Social Housing (England)

Nick Raynsford Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right on that point. I became increasingly convinced of that in my three years shadowing this post. At one stage I went to see Owen Buckwell, an officer looking after housing in Portsmouth. I discovered that he had been doing precisely what the hon. Lady describes, which was to look properly through the list and try to manage it better, to understand who was on the list and for what purpose, and whether they had any likelihood of achieving a social house, or would be better looking elsewhere. The problem is that the current legislation—I think a 2002 Act—makes that nigh on illegal to do. He had to skate quite close to the limits of the legislation to manage that list properly. Bearing in mind the hon. Lady’s comments, I hope she will support—if not the entire Localism Bill—at least the aspects of waiting list reform which I believe will do what she has called on us to achieve.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford talked about flexible tenures and stable communities. That is at the heart of so much of the current housing debate, for reasons I have already mentioned to do with changing the automatic presumption or insistence on a lifetime tenure. He is right that I believe in stable communities: I want them to exist and flourish. The intention of the legislation is not in any way to undermine the ability for that to happen.

Much has been made of two-year tenancies, referred to by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View. I am being clear, in all our language and in the tenancy standards that we will put in place, that two years is to be considered as an exceptional circumstance, and that at least five years would be the norm. I am sure many areas will want to provide tenancies of five, 10, 15, 20 years, perhaps even lifetime tenures still. However, the provision at a local level to provide for a short tenancy to account for exceptional circumstances could be very useful and welcome.

[Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

If the Minister believes that the two-year tenancy should be the exception, why did his party not accept amendments to that effect when the Localism Bill was debated in Committee?

[Grant Shapps]

Quite simply because we have said we will include it in the tenancy regulations. It is a question of where it is mentioned. The fact is that there are some good and striking reasons why a short tenancy might be useful. I have used the following example in the House before and will use it again, as the family have been in touch this weekend. My constituent, Matthew Hignett, fell off his motorbike on his way to work and is now paralysed from the neck down and will be for life. He told me that he needed some support for just a very short period of time to get himself together and back into work, which, remarkably, he has now done.

When I approached our local authority—otherwise an excellent housing authority—it said it was sorry but that it had no option to help that constituent. He did not qualify for social housing because he previously had his own home, though mortgaged. If it were to give him a home, its only option would be to give it to him for life. That creates problems on both sides. He needed some help for a limited period of time. I want to make that available, and maximum flexibility will do precisely that for people who are sometimes in unusual circumstances, which are difficult to predict. There is no argument against flexibility.

To believe that people are going to be thrown out of their homes after two years is fundamentally to misunderstand the role of social landlords in this country. Social landlords, councils, housing associations, do not spend their time plotting how to kick people out of their homes. They are there to house people: that is their core activity, that is what they do. There is every reason to believe that they would want to keep people in those homes for as long as possible, and not to throw them out. Flexibility is the key; using the housing that we have to best advantage is essential. That is what the flexible tenure will provide within the circumstances of stable and secure communities. People’s expectations will be established, so that they know that they can live in their home for the next 20 years and bring up their family, but that when their family move away, they will probably downsize, as often happens in the private sector.

