Affordable Homes Programme

Taiwo Owatemi Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Taiwo Owatemi (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for securing this debate.

Britain’s housing market is broken. Renters have been priced out of the cities they have called home for their entire lives. Young people cannot get a foot on the ladder, and most of the homes that are built are unaffordable. Research by Crisis and the National Housing Federation found that, over the next decade, 145,000 affordable homes must be built each year, with 90,000 of those for social rent, if we are going to meet housing needs in England alone. The truth is that we are nowhere near meeting the overwhelming need that already exists. With only 13% of homes built between 2021 and 2022 designated for social rent, it is clear that the Government are not taking this crisis seriously. The scale of the challenge ahead is monumental, and Ministers have their heads in the sand, hoping it will all just go away.

Let me demonstrate the problem to the Minister, using statistics from my constituency, which has been badly affected. The statistics clearly outline how the housing crisis in this country has spiralled out of control over the past 13 years. In Coventry, the number of new social housing lettings has fallen by more than a third over the past decade. Looking at the most recent figures, 1,939 of the new social housing lettings were in the most affordable category, down from over 4,000 10 years ago. We have nearly 6,000 households stuck on the waiting list, chasing the handful of homes that ever become available.

Behind those numbers are the lives of thousands of constituents whose futures are being robbed from them by a lack of decent housing. I want to give three examples of constituents who have been affected. The first has four sons, who are cramped into one bedroom, denied any privacy or space to revise for next month’s exams. The lack of any ground-floor flats has left the second constituent, crippled from a lifetime of hard physical labour, sleeping on his sofa and doing his washing in the sink. My third constituent is a cancer patient who needs round-the-clock care but who is trapped in a tiny bedsit up a flight of stairs he can barely climb, with no facilities for anyone to stay with him overnight and nowhere to move.

What more evidence do the Government need to accept the scale of the housing crisis that has grown and grown since they came into power? Change is overdue. The inaction of Ministers has left us gripped by a planning and development free-for-all where developers hold all the power. They decide which type of homes are built, where they are built and the prices they are sold for. They are accountable to absolutely nobody—not residents, not local councils and not even the Government in Westminster. Even as we speak, thousands of Coventry families are being denied a modest social home, while historic hedgerows and badger setts are being torn out in Keresley by developers constructing half-a-million-pound executive mansions, which are irrelevant to local need and built solely for private profit.

The big picture is really bad. The specifics of the planning system, however, are even worse. Take housing targets. Coventry has long been singled out for unfair treatment by this Government, who demand that more and more houses be built every year but do nothing to ensure there is enough social housing for those in need. For years, Whitehall ignored Coventry’s residents and councillors, who said time and again that the projections were wrong. Time and again our concerns were cast aside, with Ministers simply too gutless to order an investigation that might uncover an inconvenient truth. Tacked on to this is the 35% uplift—a further inflation of figures that bear no relation to the lack of brownfield sites in our city or the housing mix Coventry residents need.

Thanks to the census, the facts are now clear. The Government’s population estimates were wrong by a massive 30,000 people, rendering the plans drawn up as a result of those figures virtually worthless. Now our councillors are left having to revise the local plan to make up for the unforgivable errors of Ministers—errors that the council reported long ago and that were ignored by those in Westminster, despite the fact I raised the issue on several occasions with the Minister’s predecessor.

As it stands, the planning system is a shambles. A complete overhaul is desperately needed, with local communities and local government in the driving seat. That way, they can set the direction of travel for new developments in their neighbourhood, delivering affordable homes for families exactly where they are needed. The housing crisis will only get worse unless the Government reform planning and deliver for the needs of people up and down the country. I hope the Minister will outline what steps the Government are taking to achieve that reform.