It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing this vital debate. He highlighted that the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office have looked into this issue. I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and declare that I am the landlord of a property in the private rented sector.
Affordable housing is critical for my constituency. Many of my constituents live in very overcrowded conditions, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) highlighted. Every week I am out on doorsteps, doing surgeries and visiting people where they live. There are many examples of four children sharing a bedroom, and of a family living in the living room and another in the bedroom. Families are experiencing severe overcrowding without any hope of moving out. I will touch on that in a moment. Too many people just cannot afford to rent in the private sector or to buy, given that rates are very high, and the Government have changed the definition of “affordable” repeatedly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) highlighted. Crucially, we are just not building enough housing.
The record of the affordable homes programme speaks for itself. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, on whose behalf the Minister is here to answer, set out to deliver 180,000 homes in 2021. It has already downgraded that forecast to 157,000 homes, but half of them will be for ownership, not rent. I am not someone who wants to get in the way of home ownership, but it is not even a distant dream for those of my constituents for whom renting privately is not an option. They just need somewhere to live, so we need social housing in London. Of course, the impacts of inflation and construction challenges put the figure of 157,000 at even more risk. The Government’s original intention was to build 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s. Some of them were to be affordable homes, but we have not been given a figure, so I want to delve into that.
Let us pick up on the issue of definitions. Perhaps the Minister could take away the thought that we are conflating or confusing a multiplicity of markets. We have the full ownership market, but we also have affordable home ownership and shared ownership, which poses challenges for many people because they are liable for the whole property but own only part of the equity and pay rent on the rest. The term “affordable” was defined by the previous Mayor of London and former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), as 80% of private rents. Well, good luck with that in Hackney, where it is simply unaffordable for many people.
There are various definitions for key worker housing, depending on where the development is—the term is very ill defined in law and regulation. At least social rented housing has a rent escalator model set out in law, so tenants have an idea of what they will be paying. That has, of course, been capped because of inflation rates. I welcome that for residents, but it does also create a problem for properties in desperate need of investment. There is also, of course, the private rented sector. Although it has been subject to more regulation, there is nothing
about the level of rent and it does not have anything like a rent escalator model. That means that tenants can find their rent going up exponentially after spending only a year in their home. We are increasingly seeing that across the piece in my constituency and throughout London.
Social housing is critical. There are people in Hackney who work hard in good jobs, such as the hospital porter I visited, who is renting a room in a private home. He was living with his daughter, and they rented a room each in a private home. When the private landlady put up the rent from £400 to £550 a month for each room, they could no longer afford to rent two rooms, so he was living with his then 17-year-old daughter—she is now nearly 20—in one private room, because he could not qualify for social housing. As he was not homeless, he would not even get into temporary housing—not that that is a pathway people want to go down.
Five years ago, if people had been in temporary housing for six months I would encourage them to hang on in there because a prized council or housing association property would eventually become available. It is now increasingly the case that people spend more than three years in temporary housing. Recently, a family I was dealing with were rehoused from Hackney to Wellingborough. There are other examples, with the excellent head of homelessness at Hackney Council, Jennifer Wynter, saying that this is the worst situation she has known in her long career, and warning all of us not to raise people’s hopes that a home in Hackney will be a real possibility.
The Department’s own figures show that homes built for social rent provide higher value for money than those built for ownership. This thoughtful Minister used to be a member of the Public Accounts Committee. If he looked at the figures, I think that he, along with the Secretary of State, could be an advocate in his Department for social renting housing. The problem is that the Government, who are not meeting their targets, are chasing numbers, which means fewer social rented properties for the money. We want to see more homes, but we need social rented housing, and it is no good building homes that people just cannot afford to live in. We have a sore need for such properties, yet the Government rejected the Public Accounts Committee’s recommendation to assess the demand for social rent.
Sometimes the Government also respond to reports in a confusing way. A recommendation report notes:
“The government will work with delivery agencies to confirm the 2021 programme’s capacity to deliver homes for Social Rent as part of the review”
of the delivery of housing, and that they
“will confirm the programme’s ability to deliver an increased proportion of homes for social rent to Parliament at the same time as confirming the programme’s overall delivery targets.”
