Housing
Debate between Meg Hillier and Stephen Pound
Stephen Pound
Sorry, it’s Colin’s brother.
We are speaking today on an incredibly important subject. Last Friday morning, I went to the extreme east end of the District line, where a family from my constituency have been housed in temporary accommodation at the other end of London. The children have to get up at 7am to carry on attending their primary school in Northolt in my constituency. It takes an hour and a half to get there, before the day has even started. This is the reality of the housing crisis in the nation as a whole, but particularly in London. The housing that that family could once have aspired to has been sold. It is one of the cruellest ironies that some 42% of temporary accommodation that we provide under the private sector leasing scheme in Ealing is former council housing.
What are the Government proposing? Are they talking about a sensible house building programme? Are they talking about fiscal incentives and mechanisms to assist people in buying properties? No. They are proposing one of the most cruel, stupid and brutal pieces of legislation I have heard of in my life. Harold Macmillan was mentioned earlier, a man who spoke for a time when we thought that housing was something that should be built, not sold off, and something that is not a bribe but an entitlement and a right.
I have great respect for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. He is a good man, but he has fallen among asset strippers here today. Harold Macmillan talked about selling off the family silver. Well, we are talking about selling off the family shelter. The idea is that the Government can go to a charitable housing association and say, “We are going to nationalise you and then we’re going to liquidate you and sequester your assets.” How on earth can anything think for a moment that that is a logical or sane way to go forward?
I wish to do the Conservative party a favour. I wish to save them from themselves. I know there is no chance whatsoever of this proposed legislation actually seeing the light of day and becoming an Act. It simply cannot work. There will be legal challenges. As soon as we start to drill down into the minutiae, it will be realised that the Government simply cannot take a private asset and sell it off as a possible bribe to the future. If they want to take the logic of this forward, why not go to every single private landlord—including the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies), who confessed to being a landlord—and say to them in an attempt to expand the property-owning democracy that made this nation great, “We’re going to take your property. You are a private landlord, just as a housing association is a private landlord”? Where is the logical difference?
Stephen Pound
I wish I could, but I cannot.
I believe in the fairly basic precept that no person should have a second home as long as there is one person who has no home. Will the proposed legislation—I address specifically the issue of extending the right to buy, the sequestration of housing associations—make any difference whatsoever? It will. It will make matters a great deal worse. Housing associations will lose their collateral base. They will lose their ability to borrow. There will not be some great freeing up of assets spreading across the nation. Rather, there will be the same slithering, slimy people scurrying around the remnants of our housing estates trying to persuade people to buy their property, to realise their assets and to free up the money in their property. These poodle-faking spivs have had the time of their lives under Conservative Governments. We do not want to see it reach an efflorescence again under this ludicrous Bill.
In case after case in our surgeries, every one of us surely hears heartbreaking stories arising from the housing crisis. If someone is ill, they can go home until they feel better. If they lose their job, they can go home and apply for other jobs. If they lose their home, they are on a slippery slope to perdition. Homelessness means not just not having a home; it means being on the street and losing one’s health and one’s future. I spoke earlier about a primary school child making a one-and-a-half-hour journey in the morning and afternoon. What will be the corrosive effect of that on future generations? It will destroy their hopes, their dreams and their ability to learn and become good citizens.
The Bill will not help. Let us save the Conservative party and say, “Get away from this nonsense of trying to bribe the future with their own property”, and let us look at building new housing. That is what it is all about. That is the important thing. Let us do that and get rid of this insanity of trying to sell something that does not belong to the Government in the first place.
Department for Communities and Local Government
Debate between Meg Hillier and Stephen Pound
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to ventilate the important issue of housing. A number of my colleagues applied, successfully, to speak on this subject as it is of intense importance to us. Although I and many of my colleagues are London MPs, we do not claim for a second that the housing crisis is unique to our capital city. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has a housing waiting list of nearly 3,000 in his idyllic constituency. This problem affects all of us.
The housing situation in London has gone beyond inconvenience, awkwardness or even embarrassment to something that it is now in a profound state of crisis. In Ealing, the borough in which I have spent virtually all my life, we have 23,416 people on the housing waiting list and there is no chance whatever of them finally finding accommodation. One reason for that is that in London the average house price is £421,395, and the average London income is £26,962. Even in dear, dear Ealing, the average house price is £374,707, whereas median earnings are £25,392.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend think that the Government’s recent proposals in the Budget to provide cheap mortgages to anyone will help the situation?
Stephen Pound
My hon. Friend makes a telling point. In doing so she has rather stolen my thunder, but I forgive her in that as I do in all things. The Government may well have a policy, but it is retrogressive. The idea that the solution to the housing problem in London is to sell off the last few remaining properties at vast, eye-watering discounts and somehow assume that, in extremis, property can be sold as cheaply as £10,000, and that that money will then go forth, multiply and create a new property, is absolutely absurd. The other strand of that—somehow to blame the whole housing crisis in London on the immigrant community—proves once and for all that it is a lot easier to find a scapegoat than to find a solution. The scapegoat is being identified; the solution is not.
Boroughs such as mine in Ealing are having to take incredibly exhaustive steps to build houses. We have a commitment to 500 new build houses over the next five years, but we also have an estate regeneration programme. We are using existing land to increase the estates that already exist, so that with hard work—exhaustive work—and a great deal of extremely fine officer time, we can create 5,044 units from a total of 3,653. I pay tribute to my colleague Councillor Hitesh Tailor in the London borough of Ealing, who has somehow managed to square the circle in the case of Copley close, an absolutely typical old Greater London council estate. Allegedly—I have never heard anyone disprove this, but I am told it is true—the architect who designed the estate never set foot in the borough of Ealing, let alone on Copley close. She took the scheme down from a shelf somewhere, ran it along the side of the railway line at Castle Bar Halt and left the people to get on with it. That is the scale of the problem we face.
