Housing and Social Security

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I have visited home building sites and potential home building sites in Cannock Chase. I commend the record so far and the proactive attitude that is taken, certainly by the local Member of Parliament, to ensuring that local people have the homes that they need and deserve.

Since 2010, house building starts have increased by more than three quarters. More than 382,000 households have been helped to buy a property through schemes such as Help to Buy and the reinvigorated right to buy.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is telling us about his record. In these changed times, is it still Government policy that housing associations should be required to sell off homes faster than new homes can be built?

[Sajid Javid]

It is Government policy that people should have the right to buy their home, whether it is a council house or a housing association property. The hon. Gentleman will know that we are piloting how the housing association right to buy programme works. We will then work on how we can take it forward.

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[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

Like many others, I had expected a little more from this Queen’s Speech. On the key point regarding the repeal of the European Communities Act, the certainty and assurance my constituents want to see is that there will be no loss of rights or protections as a result of leaving the EU. The last thing our country needs right now is a bunch of “here today, gone tomorrow” Ministers blundering around undoing the rights and safeguards on which the British people depend for protections at work, human rights, environmental security and economic wellbeing.

One thing is clear: we do not need to hear any more nonsense about extensive use of secondary legislation or Henry VIII powers, as this Parliament has plenty of time to debate these issues. As we reflect on whether contempt for regulation played any part in the Grenfell tragedy, the last thing we want is to see our water and air standards reduced and food safety compromised because of the behaviour of those who fundamentally reject precautionary principles or the idea that the polluter pays.

If part of my job is to reflect the concerns of my constituents, it is only fair that I point out that in a recent survey I undertook with the people of Selly Oak, they were very clear that their No. 1 concern was housing and homelessness. That is perhaps not surprising when we can barely move in Birmingham these days without coming across someone sleeping in a shop doorway. The problem is not confined to the city centre; it is rife across the suburbs and the same all over the country. It is a consequence of an obsession with austerity. In some cases it is a direct result of the Government’s pointless meddling with the Supporting People programme, heartless and botched attacks on local authority spending, and ill-considered welfare changes. My advice centres are full of people with housing problems: a mother with two children who has been forced to sleep on the floor of her parents’ two-bedroom house for over three years; the man whose bedroom is covered in black mould; repairs that never get done; or the woman who contacted me to say that she and her three-year-old son had been subjected to carbon monoxide poisoning courtesy of a flue that had not been properly connected to a boiler despite the work being signed off by the landlord’s gas engineer.

This Queen’s Speech should be setting out to make these problems a priority. We need the law to be simplified so that there are powers to utilise land that has been banked by individuals or organisations. We need permissive powers to encourage funding opportunities so that, as well as traditional build, there is scope for smaller developments, community build, and high-quality, healthy and environmentally modern systems. We need to be certain that this Government are now serious about building such housing and ending the scandal of homelessness.

Of course, rather than being shy of regulation, we need to tackle rogue landlords and developers, whether we are talking about council and social housing or the private sector. Last year, the Government had an opportunity to look at my Protection of Family Homes (Enforcement and Permitted Development) Bill, which warned of the dangers of rogue building and conversions. Perhaps if the Government had spent a little more time listening and a little less time talking it out, their minds would have been a little more focused on safety and regulation. I hope that I will be able to give them another opportunity in this Parliament, but we should not be waiting for a private Member’s Bill; providing protection for tenants and homeowners against rogue landlords and developers should be a Government priority.

Of course, with so little else to address in this Queen’s Speech, I thought we might have seen an offer to revisit the plight of the WASPI women. If transitional arrangements in the form of pension credits are not the answer for these women, who are being punished through no fault of their own, what is the answer? It surely cannot be to wait until their numbers dwindle through age and ill health. This is an injustice for all to see. Why not have a short piece of legislation to tackle it now? And while we are at it, where is the promise to straighten out the mess that is affecting disabled people and the scandal of personal independence payments? How many people have to go hungry, suffer a breakdown, get into mountains of debt and lose their entire self-respect before this Government recognise that there is a world of difference between helping those who can work into work and setting arbitrary targets based on bonus payments for private companies that strip the poor, the sick and disabled of support to which any civilised society would see them as rightfully entitled?

We heard a bit yesterday from the mover of the Gracious Speech about his wish for a fairer, more just society. I want that as well. So how am I to explain to my constituents that the average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company now earns 144 times the average salary? How do we compare that with cuts to in-work benefits and pay freezes for low-paid workers? Why are the Government not doing something to tackle that? What about introducing a compulsory living wage—and these people on high salaries can certainly afford to pay tax on a salary of that level?

