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Motion made, and Question proposed,
That a further, revised sum not exceeding £3,083,844,000 be granted to Her Majesty out of the Consolidated Fund to complete or defray the charges which will come in course of payment during the year ending on 31st March 1997 for expenditure by the Department of the Environment on Housing Revenue Account Subsidy; slum clearance, repairs and other improvements to private housing; payments to the Housing Corporation; the transfer of local authority estates to new landlords; accommodation for the homeless and special needs accommodation; housing management and mobility; rent officers and Rent Assessment Panels; grants for the provision of gypsy sites; grants to home improvement agencies; asylum seekers' special housing grant; for research projects, including European Community programmes; publicity; and for sundry other housing and construction services and projects.--[Mr. Curry.]
6.12 pm
Mr. Andrew F. Bennett (Denton and Reddish): I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about the Environment Committee's report on housing need, which is an important issue.
I thank all those who submitted evidence to the Committee. A Select Committee--certainly, the Environment Committee--depends a good deal on the quality of evidence, and the willingness of those who submit it to come before the Committee and answer questions. I also thank all the staff in the Select Committee office--including Steve Priestley, the Clerk--for helping us to marshal the evidence and organise our activities. I am also grateful to our specialist advisers, Christine Whitehead and Peter Chapman, who gave us invaluable advice and helped to steer us into the crucial areas of investigation. Finally, I am grateful to the Committee itself, which worked in a very co-operative way.
Let me express particular appreciation to my predecessor in the Chair, the hon. Member for West Hertfordshire (Mr. Jones), who is now the Minister for Construction, Planning and Energy Efficiency. I say that for two reasons. First, I have some reservations about the way in which Select Committees work. They depend on a Government majority within them, and the Government sometimes try to influence their workings and, perhaps, to encourage them not to become too deeply embroiled in some of the more controversial issues.
Between 1983 and 1992, the Committee produced some excellent reports on "green" issues, but during that time it never examined local government finance--for instance, the whole question of the poll tax--or housing, because its then Chairman felt that on such controversial matters the Select Committee would not work particularly well. I was very pleased when the hon. Member for West Hertfordshire became Chairman, and agreed--perhaps as a result of a little pressure from Opposition Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich (Mr. Raynsford)--that we should try to examine some of those more controversial issues. In 1993 we were very
successful, managing to consider the question of the Housing Corporation and housing associations and producing what I considered to be a useful report.
One of that report's key recommendations was for the Government to publish again their estimates of housing need. I was disappointed by their response, in which they said that they were still not prepared to publish the figures. I was very pleased that the hon. Member for West Hertfordshire had joined the Government when, relatively soon after that, he obviously remembered the report of his Select Committee and was part of the process that produced the Government's figures for housing need.
I have always felt a little sympathy for the Government. First they are castigated for not publishing the housing need figures; then, as soon as they publish them, they are told that the figures are wrong. If we are to have a proper debate in this country about three issues, we must have those housing need figures. First, there is the sheer importance of meeting housing need effectively. As the introduction to our report states,
Secondly, providing housing takes up a substantial proportion of the resources of both individuals and the nation. That proportion has tended to grow. Back in 1960, individual households spent about 9.5 per cent. of their income on housing; the figure has now risen to about 15.8 per cent. Some of those who are in the least adequate housing--in poor furnished rented accommodation--spend more than a quarter of their income on housing costs. While Government expenditure on housing provision, particularly the provision of social housing, has tended to decline, expenditure on housing benefit has risen dramatically. Thus the second reason why it is important that we have a clear idea of housing need relates to the personal and national allocation of resources.
Thirdly, we need to know about housing need because if we need more houses, we need to decide where they will be built. There is also the question of planning, which spills over into matters such as public transport. Low-density housing affects public transport. Such issues are important. We must also protect the countryside. We do not want it to be built over. Thus the three reasons why we need to understand housing need are: individual needs, allocation of resources and the planning implications.
On resources, the central question is: how long will the problem last? The Select Committee appreciated that the Government published the figures up to the year 2006, but we wanted them to publish figures up to 2011 or, possibly, 2016. I regret that the Government have not been able to accept that recommendation. I understand that the further into the future the estimate, the more difficult it is to make. The longer estimates may turn out to be pretty inaccurate towards the end, but they can give us an idea of the trend.
It is important to understand the trend. By analogy, if one is swimming against the current, it helps to know when the current will change. One's behaviour will be different if one knows that the current will change in five minutes from one's behaviour if one knows that it will never change. It would help if the Government would examine predicting beyond the year 2006. If housing need continues in an upward curve, we shall have to behave in a way different from how we would behave if, after the year 2006, the figure started to fall. Will we be trying to meet a need that has peaked or a continuing one? I hope that the Government push further forward their housing need predictions, if not tonight, then certainly over the next few months.
