Clause 5 - Houses in multiple occupation
Home Energy Conservation Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Harold Best (Leeds North West, Labour)
I listened with great interest to the observations of previous
speakers. I found the remarks of the hon. Member for Billericay fascinating. They were a delightful mixture of straightforward honesty, on which he should be congratulated, and observations, laden with a call for the status quo, which we hope to change. I should like to comment on some of those interesting observations.
The hon. Member for Billericay referred to the number of people who own dwellings that may or may not be defined as HMOs by whatever means we finally determine and how they tend to be held in the possession of one or more members of a family, especially in the case of one property, and suggested that corporate interests are rarely involved. I think that I understand the difference between a corporate interest and the interests of someone who may have five, 10, 20, 30, 50, 200 or 300 houses and own them individually. We have that in Leeds, and problems flow from that.
On either side of my house are HMOs that have been newly developed in the past few years. I can look from my landing window through the opposite landing window and see the locks and bars on the doors of the bedrooms opposite. I can look straight through, as there are no curtains. That is one of the effects of a plague of houses in multiple occupation—the standard of appearance of the housing stock quickly degrades.
The nature of such ownership is causing most of the problems. Great sums are made from such properties. I was fascinated to hear the suggestion that people may accept a lower income. That is not the information that I have from the owners of such properties. On the contrary, they look for every possible means to increase their income and are terrified of a definition of an HMO such as is contained in the Minister's new clause 7, as it would mean that they would have to register in a manner that might affect their profit-making capacities.
Houses in Headingley, where I and the great bulk of students at Leeds university live—there are some 60,000 students in total, from two universities and a large teacher training college—have had an enormous effect on the environment there. More than 50 per cent. of what was formerly traditional family housing stock has become HMOs. Hon. Members can imagine the catastrophic social and structural effects that that has had and how damaging that can be in relation to, for example, the number of schools in the area. A primary school was built 10 years ago that the demographics suggested would have a long and continuous future. A large sum of public money was invested in it, and yet it is struggling to survive. The reason for that is simple; the area has more houses in multiple occupation and fewer families. That means that there are fewer children, which leads to a greater threat to the community's infrastructure.
That process is being driven by the pursuit of profits. Vast sums of money are being made. The houses either side of me will generate income streams of about £15,000 to £20,000 a year if their owners are lucky—which they are. They have six, seven or eight bedrooms, and the numbers of tenants, and their safety, depends on the effectiveness of the local authority. We had a protracted battle with the house next door to mine. With the aid of the planning
department, after a long inquiry, we eventually reduced the number of its occupants from eight to six for their safety, and in accordance with the planning regulations. Those are the kinds of real problems that it seems that the hon. Member for Billericay would not want to do anything to address them.