What is the solution? On the figures I gave earlier for median house prices, the solution is not to unleash some great entrepreneurial surge or for everyone somehow to manage to do 15 jobs and buy their own property. One of the solutions is to do as my children, aged 24 and 22, have done and start sending away for loft extension catalogues anonymously. They pour through the door at an extraordinary rate—and I have finally accepted the hint. However, one thing we really can do—I want the Minister to give particular attention to this—is to consider raising the housing revenue account cap, which was discussed in the other place on 12 March in a debate on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill. Three amendments were tabled by three distinguished Members of the upper House, all with considerable local authority experience.
The idea at present is that there are streams against which local authorities can borrow, and not just the traditional ones, such as the Public Works Loan Board or the general fund. Some people have rather imaginatively —and in a way that is almost suggestive of Robert Maxwell in his prime—talked about borrowing against pension funds. That slightly worries me, but the housing revenue account, which has traditionally been massively in surplus, despite what some would have us believe, is a good thing to borrow against. The recent relaxations in this area are to the Government’s credit. Let us be honest: the Government have done the right thing on that. However, the present cap limits local authorities massively. They include not just boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham, which have a property portfolio worth well over £2 billion, but even small, modest boroughs such as Ealing, which could borrow more and build more.
Ultimately, let us never lose sight of first principles. A person who has no home has no hope, no job, usually no family and certainly no future. If someone loses their home, they lose everything. A person can lose their job and get another job; they can lose their health and get healthy again. Without a home, a person has nothing. Every single one of us in this House has a bounden duty to try to provide that simple, most basic of needs: accommodation. Raising the HRA cap to a more realistic level would give local authorities the power to do much, much more.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I rise to speak about the Government’s proposal to free up planning to allow offices not in use to be converted into homes. I want to talk about the overall policy, its impact on my constituency and, if there is time, the more general issues of housing need.
In short, the Government believe that if all empty office space in the UK were converted into residential property, it would create 250,000 new homes, saving nearly £140 million in planning system costs. The Government tell us that, following the recession, between 7% and 9% of commercial space in the UK is empty, but that many developers have been put off converting buildings into homes because of the costs and time required to secure planning approval. That may be true in some parts of the world, but in my Hackney South constituency and particularly in Shoreditch, many developers have land banked old offices and warehouses to cash in on rising housing prices as housing demand increases. They have been sitting on this for investment reasons rather than because they have been put off by the conversion costs. The conversion costs could soon be recouped, but every day that the developers sit and wait, the price of housing goes up.
In Hackney, the legislation will have a major impact on our business and creative communities and on the local economy. We sit right on the edge or fringe of the City. In fact, Broadgate used to be in Hackney until a boundary change some years ago, and many of our business locations will be adversely affected by this policy. The area is coveted as a residential location, but not for local people. It has fancy loft apartments for those with very deep pockets. This will put business at risk, potentially leading to forced relocation and loss of jobs for local people in an area where unemployment is already high. Of course, all of us speaking in this debate are keen to see more homes built, but this policy will encourage landlords and freeholders to dash for the short-term gain of changing offices to residential homes, at a big long-term cost to our area and to one of the engine rooms of our current economy.
Hackney South and Shoreditch, as business development hot spots, have often been visited by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. I cannot seriously believe that No. 10 Downing street is enthusiastic about the policy as it applies to Shoreditch. Business growth is under threat from the proposal. Without an exemption, existing businesses will be under threat, too, so I strongly support full exemption for Hackney, which Hackney council has bid for. I urge the Minister to give us some comfort today to ensure that the area remains a thriving business location making an important contribution to the economic prosperity of London and the UK.
To date, more than 1,000 businesses locally have signed a petition supporting exclusion. None of the active housing campaigners—whether they live in digs, are Hackney Homes tenants or members of tenants associations—have objected to the council’s stance on the policy because they see that the sort of housing we need is very different.
Even the British Property Federation does not necessarily support the policy. Ian Fletcher, its policy director, talked about the acute shortage of houses but, in welcoming the step, said it
“won’t work for all buildings, or in every area”.
I say to the Minister that it will not work in Shoreditch and it should be stopped now.
On general issues to do with housing, what we need in Hackney is not more high-price right-to-buy sales but more affordable family-sized homes. About a quarter of my constituents are under 16. We have families who need housing who cannot find it. Instead many of those families are being hit by this invidious—
Stephen Pound
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that one of the great flagships of Government policy, the spare room tax, will not have anything like the effect that they anticipate because most of the people with extra rooms are pensioners, who are exempt from the bedroom tax anyway? Does she share my despair that that is the mast to which the Government are nailing the flag of housing hope?
Meg Hillier
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He is right. This invidious little tax is having a disastrous impact on many of my constituents. For example, if a family who occupy a three-bedroom property have two children of the same gender between the ages of 10 and 16, or two children of opposite gender under 10, they will be counted as under-occupying and be forced either to find the extra money to pay for the bedroom, until their children reach the age at which they qualify for the extra bedroom, or to give up their home and try to find, magically out of nowhere, a two-bedroom property. There is heavy demand for all types of social housing, while pensioners remain exempt.