Housing

Part of Schedule 6 – in the House of Commons at 8:45 pm on 25 July 1984.

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Photo of Mr Jeff Rooker Mr Jeff Rooker , Birmingham, Perry Barr 8:45, 25 July 1984

The city council selected blocks of houses for enveloping contracts in a manner that was designed to attract maximum help from the Government, following the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget statements of 1982 and 1983, in repairing the external fabric of thousands of dwellings with only a modest contribution from the owner-occupiers. That was the other great assistance to my constituents and the constituents of other Birmingham Members.

Many of the owner-occupiers involved are elderly and many others are unemployed. In many roads the majority of owner-occupiers are first and second-generation immigrants. They saw an opportunity for the first time to make a real improvement to the homes that they had bought and occupied for many years. They had found that they could not carry the entire burden of repairing and improving their homes because of the general decay. Those who could afford to spend money on their homes often found that there were only one or two others in the street in that position. These factors were holding up the regeneration of the inner city.

The great benefit of the enveloping scheme is that it provides an incentive for all occupiers. Entire blocks are improved under single contracts, which means that half the properties in a street are not left in decay. The city council used its authority and powers and exploited to the full the opportunity that had been presented by the Chancellor. Large construction companies had not wanted to know about home improvement work for years because they regarded the work as penny-pinching and not worth their while. Under the enveloping scheme, large construction companies were obtaining contracts worth about £1 million in the Birmingham area. That sort of business is obviously attracted to the large construction companies. Small, large and extremely large companies have been involved in Birmingham's enveloping schemes.

Birmingham received an average of 3,000 applications for home improvement grants each year until about 1982. In the past two years it has received 35,000 applications. The increase cannot be attributed to magic. It has occurred because it has been the city council's deliberate policy while under the control of both the Labour and Conservative parties to inform people of their rights under the Chancellor's Budget statements. "Spend, spend, spend," said Ministers. "There is no limit on the sum of money available." Admittedly, it was only available until a certain date. That exhortation was repeated the following year. People were encouraged to apply, and there was the jump in two years from 3,000 applications a year to 35,000. That bulk of applications could not be dealt with overnight.

The real issue affecting several thousand of my constituents became apparent earlier this year. A year or 18 months ago, the roofs and external parts of the houses were being repaired. There were contractors all over the place, bedroom ceilings were caving in and there were lots of problems, but a great deal of good work was being done. The city council told my constituents, "You do not want contractors all over the outside of the house and the inside at the same time. Wait until the external block enveloping has been done before you apply for the internal improvements to the kitchen and bathroom and so on." Thousands of people were given that advice.

The city environmental officer, Mr. Reynolds, wrote to me on 20 February this year. He said: During the course of the Heathfield Zone II envelope contract, prospective applicants were advised, in good faith, that in order to avoid problems of having two contractors working on the same property at the same time it would be advisable for them to delay their application until the completion of envelope works to their property. That was sound advice and given in good faith, but it turned out to have been based on a false premise of what the Government's policy would be. A major problem now faces hundreds or thousands of my constituents and those of my hon. Friends who represent Birmingham. I believe that the whole inner city is represented by my hon. Friends, unless part of it falls within the constituency of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Mrs. Knight). I am not sure of the effect of the boundary changes.

These people have better garden walls and front paths than bathrooms and kitchens. If one drives, cycles or walks around the roads in the Birchfield and Handsworth part of Perry Barr, it looks great. The roofs have been redone, the guttering has been repaired, there are new window frames, the external fabric looks great and there are new gates and walls. However, some of those houses cannot be lived in. I have many elderly constituents who have had to go to live with their children since the work on the inside of the house could not be done because, with the change of policy since the general election, the owners could not get the grant. Those houses will deteriorate. There will be vandalism. This is a crisis of monumental proportions.

The problems connected with the block improvement work are not confined to the inner city. In another part of my constituency, in the green leaf area on the city boundary, there is a pre-war council estate built in the '20s and '30s called Kingstanding. It borders the leafy suburb of Sutton Coldfield. There are 2,000 houses there with outside toilets. The council has been modifying about 100 a year. Under the schemes, that work has had to stop. Many of the houses have been sold in recent years, either to sitting tenants or as empty houses under the scheme that operated until May this year.

One of the key points for those buying such houses, which might have been thought sub-standard because they had outside toilets, was that one could get a grant for a mini-mod to convert to an inside toilet. That was a key selling point, for octogenarians as well as for families with young children. I have constituents in their seventies, eighties and nineties who have not been able to get a grant to convert an outside toilet. The problem extends from the inner city to the boundaries of Birmingham. In some cases, it affects entire rows of houses because the improvements have been made in a block enveloping scheme.

This year, Birmingham has £17 million available for home improvements but it is already committed to spending £22 million simply because the previous administration did not turn the tap off on the applications quickly enough because it was not told by its Government that there would be a change. Conservative Members should just imagine Councillor Neville Bosworth during the recent elections on the telephone to the Secretary of State for the Environment saying, "Patrick, do you not know that I am trying to run an election up here?" He said that because Ministers did not understand what would happen in Birmingham.

