It is a delight to follow my colleague from the all-party group on London, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), given his expertise on housing and planning. I want to talk about conditions in the private rented sector and to express my agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) on leasehold reform.
4.15 pm
I am not an expert on housing and planning, but I have just opened my 1,000th constituency case since 8 May—there is an awful lot of work to be done—and
60% of those who have come to see me, written to me, phoned me or emailed me have talked about housing. Whereas 20 years ago the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green would have been dealing mainly with local authorities, housing associations and homeowners, many more cases now relate to the private rented sector. For that reason, it is a pleasure to speak today. As we know from our debate on the private Member’s Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), the condition of many homes in the private rented sector leaves something to be desired. Instead of 10% or 15%, up to 45% of the population of an average London borough are in the private rented sector, which is why we need to be much more ambitious when it comes to the quality of homes.
We know that fewer and fewer people can afford to own their own home and that the level of homeownership is at an all-time low. The Government’s policy is to try and assist people, but, when I last looked, only one household in my constituency, which has 80,000 electors, had been helped by the Government’s Help to Buy incentive scheme, which indicates how difficult it is for people to get on the housing ladder. It is important, therefore, that while people save up, in the hope of one day owning a home, we ensure high-quality private rented homes.
Most landlords are very good and want to look after their tenants and follow best practice, but unfortunately, owing to the high demand for privately rented homes and because people want to live near where they work, standards sometimes drop and people are afraid to raise issues of poor quality with their landlord for fear of being evicted. We have heard stories of people queueing up with baked goods—cakes, biscuits and so on—for landlords and saying, “Please can I be your tenant?”, such is the demand for properties. There is, therefore, no great incentive on landlords to provide high-quality homes. Instead of having to fix the plumbing, they are getting cakes. We are ambitious for our communities, however, and want to ensure the provision of high-quality homes. We need to ring-fence funding for local authorities to ensure quality in the privately rented sector. Local authorities, given their duty to prevent homelessness, should have an eye to this anyway, but they rightly complain of a lack of funding, so we should ring-fence funding for high-quality homes, particularly as up to 40% of families live in the private rented sector.
My particular bugbear is where housing benefit either wholly or partly pays the rent. That is state-sponsored squalor. It is not fair that the state subsidises landlords where conditions are not good. It is one thing for people paying out of their own pockets to think, “Maybe I won’t demand better conditions”, but, where the state subsidises landlords, we must demand much better quality homes.