Secure Tenancies (Victims of Domestic Abuse) Bill [Lords]
Toby Perkins Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Mrs Wheeler
I thank the hon. Lady for mentioning Solace, which has a very good reputation across London. It is quite right that it should get a namecheck in this place.
The Bill will do two things. First, it will ensure that if victims of domestic abuse who have a lifetime social tenancy need to flee their current home to escape abuse, they will be granted a new tenancy and retain their lifetime tenancy in their new social home. It will also apply to lifetime tenants who, having fled their homes, may be considered to have lost their security of tenure, or may have lost their lifetime tenancy altogether before they are rehoused. The Bill will specifically protect all lifetime social tenants in such circumstances, whether they have a secure local authority tenancy, or an assured tenancy with a private registered provider of social housing —a housing association.
Secondly, the Bill will ensure that victims of domestic abuse who are joint lifetime tenants and want to remain in their home after the abuser has left or has been removed can be granted a new lifetime tenancy after the joint tenancy has ended. We have Baroness Lister of Burtersett to thank for her persistence in ensuring that the Bill should be extended to apply to that situation as well. The provisions will apply to all local authorities in England, and not only when the tenant is a victim of domestic abuse, but when a member of the household, such as a child, has suffered domestic abuse. The definition of domestic abuse has deliberately been drawn widely to apply not just to those who have suffered physical abuse and violence, but to victims of psychological, sexual, financial and emotional abuse.
The Bill delivers on a commitment the Government made to the House during the passage of the Housing and Planning Act 2016. We committed to ensuring that when local authorities move to fixed-term tenancies, the regulations that specify when they may grant a further lifetime tenancy would make that mandatory for victims of domestic abuse. Primary legislation is necessary for us to deliver on that commitment, and I am very pleased to be introducing it today.
I should make it clear that the Bill does not create a new requirement for local authorities to rehouse lifetime tenants who are the victims of domestic abuse, and does not require local authorities to grant a further tenancy to victims in their own homes after the perpetrator has left. However, it ensures that when a lifetime tenant is rehoused in those circumstances, or when a victim is granted a new tenancy in his or her home after the previous tenancy has ended, the victim does not lose security of tenure. The purpose is to remove an impediment that could prevent victims from leaving their abusive situations, or from taking steps to secure their safety in their current social homes. The Government are absolutely committed to supporting victims of domestic abuse.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
That support for victims of domestic violence is incredibly important. Will the Minister say a little more about allocations policy, which seems to be applied very inconsistently in different local authority areas? If a victim of domestic violence moves from one area to a hostel in another local authority area, should that local authority have a responsibility for the tenant who is fleeing domestic violence?
Mrs Wheeler
The average stay in a hostel or refuge can be up to four and a half or five months, so a local connection is created. Most local authorities that deal on a workaday basis with people who need to be rehoused from refuges take the view that domestic abuse is one of the highest priorities when it comes to the reallocation of premises. I think that there needs to be a full and frank discussion about which is the best place for a family to move to, and the best place may be where the family have been for the last four and a half months.
Toby Perkins
It is true that some local authorities take the view that the Minister describes, but would it not be better if central Government made the rules clear? Allowing people who are fleeing domestic violence to stay in hostels for an extended length of time simply in order to develop a local connection is the wrong approach. Do the Government plan to put in statute the rights of victims of domestic violence in respect of future allocations?
Mrs Wheeler
That is a very good question, but I do not think there is the problem that the hon. Gentleman thinks there is. I have certainly never known that to be the case.
As I have said, the Government are absolutely committed to supporting victims of domestic abuse, which is why we have invested £33.5 million in supporting them since 2014. However, we want to go further. We are carrying out a fundamental review of the commissioning and funding of domestic abuse services, which will conclude this summer. I look forward to updating the House on its progress later in the year. We will also announce details of further significant funding for domestic abuse services as early as possible in the new financial year. It will be open to all local areas to bid for a share.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
It is an honour to make a brief contribution to this debate on a much needed and welcome Bill, which I am glad has cross-party support and which I support fully. When I was practising at the Bar, I came across many people. As many Members who have also practised in that field will realise, one of the most common emotions encountered there is fear. Sometimes that is people’s fear of the consequences of things they have done, but unquestionably the most moving is people’s fear as a result of what has happened to them or what may happen to them in the future.