That is the reality, but it is not for lack of ministerial visits to Birmingham. On 29 June, the Secretary of State said that he had made five official visits to Birmingham in the past 12 months. He then listed six. The present Secretary of State is so accident-prone it is not true. Four of those visits were specificlly to the inner-city partnership programme. Lord Bellwin had been there twice, the Minister for Housing and Construction had been three times—he might have been since—one Under-Secretary of State had been three times and another Under-Secretary of State had been there once. Ministers are therefore fully aware of what is going on. However, the prospects for 1985–86 are probably worse than for this year. A serious problem is emerging.

Do we have to wait until two years before the next general election before the Government decide to change their policy and tell us to spend, spend, spend, as the Prime Minister did? She told local authorities that they were not spending enough on capital improvements. She had the brass face to accuse them of not spending enough. That gave authorities such as Birmingham a massive incentive to spend and then commit. People's expectations were raised. They were encouraged to apply. It was only by encouraging people to apply that Birmingham could assess the scale of the problem. It could then get the big international building companies to take an interest. They are not interested in 20 or 40 houses; these boys are interested in 100 or 500 houses on one contract. It is not possible to do that without testing the market. That is where Birmingham has failed because of its success.

Ministers must put that right. They must show that they do not hold in cynical contempt inner-city problems and the desire of people who live in them to improve their areas. People who live in the inner city in Birmingham have attempted to improve their environment. They want to live there. Only a few are forced to live there because of house prices or other factors. Unfortunately, the people who want to improve their environment are being prevented from doing so because the Government are not making their contribution.

The Government have shown a callous disregard for the implicit commitment to make the funds available. They have a duty to make that good. Birmingham still has about 18,000 applications that it must inquire into before deciding how they will be processed. Ministers should act like statesmen rather than as Tory politicians. I am aware that they are concerned for the fabric of society and for their fellow citizens. That is what they keep telling us. But are they concerned for the integrity of Government? That is what is involved here.

Although Ministers might have been coming up the motorway for lunches, dinners and breakfasts with various people, they have not met my constituents and gone into their houses to see the reality. The Secretary of State has refused to meet my constituents who are involved in the Heathfield envelope scheme. He said that he would not meet them in London or in Birmingham because no useful purpose would be served by meeting them. They are the people who have the outside of their houses done but cannot get the inside done. They need to know that their case is being put effectively and to talk to Ministers. They honestly do not believe that Ministers understand what has happened in Birmingham.

I am making a special plea for Birmingham. It is not possible for any other hon. Member to claim that his or her authority made such great strides as Birmingham did following the 1982 Budget announcement. We have created a problem because of our success in moving so fast. I ask one of the Ministers—preferably the Minister for Housing and Construction, who is to reply to the debate, because it is more likely that he will still be here when Parliament returns after the recess than the Secretary of State—to give a commitment that, before the end of the recess, he will come to my constituency as my guest. I shall even pay his train fare if need be. He need not put an impost on the Civil Service. I do not want any increase in public expenditure. He can enjoy the hospitality of my constituents, who will be more than happy to show him the problems of the inside of their dwellings.

There are important issues at stake. It is worth just drawing the attention of the House to a couple of quotes from the book by Paul Harrison entitled "Inside the Inner City". In his concluding chapter on page 434, he says: The very existence of inner cities and depressed regions as distinct georgraphical entities militates against policies to assist them. It is perfectly possible for a suburban or rural resident, a Tory minister or a higher civil servant, to live and die without ever witnessing, let alone understanding, the realities of life on the lower terraces of the social ziggurat. It then becomes easy, all in good faith, to underestimate the scale and depth of the problems, to misconceive their causes and consequences, and to support misguided measures that only serve to aggravate the situation. He made a further point which will not be valid because of this debate tonight, when he said: it is much easier to crush the disadvantaged without an outcry than it is to reduce the privileges of the privileged. As long as there is breath in my body and in those of my hon. Friends, the demands of our constituents will not go unspoken in the House. As sincerely as I possibly could, I have deliberately attempted not to make this a partisan speech. It is political—by God, it is—but I have deliberately sought not to make it highly partisan because the structure and the cause of the problems are not of that nature.

I am pleading with the Minister to come and look at the problem. I do not expect him to come to the Dispatch Box tonight and say that there is an extra £10 million or £20 million for Birmingham. I suspect that the Prime Minister is not too happy about the rates there being cut two years running and the Tories losing control. She must think that something is wrong in Birmingham. One of the things that is wrong in Birmingham is that the people feel cheated. They knew about the problem in May. I am paraphrasing the efforts of Councillor Bosworth. He made valiant efforts before the election to change the policies, but he failed. That is out of the way now. I ask the Minister in all good conscience to listen to and study what I and my hon. Friends have said and to come with us to Birmingham before Parliament returns after the recess to see the reality of the problem for himself.