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Mr. Bill O'Brien (Normanton): Does my hon. Friend agree that, because of the rundown of the villages, amenities such as thriving shops, pubs and telephone kiosks to which he referred have been lost? The old people who made the village no longer have those back-up amenities. That is a further problem for them, adding to my hon. Friend's argument that something should be done for such communities.
Mr. Ashton: My hon. Friend is right. The pub in Warsop Vale has shut. The post office shut and reopened as part of a grocer's shop. Bus services are poor. Elderly people are trapped in their houses, unable to get to a supermarket. It is like a backwater of Kentucky.
Five years later, British Coal again tried to auction off the houses, and there was uproar. My hon. Friends the Members for Mansfield (Mr. Meale), for Normanton (Mr. O'Brien), for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), for Bolsover, others who want to speak in today's debate and even some Tories, protested strongly at the inhumane attitude of auctioning off people's lives. The Government agreed and told British Coal to sell houses to housing associations.
Later types of houses, made from concrete slabs, which were built in 1947 because miners were coming down from Durham and Scotland, are now in the hands of
housing associations, but they have problems. Many of them need repairs. The iron bar that runs through the concrete slab is often rusted or rotten. Some miners bought such houses, but now find that they are stuck with them because building societies say that they do not have a long life and they will not provide mortgages on them. The housing stock is not very good at all, although I must say that the housing associations that took over the houses have been excellent landlords, and the scheme has worked in that respect.
The landlords who bought the houses for about £1,500 each have made enormous profits. They have managed to take in rents of £50 or £60 a week for 10 or 12 years, while spending negligible amounts on the houses. Now that they realise that they cannot get such rents, they want to sell the houses to the local council for about £17,000 each.
So, along with one or two other private landlords, Mr. Dennis Rye in Warsop Vale, who bought 80 houses, 20 of which have been vandalised and are standing empty, wants to take about £1 million out of the small village of 280 houses. The modernised houses with two or three bedrooms, an attic and a bathroom, which have had grants spent on them and on which many people have spent a lot of money, still sell for only £21,000 each. In London, the same houses would go for £80,000 or £100,000.
The local owner-occupiers and decent tenants have been very angry for many years. Reports have been produced and there have been meetings, but we have got nowhere. Numerous surveys on housing conditions have been conducted by various officers of district and county councils, but everybody blames each other. We need Government action to get something done.
I understand that the Housing Corporation in the east midlands has a surplus of £3 million, so there is cash available if it is a question of housing associations buying the houses. Three or four weeks ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield and I clashed with the housing associations at a meeting. It seems that they admit that they have the cash but are interested in spending it only on the houses they already own, and are not keen on using it to purchase houses from private landlords and improve such houses. They accept that the Housing Corporation in the east midlands is sitting on the money, but put up strong resistance and display a marked reluctance to taking over houses from private landlords.
The Government have announced that there will be extra cash from the receipts of the sale of council houses, which is very welcome. The announcement was received with acclaim. Obviously, the scheme will be phased in. Local councils have reacted by saying that the money must go on modernising council houses and that they would prefer to spend the cash on their own council houses rather than private rented houses, which nobody wants to touch with a barge pole due to the amount that needs to be spent on them.
There is a problem with the old compulsory purchase powers. When Roy Hattersley was chairman of housing and I was deputy housing chairman on Sheffield city council in the 1960s, the council compulsorily purchased thousands of houses at a time. All that the landlord got was the value of the site. The regulation was simply applied to houses that were unfit for human habitation. I know as well as anybody that they were unfit because I lived in one.
Such houses had lavatories that did not work, they were infested with rats and they were next to belching chimneys and drop hammers. We grew up in such conditions. It was accepted that such houses were unfit for human habitation, compulsory purchase orders were made and the scheme worked--the council built council houses and people were rehoused.
The Housing Act 1985 took away such powers from local councils. Compulsory purchase orders were allowed in certain circumstances, but councils had to pay the market price--whatever it was--and the price had to be agreed with the landlord. Owners are not against selling the houses--they would not mind at all selling them--but they want £17,000 for a house for which they paid £3,000 12 years ago and for which they have charged a rent of £3,000 a year--perhaps they have taken £30,000 in rent in total. That does not add up, and it cannot go on.