Victims of domestic violence have some of the most terribly moving stories, and the issue of control runs through the whole domestic violence situation. Sometimes we are talking about control of things as basic as who can be spoken to or the control of money or of what somebody does, but there can be no greater control than the control of where somebody lives. When someone is suffering from abuse and needs to leave that relationship, the extra fear and worry of where they and perhaps their children are going to go adds a whole other layer. I will always remember the people I met who were in precisely that situation, which is why I am so pleased that the Government are introducing this much needed and welcome Bill.
I entirely support the Bill, as it is essential that when those tenants are leaving lifetime tenancies, they are able to be rehoused in the same sort of accommodation as soon as possible. The policies vary in district councils across the country. My local authority of West Oxfordshire grants special case status if accommodation is unsuitable because the continued occupation of the property is likely to lead to violence, but we must go much further, so that anybody who has to leave understands and knows that they will also have that lifetime tenancy.
I am glad that, statistically, domestic violence appears to be falling, but clearly one incident is far too many and we must do everything possible to assist those who are in that situation. I am also glad that the Government are providing £100 million of funding to tackle violence against women and girls, including £17 million for the transformation fund.
I want to say a word or two about social housing, because it is important that we do have social housing available. I am glad this Government have been building more council housing since 2010 than we saw built over the previous years of the Labour Government. I am not saying that just to make a party political point; I am simply saying that we have to have that social housing in order to ensure that if there is a family break-up for reasons of domestic violence, we have the property available for someone to go to and that that will remain the case.
Toby Perkins
On the amount of council housing that there is, a tiny amount is being built and that has been the case for many years, including under the previous Labour Government. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a huge number of councils would love to get building more houses but simply say, “We can’t risk building new houses only to have them bought off us under right to buy within three years”? Would he support some kind of moratorium so that for brand new houses built by councils there would not be a right to buy for perhaps 20 or 25 years, so that more councils are encouraged to build houses?
Robert Courts
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that interesting point, although I do not agree with him on it. Right to buy has been a great engine of social mobility. I believe the statistic is that more than 85% of people would like to buy and own their own home, and we ought to facilitate that in any way we can. We have to enable the building of more social and affordable housing, of all tenures—that is the way forward. In my area, West Oxfordshire District Council is being innovative in working with local landowners and providing some of its own money to help with affordability issues. That is the way forward to address that particular issue.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I rise to speak briefly on this Bill. Like other colleagues, I welcome the limited but important steps that the Bill takes to ensure that one thing that victims of domestic violence do not have to consider when facing choices about their housing is whether they will lose their secure tenancy. It is important that this is clarified for victims of domestic violence. We all feel strongly about them and we all wish to protect their interests at what we know is an incredibly difficult time.
The debate has raised a couple of other issues on which I wish to touch. More broadly, there is the point about how well we, in this place and as a society, support victims of domestic violence with regard to housing and some of the other issues that have been raised today. Importantly, I am very conscious of the fact that there should be security for victims of domestic violence, who have often been left with absolutely no security—no financial security—and in psychological turmoil, as well as with the physical scars that have come from the situation from which they are fleeing.
The earlier exchange that I had with the Minister raised some important questions about the allocations policy for victims of domestic violence. In her response, she talked about the fact that, when it comes to victims who have moved into refuges, many authorities will consider that, because they are often there for four or five months, they have developed a local connection and will then consider that they should be allocated a property. From my perspective, the minute that someone flees domestic violence, we should recognise that the circumstances that they face are different. Often they need to escape their local connections, because it is those local connections—the wider family unit—that they are escaping from. Therefore, it is crucial that they can get to a place where they do not know anyone and where they do not have those local connections.