There has been a lot of discussion about the cost of housing benefit and the affordable rent scheme, and some interesting figures have been thrown about. I would like to cover that issue in a little more detail and note that the impact assessment that was published showed that the scheme would cost in the region of £25 million to £50 million. We do not recognise the figures running into billions of pounds that have been thrown around, for the simple reason that when somebody moves into affordable rented accommodation, they often come from the private rented sector where 100% of their rent is paid for and supported by housing benefit. They might then move into a property where the average rent is 67% of the market rent—that was the figure mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford—and in such cases, the cost of housing benefit would not rise but fall. Such a move will have been supported by capital to build the house through the affordable rent programme.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the affordable rent programme that I hear mentioned time and again. In fact, the programme will assist with the housing benefit bill. That does not mean that there will be no pressures on the housing benefit bill; those pressure have been acknowledged, but they will cost tens of millions of pounds, not thousands of millions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Grant Shapps]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I am very keen on shared-equity schemes and like to do all that I can to assist with them. I agree with his comments about that issue and will be happy to take a further look at it. I ask him to provide me with more details of his very interesting local bonds discussion, which is certainly worthy of further consideration. In terms of the housing revenue account reforms, local authorities can borrow the money elsewhere, particularly when the debt is large. That may apply only to those with the larger debts because it is difficult to beat the public works loan body percentage, which is still very good. Again, I would be interested to hear more about my hon. Friend’s ideas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford touched on tenancy abuse and whether people whose earnings are in six figures should continue to live in the same home. Again, that is not a huge issue because it does not involve very many people, but there is a basic principle that social housing is built for a reason. It is there to help people who would not otherwise be able to afford to get a roof over their head, and it is important that the homes are used for the purpose for which they were meant. I think that if people are staying in council homes, perhaps in London, with a £900-a-week subsidy—a subsidy that is paid for by taxpayers and to which some of the poorest people in society are contributing—long after their need has clearly gone, that is wrong. I agree with the comments that have been made on that.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech) should know that it is our policy that if people want to stay, they simply have to pay. That is a very simple principle, which means that a community is not broken up but that if someone’s salary reaches six figures, which possibly places them among the top 1% of earners in the country—it has to be at a very high level to deal with the concerns raised by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View and to ensure that the provision is in no sense against aspiration or preventing people from bettering themselves—it is not unreasonable to ask them to pay if they want to stay in their social house, rather than having it paid for by everyone else.

The issue of under-occupancy and empty homes was raised. I passionately believe in trying to solve the equation of 430,000 people under-occupying while nearly 250,000 are overcrowded. I have provided some money, time and resources in order for the Chartered Institute of Housing to assist with that issue. Some of the reforms of housing benefit, which I know are controversial but which our colleagues in the DWP are pushing through, are designed to help to deal with some of the issues of under-occupancy by simply saying that it cannot be right for the taxpayer more widely to be paying for empty rooms. That does not make sense. We need to pay for people to live in homes, not to live with too much empty space.[Official Report, 13 July 2011, Vol. 531, c. 4MC.]

[Mr Raynsford]

The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) gave an illustration of the possible adverse consequences of the higher non-dependant deductions leading families to pressurise family members to leave their home because the amount of benefit would be reduced as a result of that increased deduction—this is very complicated. The Minister will recognise that that is clearly a perverse incentive to under-occupation. Will he deal with that concern, as highlighted by his hon. Friend?

[Grant Shapps]

It is an interesting point, because others would say that the change may well be an encouragement to people to work and help to pay the rent and stay living in the home. If they are of working age, they can of course work, contribute towards the rent and stay living in the home. There is obviously a balance involved. Tempting as it is, I do not want to be drawn into a detailed debate on that. As the right hon. Gentleman said, it is a complex area, and many other points were raised in the debate that I want to cover.

There was discussion of the ombudsman, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford suggested that there needed to be something in-between to try to tackle problems. I agree: it is essential that the problems are dealt with at local level with real teeth. There has been some confusion in debate in the House about what has been described, in a rather ugly way, as the democratic filter, but the idea is, under the Localism Bill, that before people go to the ombudsman or to the Tenant Services Authority, as it used to be, they should first try to have the matters resolved locally. The reason why I am so keen for that to be channelled through local MPs, local councillors and tenants panels is that the tenants will be empowered to resolve problems, with the implicit threat that if the problem is not resolved through work with tenants and their representatives, a referral can be made to the ombudsman.

I believe that if that happens, far more cases will be resolved at local level and it will have the added benefit of drawing in councillors, who in many cases have become distant and disconnected from local housing problems, particularly where stocks have been transferred. It will draw them back into the discussion and an understanding of what is happening with the stock. It is very much about resolution.