised. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for bringing back the old issues, but the onus is now on the Minister and the Government. If the Minister is prepared to accept that the Bill should go further, we can discuss this again in Committee. If he wants to stop it, the best way of doing so is to announce today a new inquiry and that the Government will call together the political parties to see how best we can progress it, in which case I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will drop this Bill and rely on that process. If, however, the Minister does not give that commitment today, I hope to discuss some of these issues in Committee.