Service Family Accommodation: Maintenance

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Helen Morgan

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Helen Morgan]

My hon. Friend raises a good point. Community, support and family life are extremely important to servicemen and women, and I will come to that shortly.

It is important to recognise that families cannot resolve the issue simply by moving to private rented accommodation elsewhere in the vicinity of their base, as often it is unaffordable or just unavailable, and outside the military community. As we know, service families often move house every two years or have a parent or family member away from home on a tour of duty for an extended period. The support network of families who understand their circumstances is really important. It is crucial that service family accommodation is suitable.

If the usable stock is decreasing or service families are put off taking a home because of the issues I have described, the vibrancy of the community is badly affected and service life overall becomes less appealing, as the survey results have showed. Empty and dilapidated housing stock often exacerbates the situation, because where there is a shortage, families must stay in substandard homes. There also appears to be a failure of the contract arrangements to deal with empty properties. One constituent reported houses being left empty and unheated, but with the mains water still turned on. In the winter cold snap, the pipes burst, meaning that the ceilings fell in and serious damage occurred.

Other houses on the estate have had insulation fitted to roofs with unrepaired holes in them, meaning that when water ingress occurs, it causes even more damage. The houses will now cost thousands to repair to an acceptable standard and the families affected will be owed compensation. It is a truly false economy to have allowed that to occur. It is wastes taxpayers’ money and reduces the options for service families who want to live near their base and their community.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a degree of hypocrisy in the fact that we celebrate brave servicemen as our heroes because they put their lives on the line for the security of our nation, yet we cannot guarantee them the most basic support?

[Helen Morgan]

I agree with my hon. Friend wholeheartedly.

My understanding is that the current maintenance contract allows just two weeks after a family leaves a house to carry out any required upgrade work, including any repairs but also big-ticket works such as retrofitting insulation and replacing kitchens and bathrooms. Clearly, two weeks is not long enough if a significant amount of work is required. That leads to incomplete or poor-quality work, which costs more to fix in the future and causes disruption to the family living there.

The overall feedback from my constituents—there has been a lot of it—is that the response to requests for repair and the management of empty houses have deteriorated since the contract was restructured last April, and that while the coming of spring and summer has improved living conditions in the short term, there remain significant concerns about the operation of the process. There appear to be too many hand-offs between, in the case of my constituents, the contractors Pinnacle and Amey. I note that in response to an urgent question in December last year, the former Minister acknowledged that there were IT issues. That rings true with the experiences that have been related to me, in which requests have either not been logged in the first place or have gone missing in the hand-off between the two companies.

Anyone who works in a business knows that IT issues in a contract restructuring of this scale are inevitable, but the Minister suggested that they were unresolved in December 2022, a full nine months after the restructured contracts went live. Has there been any further improvement to date? I have a constituent still reporting little progress on a leaking roof and radiators. The roof was fixed in five days, but the scaffolding remained up for five weeks at goodness knows what unnecessary cost to the taxpayer and the radiators still leak. There is damp and mould, and they have not been given the results of a damp survey that was apparently carried out in December last year.

I hope I have illustrated the chaotic and broken process of reporting an issue and getting it fixed under the newly restructured contract, the shocking state of dilapidation of some empty homes that could otherwise be used for housing our service families, the impact on the service family community, and the unacceptable waste of taxpayers’ money. This is the price of a failing process. We have spent much time in this Chamber rightly debating, and indeed agreeing on, the need for social housing to be of a decent standard, and for tenants to have the right to demand a decent standard, both in the context of the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill as it passed through Parliament and in demanding an end to the system that led to the shocking death of Awaab Ishak.