In its election manifesto, the Labour party gave an undertaking that council receipts from the sale of council houses which are received but not spent by councils will be invested in building new houses and rehabilitating old ones, and that the scheme will be phased in to match the capacity of the building industry. It quite rightly said that the cash from capital receipts can not only be spent on council houses but can be used for the provision of new social housing in partnership with registered social landlords, for private-sector renovation, for improving energy efficiency and for raising the quality of a neighbourhood by, for example, encouraging or promoting mixed development.
The problem is that there are loopholes in the system. Even if councils had the cash to spend, private landlords would blatantly exploit the loopholes in the legislation. In 1996, the Government introduced the Housing (Fitness Enforcement Procedures) Order. Sections 86/189 and 86/190 should help councils to grab hold of negligent landlords, but there are too many loopholes.
The legal loopholes include landlords being allowed 28 days to start repairs; so they start, and then they stop. The council takes the landlord to court, so he starts again, and then he stops again. Then he does just enough repairs to take the matter outside the law, which covers "substantial disrepair", and says that he has taken the safety measures and does not need to do anything else. The procedures include vague clauses such as the council has to be "minded to take action"--whatever that might mean--and "give fair warning" that it is thinking about taking such action. If the landlord does not do something, the council thinks about it a bit more.
The maximum fine is £2,500. Private landlords laugh at that. It is an offence if somebody intentionally fails to comply with the council order, but it is very difficult to prove such intention in court. Did the person deliberately not comply, not understand the order or employ contractors who went off moonlighting, or could the contractor not find his tools? Usually, the contractors are part of the landlord's business, anyway. The system is full of loopholes, and is not working.
We have a new Government commitment to license landlords of houses in multiple occupancy, which is very good. Such landlords should have to apply for a licence to run houses. There are already thousands of problems with students who are being ripped off and who have to take out massive student loans to pay £40 a week for one
room to somebody they do not know or cannot find and who is not implementing any safety measures such as providing fire escapes.
I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will consider licensing not only houses in multiple occupancy but any dwelling or property where a landlord deliberately keeps it empty or uninhabitable in order to try to put pressure on the council, do a deal, or simply because the property is going up in value. Any house that is boarded up--even if the landlord cannot be bothered to board it up and squatters are allowed in--should be licensed. The existence of such houses is unfair on tenants who live next door, have mortgages and have spent money on their house, but cannot sell it because it looks straight across at a slum with smashed windows where kids run in and out.
It is estimated that 20 per cent. of private rented property is unfit or uninhabitable.
We should introduce new offences. It should be a separate offence for a landlord deliberately to refuse to maintain a house in fit condition for habitation. We should say that no landlord is entitled to receive housing benefit if he refuses to carry out repairs. We should also prohibit landlords from increasing rents if they refuse to do repairs and we should refuse certificates and licences to such landlords.
We should also pass legislation so that tenants of landlords who refuse to do repairs have the right of compulsory purchase of their rooms, perhaps as a co-operative. If the council has not got the money, the tenants could get together and buy their houses at a price agreed with the independent valuer. If that does not work, perhaps because the tenants are elderly, they should have the right to vote for a housing association to take over from the landlord at an agreed price. Such measures would go a long way towards deterring such behaviour by landlords. We should have a licensing system, and we should strengthen laws that compel decent behaviour from landlords.
Only 10 per cent. of chief environmental officers currently think that the previous Government's Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 has worked. Only 1 per cent. of them believe that it has improved standards. The Act is deregulation gone mad. The previous Government took away all the regulations and let the landlords do what they wanted.
I do not wish to detain the House much longer, but I wish to put on record the recommendations of the legal experts of Mansfield district council, who have a good approach to the problem. I am sure that the Coalfield Communities Association, which has about 80 members among towns, villages and district councils who share the same problems, agree with the legal experts' opinions.
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