Social Housing Tenants: Antisocial Behaviour

Richard Tice Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my excellent hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) for securing this debate. He has been most generous with some of his suggestions—almost unusually so, which I shall come to shortly.

It seems to me that we must have the courage to look internationally at what works elsewhere. We look to New York city in the early 1990s, which had a simple slogan: broken windows. It starts right at the ground level. What was a lawless city was transformed by saying, “We want no broken windows, no graffiti and no antisocial behaviour”. It worked. They flooded the streets with a visible security presence.

We know that having a proper deterrent also works. My hon. Friend was more than generous—unusually so—with his traffic light system of three strikes and out. I prefer a premier league football-style scenario: they get a yellow card and then they get a red card. The consequence would be that people would know that they, as a family, would lose their home if their youngsters misbehaved by, for example, revving their cars, smoking drugs or playing music from morning to dusk and throughout the night. These are the experiences that I hear about from my constituents in Boston and Skegness and in between. It is so unfair because, regardless of whether a person is a pensioner or they are going out to work to pay their taxes, mortgages or rent, it is unacceptable that those who live next door or nearby, who are not going to work, are causing absolute mayhem.

We have to have the courage to say that with rights come responsibilities. With the right to have a social housing home or a council home comes the responsibility both to look after it on the inside and to be part of the community on the street, in the housing estate and beyond. In the same way, the right for sick people, or people who are looking for work, to receive a benefit comes with the responsibility to contribute to society by looking for work. We must instil that within our culture. A deterrent is really important, so if someone does not behave, it should be two strikes and they are out and they should lose their home, in the same way that if someone does not look for work or misbehaves, they lose their benefits. If people understand that, maybe all of a sudden things will change.

We do not need more legislation—the legislation already exists. For example, public space protection orders can be used much more widely than they currently are, and councils need to be much braver in using them not just in town centres but in residential estates.

Police forces are massively stretched. In my county of Lincolnshire, the police force has the worst funding formula in the whole country. That is the subject of a review, and the situation has to change, but there are other things one can do. For example, housing associations could use PSPOs and private prosecutions. I have seen that recently, and we know it can work. Private prosecutions, rapidly used—they are always used by housing associations on nuisance tenants—would send a message: “Unacceptable behaviour has consequences. You will be fined. You will be prosecuted. You will lose your home.”

What is required is not more resources, but a proper focus on using the existing legislative framework and other aspects that are available. If we do that properly, we can make a significant difference, but it is a cultural thing. We have to make it clear to everybody that this selfish, horrific behaviour is unacceptable to communities, to decent, hard-working families and, frankly, to this country.

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

We now move to the Front-Bench contributions, starting with the spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms McVey. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) for securing this important debate, because all of us have experienced distressing constituency cases, which are a real problem for our communities. I agree with his description of the issue: it can cause mayhem and misery throughout our local communities.

I also agree that social housing should be a privilege, not a right, and that those houses should be kept in good order. When canvassing in our patch, we have all gone to areas with social housing and seen overgrown gardens with litter and furniture in them. That cannot be right for the people in those houses, and particularly the children, but also for the neighbours. It is simply not right.

It is good to see that we seem to be in violent agreement on both sides of the Chamber on the three-strikes policy, which I will talk about in a second. That seems to be a maximum, not a minimum. The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) argued for a two-strikes policy, and the hon. Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) argued for a one-strike policy. I am encouraged by that, because it is fair to say that everyone in the debate so far—I am interested to hear what the Minister will say—has said that we need to do more.

[Richard Tice]

Competition is a good thing. It may be that the Minister wants “no strikes and you’re out”.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That might be a bit tricky—people do deserve to live in a house as long as they demonstrate good behaviour.

My predecessor as shadow Secretary of State—now the Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch)—has said:

“Those who break the law, make neighbours’ lives a misery, or treat the UK as a hotel they’re just passing through, should not be given subsidised housing…The public wants to know that only decent and hardworking people who have contributed to this country are given social housing.”

I agree with that point.

The Minister is a very decent chap, and I am really interested to listen to what he will say, but let us contrast those comments with what the current Secretary of State, the Deputy Prime Minister, has said. She has confirmed Labour’s plans to ditch proposals from the Conservative Government to take away social housing from criminals, including those with a history of antisocial behaviour. The Deputy Prime Minister also binned the Conservatives’ commitment to prioritise social housing for those with local and British connections. I am very disappointed by that approach, and we need to revisit it. I very much hope the Minister will do that, based on what has been said in this debate. That is all despite the Prime Minister pledging a new clampdown on criminal and violent disorder.

I would like to pick up on what my friend, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), said in his remarks. I totally agree with many of the points he made, but particularly on right to buy. I grew up back in the‘70s in a little town in North Yorkshire with large council estates. I used to deliver milk there as a young man, and those council estates were not in the best order. Some of the behaviours were not the best, and nor was the condition of some of the houses, because people did not look after them. One of the benefits of right to buy, as well as giving individuals the benefit of right to buy, was that the individuals who bought those homes also improved them significantly. With double glazing, extensions and smart gardens, the quality of those estates increased dramatically. It is therefore a real concern that the Government have decided to cut back and water down that policy and to make it more difficult for people renting social houses to buy them. That cannot be right, particularly when the Deputy Prime Minister herself—this is her policy—has benefited from those very opportunities. It is rank hypocrisy, and it cannot be right.