`(1) Section 177 of the Housing Act 1996 (whether it is reasonable to continue to occupy accommodation) is amended as follows.

(2) After subsection (1) there is inserted—

``(1A) It is not reasonable for a person to continue to occupy accommodation if the accommodation is a dwelling which is overcrowded within the meaning of section 324 of the Housing Act 1985, and in any such case the authority shall not have regard to the general circumstances prevailing in relation to housing in their district.''.'.—[Ms Karen Buck.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

With this it will be convenient to take Amendment No. 13, in schedule 1, page 15, line 23, at end insert—

`For section 210(1) (suitability of accommodation) there is substituted—

``In determining for the purposes of this Part whether accommodation is suitable for a person, accommodation shall only be regarded as suitable if—

(a) it is not overcrowded (within the meaning of section 324 of the Housing Act 1985);

(b) it is fit for the number of occupants and it has adequate means of escape from fire (within the meaning of sections 352 and 365 of the Housing Act 1985); and

(c) in the view of the authority it is fit for human habitation (within the meaning of section 604 of the Housing Act 1985).''.'.

I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

It is a great pleasure to be back in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, discussing the Bill. It has been particularly interesting to watch the hon. Members for Eastbourne and for Bath, missing the moral message and slugging it out for the role of the Bill Murray central character, which is that of a man so confused with self-importance that he is condemned to relive chapters of his life until he rediscovers his essential humanity. One needs only to cast the obvious Sonny and Cher characters on the Opposition Benches who are responsible for the irritatingly persistent theme tune, ``I got you, babe''. I will not be cast as the eponymous rodent, for obvious reasons.

The Amendment would recast ``Cathy Come Home'' with a happy ending. Although I welcome the Bill with passionate enthusiasm, and I am sympathetic to the spirit of the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Bath, some housing need is equivalent to homelessness and measures are needed to redefine legislation to take account of the problem.

Some properties may be considered unreasonable under section 175 of the Housing Act 1996, but assessment of overcrowding is extremely difficult in practice because it is based on room and space standards that are rooted in legislation first drawn up in the 1930s.

Clusters of overcrowding in some areas are now as acute as they were in the 1930s. I do not claim that conditions in Paddington and north Kensington will form the basis for a current version of ``Angela's Ashes'', but expectations about what is acceptable have changed significantly, especially in respect of overcrowding and the age at which children of different gender should stop sharing a bedroom. We have different expectations about the kind of environment we want our children to grow up in and pressure is now rightly placed on parents to be responsible for seeing that their children do homework, which is impossible in the overcrowded conditions that legislation currently permits.

A cluster of families in my Constituency live in conditions that are not yet defined statutorily as overcrowded. However, one family of five in the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea—a Conservative-run council—have a small, one-bedroom flat that will become statutorily overcrowded when the baby is one year old. That family is sharing two rooms, neither of which is larger than my office. Those are the kinds of conditions that we expect families to live in. A constituent in the same borough who has five-year-old twins and a two-year-old wrote:

``The fact that my wife and I are still together is a miracle . . .''— because of the pressure they are living under—

``the council has us at 139 on the council housing list and we have been told that we have an indefinite wait and will never be housed.''

After my Intervention, the environmental health and housing departments at Kensington and Chelsea agreed that both of those families could be technically defined as homeless and in temporary accommodation for the purpose of assessing their position in respect of permanent accommodation. However, the underlying problem still exists because babies under one do not count when assessing eligibility and children under 10 count as half a person. In practice, as anyone who is a parent knows, such an assessment of space requirements is not consistent with the reality of bringing up a child.

Another reason for bringing the legislation up to date is that the Public Health Act 1936, which is at the root of current statutory overcrowding legislation, does not take account of local authorities or registered social landlords. The statutory overcrowding legislation is directed against bad individual landlords, whose property is over-occupied for their own profit. As a consequence, the legislation places no positive duty on a public landlord to act to eradicate overcrowding. That has all kinds of implications, which is the reason for this probing amendment.

In practice, local authorities take decisions about the reasonableness to occupy accommodation on overcrowding grounds on the basis of the prevailing circumstances in their communities. The logic of that is simply that the greater the pressure of housing need in a local authority area, the less likely one is to qualify as homeless on grounds of overcrowding. The problem is compounded in areas of acute housing stress—which covers swathes of the south-east, inner-city cores and some towns across the country. There is a risk that by changing the definitions and allowing families that meet a new statutory overcrowding limit to rise to the top of the priority list, we are merely shuffling the pack. Without an increase in supply, all of that is meaningless. The lack of definition means that the problem is suppressed. We must have a clear legislative framework by which to identify the number of households involved, with a modern, acceptable definition of overcrowding. That is the basis for a different argument about supply.

I welcome the comments that my hon. Friend the Minister made in last week's Adjournment Debate on housing pressure in London. She responded sympathetically to points that a number of my colleagues raised about overcrowding in London, and I take that as an indication that she is prepared to respond sympathetically to the new clause and consider it further.

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington (Ms Buck) who has played an important role in addressing these issues. I have much sympathy and support for her Amendment.

I shall briefly touch on my amendment and on the suitability of accommodation that local authorities make available under their requirement to accommodate homeless individuals or households. Members of the Committee will know that local authorities are already required, under a range of statutory measures, to tackle poor housing conditions in their area, but the accommodation that they provide for homeless households does not have to comply with those standards. The legislation rightly proposes that the accommodation that local authorities provide to homeless individuals or households should be ``suitable'', but it does not define suitability. Local authorities must have regard to the existing legislation, which defines suitability, but that legislation does not require that they meet those minimum standards.

