Housing and Homelessness (Local Accommodation Duty)

Debate between Nigel Evans and Karen Buck

1st reading & Housing and Homelessness (Local Accommodation Duty): Motion for leave to bring in a Bill
Monday 8th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab) [V]]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to place a duty on local authorities to ensure that persons for whom a homeless duty has been accepted are accommodated in the local area, including on discharge into private rented accommodation; to require local authorities to publish annual reports on steps relating to housing demand and supply taken or intended to be taken to meet that duty; and for connected purposes.

Listen to anyone who has been through the experience of homelessness and it will become clear that losing your home is one of the most traumatising things that can happen. Yet homelessness is a reality for tens of thousands of people every year, and over the past 30 years, since the repossessions crisis that followed the 1990 recession, successive waves of families and individuals have had to live through it, and they have done so in the context of a shrinking supply of stable, affordable social housing to meet need. That shrinking of supply and the ratcheting down of support for housing costs as rents have risen have both caused homelessness and made it increasingly difficult for many councils to meet their local needs.

Housing legislation requires all local housing authorities to secure accommodation in their own district, as far as reasonably practical. In response to a debate in my name last December, the then Housing Minister said:

“We are clear that local authorities should, as far as possible, avoid placing households out of their boroughs...that should really be a last resort.”—[Official Report, 2 December 2020; Vol. 685, c. 183WH.]

Yet that is clearly and obviously not the case and not adhered to in practice. My own borough of Westminster routinely accommodates homeless families out of borough: 55% of the 2,217 homeless households from Westminster were out of borough last year, up on the year before. The council has now also stated its intention to further cut costs by discharging homelessness duty into the private rented sector for 500 more households.

London as a whole is the worst affected region in the country. There were 16.7 households per 1,000 in London living in temporary accommodation last year, compared with just 1.8 per 1,000 households in the rest of England. In the last full year to 2020, 19,727 of those homeless households were found out-of-area housing in London, which is 56.8%, while a quarter—25%—were not even in their sub-region and 2,559 were placed outside London.

Even across the country as a whole, a quarter of homeless households are accommodated out of area, because councils cannot find suitable properties for them. This is not, of course, to denigrate the places where disproportionate numbers of homeless households end up—quite the reverse. It is to point out the manifest unfairness of requiring some of the poorest and most stressed boroughs to take an ever larger share of homeless households from other places, increasing pressure on their housing stock and other services. As we know, it also leads to the use of substandard properties thrown up under permitted development rules in places such as Harlow, Merton and Croydon.

However, most of all, this is about the impact on homeless people themselves. It is the tearing up of local connections—not infrequently, lifelong—that are cast aside when they are most needed at a time of crisis. Uprooted families and vulnerable adults are removed from friends and family, support networks and communities, schools, work, and caring responsibilities that they themselves undertake. Parents are often desperate to keep their children in the same school to maintain what little continuity they can in lives marked by disruption. Forced mobility and upheaval have terrible outcomes for physical and mental health and educational achievement.

These are the stories of some of the families affected. One constituent said:

“My 6 year old, who has been through so much trauma from repeated changes…has to do a 4 hours a day bus journey back and forth to attend her current school. She often eats breakfast on the bus and does homework on the way back and most of the time she falls asleep”.

Another said:

“I have a child who attends a school in Westminster and who has been through a tough few years as have we all as a family. Her brother was diagnosed with a brain tumour and sadly passed away. My daughter has gone through and endured things I wouldn’t have wished for her to have faced at her age or any other child but we were still sent to a temporary property on the other side of London. My housing officer advised there was ‘no other option and I would advise you to accept as if you don’t you could be taken off the housing register’. I told her I just wanted anything so I didn’t need to commute for 1.5 hours every morning and ever afternoon and that school was one of only consistent things that has kept my daughter happy & well. I was born in Westminster, I’ve always been a resident and paid my dues and taxes and voted. I feel like I’ve been treated extremely unfairly and I feel sick to my stomach to the point I’ve been so stressed I’m not sleeping. I’ve been getting migraines, it’s just non-stop stress…and I feel like I have no rights.”

Another said:

“I am a 19 year old…who is registered blind and am going through daily stress and anxiety. My case worker had said”

she is unable to find anywhere to live in Westminster

“despite showing her all my records and how I have been living there all my life, knowing the area well and how to get around. They put me first up in North West London, but are now offering me”

east London,

“even further than where I am now. I am completely unfamiliar with the area. I’m very frightened from places I’m unfamiliar with as I can’t get around... The council told me if I do not accept it they will end my contract for where I am now.”

Another said:

“I have lived, studied and worked in Westminster all my life. I lived with my elderly father and looked after him, but we were too overcrowded. Thankfully, after being classified as statutorily overcrowded, the council accepted my family as being effectively homeless. However, notwithstanding our pleading and objections, we were moved away from my elderly father and placed in temporary accommodation in east London. I cannot begin to describe the negative impact this has had on myself, my wife and my family, but more importantly on my father. He effectively, overnight, lost his family and the people who helped and cared for him on a daily basis. I find it sad and frustrating that the Council are prepared to separate an old man from his family. For more than two years we have continued to travel back and forth every day from what should have been short term accommodation, in order to cook, clean and care for my father. However, this is expensive, time consuming and taking a toll on our health, marriage and on our children.”