The Minister said that I was talking about something that did not really exist, but when I visited the Elm Foundation, an important domestic violence refuge in my constituency, precisely that issue was raised. The staff said that they faced different circumstances depending on which local authority they were dealing with. That is why I believe that it would be useful for the Government to clarify more broadly that we do not operate a postcode lottery here and that the rights of domestic violence victims should be the same wherever they live in the country. There should also be a recognition that once someone finds refuge in a hostel and is accepted by that hostel, a local connection should be established immediately at that point. They should not be stuck in the hostel for a long period to establish some kind of local connection. The moment that they and their family unit are ready to move on from the hostel, they should be accepted by that local authority area as having a local connection.
It is impossible to separate the needs of domestic violence victims in our social housing environment from the wider crisis that exists around social housing, homelessness and pressures on local authorities. That is why I took up the point that the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) raised about right to buy. I very much support the right to buy. In its broader context, it plays an incredibly important role. My sister has just moved into a council house and is delighted to know that she is one of the last to get a secure tenancy and is delighted to know that there may be an opportunity in the future for her to take over the ownership of that property. However, an exemption should be put in place for brand new council houses. In Chesterfield, we have about 9,500 to 10,000 council houses, and a council that is very enthusiastic about taking up the opportunity to build more council houses. However, it also says that it would be unaffordable for it to build a new estate of the size that Chesterfield Borough Council used to build in the past, because, within three years, it would be vulnerable, as a large number of those houses would have been bought by tenants.
Wera Hobhouse
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the system would only really work if we replaced like for like? If a social house has been lost through right to buy, we should replace it. That requires large Government subsidies. The fact that those are not forthcoming means that we are losing large numbers of social homes.
Toby Perkins
I partly agree with the hon. Lady. A big flaw in the original right to buy policy was that the same number of houses were not replaced. That was a deliberate political decision. I do not think that Mrs Thatcher wanted to see large numbers of tenants in council houses. She introduced the policy with a view to reducing the number of council house tenants. Like with so many other policies, she wanted to reduce people’s dependence on the state, because she thought there was a political purpose for doing so. Therefore, there was a flaw in the original policy.
I would certainly like to see more council houses being built and some kind of link between the number being built and the number being sold off. To an extent, these are two different questions. There is one question about whether we replace the number of council houses. Some Members want to see more council houses built, but we should have a specific exemption from the right to buy on brand new properties, so that those council houses could regenerate the money for local authorities before they are expected to sell them. Councils would then be more enthusiastic about building more council houses.
If we head back to the 1980s when the Thatcher Government introduced the right to buy, we can see that a very reasonable point was being made at the time. It was that local authorities had built these houses and that families had lived in them for 30 or 40 years and had spent in rent far more than they would ever have spent if they had bought their houses in the first place. Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for them to say, “Well, look, I have already paid for this house many times over.” Getting a discount when they bought their houses seems very reasonable, and I support that entirely.
None the less, if we want local authorities to build more council houses in any substantial way—there is a real need for that now—a moratorium should be introduced. I will encourage my colleagues on the Front Bench to develop this as Labour party policy. In those early years, councils could build the required number of houses, giving domestic violence victims and others the opportunity to move into them—I say this without in any way wanting to undermine the value of the right to buy as a policy more generally—and that is how we will achieve the council house building that we need.
I very much welcome this Bill, but we cannot discuss the impact of policy on domestic violence victims in the round until we address issues such as housing allocation for domestic violence victims and the shortage of council and social housing more generally. Notwithstanding that, this Bill is a welcome step forward that I look forward to supporting.
Mrs Wheeler
No, I will not—I have to move on.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling) brought up the matter of domestic violence as a priority for Essex police. I am very grateful for that. Councils have been given large amounts to help them to support people in this regard, and training on domestic abuse has been provided from that funding pot.
My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) mentioned GPs charging for letters. The provision of notes or letters as evidence falls outside a GP’s NHS contract, so a fee can currently be charged. This issue was raised in the Lords, as we heard, and Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth has already written to the Department of Health and Social Care about it. While we await a response, it is important to note that GP contract negotiations for 2018-19 are still ongoing and negotiations for the 2019-20 contract begin in April. We look forward to receiving the details of that response.