I could read that in all sorts of ways. I like to read it positively, as saying that the Department is determined to see an increased proportion of social rented housing. I hope the Minister can clarify exactly what the Government mean in that response.
It is worth putting the challenge in Hackney in context. I make no apology for repeating these figures. There are currently 3,100 households in temporary accommodation, 51% of which—more than half—are housed outside the borough due to a lack of supply. There are 3,528 children
in temporary accommodation. That is enough to fill eight primary schools and is equivalent to 1% of Hackney’s population. We are having to close primary schools because of falling numbers. Many of those families would love to send their children to school in Hackney, but they cannot live there because there are not enough permanent homes. I have had so many tragic conversations with constituents in my surgeries or the living rooms of their temporary accommodation. They think that if they hang on, they will get a property in Hackney, where their kids are still at school, but I have to say to them, “You are not going to be in Hackney for some years. You have a five-year tenancy somewhere else so you need to think about moving your children.” They are aghast and upset, but that is the reality. Children are being shuttled around to schools where there are places; they are not going to schools their parents choose.
Average waiting times for council and housing association housing for homeless households is now nine years for a three-bedroom property—of course, that is a notional figure—and 12 years for a two-bedroom property. That is a lifetime for a child. Children are growing up in massively overcrowded conditions. They often live in a single room in accommodation or, if they are lucky, a couple of rooms in a hotel. Sometimes, they are in temporary, rented accommodation elsewhere, but with no certainty and, even if their parents are bidding for properties, no real prospect of getting a home anywhere near any time soon.
Homelessness in the borough is increasing rapidly. The number of households seeking support increased by 44% between 2017-18 and 2021-22. Hackney Council anticipates that the number will continue to increase by about 8% a year. That is just one London borough, but I am sure my colleagues across London will say the same. It was interesting to hear that in Coventry the experiences are very similar. In Hackney, that would be considered cheap housing, compared with what we have to deal with.
I pay tribute to the Mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, who is doing his utmost to build council housing—affordable, secure homes—but for pretty much every one he builds, he has to have one for sale to cross-subsidise because there is not a Government subsidy, despite the Government’s own figures showing that investment in bricks-and-mortar subsidy is the most cost-effective way of delivering these homes.
I am sure the Minister is thoughtful enough to take on board the cost of poor housing to the Exchequer. The Public Accounts Committee looked at the private rented sector. In my constituency, ownership is out of reach for so many people—average house prices are at ridiculous levels—so people are living in the private rented sector. The National Audit Office concluded that 13% of privately rented properties—589,000 of them—pose a serious threat to their tenants’ health and safety. The Committee and the National Audit Office estimated the cost of that to the health service to be £340 million per annum, so it really is spend to save. I know it is difficult for any Department to sell that to the Treasury, but I am sure that if the Minister wanted to join forces with us on this issue, we could all work together to persuade the Treasury that spending money, investing in people’s homes and getting them on a stable footing is better for everybody.
This is not rocket science. We need more homes to be built, and we need to unblock the logjam that is stopping that. We do not have the time to go into all the reasons for that, but we need more social housing that is actually affordable for people on average wages—people who work hard every day but have no prospect of buying a home. Some even find it hard to afford council rent. There are issues there, but we certainly need council rented housing and housing association housing. We need pathways to home ownership, but every time someone buys under right to buy, that is another home lost to the local council or the housing association, and that is not a path that many people can pursue.
Many years ago, when I was a councillor in Islington, we would pay people about £16,000 to move from their council property to help them buy a property elsewhere, so they freed it up. That is actually good value for money. Who would have thought that the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee would be standing here saying, “Give tenants who want to move the money to do so”? Sure, home ownership is understandably a dream for many people, but it should not be a dream that is out of reach. We could free up the housing we have for those who have the wherewithal and ability to move into other homes.
We need better rights and stability for private tenants. People live in a home with a year’s tenancy, perhaps, but cannot be sure from year to year whether their children can stay at the same school. It is an upheaval in a family’s life. Now, increasingly, as people are evicted, rents are going through the roof, as many landlords exit the market. In summary, I believe firmly—I hope that the Minister concurs and will tell us how he will help to achieve this—that people need a safe, secure and long-term home as the foundation for their life and, crucially, the springboard for opportunity.
3.5 pm