Finally, there is a letter from a mental health worker about a family who were moved first to east London for eight months and then to another flat in outer west London for two and a half years. The parents made the choice not to move their children to another school because at the time three of them were taking their exams. One child, I am told, started to lose her hair from anxiety when they became homeless. The youngest are extremely anxious and stressed; one has problems with eating and is having panic attacks. The mother has had cognitive behavioural therapy in the past and tries to give her children the tools to cope, but her own mental health condition is deteriorating.

As I have said, successive Ministers have stressed that out-of-borough placements should be the exception rather than the rule. There have been landmark legal cases, but nothing has changed. Temporary homeless accommodation is expensive and too large a share of the cost is put on councils—£189 million for London councils alone. The truth is that councils are between a rock and a hard place. The shrinking stock of social housing and social security cuts, from reductions in local housing allowance to the benefit cap, make it impossible to do what successive Ministers say should happen, leaving cases to be tested against the law one by one. All too often, the families affected are failed. It is no good offering platitudes in the full knowledge that the system is broken. Local connections must be maintained and councils enabled to meet those needs in line with Government commitments.

The Bill strengthens the protection that is now honoured increasingly in the breach and, in doing so, reduces the harm being done to tens of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the country.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Thank you, Karen. I do not know whether you know that you were on audio link rather than video link, but we heard you loud and clear. I have been given no indication that anybody intends to oppose the 10-minute rule Bill and I see nobody rising, so I intend to put the Question.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Ms Karen Buck, Robert Halfon, Bob Blackman, Fleur Anderson, Ms Lyn Brown, Siobhain McDonagh, Dawn Butler, Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, Feryal Clark and Dame Margaret Hodge present the Bill.

Ms Karen Buck accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 266).

Safer Neighbourhood Policing: London

Debate between Nigel Evans and Karen Buck

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Ms Buck]

I have a terribly old-fashioned attitude: the police should police and the local authorities should run libraries and children’s and other such services. I am struck by the fact that a few weeks ago in Westminster the leader of the council said at a staff conference that the local authority was on the path of having its total funding reduced from £390 million to £90 million over the course of the two spending review periods, so I am afraid that it is facile to say that the local authorities, which are being slashed to ribbons, are the ones to take on additional policing roles.

Aid has increased and the continuity of relationships built up by neighbourhood policing teams has been undermined. The impact, according to the MOPAC review, has been that public awareness of police visibility in London has faltered; the neighbourhood confidence comparator shows that over the previous year, on average, it has reduced from an already low 53% to 51%. MOPAC challenged the Met to increase public confidence in the police by 20%, but levels remain broadly unchanged from the March 2012 baseline. The Mayor also set a target for public confidence in the police of 75%, but it is 67%. A review into safer neighbourhood boards by the London Assembly police and crime committee received evidence from those SNBs that some police safer neighbourhood ward panels were meeting infrequently or not at all, so the community relationship was not being sustained evenly simply because the police were unable to find the resources to continue their work. I have found, as I am sure colleagues have, that concerns have bubbled up in the neighbourhoods about the kind of problem-solving work that safer neighbourhood police were so good at doing.

I want to make a few remarks about three particular areas that reflect our priorities at the moment, the first being counter-terrorism. In particular since Paris, we are acutely aware of the critical importance of counter-terrorism work. We should all pay tribute, as I do in heartfelt manner, to the work of the intelligence and security services in keeping us safe. In that context too, however, the local knowledge and relationships built up by neighbourhood policing are absolutely irreplaceable. I can state with certainty that the local officers I know knew exactly who the families and where the areas to focus on were. Such officers were a source of information on and of trust in the police in the community, vital not only to help counter-terrorism work, but in reassurance and community confidence building. Immediately after Paris we, the police teams and the local authority were called together by our excellent borough commander in Westminster, Peter Ayling, to talk about exactly that—higher visibility for our neighbourhood police teams in London in order to reassure our communities.

The second area is hate crime, of which sadly there is soaring incidence in the aftermath of Paris. It has also increased over the course of the past two years, notably anti-Semitic hate crime given a couple of flashpoints, as well as the spike in Islamophobia after Paris. Again, the relationships built by our neighbourhood police with our mosques, churches and synagogues are irreplaceable. Such efforts need to be well led.

The third area is serious youth violence: last year 19 teenagers were killed, which sadly is a dramatic increase on the figure for 2014 and the highest figure for seven years. According to Scotland Yard, nearly 20% of all murders in London now have gang associations. Trident, as with our security services, is a critical specialist service, but I can also state from personal experience that the knowledge built up by my safer neighbourhood team sergeants on gang membership or the risk of that is totally irreplaceable, as are their relationships and their work on the ground, often directly with troubled young individuals. If we are to make serious progress in tackling serious youth violence and gang violence, we have to review urgently what has been done to our local teams.

