Homelessness

Rob Marris Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Barwell]

That was a long intervention that did not refute any of the points, but let me deal quickly with each of them. First, on supply, the Government are behind but not way behind, as the right hon. Gentleman suggests they are. [Interruption.] In 2015-16, the first year of the five years of the Parliament, we delivered 190,000, exactly as the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) has just said, and to meet the 1 million target we need to be at 200,000 a year. I will return to the subject of affordable homes later, if the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) will bear with me. The fundamental point that I was trying to make is that we could do with a little less complacency from those on the Opposition Front Bench. [Interruption.] Bear with me for a second. There is no room for complacency on this side of the House, either.

[Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)]

rose—

[Gavin Barwell]

Let me develop the point; then I will happily give way.

Homelessness and rough sleeping are both rising. The right hon. Gentleman quoted the speech that the Prime Minister made on the steps of Downing Street, in which she said that the mission of this Government is to make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us. Sorting out our failing housing market and tackling the moral stain of homelessness are central to that mission. I want to spend the rest of my speech setting out how we propose to do that, but first I give way.

[Rob Marris]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his generosity today, as yesterday. I agree with him: Labour did not build enough housing units, and those of us then on the Back Benches pleaded with the Government to do so, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). I welcome the recognition in the Conservative amendment that supply is absolutely crucial. Can I tempt the Minister to go a little further and announce that the Government will abandon the plans that have kept jacking up demand by processes such as Help to Buy, which simply increases prices and increases homelessness?

[Gavin Barwell]

Until the hon. Gentleman’s last point, I was in complete agreement with him. He is definitely right to say that the main focus of housing policy should be supply, and when he sees the White Paper that the Secretary of State and I are working on, he will see that is the case. However, even if tomorrow we could start building in this country at the level that we need to build, we would have to do that for a number of years before there was an impact on affordability. To do as he suggests in the interim—give up any measures that are trying to help people to bridge the gap—would be a mistake, in my opinion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I am speaking in this debate because I am angry. I am angry because in one of the richest countries in the world, the number of people sleeping rough on our streets is going up; I am angry because the number of families placed in temporary accommodation is increasing; and I am angry because the cuts to housing benefit mean that more and more of my constituents are unable to cover their rent, so they find themselves out on the streets with their belongings.

I am angry, but I am also sad. I am sad because if someone is on the minimum wage in an area such as mine and they do not have a council or housing association property, their chances of finding somewhere decent and affordable to live are close to zero. I am also sad that children often pay the highest price. A family may be placed in a bed and breakfast miles away from their children’s school, because the local authority cannot source local properties at an affordable rent.

When I became an MP six years ago, it was uncommon for anyone to visit my advice surgery because they were a rough sleeper. It was uncommon, but not unknown: there were men who would ride night buses trying to keep warm, and some would find shelter in disused garages or parks. Now, it is commonplace. At one advice surgery in October, I saw four people in the space of as many hours, all of whom were set to sleep outside that evening. They could have been the people my constituents see on a daily basis on a mattress underneath the arches next to Lewisham station, in sleeping bags in Ladywell Fields or huddled and cold on wet cardboard outside the BP garage on Lee High Road. It is all too easy to walk by and to think that it is someone else’s problem. It is not, though; it is our problem, and as a country we need to fix it.

[Rob Marris]

As well as being angry, does my hon. Friend share my dismay? There is a consensus in the House about the need to do something about homelessness, but homelessness is not a problem that drops out of the sky. Homelessness and the explosion in the number of people using food banks are consequences of Government policy in the last six years.

[Heidi Alexander]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. As I said in my intervention on the Minister, the previous Government cut the national affordable house building programme by 63% in 2011 and they have an awful lot to answer for.

I want to share with colleagues one story that underlines the need for change. At my advice surgery in Downham a few weeks ago, I met a man called Terry. Terry is not his real name, but for reasons that will become obvious, he does not want his real name to be known. Terry, who is in his 60s, works with young men at risk of getting into trouble with the law. He has lived alone for the past few years, having gone through a divorce. Terry used to pay £650 a month for a one-bedroom flat—cheap by Lewisham standards—but then the rent doubled overnight. He could not afford it, and he had to move out. Terry now sleeps in a van. He has not told his children because he is too embarrassed, and he cannot get help from the council because he is not deemed to be in priority need. When I hear Conservative politicians say, “If you can’t afford to live in London, you should move out”, I wonder whether they mean people like Terry—people who have not done anything wrong, and have done quite a lot right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend is right. Sometimes it is easy for us to simplify the challenges surrounding homelessness and rough sleeping, but most informed Members know that the position is far more complex. I welcome the provisions in his Bill for a personal plan that local authorities must go through with individuals, both people who are homeless and are owed a duty by a local authority to be housed and people who are not owed a duty to be housed. For the first time, they will get bespoke support. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that.

