Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill

Debate between Mark Pawsey and Karen Buck

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 19th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is a mind reader because I was coming to that very point. There is plenty of evidence to confirm that bad housing is a drain on the national health service and—as in so many other areas—if we were able to act more effectively to tackle the causes of bad housing, that would also benefit the NHS.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on introducing this Bill and I assure her of our support. She mentioned some disturbing cases, examples of which we will all have heard in our constituency casework. Does she accept that private sector landlords play a valuable role in the housing market and that the vast majority of them understand that, in addition to their right to receive rent, they also have obligations towards their tenants?

[Ms Buck]

I absolutely do. The vast majority of landlords act responsibly towards their tenants, and they have an interest in ensuring that the rogue minority do not get away with irresponsible behaviour.

This week, I was pleased to take part in Parliament’s digital engagement process, and our project on housing standards received the best response so far in that important experiment. That is pleasing, although it further served to confirm the extent of the problem. We were told that 57,000 people viewed the Facebook page on which we presented our questions about attitudes to housing fitness, and some of the case studies that came in as a response were truly horrifying. Those studies came from all over the country and reflected the scale of the problem.

We know anecdotally, and from Members of Parliament, councillors and other caseworkers, just how serious is the problem of substandard and unfit housing. The English housing survey shows that three quarters of a million private rented properties—about one in six of that sector—are unfit and that about a quarter of a million social rented homes contain a category one hazard under the housing, health and safety rating system. That could relate to damp, infestation, excess cold and a number of other risks, and it means that 3 million people, including many children, have their health and safety compromised every day by substandard housing.

Local council-led enforcement is simply insufficient for the task. I have already mentioned my very positive relationship with my local authority, although it still has constraints, particularly in respect of its own housing stock. Taken across the board, however, local authorities are not enforcing more than a tiny proportion of measures to deal with substandard properties. My most recent freedom of information research, which was prepared into a report by Stephen Battersby, indicates that enforcement action is taken at a level equivalent to only 1% of all the properties that are unfit according to the English housing survey. Research carried out by Shelter about a year ago found that enforcement action has fallen by 40% in recent years. Importantly, this is not a criticism of local authorities, but the fact is that the capacity simply is not there. Performance varies hugely between councils. There is a reliance on informal action in some areas, and although that has its place and can help to resolve some problems, it makes it hard to assess the overall effectiveness of what local authorities are doing.