The Committee received much evidence that the Government's estimates have not taken account of unmet need. I was pleased that paragraph 39 of the Government's response hinted that they might be changing their attitude and that future studies would try to make more of an estimate of unmet need. I also noticed that they criticised the Committee for not putting a figure on unmet need, which I accept, and that they tried to argue that unmet need was falling. They suggested that the number of people sleeping rough was declining. I do not have much confidence in that view, because my experience from Greater Manchester and from walking around London is that the problem is not declining.
The Government say that fewer people are having to be put into bed-and-breakfast accommodation and that the figures for overcrowding have gone down. The statistics may be correct, but they were not much supported by the evidence that the Committee received--and certainly not by my constituency experience. At this stage, I do not want to argue too much about who is right and who is wrong. I want to impress on the Government the fact that we need a calculation of unmet need.
In considering housing need, it is crucial that we examine existing stock. There has been a tendency in the House to bandy about the idea that local authorities have a lot of empty properties. That is a myth. The evidence to the Select Committee was that the majority, although not all, of local authorities had got to grips with the problem and were doing well. The good ones at least were reducing the number of empty council properties. I am afraid that the Government, especially the Ministry of Defence, were not doing quite so well; we shall have to watch what happens in the next few months in respect of that.
The number of empty privately owned houses is an intriguing question. With the downturn in the housing market, that number has tended to increase. How many empty owner-occupied, or perhaps owner-unoccupied houses do we need to have a properly regulated housing market? It is pointed out, especially by people who are worried about building lots of new houses all over the countryside, that if all the owner-occupied houses--I am getting tangled; perhaps I need another phrase--were occupied, we would not need to build so many houses. How many houses need to be empty to allow people to move around the country?
The next question is: how many houses are in the wrong place? That fundamental question has not had much attention. In some areas, there is almost a surplus of houses. People find it difficult to sell their houses because the jobs have disappeared, and councils find it difficult to let houses. In allocating resources, we must
decide whether to take steps to ensure that the jobs go to those areas or whether to help people to move to such areas for retirement or other reasons rather than having to build more and more houses in areas where there are employment opportunities.
How many houses in the existing stock are of the wrong type? The Select Committee received much evidence on the problem of bed-sits. Some housing associations, and certainly some local authorities, were enthusiastic about building bed-sits in the late 1950s and 1960s. They were aimed especially at elderly people, with the idea that they would not want large dwellings to look after and would be happy with bed-sits. Many of them were happy in the 1960s, but increasingly, elderly people are not happy with them. They prefer to have bedrooms separate from their living rooms and often would prefer two bedrooms, especially in the case of couples where one has an infirmity and does not sleep well. Such problems need to be tackled. Bed-sits are becoming increasingly difficult to let.
I am critical of Stockport council in my constituency, and of one or two others, which, perhaps because of the pressure not to have empty properties, are keen to let bed-sits to people who come off the housing waiting list. Those people sometimes have drug-related problems. They may be alcoholics or have psychiatric problems. They would be difficult neighbours. I could make a pretty good fuss about it if such people lived next to me. But it is unfair when they are put into bed-sits next to elderly people who have enough problems coping with day-to-day life. In considering the existing stock, we must remember that many bed-sits must be remodelled if we are to get the best use out of them and not produce major problems.
My last point on the existing stock is that some social housing estates, because of the way in which they have developed, are unpopular. Perhaps the Government have not spent enough money, but they have allowed local authorities to spend considerable amounts in implementing the estate action scheme and other schemes to reinvigorate some of the estates. Some of those schemes have been extremely successful and some of them will give long life to those estates. Some of them have had spectacularly large sums spent on them but, five or six years later, we cannot see the benefit of that expenditure.
In the Chamber we have, over the years, become hung up on whether or not properties are owned. We tend to take the view that if someone owns his property, he looks after it and if he is a tenant, he does not. I can think back to minutes of meetings of tenants' associations in my constituency in the 1950s and 1960s--although they were tenants, they behaved as if they owned the estate. The idea of ownership--whether a property is bought using a mortgage or whether rent is paid--is important.
"Shelter is one of the most basic human needs. Being without a home is a catastrophe. Not only are the roofless deprived of the means to improve their lot: an address holds the key to employment, credit, goods, support, and services."
When we quote statistics, we should bear in mind the number of individuals who do not have adequate housing. It is easy for those who live comfortably to forget them. The first reason why housing need is an important issue, then, is the human tragedy that lies behind it.
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