Temporary Accommodation
Debate between Siobhain McDonagh and David Lammy
Siobhain McDonagh
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right.
Currently, 22,000 households face such a “last resort” and are placed in temporary housing outside their borough. Under the Housing Act 1996, when a local authority undertakes its housing duty to people by placing them in temporary accommodation in another borough, it should notify the receiving borough that it has done so. That notice should be in writing and made at least 14 days before the household is placed in the area. Is the Department confident that each household is accounted for in their new, temporary home?
I have received a letter from the chief executive of Thurrock Council, which had 183 placements from London boroughs between April 2016 to February 2017. She said:
“Unfortunately, our experience has often been that the notifications are either not sent or sent to the wrong contact within the Council.
Over the past couple of years housing departments have noticed an increase in the number of cases who report that they were placed in another borough from London without the formal notification being received.”
Housing outside a borough is not unlawful, but councils are legally obliged to ensure that relocation is suitable and appropriate to a family’s circumstances, taking account of potential disruption to education, medical needs and employment. Does the Minister agree that processes must be put in place, and enforced, to ensure that a receiving local authority is fully aware of a family’s arrival and that they can receive the healthcare, education and welfare support to which they are entitled once they are there?
Let us consider the enforcement of legislation. In 2004, the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2003 came into force, providing that homeless families with children should not be placed in a B&B except in an emergency. If such an emergency were to arise, it could last for no longer than six weeks. In June this year, 6,660 households were being temporarily housed in B&Bs. That was twice as many as in 2011, and three times as many as when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. A deplorable 2,710 of those households trapped in B&Bs include children. For 1,200 of those families, their living hell has gone on for far longer than the six-week legal limit. The local authorities that are housing them are, quite simply, breaking the law.
One of these families joins us in the Gallery today. Kelly’s family were evicted earlier this year, making them homeless. Sutton Council placed Kelly, her husband and her two young children in a single room in a B&B in Wimbledon. They had so little space that Kelly’s stepson had to leave the family home. For 10 weeks, the family were left in one tiny room, hidden from society in a B&B. No one told Kelly when the nightmare would end. After 10 long weeks, Kelly is now finally out of the B&B, although her temporary home is not much better. Kelly tells me that she simply does not feel safe there, and I completely understand why. The oven does not work, the electrics are precarious, and the flimsy door is a precarious barrier to the outside world. Only yesterday, Sutton Council’s planning department knocked on her door to tell her that there was no planning permission to allow the flat she lives in to exist.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the manner in which she is leading this debate. In the sixth richest economy in the world, does she think it is an abuse of human rights that we have so many people living in these Dickensian conditions?
Siobhain McDonagh
It is an abuse of human rights. There is a moral duty on us all to bring a resolution—this is possible—to the situation.
Kelly’s daughter is old enough to question but too young to understand the situation. When she returns from school, she queries why none of her friends have to share a room with their parents. Both Kelly and her husband hold down good jobs, but she tells me that she simply does not know how to get out of this situation. If she complains, will she be moved far away from her job and her children’s school?
Kelly is not alone, however. Birmingham City Council currently houses 85 families with children in B&Bs for longer than six weeks, while Croydon, Harrow, Redbridge and Southwark local authorities have all housed hundreds of families with children in B&Bs for longer than the legal limit of six weeks over the past year alone.
Take Renee and her sister Jade, two young brave girls whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Parliament just a fortnight ago. After living in their friend’s house for over a year, Renee and Jade’s family became homeless and had to move to temporary accommodation in Acton, away from their friends, family and school. A double bed, single bed and a bunk bed filled their tiny room, with their bathroom and kitchen shared with another family. They tell me that they felt brushed under the carpet because they were unseen by society, too ashamed to open their curtains to the outside world. This makes Renee’s recent GCSE success even more remarkable and I congratulate her on her well-deserved achievement. Does the Minister agree that a B&B is no place for Renee—in fact for any family—for longer than six weeks, and that a law against that is superfluous if there is no way to enforce it? What tangible changes would he suggest to ensure that local authorities abide by the laws that this House has agreed?
