Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Rebecca Long Bailey Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab) [V]]

Sadly, the Queen’s Speech demonstrated a failure to act on acute social housing shortages, while thousands languish on housing waiting lists. It failed adequately to protect renters as the evictions ban and furlough schemes come to an end, and it failed to act urgently on fire safety and to protect leaseholders and residents from the cost of a crisis they did not cause.

On social housing, the reality is that, over the last five years, less than 10% of the amount needed has been built, but the Government had absolutely nothing to say. They should have adopted calls from organisations such as Shelter, which has suggested an investment of at least £12.8 billion a year over 10 years, which would have delivered 90,000 social rented homes a year.

On private renters, of course the Government reaffirmed commitments to end section 21 no fault evictions, but we have been waiting for over two years for that. If the Government honour their promise, that still leaves a glaring lack of protection for all those tenants in pandemic arrears who can still legitimately be evicted. The Government should have set out a package of support for them.

Finally, on cladding and fire safety, we saw nothing: no support for the victims and no remediation deadlines, just the promise of a building safety regulator. Members across this House have repeatedly called on Government to protect leaseholders and residents from the cost of a crisis they did not cause. Absurdly, the Government told us that amendments that defined responsibility for the cost of remediating fire safety defects were too complex an issue to go in a Bill whose purpose was to deal with the responsibility for fire safety defects, and it seems they were also too complex to go in the Queen’s Speech. The Government know that the building safety fund only covers unsafe cladding, yet 70% of the buildings surveyed have non-cladding fire safety defects. They know that there is no support available at all for interim measures such as increased insurance premiums and waking watches. They know that providing cladding remediation funding for buildings over 18 metres yet forcing leaseholders in buildings under 18 metres to pay is simply unjust. The Government must honour their moral duty to these victims. They must provide up-front funding to remediate all residential buildings urgently and finally legislate to protect leaseholders and residents from the cost of the crisis they are not responsible for. It is not a complex issue; it is a moral issue, and the Government need to sort it out.