We have had a very good debate. There is cross-party support for the Bill. I am grateful to everybody who has been involved in the debate and hope that I have dealt with the points that have been raised. I commend the Bill to the House and look forward to discussing it further during its later stages.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Housing, Planning and the Green Belt
Toby Perkins Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) on securing this debate. The contributions have been excellent. I often meet constituents who bemoan the quality of our debates. I always tell them, “Don’t bother watching on Wednesday lunch time. Switch on the BBC Parliament channel on a Thursday or Tuesday afternoon and you’ll get an entirely different impression.”
What has been interesting is how many of the issues that have been raised on both sides of the House have parallels. Listening to the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) and the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), I was struck by how statist their solutions appear, which I strongly encourage. I remember two or three years ago when my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) first mooted the idea of seizing land off developers who are not getting on with building. It was seen as positively communist. It appears that, all the way from Doncaster to Grantham, the centre ground of politics really is shifting. I encourage much of that.
It is important to recognise that Governments can free space for the private sector to develop, but the rules of the game are the rules of the game at the moment. Given those rules, it is useless for us to come to this place and complain that developers do not build houses from which they cannot make a profit. We need to understand that. If we rely entirely on the private sector, we will get houses built and developed in areas where those houses will be profitable. London authorities will build houses at an amazing rate, but nothing like the same numbers will be built in towns in the north, where there has not been the same sort of investment in infrastructure and where a variety of other things have not been done. We will not see anything like the same numbers built and we will not get them built on brownfield sites.
In Chesterfield in 2005-06, a housing development was being built on the old Bryan Donkin site. The developer went bust about a third of the way through the development. That huge brownfield site remained unbuilt for the next seven or eight years. Therefore, there is no point our coming to this place to bemoan the fact that developers, which are companies that are ultimately there to make a profit, are not building on sites on which they will not make a profit.
What has been lacking from this debate is the sense that housing and planning are just one part of this whole thing. We need to talk about skills because, if there are not enough trained people in the construction industry to get more sites built, there will be an impact on the cost of labour, which will have an impact on the number of houses that are built.
Transport is incredibly important. The north has huge potential, but we need to improve the transport infrastructure. When 10 times more is spent on transport infrastructure in London than on transport infrastructure in other parts of the country, it is unsurprising that everyone wants to move into London, where they can move about easily, and not into areas where they cannot move around so easily.
There has been a lot of talk about the green belt and that is sometimes misleading. Whenever I fly over Britain during the day while travelling overseas, I look down and see that Britain is a green and pleasant land—I fly over field after field before coming to a town or city. If we are to build these houses, the public sector needs to have a role because the public sector can build even in times when building is not profitable.
I would like to see the Government address the issue of right to buy. I am not against right to buy, but unless councils can borrow and know that they can build new houses without the prospect of having to sell them at a discount three years later, local authorities will not build those houses. Local authorities have a role to play in this and I would like the Government to recognise that.
I would like this debate to recognise the importance of transport and local infrastructure. We have heard about the objections in many areas to developments, but often when people are objecting they are concerned about the impact on schools, roads and local health services. Infrastructure needs to be a part of all this discussion, as do skills; we need a much wider debate.
In the final minute available, while touching on the planning issue, I also wish to discuss the issue of Traveller sites. In Chesterfield, we have a local plan, which is currently under consultation. The council has identified two sites for Travellers already in Chesterfield, but it has been told it needs to identify two more. There is a huge amount of public concern about that. Four sites in my constituency—in Grangewood, Newbold and Inkersall—have been consulted on and I know there are two such sites in the constituency of the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley). The pressure that is going on councils is unfair. There is also pressure on constituents, who are, for understandable reasons—I would be concerned for exactly the same reasons—very concerned about this. If we are going to see local authorities put in control of their areas, we do not need to see them forced to have such sites, as is currently happening in Chesterfield.
Mr Harper
That proposal sounds sensible. I am not familiar with the detail, but given what my hon. Friend sets out, it sounds like the local authority is focusing on demand. We will need significantly more of that if we are to meet demand in London.
My hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury put his finger on it when he spoke about housing demand. Clearly, compared with the situation when I was younger, we are much tougher with the loans that people can take out. When we look at what happened to the financial system after the banks made unwise lending decisions, such practice is probably very sensible, but it does make it more difficult for younger people to purchase houses. I welcome what the Government have done on the finance side of the argument, and two things are particularly welcome. The Help to Buy equity loan scheme is helping a significant number of young people who can afford a mortgage to be able to finance their deposit. It is not true to say, as some people do, that that only deals with the demand side of the equation, because it is of course only used for buying new houses. If we look at how house builders operate, we see that they build houses as they sell them. If we make it possible for a first-time buyer to purchase a home through the Help to Buy equity loan scheme, the house builder will then build more houses on that estate, as I have seen clearly in my constituency. Such practice helps on the demand side, which in turn generates housing supply.
I also welcome the introduction of the lifetime individual savings account, which enables younger people to save for a pension or a home, but I have one policy suggestion for the Minister. I am very supportive of our auto-enrolment policy to ensure that everybody saves for a pension, so will he consider whether we could apply auto-enrolment to lifetime ISAs? A young person going into the labour market would then find that their savings and their employer’s contributions would go into a lifetime ISA—at least that would be an option—so that the money could be used to fund either a pension or a home. If someone is a homeowner when they retire, they will not need such a significant pension, because they will not be paying rent on the home that they own. I think that that sensible proposal might make younger people keener to save for a deposit, because they would find it more affordable, so I urge the Minister to consider the suggestion.
I am grateful that the Government have said so much recently about the northern powerhouse. Given the location of my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury, I also welcome what the Secretary of State for Wales did with the Severn growth summit to encourage the development of what we might call a western powerhouse to create another centre of gravity for developing economic growth in Wales and the west country. It seems to me that one of the real problems is that we will not deal with the housing crisis simply by building more homes. London, for example, has high levels of immigration—23% of Londoners are non-UK born residents, and 156,000 migrants moved to London in 2016. Having listened to colleagues’ concerns about excessive house building in London, I argue that we cannot build our way out of the problem. A longer- term solution is to generate progress in the northern powerhouse—in transport infrastructure and development in that part of the country—and then generate development in what I might call the western powerhouse in the west of the country and Wales. We could also look at things such as the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford growth corridor, so that we actually see economic development spread more equitably across the United Kingdom. That would mean that rather than feeling the pressure to move to London, or to get a job or create a new business there, young people in many parts of the country would feel able to stay in their home towns and cities, or indeed to move to Manchester and the great cities of the north. That will happen if we create a powerhouse that is globally competitive, as London is.
Toby Perkins
I am much happier with where the right hon. Gentleman is finishing his speech than I was with his position six or seven minutes ago. It seems that London has doubled in size during my lifetime, but the major cities of the north have hardly changed. If the message that the Government get today is that we need continually to expand the size of London, I agree entirely that we will not build our way out of this problem, as we will just continue to feed that demand. The solution has to be investment in infrastructure and skills all around the country, not just focused on London.
Mr Harper
I am glad that I have cheered up the hon. Gentleman as my remarks have developed, and I hope that I have had that effect on at least one or two other colleagues. He is right that that is the answer. There is a regional housing problem in the United Kingdom. House prices in London and its surrounding areas are massively out of kilter with the rest of the country, and we can deal with some of that by building houses. We do need to increase the density of house building in London, so I welcomed what the Government said yesterday about building upwards, and having slightly increased housing densities and slightly higher rise properties—not massive, but perhaps with more storeys than a traditional two-storey property—but we also need to spread economic growth across the country.
People with housing challenges who live in London should be as supportive of investment in the northern powerhouse and other parts of the country—and in creating a great, globally competitive city in the north—as people who live in the north. Such investment would result in us sharing economic growth more equitably across the country. That is how we deal with the housing challenges that we face more fairly and equitably, and it would also help the whole country’s economic growth and make us more globally competitive.
Oral Answers to Questions
Toby Perkins Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Dominic Raab
We are certainly looking at that as part of our wider strategy, which I have already described. I am very happy to write to my hon. Friend about its particular impact on his constituency.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
Sajid Javid
We have made it an absolute priority in government to help to fight rough sleeping and homelessness. We have committed to halving it by the end of this Parliament and to eliminating it completely by 2027. I share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns, but I hope that he agrees that this issue is not a party political football, and we should all work together across the House to deal with the issue.