Behind the facts and figures that I have described today are real homes, real people and real families—and, in my constituency of Mitcham and Morden, one very real building named Connect House. At my advice surgery, the name Connect House has become an increasingly regular feature over the past year, with constituent after constituent calling me for help, desperate to escape what they describe as their living nightmare.
It is incredibly difficult to summarise the conditions at Connect House without visiting it in person. I therefore invite each and every right hon. and hon. Member in the Chamber to join me in Committee Room 9 after the debate, where I will be releasing a video so that each of them, as well as the general public, can see with their own eyes the appalling conditions that the 84 families living inside Connect House find themselves in. For now, however, I will do my best to find the right words.
Willow Lane industrial estate is home to a plethora of successful businesses in my constituency. With its businesses ranging from the manufacturer of timber windows to motor works, and from scaffolders to joiners, it is one of the busiest industrial estates in south London. Almost two years ago, however, there was a peculiar change on the estate. The businesses began to notice prams being pushed past their front doors and children playing while their lorries and vans raced through. They began to notice hundreds of residents using their working industrial estate as a home.
Connect House is at the heart of Willow Lane industrial estate. It houses 84 families who have been placed there by four local authorities: Bromley, Sutton, Croydon and Merton. There is little collaboration between the authorities as to who is placed in Connect House, which heightens the danger of vulnerable residents being placed among completely inappropriate neighbours. To reach the nearest amenities, the residents have to walk through the industrial estate itself. Cars line the pavement, forcing families with prams or wheelchairs into the lorry-filled road. It is fair to say that local workers simply do not expect 84 families to live within their industrial estate.
Waste surrounds Connect House because its industrial bins are ill equipped for the needs of the residents inside. This naturally attracts rats and foxes, and litter is strewn across the adjacent car park. Litter is also found throughout the building itself, causing considerable damage to both the building and its few facilities. The building is not staffed at evenings or weekends, and one resident found herself locked out in the middle of the industrial estate when she arrived back at night. A single key fob is allocated to each room, but additional fobs come at a deposit of £20. It is no wonder that young children have escaped into the dangerous industrial estate outside.
As for those who are able to enter, one resident told me of the danger that she and her daughter were in when a man was able to follow her right to her front door. Incidentally, the doors have neither a spy hole nor a door chain for safety. For a vulnerable family, their security is nothing more than the thin door separating their room from the industrial estate outside. Importantly, there is no communal room in Connect House, and neither is there anywhere for children to go, other than their tiny bedroom, where they are so often forced to share a bed with their parents and/or siblings. Residents complain of children running through the corridors at night, while the car park outside the building has been described as a playground in the evenings. Does the Minister agree that an industrial estate car park is no fit playground for the hundreds of children inside Connect House?
Residents and businesses have described Connect House as an “accident waiting to happen” and a “death trap”, yet this is a property that Bromley Council has not even visited, despite placing families there. It argues that there is simply not enough time or resource to do so, and that in its own words:
“This is compounded by the fact that a significant number”
of properties
“are out of the borough”.
The building’s remote location means that there are no immediate shops or amenities for the residents. The location is so remote, in fact, that even an ambulance was unable to find it when called by a heavily pregnant lady housed there who had to have her baby in the car park outside. It truly fills me with sadness to tell this Chamber that the baby is no longer with us.
The property provides the landlord with an estimated—and simply staggering—£1.25 million to £1.5 million of taxpayers’ money each year, with the local authorities charged between £30 and £40 per room per night. Connect House is therefore a 21st century, multi-million pound death trap in the middle of my constituency. In the Gallery today sit dozens of residents from Connect House. They have joined us here to have their voices heard, to find out why the Government consider Connect House to be a suitable place for them to live, and to listen to what changes the Minister will propose before this death trap takes its next victim. From down here in the Chamber, I would like to tell their experiences, their challenges and their stories. Take Laura. She shares a room with her teenage daughter, despite having a spinal disability. Her room is so small that she had to move items out just to show me inside. She sleeps in her bed in the day so that her daughter can sleep in a bed at night.