I am delighted to see that others are present to speak. In conclusion, I want to reinforce the fact that our model of safer neighbourhood policing is not now what it was originally envisaged to be. It was always intended to be at the core of policing. I had a number of enhanced teams in my most deprived areas, I am pleased to say, but the model was never only about total resource, but about leadership—for community relationship building, networking, developing local knowledge and providing continuity. That has been diluted, the model has been changed and we have lost the previous safer neighbourhood model. I am relieved that we do not face further cuts to or the loss of our PCSOs, but I hope that the local commander, MOPAC and the Minister will hear a plea from the Opposition: we need to return to the core of a ward-based and, ideally, sergeant-led neighbourhood police team to restore public confidence in community policing, which was so valuable and hard won and is in danger of being lost.

[Mr Nigel Evans (in the Chair)]

The Front Benchers will be called at 12.40 pm, which leaves roughly 45 minutes for the debate. If everyone shows time restraint, everyone will be able to speak.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Nigel Evans and Karen Buck

Friday 22nd March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

We have heard a great deal in the Budget debate—not unreasonably—about public debt, but less about the private sector crisis that generated the public sector debt crisis. We have also heard about the impact of private debt and deleveraging, including from the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). In that context, it might be worth mentioning that private debt and deleveraging are connected with the substantial decline in the number of people who can afford their own homes because of house price inflation in the past decade. That feeds into the core of my argument on the extent to which housing and housing costs have led us to a crisis in the welfare state.

We have heard less in the debate about flatling growth, the crisis in unemployment and under-employment, and the crisis in real wages and living standards. It is worth noting that real wages fell by 0.7% last year, and that average earnings will have fallen by 2.4% over the course of this Parliament. That fall in purchasing power is contributing to the continued stalling of growth.

Unfortunately, housing costs are at the heart of the living standards crisis, particularly in respect of first-time buyers, younger people, and those in what we call generation rent. Home owners have benefited for a decade or so from low interest rates. The tragedy is that many people are not aware of the fact that low interest rates are sustaining lower mortgages. A third of home owners have interest-only mortgages, and are extremely vulnerable to a future rise in interest rates.

Shelter has demonstrated consistently the crisis in home affordability. Some 7.8 million people struggle to pay their rents and mortgages, and 2.8 million people rely on unauthorised overdrafts and payday loans on a regular basis to cover the cost of their mortgage or rent. With underemployment and the continuing flatlining of real wages, that situation will only get worse.

In turn, that has contributed to a dramatic rise in the number of people who are caught in generation rent—they cannot save for a deposit and cannot get a mortgage because of the high house prices we have seen for generations. Two million more people now rent in the private sector than 10 years ago—26% of all Londoners now rent privately. That driver into the private rented sector has led to an escalation in rents, particularly in London. London rents now average £2,200 a month. Naturally enough, people are unable to afford such bills. That explains why the housing benefit bill has risen. It is due not to Government policy, but to the increased case load in the private rented sector, together with unemployment and flatlining wages. The Government, despite their rhetoric, will spend £12 billion more in real terms on housing benefit in this comprehensive spending review period than the last Government spent under the previous comprehensive spending review. That was the figure before the Office for Budget Responsibility upgraded that expenditure this week.

If I were the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, I would be furious that the Department for Communities and Local Government had driven up the bills of my Department through its housing policy, with the failure to build and the halving of the affordable housing investment programme, and its rents policy. However, if I were the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, I would be equally furious at the extent to which the Department for Work and Pensions policy of capping housing benefit had increased the pressure on my budget, particularly through homelessness. Today, we have heard about a further rise of 10% in homelessness, with an increase of 22% in London. That is not only a human tragedy; it costs money.

Will the Budget proposals address the crisis in housing and housing affordability? No, they will not. David Orr, the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, has said that if the investment had gone into affordable housing supply instead of the mortgage guarantee schemes, it would have delivered 175,000 new homes and a £30 billion boost to the economy. We know that the money is available because the Chancellor has secured £13 billion to underpin the mortgage schemes. Those schemes are effectively the rebranding of existing schemes that have not worked over the last two or three years. As other Members have said, the schemes risk inflating a housing bubble.

A consistent theme is emerging not only from the Opposition but from commentators on the right. Even the Daily Mail has said today, “Could the great state mortgage scheme be hijacked by the rich?” The answer is probably yes. It will be a boost to older buyers and second home owners, rather than the young. Mervyn King, of the Bank of England, has warned that the mortgage guarantee is not the answer to the housing crisis. It will stoke up house prices and continue to freeze younger homebuyers out of the housing market, which will keep them locked in generation rent. That will in turn lead to an increased housing benefit bill, which Ministers will scurry to try to cap.

The housing crisis is being exacerbated, not relieved, by Government measures. That has a fundamental impact on private debt, the banking crisis, in-work and out-of-work poverty, work incentives and welfare. The Government inherited an imperfect position on housing supply, but they are making it considerably worse. Beveridge and Keynes, those giants of post-war economics, knew that affordable housing was the key to—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I call Stella Creasy.