[Martin Caton in the Chair] — Social Housing (England)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 9:49 am on 28 June 2011.

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Photo of John Leech John Leech Liberal Democrat, Manchester, Withington 9:49, 28 June 2011

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. I congratulate Jeremy Lefroy on securing this important debate. I am surprised that more hon. Members are not here in Westminster Hall to discuss social housing.

I believe that we face a social housing crisis that is not of this coalition Government’s making. In Manchester we have thousands of people on waiting lists, many of whom have had to wait several years, with no realistic prospect of getting a social tenancy in the near future. Residents raise a large number of concerns with me, as they do with the hon. Gentleman, in relation to housing. I would say that the No. 1 issue that people come to see me about is either their concerns about the lack of social housing, or the fact that they are over-occupying their existing property.

The lack of social housing causes a number of problems, the most important of which is massive overcrowding in some of our social houses. I have constituents who have lived in a three-bedroom house with 10 or more people. Others end up having to move away from the area in which they have lived their whole lives to other parts of Manchester where the housing situation is not as serious as it is in south Manchester. The result is a big increase in the cost of private sector housing, and people are simply not able to afford the cost of going into private rented accommodation. All this has been exacerbated recently by a real difficulty in people being able to get mortgages and get on the property ladder, so more people have had to stay in rented accommodation.

I do not think that the Minister is to blame for any of this. It is the fault of previous Governments. We have to look at the right-to-buy legislation in the 1980s, which, while it had many merits, certainly had many drawbacks. It has resulted in a massive shortage of social housing in many parts of the country, and the money that was made from the sale of those council houses has not been invested back into the housing stock. In some cases in some parts of the country, those houses were almost given away, due to the low prices that people paid for them.

Unfortunately, following the introduction of the right-to-buy policy, the previous Labour Government, who followed a Conservative Government, did little or nothing to alleviate the problem. Social housing was not a priority of the previous Labour Administration, even in good economic times, when money could have been made available to build a significant number of social homes. We have, therefore, been left in a situation in which the coalition Government, with very little money to spend, face a rising need for social housing.

I would like to make three brief points on the future of social housing. The first is on changes to housing benefit, which the hon. Member for Stafford has already alluded to. There is a real problem with the proposed changes in relation to the single room rates for under-35s. The social housing simply is not available for people to share, which means that people will have to stay in properties where they will not be able to receive full housing benefit, or that they will lose their secure tenancies in social housing. It will also, almost certainly, result in an increase in housing benefit costs in many areas. In parts of my area, a one-bedroom flat occupied by someone under 35 who is in receipt of housing benefit is cheaper than the shared room rate in private sector accommodation would be in the same area. Therefore, rather than reducing the housing benefit bill, which is the intention of the legislation, we could end up increasing it.

Under-occupancy is another issue. I recognise that the Government’s plans on this issue relate to trying to make best use of the stock that we have, but that will not solve the problem, and for several reasons. The plans do not—rightly, in my opinion—include pensioners. In my area, the people who are most likely to under-occupy a property are pensioners. I want to make it clear that I do not want to see pensioners included in the change to the legislation. However, it is certainly the case that, in my area and other parts of Manchester, the people most likely to be under-occupying properties are the elderly. Rather than having disincentives for people to stay in properties, the solution, in my view, is to increase the incentives for people to move. At the moment, there are no incentives for people to move. As it stands, if someone who is under-occupying a property wants to exchange with someone who needs a bigger property, they have to take their new property as seen. There are no improvements when they move to a smaller property. An elderly person living in an immaculate house is never going to want to move to a smaller property that needs some work done to it. The Government’s plans to try to reduce under-occupancy by reducing housing benefit simply will not work.

My second point relates to the number of social homes. It is not rocket science—we simply need to build more. I am encouraged by the Government’s plans to build 150,000 social homes, but that is not enough. The tweaking of housing benefit rules will not disincentivise people from staying in bigger properties, so it is not going to solve the problem. We need to invest in more social housing. Local authorities in all parts of the country, with the possible exception of London, are sitting on large swathes of land that could be used for social housing. In Manchester, the council is waiting for land prices to go up, so that it can sell some pieces of land in my constituency to the highest bidder. We need to incentivise local authorities to make that land available to housing associations to build. Allowing local authorities to get more council tax as a result of building new houses will not be enough to persuade them to give up land that is worth millions of pounds. In the comprehensive spending review, we concentrated on spending our money in relation to transport on capital investment. We need to concentrate some of our resources in relation to housing on capital investment, to boost the construction industry and to build lots more social homes.

My final point relates to the size of the 150,000 homes that will be built. In my area, unlike that of the hon. Gentleman, there are plenty of one and two-bedroom flats. The real shortage of housing in my area is of larger, family properties. My plea to the Minister is that, when they come to be built, we get the right mix of social homes. In areas in which the shortage is in small, one-bedroom flats, let us build small, one-bedroom flats. In areas in which there is a massive shortage of bigger family properties, we must build three and four-bedroom houses, rather than two-bedroom houses. The social homes that have been built in Manchester in recent years have tended to be smaller family homes. We need bigger family homes so that all the people who are currently over-occupying properties in Manchester and other parts of the country are able to get bigger homes that are more suitable for their needs.