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11.23 am
Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Ashton) for initiating the debate today. The problems he has described are mirrored in all the coalfield areas, as exemplified by the fact that several of my colleagues are here today to speak on the issue. My hon. Friend gave a list of suggestions by Mansfield district council. Its environment department is certainly at the sharp end of dealing with the landlords who cause problems.
One particular landlord in my area has already been mentioned--Dennis Rye. He has got houses all over the place, including Yorkshire, and I reckon that he has houses in 12 or 15 constituencies. He has spread his net far and wide. In the Pleasley area of Bolsover, which is not very far from Mansfield, Dennis Rye owns some 70 houses. In 1987, he decided to apply for grants, and Bolsover district council agreed to give him grants to improve the houses. Dennis Rye then decided that he wanted grants to make the properties into flats to make more money. The council said that he could have the money, but he appealed against that decision. That dragged out the procedure.
Some years later, Dennis Rye said that the properties should be demolished. So the Bolsover district council, as the Mansfield district council would have done, said that it would put in an order to demolish the houses, which were unsightly and like a bomb site, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw described. What did Dennis Rye do? He appealed against the demolition order. The case went to court again and was dragged out further.
Such cases usually go to magistrates courts, but sometimes to the county courts. Sadly, all the magistrates courts work separately, but many deal with the same small number of landlords. Although my hon. Friends and I are aware of the landlords' efforts in all the different areas, the magistrates, for some reason, are not aware that they are being taken for a ride.
In the 1990s, after Dennis Rye had appealed against the demolition of the properties in Pleasley, the Bolsover district council decided to serve repair notices. We all know the problem with those. The landlord gets a builder to knock a nail in a skirting board and that is enough for the magistrates to say that the landlord has made a start on repairs, even though people are still living in terrible conditions.
The process is dragged out even more. Bolsover district council currently has three outstanding actions against Dennis Rye, but the environmental health department knows that the chances of solving the problems are remote, as it told me yesterday, unless the law is changed in the way suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw.
We all know that the examples in Warsop Vale and in New terrace in Pleasley that I have mentioned are not isolated instances. As my hon. Friend said, many houses were sold off in job lots to landlords in London. I have evidence that, in some cases, groups of houses were sold three times in a month, with each successive purchaser making money from the ribs of miners and their families living in those properties. Eventually, the ownership of the properties ended up in tax havens.
Many landlords have agents in the coalfields. There is an agent in Creswell, a wonderful model village that was built at the turn of the century. Some 200 houses were built in a circle and, at the time, were an example of state-of-the-art building. For many years, while the pit was open, the village had a vetting procedure. The local National Union of Mineworkers and the residents ensured that anybody who took over an empty house was vetted. There was nothing wrong with that, and it gave an element of democracy, but it went when the pit shut.
The Tories--who are not here now, although they were in the Chamber for the previous debate about fox hunting--should understand that this debate is also about rural life. Each of those areas is a village. We are talking not about towns, but about tiny little communities. The Tory Government smashed them as they closed pit after pit. They may not have realised, although I am sure they did, that they took away the mantle of security that existed for the people who lived in those villages.
The net result is that there are no more vetting procedures in Creswell model village, with the result that the houses have been taken over by Villagate Properties, which is based at Westerham, Kent. When repairs are needed, I have to write to someone in Kent, after trying the agent first.
People are coming in from all over the place. My hon. Friend referred to the transient population. About a month ago, some paedophiles finished up living in Creswell model village. I will not go through the details, but they do not live there any more. Action was taken. Least said, soonest mended, but court cases will follow.
I want to stress to the House that the people of Creswell regarded that episode as an insult to them. They had worked hard--the miners at the pit--and now they see all those people coming in and upsetting their community.
I am not saying that everything can be done in next to no time. We have five years, but we do not want to wait for five years; we want to start now. We have a Minister who knows a little about housing. As we know only too well on both sides of the House, not every hon. Member
who reaches the Front Bench is well equipped to do the job immediately, but the Minister understands the subject and should be able to make a flying start.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw presented a good number of proposals. Every village in the mining communities is affected. I could go on to speak about Langwith, Shirebrook and many others. They follow a similar pattern. People have been deserted by the previous Government. Their jobs have been taken away, and now they are having to put up with living in communities that are falling apart, with desolation and dereliction all around them, as at New Terrace, Pleasley.
