Household Overcrowding: Covid-19

Patricia Gibson Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP) [V]]

I am pleased to participate in this important debate on household overcrowding and the covid-19 outbreak. I thank the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) for bringing the debate forward. As we have heard, there is no doubt that housing and health outcomes are inextricably linked and that those living in poor housing are more likely to suffer from poor mental and/or physical health.

Covid-19 has indeed thrown into stark relief the existing and ongoing housing challenges that need to be addressed. It seems self-evident that household overcrowding is associated with greater risk of transmission of the virus because self-isolation, as we have heard, becomes much more difficult, as does shielding. That may well have contributed to a higher death rate.

Analysis carried out by Inside Housing shows a clear correlation between overcrowding and covid death rates. In addition, lockdown forces us to spend much more time at home, and doing so is much more challenging for those living in those overcrowded conditions. One study shows that nearly 20% of those in overcrowded conditions during lockdown have experienced mental or physical health problems due to a lack of space.

To return to the overcrowding example given by the right hon. Member for East Ham in his constituency, I know all too well what that is like in normal times: I grew up in a small three-apartment flat with my seven older siblings, my mother and my stepfather as my mother waited an astonishing 28 years for the council to allocate her suitable accommodation. It finally did in 1982, on my 14th birthday.

I hope the right hon. Gentleman’s constituents do not have to wait quite as long as my family did for suitable accommodation, because I know the damage caused by living one on top of the other with no space and no privacy in such overcrowded conditions. However, even I cannot imagine how people can possibly cope well with such overcrowding during lockdown and how much more challenging lockdown makes such terrible living conditions.

We cannot change the past, but the focus now must be to ensure that more affordable homes are built. In Scotland, the SNP Government have built 97,000 affordable homes since 2007. In the four years to 2020, the SNP Government in Scotland have delivered over 75% more affordable homes per head of population than in both England and Wales. The Scottish Government have recognised the positive social and economic impact that investment in social housing brings, and remain committed to expanding the social housing stock.

In Scotland, the £30 million rural and islands housing funds support the delivery of affordable homes and are to be continued beyond March 2021, with the affordable housing supply programme having already delivered 5,000 affordable homes in rural and island areas in its first four years. There is still more to do.

In its “Building more social housing” report, the Select Committee on Housing, Communities and Local Government recommended that

“A social housebuilding programme should be top of the Government’s agenda to rebuild the country from the impact of Covid-19.”

The report went on to say:

“The crisis has exposed our broken housing system. Families in overcrowded homes have faced worse health outcomes.”

In the first instance, the Government need to help those living in overcrowded accommodation. Investing in more social housing is an obvious way to do that. It is also vital to reverse effective cuts in local housing rates and scrap poverty-inducing policies, such as the hated bedroom tax, which the Scottish Government have completely mitigated in Scotland.

The decision to maintain local authority housing rates in cash terms in 2021-22 represents a freeze for private renters and puts at risk all the work done by the Scottish Government to support homeless people, and it potentially makes private sector tenancies unsustainable for some. Indeed, there are examples where the temporary restoration of local housing rates has facilitated moves out of temporary accommodation. The freeze on local housing rates for a Government who want to be taken seriously on tackling homelessness was not considered in last week’s Budget.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Government have an estimated spend on the discretionary housing payment for 2021-22 of £82 million—an important tool used by councils to safeguard tenancies and prevent homelessness—with £71 million of that used to mitigate the bedroom tax for more than 70,000 households in Scotland, to help them sustain their tenancies, with another £11 million spent on mitigating other cruel welfare cuts, such as changes to local housing allowance rates.

Long before the pandemic hit, the policy of no recourse to public funds was pushing working families into abject poverty, forcing them into unsustainable debt and into homelessness, or unsafe, overcrowded and insecure housing. The Children’s Society highlighted last year that families with no recourse to public funds, without access to housing benefit or social housing, find it immensely difficult to shelter their children properly. That matters because covid-19 is no respecter of immigration status and everyone needs help to get through and survive this crisis.

The Scottish Government cannot change those policies because 85% of welfare expenditure and income replacement benefits remain reserved to Westminster. All the Scottish Government can do is try to mitigate the worst impact of those policies, bearing in mind that they are required to present a balanced budget every single year, so that the huge sums of money spent trying to protect Scots from the regressive policies of this Government mean that less money can be spent on other areas. I hope the Minister will reflect on that.

We know that there are real housing challenges across the UK. The Scottish Government have a demonstrable record of trying to tackle them; the UK Government, not so much. Covid has thrown those challenges into stark relief. The Minister knows that the solutions here are not brain surgery. We know what needs to be done to tackle overcrowding, which, there is little doubt, is directly linked to people catching and dying of covid in this pandemic.

I urge the Minister to be more ambitious about plans for building social housing—not just through announcements, but through actual building. The Government also need to abandon the effective freeze on local housing allowance, to facilitate more secure tenancies, and help more people move from temporary to more settled and suitable accommodation, which we have seen can be done.

In addition, the UK Government need to abandon their bedroom tax, which in effect prices people out of their homes. They also need to look afresh at the inhumane policy of no recourse to public funds and at the real damage that that has done and continues to inflict on families. That has not been the case just during the pandemic, but it has certainly shown a clear vision of what that policy means.

We have suffered a global health pandemic, and it is not over, but we can already start to learn the lessons of how we can do better in order to tackle deep-rooted and long-standing housing challenges such as overcrowding and poor living conditions, which have a genuine impact on the mental and physical health of too many people. The word “home” should indeed conjure up images of safety and warmth—a place you want to be. For too many families, poor and overcrowded conditions mean that that is simply not the case. We know what the challenges are and what measures are needed to tackle and mitigate those challenges. I hope that the Minister today will tell us how he and the Government intend to just get on and get down to that important work.