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Remaining Private Members' Bills
GENERAL TEACHING COUNCIL (ENGLAND AND WALES) BILL
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse): Not moved.
POLICYHOLDERS PROTECTION BILL
Read a Second time.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 61 (Committal of Bills),
Bill immediately considered in Committee; reported, without amendment; read the Third time, and passed.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Not moved.
Read a Second time, and committed to a Standing Committee, pursuant to Standing Order No. 61 (Committal of Bills).
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Not moved.
As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.
Bill read the Third time, and passed.
Read a Second time.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 61 (Committal of Bills),
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Brandreth.]
Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent):
The variety of the business of the House and the speed with which it has been dispatched have left me gasping slightly, but I shall do my best to address the issue of this Adjournment debate. I confess that I requested such a debate because I was leaned on by my friends at Age Concern--who are celebrating "Age Concern month"--and asked whether I would bring the matter to the attention of the House. I was delighted to do so, because I have long been interested in the concept of lifetime homes and in our building convenient and accessible houses that are fit to live in.
In 1986, I published the results of a seminar that I had conducted, and we also produced a report urging a variety of improvements in the design of modern houses. Although Age Concern has been my prompter in applying for this debate, I should say that the remarks I shall make are not confined to housing for disabled and elderly people. I passionately believe that current housing design is inappropriate for the vast majority of the population, and I hope to make one or two points later in my speech to support that belief.
It is worth reminding my hon. Friend the Minister--as if he needed reminding--that we have just passed the second anniversary of the start of consultation on regulations governing housing design. I have been told that, to celebrate the second birthday, he recently took possession of a cake shaped like a house--which, I am happy to say, was designed with level access to the front door. I hope that he enjoyed the cake very much.
As I said, the Department of the Environment has been consulting the building industry and all other interested parties on whether new regulations should require the industry to make some desirable changes. When we asked when the results of the inquiry would be available, those at the Department told us that they would love to do so but that they could not because they had been swamped by the responses, which numbered about 1,000.
We asked how many people in the Department were dealing with that flood of responses. We were told that one hapless official was trying to wade through it. It is laughable to suggest that having one official deal with such a massive response is a way of giving the issue priority. Even worse, the Department is now saying that it needs to examine the cost of the proposals, but why on earth could an analysis of the costs not have been carried out concurrently over the past two years?
Accessible housing matters, because too many people are prisoners in their own homes. It used to be said that an Englishman's home was his castle but, for far too many, it is a prison. It is extraordinarily difficult for the elderly or the injured to get in and out of their home. I stress that the problem is not confined to the elderly. I have a constituent whose 17-year-old son broke his leg in two places playing rugger and was in plaster from hip to ankle. She said that it nearly killed the family having to get him upstairs to the lavatory because there was none on the ground floor.
Accessibility also matters because the population mix is changing. In 25 years' time, there will be twice as many 75-year-olds as there are now, and the enormous advances
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Change is necessary, because this country's housing stock is expensively inflexible, and the problem is getting worse. In 1980, 800 wheelchair homes, as they were then called, and 5,200 mobility homes were built. By 1993, the numbers had fallen to 247 wheelchair homes and 1,150 mobility homes. That is movement in the wrong direction.
Inflexibility is enormously expensive in terms not only of cost but of time. For example, it can take a year to adapt a home to make it liveable. If new homes were made accessible for all generations, the Government's own figures suggest that it would cost between £100 and £300 to adapt a house, depending on the size. As about 140,000 homes are built each year, adaptation could cost £28 million per annum, but it currently costs £350 million each year to adapt houses.
It has been estimated that as many as one in three homes will need to be adapted in the next 30 years, but if every new home built during that time were built to lifetime standard--we can assume a life expectancy of 60 years, but a hell of a lot of houses in this country last much longer--about £2.337 billion would be saved in that period.
Where does the opposition lie? I think that the building industry is the source of it. Builders appear to want to build only the type of homes that their fathers built, except that they use modern materials to do so. There is huge resistance to building level-entry homes, even though it has been proved a thousand times that level entry is convenient for mothers with buggies, old people with shopping trolleys and young kids with bicycles, as well as for people who find going up and down steps almost impossible. It has also been proved time and again that water does not come under the door in a level-entry home, as has been suggested. In any event, if there is a risk of it doing so, something that costs £5.40 can exclude it.
The building industry's interest in this matter is well demonstrated. Age Concern sent to 200 builders a report on the difficulties of older people and a check list on how houses might be better adapted. Two replied--one favourable, the other hostile--whereas, of the architects to whom the report was sent, 95 per cent. replied, as did 85 per cent. of housing associations and 92 per cent. of local authorities. Why are builders so stubbornly hostile?
There are costs, and the biggest single cost in a whole lifetime home programme is the greater space required, for example, for a hallway in which a wheelchair can turn around, or a downstairs lavatory in which it is possible for a disabled person to have a shower as well as use the lavatory. It might mean that, in one hectare, one might lose one housing unit, and that is expensive; I accept that. We need to look at that cost against the cost of the inflexibility that we currently have.
What on earth is stopping the building industry designing into the houses that they build the things that do not cost anything? I have already mentioned level entry.
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There is absolutely no reason why electricity sockets should not be placed at a height that all of us can easily reach. In most houses, electricity sockets are accessible to only one member of the family--the infant who crawls on the floor. I understand that infants are discouraged, by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and others, from putting their little fingers into sockets. Why on earth are sockets not placed at a level where they can be reached easily?
Why are windows not lowered slightly, so that, if somebody is confined to bed or is sitting in a chair, he or she can look out of the window? It would not cost any more. The window could be the same size. It would just be a foot or 18 in lower. Where that is done, the measure is extremely well received.
When these wonderful kitchen units are put in when kitchens are redesigned, it is possible to have adjustable surface heights, which would help people like my old aunt who recently died; because she was small, she used to stand on a rickety stool to preside over the pot on her cooker. By the time she was 95, she had shrunk to the point where she could not see what she was cooking.
To the building industry and to my hon. Friend on the Front Bench I stress that, where these modifications are introduced, nobody notices. That is the interesting bit. I have been to the Joseph Rowntree estate in York, where every house has level entry. If people who drove into that estate without knowing that fact were asked, when they got out of their car, "What is different about this estate?" they would say something like, "It is wonderfully clean," or, "It is very nice." They would not say, "Isn't it interesting that there's not a single step to be seen?"
These changes will not put off potential buyers brought up by the building industry to believe that they must have a house just like their grandfather. What is more--this is the crux of the debate--all my contacts in the building world are far more concerned about losing a competitive edge than they are about the minimal basic additional cost that such adaptations might incur.
That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House.--[Mr. French.]
Question agreed to.
That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House.--[Mr. Evennett.]
Question agreed to.
2.36 pm
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