My hon. Friend is right to point out that we must deal with this challenge at a local level, but I am also absolutely committed to making sure we work effectively across the Government to tackle it. I am driving action across the Government through a ministerial working group on homelessness, and one example I can give the House is in regard to mental health, where we are looking at what more can be done to make sure rough sleepers with mental health problems get the specialist support they need. The group is also looking at how we can ensure that people who are homeless, or at risk of homelessness, receive the help they need to get into work.

I want now to pick up on a number of the comments hon. Members made. First, it was great to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond). She extolled the virtues of the way in which Portsmouth City Council is trying to tackle homelessness, particularly through prevention and the work it is doing upfront to try to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. It was good to hear that the council is also working closely with local charities and other partners, and that is something we certainly want to see in the proposals local areas bring to us in relation to the grant-funding programmes we are providing.

The hon. Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) made a number of important points. She mentioned the rough-sleeping statistics. They are now much more accurate than they were in 2010, when local authorities were not obliged to provide a return to central Government in relation to how many rough sleepers there were in their areas. They are now compelled to do that, so the data are far more accurate. We are looking, though, at how we can improve the data that the Department holds, and we are doing so by trying to work out when people become homeless on multiple occasions and how we can prevent that from happening again to them.

I welcome what the hon. Lady said about the work Boots is doing in relation to sanitary products for women who, unfortunately, find themselves sleeping rough—an issue that she is particularly interested in. A number of programmes are centrally funded from the Department for Communities and Local Government for outreach organisations that deal with rough sleepers. In that sense, we do provide funding to those organisations, and they do, in turn, provide the type of support the hon. Lady rightly recognises is required for women rough sleepers.

[Rob Marris]

May I take the Minister back to the question of data? The hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), for example, raised the issue of hidden homelessness and sofa-surfing. The Minister has just said that the figures on rough sleepers are getting more accurate—I welcome that—but what are the Government doing to collect more accurate data on hidden homelessness and the sofa surfers, who are particularly at risk of becoming rough sleepers?

[Mr Jones]

That is obviously a much more difficult thing to measure, but with regard to the Homelessness Reduction Bill, which the Government are backing, I am absolutely sure, and we are certainly factoring this into our sums, that a significantly higher number of single people who are homeless—the type of people the hon. Gentleman identifies—will present at a local authority, because they will expect to receive far better advice and support than they do now, and they will have a personal plan, which we hope will allow their homelessness to be alleviated. So I think we will be able to measure that in a better way. On whether we can go as far as identifying all those people, I think that would be rather difficult.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East was right to identify the challenges, particularly in London. He was also right to identify the record funding—£3.15 billion—that the Government are providing to the Mayor of London to build 90,000 new homes across a range of tenures to suit the needs of Londoners. It is great to see that in a spirit of co-operation the Mayor has welcomed that record funding.

My hon. Friend also hit the nail on the head when he said that just having a place for a rough sleeper to stay is not enough, as we discussed earlier in the debate. We have to look at the underlying personal challenges and tackle them in the work that we do. The cross-Government working group that I lead is looking to tackle a number of other issues in that regard.

My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (David Mackintosh) made an excellent speech in which he particularly highlighted his knowledge of this subject as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness. He highlighted the tragic consequences that can happen where rough sleepers are not supported sufficiently, as did the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) and my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight). I was heartened to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South about his support for the Government’s programmes, particularly those on tackling rough sleeping.

The hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) mentioned a housing association in her constituency that she said was not providing adequate housing conditions for its tenants. That is an extremely serious situation if it is the case. I recommend that she take that up with the local council. I would be keen to hear more detail from her on the types of issues that are being experienced. I can say, as somebody who was quite heavily involved in the Housing and Planning Act 2016, that there are now significant penalties for rogue landlords. Local authorities can now levy significant financial penalties of up to £30,000 on rogue landlords who do not provide adequate housing for the people to whom they rent property.

My hon. Friends the Members for Colchester (Will Quince) and for St Ives (Derek Thomas) made excellent speeches underlining the causes of rough sleeping. They were absolutely right to highlight the role of charitable workers and volunteers, who do tremendous work up and down the country. I would like to thank those volunteers, on behalf of the Government, for doing such an excellent job on behalf of a group of very vulnerable people.

The hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) mentioned funding for the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East has brought to the House. I can assure the hon. Lady that it is the Government’s intention to fund the Bill. We recognise that new burdens will be created, and as the new obligations on councils come forward, we will fund that. We fully expect, though, that the Bill will create a situation whereby councils deal with homelessness far more quickly. It will therefore become far cheaper for local authorities to deal with and support people because they will not be dealing with a housing crisis as often as they do currently. She referred to temporary accommodation. I can assure her that, by law, temporary accommodation must be suitable. If it is not in the case of the constituent she mentioned then that constituent has the right to a review and should go back to her local authority in that regard.

This has been an excellent debate on an extremely important issue. Our ambitions are backed by a new funding programme and the most ambitious legislative reform in decades. This Government are taking an end-to-end approach to tackling homelessness because we—