The amendment is a probing amendment that suggests minimum standards for accommodation so that it is deemed suitable for people who are homeless. I am sure that all members of the Committee are aware of the requirement to have regard to various aspects of housing: for example, the Housing Act 1985 requires consideration of issues such as slum clearance and overcrowding, which the hon. Lady mentioned, and houses in multiple occupation. There are also requirements in respect of the affordability of accommodation. Legislation exists that attempts to provide some definitions but the local authority is under no specific requirement to do more than have regard to those definitions. Like the hon. Lady, I acknowledge that some of the existing definitions are massively out of date: the legislation on overcrowding, for example, is based on legislation enacted before the second world war. Measures that go that far back obviously need to be reconsidered. However, they are on the statute book and I used them in my amendment, although I acknowledge that more up-to-date Government proposals would be preferable.

I am grateful to hon. Members for raising important issues of homelessness and quality. Since I took on responsibility for housing, several hon. Members have expressed concern about the operation of room and space standards. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North raised the issue on Second Reading, and other hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Ms King), returned to it last week in an Adjournment Debate on housing in London.

Overcrowding and poor standards are unacceptable, but it will take time to deal with such deep-seated problems. The issue has a long history. The first standards date back to the Nuisances Removal Act 1855 and the Diseases Prevention Act 1855, which permitted a local authority to close a house where insufficient

``privy accommodation, means of drainage or ventilation''

or other nuisances were such

``to render a house or building, in the judgment of the Justice, unfit for human habitation''.

Fortunately, we have moved on since then. When pressure on housing rises, it is a regrettable fact of life that more poor and unsatisfactory housing is drawn into use and the occupancy of existing accommodation increases, resulting unfortunately in overcrowding. My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North was right to note the difficulties with the overcrowding regulations. We all recognise that there are problems, especially in London and the south-east, where demand for all forms of tenure is growing beyond the region's capacity to cope.

Many people live in unacceptable conditions, and we are all familiar with the problems faced by those in temporary accommodation.

I am sure that my hon. Friend accepts that the problem is not particular to London or the south-east. It can be important in areas such as my Constituency, where large households live in severely overcrowded conditions. For example, many Muslim families, because of their religion, face acute problems when both sexes live in one room. I have many other examples similar to those given by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North. Does the Minister accept that such families are in an untenable position? Large numbers of people—perhaps six—often live in one or two-bedroomed accommodation while waiting for four-bedroomed accommodation that, because of local authority transfer policies, will never arrive. Those families are in a no-win situation; they are irredeemably sentenced to a life of overcrowding.

Order. I remind the hon. Lady that she should make interventions, not speeches.

Thank you, Mr. Gale. I am aware that the problem does not only exist in London. The regulations apply nationally and impact on different communities in different ways. They impact on large families and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North said, there is a problem for small families. The regulations therefore affect quite a number of different sizes of family.

Many people live in unacceptable conditions and we are familiar with the problems faced by people in temporary and bed-and-breakfast accommodation. The Government have made a start on dealing with those problems with a range of measures to improve the supply and quality of housing. I have already mentioned those, so I will not go through them all again. However, taken together they will bring social housing up to a decent standard by 2010 and improve the supply of affordable housing in areas where it is most needed. They will also promote sustainable home ownership and a healthy private rented sector. None of that will happen overnight, but we are making progress.

Amendment No. 13, if accepted, would strengthen the duty on local authorities. However, it would not increase the supply of suitable accommodation; the Government's other measures will do that. As such, it would not have the effect that the hon. Member for Bath wants. I recognise the problem. The solution must be found through the real resources that the Government are devoting to the problem.

New Clause 3 was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North. In conjunction with other provisions in the Bill, it would mean that any household that fell into the priority need category—families with children, for example—and lived in overcrowded accommodation and made a homelessness application would have to be secured suitable short-term accommodation until an alternative home could be found.

In the London debate, I undertook to review the overcrowding provisions, which are outdated. As I said, it is unacceptable that families in overcrowded accommodation should have to resort to converting airing cupboards into bedrooms. I cannot predict the outcome of the review, and all hon. Members will be aware of the tensions and pressures. The Government are determined to tackle poverty in all its manifestations.

As my hon. Friend said, the current room and space standards date from the Housing Act 1935, which was a major step forward. Although some local authorities had already adopted their own standards, national numerical standards had not been laid down until then, but not a square foot has been added since. That is why I have taken a keen interest in the issue and why the standards should be re-examined.

We are investigating overcrowding issues and the effects of the current standards. I will report back to hon. Members when I have considered the options. Therefore, I ask that the motion be withdrawn.

I welcome the general thrust of the Minister's response and want to make two comments. I support the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) about ethnicity. As we move increasingly into a multicultural society, some recognition is due to specific communities' housing requirements. The concentration of housing problems is certainly spread, with pockets of severe problems across the country, although it is larger in scale in London.

The Minister mentioned the investment in social housing and the commitments made to eradicate substandard housing by 2010. That is deeply welcome, and we are all pleased with the additional investment in the comprehensive spending review. We have yet to convince ourselves absolutely that space is an element in decency of conditions. Substandard accommodation that is overcrowded will continue to be substandard even if the fabric of the building is improved.

Within that context of welcome, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion and Clause, by leave, withdrawn.