Then there is Alice. She has a three-hour return journey to collect her children from school, finishing at the tram stop outside the industrial estate. It is dark by the time they return and so, before making the final walk home, Alice and her children pause to pray that they will make it safely. Finally, there is Sarah. Her two children are not yet of school age, so they are confined—day in, day out—to the industrial estate. It is no wonder that when Sarah’s baby boy was taken to the doctor’s with a wheezy cough, the doctor put it down to the constant fumes he was inhaling from the factories outside the window.
There are Connect Houses in so many of our constituencies, and today is our chance to shine a light on them. So what can be done? If there are tangible actions that should be taken from this debate, let them be as follows.
First, does the Minister agree that if a local authority is forced to house residents temporarily in another local authority area, it is fundamental that a designated officer in the receiving authority should be clearly informed of those people’s arrival so that their safety and welfare can be ensured? Secondly, I cannot help questioning why we have laws and regulations on temporary accommodation if they are simply not enforced. Does the Minister agree that local authorities should be held to account under the regulations on which the House has decided? Assuming that he does, may I ask how he proposes to ensure that families like Kelly’s are no longer illegally housed in B&Bs for more than six weeks?
Finally, do the Minister and colleagues agree that there should be a minimum standard for temporary accommodation, and that the conditions that I have described are simply not fit for purpose? I encourage anyone who is in any doubt about that to join me in Committee Room 9 after the debate.
The 78,180 families who are in temporary accommodation are hidden from our society, whether in a hostel, in a B&B, or lost in an industrial estate. Today many of those families sit proudly in the House of Commons. Today their stories will be hidden no more, and I urge each of us to be their voice and to call for change.
Mr Lammy
It is shocking and appalling that councils are being put in that position. Many councillors across the country are having to make the hardest of decisions on behalf of people—frankly, as Members of Parliament, we are all pleased that we do not have to make those decisions. We now have a ridiculous situation in which we are spending almost £10 billion a year of taxpayers’ money on housing benefit that goes straight to private landlords. Slashing social housing funding is a false economy. This is dead money. Instead of lining the pockets of private landlords, it should be used to build new social homes.
Siobhain McDonagh
I worked out last night that we could build 88,000 prefabs with the money we are giving in one year to the private rented sector in housing benefit.
Mr Lammy
Absolutely. We have to find new ways of building homes. We would be better off giving people a home for what may be 40 or 50 years by building those prefabs than handing out money in the way we have.
The state grant available for social landlords to build social homes was slashed to zero in the 2010 spending review. In its place we got new categories of homes: homes for affordable rent, and affordable homes for first-time buyers. It is important to place on the record that the crisis will not be solved by building affordable homes that cost £400,000 to £450,000 in London. It is time almost to banish the word “affordable” from the lexicon, as it means nothing to ordinary people when it comes to housing policy. We have already heard that the Government are not building social homes, but they are spending 80% of the total housing budget on subsidising private homes through Help to Buy and discounted starter homes. The Government are not even really serious about their own affordable homes programme.
The dire situation we are seeing in temporary accommodation is symptomatic of the intrinsically linked shortage of homes and housing crisis. We will get to grips with the crisis only through a mass social housing building programme. The Government are beginning to recognise that, and I welcome the Prime Minister’s promise of a council house building “rebirth” in her speech last month.
The crisis will not be solved by further overheating the housing market by offering Help to Buy loans to first-time buyers, who have help from the bank of mum and dad anyway. The crisis will not be solved by building 5,000 homes each year. That is a drop in the ocean given the scale of the problem—it is only half of the households waiting to be housed in the London Borough of Haringey. Some 1.2 million households across the country are waiting to be housed, according to Shelter.
I hope the Government are listening and, on behalf of the 3,000 families in Haringey, I hope they will finally act.