My Lords, it has been a very wide-ranging debate, and many different aspects have been developed by different speakers. I start by taking issue with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for saying that we on this side have tried to make this a battle between the deserving and the undeserving. I do not think that there should be moral judgments like that, and I do not believe that our party is making them. I will start with the noble Lord’s speech because it was the previous one and therefore it is fresh in my mind. It is important to realise that housing benefit has been a great problem. He says that we need to address it. Of course we do. One way to address it is to restrict it, and that is what has had to be done.
I have seen people living in properties who have been getting housing benefit of about £80,000 a year. That is just the benefit. It is not their living costs or
anything else. People in employment might be earning £20,000 a year in the same area. It is pretty hard to watch that happen. When I was chairman of social services on Westminster Council, many years ago, we discovered that housing in London was terribly expensive even then, and that there was plenty of space and lots of unoccupied properties in, I think, Liverpool. It was somewhere quite remote.
We gave all those people who had no housing rights at all the right to go there. We provided transport and everything else, and Liverpool was willing to provide the accommodation. One-third of those people arrived there. The other two-thirds vanished into the blue. They went off our housing list, but they never appeared anywhere else. Evidently they would rather do anything than leave London. When we now see these people living in a little shed in a back garden in Acton or somewhere, it is terrible that people so desperately want to stay in London, where housing is, I would say, at the top of the range in price, and the least available. We had terrible trouble then because all the bed and breakfast hotel accommodation, which is so widely used now, was taken up by tourists or new arrivals to the country. Even to get a bed and breakfast space we at Westminster Council had gradually to move out wider and wider. It got to the point where no one in London had any bed and breakfast space available.
I feel for councils now that have nothing to offer people. This problem has not arisen in five minutes. It goes back a long, long way. When I was on the Greater London Council, I remember that we had a Conservative housing chairman and a Labour Government at that time. The chairman said, “This is the time when we could solve the housing problem, because I know what we need in London and the Labour Government have good ideas on what they could do”. However, it never happened because each of those authorities changed. The Government and the council changed, so the whole scenario changed.
Housing is a major problem. What is very bad is the continuing increase in utility bills and fuel rises. People in council blocks have recently told me that they can manage to pay the rent—they were renting from people who had bought their leasehold because that was all that was available—but they could not afford to warm the flat because the fuel bill is so high. That is worrying, because we were told that every effort would be made to see that fuel bills came down to a level where a card payment at a prepayment meter, which most of those people have to use because it is the only practical way for them to budget, would not be more expensive than having a quarterly bill. Yet only last week someone told me that it is still 10% more. Of course, it is going up all the time. That would be something—there are many things—that could be done to help people. The housing issue is not such a battle now. It has been addressed by putting a ceiling on housing benefit.
I heard the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, talk about Wales and the shortage of work there. Surely a lot of those people who cannot get anywhere else to live in the country could go to Wales. If you are living on a benefit, it does not matter where you are living if it is fully paid for by someone else. I do not understand that position.