Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I also came to the Chamber intending not to speak but to listen carefully to the arguments. I feel moved to speak because of my personal experience as a local councillor in inner city areas such as Islington and Hackney, where homelessness and poverty have gone hand in hand and where over several decades we have seen the decline of affordable housing that ordinary families can rent. The two previous Governments have to take responsibility for not building enough affordable housing. That is the fact of the matter and the elephant in the room that is not being addressed. It therefore pains me when I hear people around this Chamber, whom I respect, saying, for example, that families are moving to upmarket areas such as Hampstead in order to live in a better area. I have never seen evidence of that. When families through no fault of their own lose their home, which might be because it has been repossessed or they have been unable to keep up with the mortgage payments, they naturally present themselves to the local authority. The local authority has to take a view in making an assessment of such families and, if the family is not dysfunctional enough, if the children or either parent do not have enough of a disability or they do not have enough points—because it is all done on a points system—there is not much that the local authority can do. Very often, those families or individuals are directed to the private sector. Local homelessness departments will usually give them a list of estate agents where they can go to find somewhere. Often, families who have lost their homes will end up in the private sector. The private sector has filled the gap, certainly where I come from in Islington, between the unaffordable private homes and social housing. It has taken up the slack there. Of course, prices have shot up because of demand. That is not the fault of people who have become unintentionally homeless. I hear my noble friend saying that 76 per cent of the public support a cap. I do not think that anyone in your Lordships' House would disagree that there should be some form of cap and that it should not be an open-ended provision. It is the implementation, how this will work, that is worrying many of us here. We should not force out families from areas such as mine. People often think that Islington is a very rich area full of wealthy people, which it is, but it has the third-highest level of child poverty. We have the extremes: very rich people and very poor people. The very rich live in the houses that have become increasingly unaffordable for most people, and the rest live in social housing, apart from some in the middle who live in private accommodation. I want to live in a mixed community. I do not want to live in a Paris-style ghetto. I do not want ghettos such as in Paris, where the poorer families have been forced into the doughnut outside the city. We should support mixed communities. We want our children to have a healthy outlook and mix with people from all different backgrounds. Where exactly are we saying that people should be moving out to? For example, even the less salubrious areas of Islington and the neighbouring borough of Hackney have become incredibly expensive. That is not the fault of people who still live there, whose children go to school there, whose families are there and who may have lived there for generations. All their support networks are there. We are asking people to move outside London—I have read that more than 50 per cent of those directly impacted would be living in London—but where would they go? They would move outside to areas where, as was said earlier, there is probably not much employment. Over the past 15 to 20 years, as a Londoner I have witnessed people moving to London to find work. Are we now saying that people should move away from any possibility of getting work to areas where there is very little work? That does not make sense. I do not think that the full consequences have been properly examined. I get irritated when I hear unfortunate comments, such as that families are having children in order to get more benefits. We are talking about people with a lack of education and support. Some of the women from those communities are not in a position to make such choices. It is unfortunate that that has been mentioned. We have poorer families who are entitled to social housing—but there is a lack of social housing—and then we have families who are not. Until we hear from the Government—