Clause 2 - Meaning of ''category 1 hazard'' and
Housing Bill
3:15 pm
Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
We have come to clause 2 with appropriate alacrity. It happily brings us to a discussion that stems directly from the previous one. That seems logical, but it is important to rehearse the Minister's earlier point. He said that the important change under part 1 of the Bill was to make it person-centred. I prefer the description ''man-centred'', but perhaps ''person'' is the politically correct term if not the generic one. The person-centred approach marries considerations about the property with considerations about the people who occupy it. The right hon. Gentleman also said that the system should be objective and transparent. He said that those were the two great changes. On one hand, the change is to be person-centred, while on the other it is to be transparent and objective. That is a neat turn of phrase. It well summarises the intentions of the Government and that is made clear in the detailed documents that we have all studied.
The group of amendments does two things. It probes the Minister to be more specific, in the interests of transparency and objectivity, about the balance between category 1 and category 2 hazards. He has been more specific to some extent by describing the process in his useful remarks at the end of the first clause stand part debate. However, there is a need for greater clarity about the difference between a category 1 hazard and a category 2 hazard, because of the repercussions of each. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will have a chance to clarify matters. Several of the amendments are designed to elicit greater clarification.
Amendment No. 175, in particular, gives us the opportunity to study in some detail the people-centred aspects of a hazard and risk assessment. I understand precisely why the Government have chosen an
approach whose essence is to base the people-centred assessment on age but, as I told the Minister before our sitting, I have certain worries about it. Such an approach has the advantage of simplicity, but there is more to it than that. It is rooted in good evidence that typically, as people grow older, they become subject to more risks. We need not study rocket science to work out that, as people become old, they often become less able. Sometimes they become less capable of dealing with various risks that are associated with housing.
Such an approach is laudable but unsatisfactory. My amendment suggests that we move from an analysis based solely on age to an analysis based on ability or disability, so that the system can be implemented with greater confidence. We can define ability and disability without a significant overlap with age. People often become less able as they become older, but that is not exclusively the case. We can define matters in a way that allows the analysis of hazard and the enforcement measures to be completed in a more targeted and effective way.
The Minister described the importance of targeting when he was defending the financial aspects of the information that has been provided to members of the Committee about as persuasively as Max Bygraves would have done in Committee. His description of the numerical analysis was a little like the Max Bygraves rendition of ''Deck of Cards'', in which the four stood for the evangelists and the three for the Trinity. I could go on, but I do not want to become too biblical. In the interests of clarity and targeting, it is important that we reach the people who are most at risk. Disabled people may not be old; old people may not be less able. The marriage between people's behaviour and habit and their culture that prevails when they are exposed to risk requires a more sensitive, targeted approach.
For example, we know that mentally disabled people are critical of the quality and appropriateness of their housing. Members of the Committee will be familiar with the parliamentary briefing on wheelchair users that we received from the John Grooms housing association. It suggested that about 40 per cent. of wheelchair users believed that the place in which they lived was inappropriate for them because it was not well adapted to their needs. We know that other disabled people are at particular risk from a range of hazards that are described in the new document. The guidance that has been provided to implement the new standards deals specifically with mental health and psychological implications of various conditions that might prevail in housing. In many ways, the guidance seems to apply outside the narrow boundary of how old someone is. Surely we can be more intelligent, more targeted and more specific in how we deal with the analysis of the types of people who are most likely to be at risk from the hazards that we define as a result of the new information.