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[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) on a fine maiden speech, and congratulate others who have made maiden speeches today.

I hope I may be forgiven for particularly singling out my hon. Friend the new Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad), who not only made a fine and moving speech but has had to rise to the kind of challenge that I am not sure anybody has ever had to rise to so soon after being elected to Parliament. Kensington needs her, and she has certainly risen to that challenge in these days. I hope we will all do what we can to support her in the times ahead. I speak with particular feeling because some of the wards in the northern part of her constituency were in my constituency under previous boundaries, as was Grenfell Tower. What she said was therefore particularly powerful and moving for me.

I echo what my hon. Friend and others have said about the extraordinary community response at a time of serious failure in the institutions of the state in the aftermath of the tragedy, including from many constituents in north Westminster, a sister community who have been working tirelessly over the past week to help the victims and survivors of the disaster.

Along with very many other Members of Parliament, my hon. Friend and I have residents living in other tower blocks, many of whom are deeply concerned. I hope that few will have anything like the equivalent level of reason to be concerned, although they will still need reassurance. However, some may need more support and assistance than reassurance. It is absolutely incumbent on us to rise to that challenge.

[Steve McCabe]

Is not the one single bit of reassurance that everyone needs the knowledge that if local authorities are going to carry out inspections and take remedial action, there will be funding from the Government to deliver it?

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I and others pushed for that during the statement and at other opportunities. The local authorities, the arm’s length management organisations and other providers must have a guarantee. They must have the bills underwritten both for the inspection process and for any remedial works. I think we have nudged closer to that commitment this afternoon, but we still do not have it unequivocally. This is important because local authorities have had their budgets cut very severely, Kensington by 38% in the past five years and my own borough of Westminster by 46%. Local authorities, including the environmental health teams who are so important in this context, have had their budgets cut, and social housing providers have had a rent cut imposed on them, with an impact on housing revenue accounts and on management and maintenance in social housing. That has to be recognised. It was a policy imposed by the Government and it has implications that they need to respond to. That action has to be forthcoming.

The Government will need to demonstrate to us how quickly they can respond to the findings of the inquiry, which cannot be prejudged, of course, but actions need to be taken even before that. We have spoken about social housing in this context, but we need to remember that many residents in towers and high-rise blocks, even those built by local authorities, are not actually local authority tenants. In many cases, about a third are either leaseholders, or are legally subletting their properties to private tenants. Those people are all in different situations and subject to different regulatory arrangements, and there are real concerns that the fire safety and other standards applying in social housing do not automatically apply to private owners and leaseholders in social housing blocks. That must be urgently addressed by the Government.

In my view, we need to bring into force section 38 of the Building Act 1984, which would allow victims of breaches of building regulations to sue for damages. The Government could move on that. We need to introduce a statutory consultation process applying to tenants when there are major works in buildings. Such a process currently applies to leaseholders, but not to tenants. We need to amend the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 to allow landlords to go into tenanted properties and ensure that fire safety standards are comparable. We also need to impose new obligations on leases to enable landlords to require access for the purpose of making fire safety improvements, and so forth. There are regulatory changes on which the Government could act immediately and urgently—and they must do so—without in any way prejudging the findings of the inquiry and the separate actions that they will need to take afterwards.

I ask the Government to revisit a revised version of the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill—I introduced the proposals as a private Member’s Bill, and the Opposition put them forward as amendments to the Housing and Planning Act 2016—because, particularly in an age of cash-starved local authorities, we need to enable tenants to enforce standards in law when there is substandard accommodation, as they can currently do with respect to properties in disrepair. This is not about having a new regulatory burden; it is about tenants being able to enforce such standards.

In my last remaining minute I want to raise one other matter. The absolute first priority today must be to house the survivors of the Grenfell Tower tragedy adequately—we must provide them with decent local accommodation—but that must not be at the expense of the needs of other people who are homeless and in desperate housing need, whether in Kensington, Westminster or other parts of London. At the moment, we are in the dire situation that homelessness is rising fast: it has risen by 17% since 2010, and just yesterday we saw figures showing that the number of households in temporary accommodation has risen by a staggering 61% since 2010. As has happened in Kensington and Westminster, many of those families have been moved away from their homes, their children’s schools and their support networks. Social housing is not part of the problem; social housing for these and other people is part of the solution, provided it is properly funded, decent and affordable.