My hon. Friend suggested the action that could be taken, and I agree with much of what he said, bearing in mind that local authorities are spending thousands of pounds going to court. Environmental teams in local authorities should be given the power to work together. They know the landlords who are causing all the trouble. Each local authority is litigating separately, but those who want to do so should be able to take joint action against rogue landlords such as Dennis Rye.
My hon. Friend referred to various housing Acts. Local authorities have the power to take a landlord to court to enforce the repair of properties and maintenance of sites, and the need to clear up the dereliction should be part of the argument for the local authority to exercise those powers.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw about fast-track litigation, although that is a matter for another Government Department. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will consider that. My hon. Friend also dealt with the licensing of landlords.
For a local authority to enforce a compulsory purchase order, as I understand it, it must be based on housing gain. A local authority should be able to obtain a compulsory purchase order on the grounds that the property is unsightly and a mess--that would deal with Rye, both in Warsop Vale and in New Terrace, Pleasley--or if they can prove that there is constant litigation and that the landlords are using the courts to drag the process out.
Mr. Kevin Barron (Rother Valley):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Ashton) on securing this opportunity to debate such an important subject.
Like my hon. Friend, I have in my constituency a large number of properties that were once owned and managed by the former National Coal Board, and as in Bassetlaw, the decision to sell off those properties in the Rother
Valley, and the clumsy and disjointed way in which the sell-off was handled, has had serious and damaging consequences for several of the villages in my constituency.
The Rother Valley has three estates consisting of former NCB homes--at Aston, Kiveton Park and Maltby. The houses on the estates were constructed using pre-reinforced concrete. They were built in factories and assembled on site. In the 1950s, at the age of eight, I moved into one of those houses, when I moved from North to South Yorkshire.
Because of their flawed design, the houses on those estates have been classified as defective under the terms of the Housing Defects Act 1984. I understand that those provisions are contained in more recent housing legislation. The steel in the houses is corroded because the concrete has let water in. The steel has expanded, rusted and forced the concrete up on the outside. Consequently, no one will loan money against such a house.
The properties were sold off in lots at auction. Various parts of the estates were bought up cheaply by organisations and individuals who had little or no interest in maintaining the estate as a whole. Some properties were sold by the NCB to sitting tenants in the 1970s and 1980s, and were bought back by the local authority under the 1984 Act.
I shall describe the situation at one estate, Kiveton Park, in my constituency. Florence Unity Biby Richardson and Clive Richardson of Wimbledon own 20 of the houses. Great Parndon Investments of Harlow in Essex owns 14 houses. Michael Windle from Skipton owns 40 houses. He also owns houses on the Maltby estate. Paul Wright of Worksop owns 18 properties at Kiveton Park. DetaRock Properties owns four houses, Globe Properties owns one, and Rotherham borough council, having bought back houses from sitting tenants under the 1984 Act, owns 43.
One of the houses on the estate has a great history, as my case work revealed. The landlord proved to be so bad and difficult to deal with that the London solicitors who were acting as his agents eventually gave up on him. They cancelled their agreement with him and refused to deal with inquiries about the property's state of disrepair. I was told by the firm of solicitors to contact the landlord direct--he lived in Baghdad. He, like many other people, had bought the property at an auction in the Connaught rooms. He had seen photographs of the houses, which looked like decent, three-bedroomed semi-detached houses. No one had told him of the concrete construction that had been classified as defective. He thought that he could spend a few thousand pounds and make a profit.
The fragmentation of the ownership of what are called locally the "White City" estates was only the beginning of the present problems. Although some money is available to make the necessary repairs and correct the building faults of some of the houses, that money is too slow in coming through. When it arrives, the piecemeal way in which it has to be used can itself be a contributory factor in the decay of the estates. I shall return to that thought at the end of my speech.
The Housing Defects Act 1984 allows local authorities to buy such properties from their owners, but it does not fully cater for the circumstances on the former NCB
estates. Rotherham borough council was reluctant to buy the residents out, because it had never previously owned the stock and did not consider itself responsible for the situation. The Act made the council responsible, but it showed great reluctance, and I had a public falling out with it about how quickly it should respond and buy the properties back.
While the wrangling about the status of the houses continued, many of them fell into disrepair, and even dereliction, as they became empty. Many hon. Members will know that, when a property becomes empty, that can be the beginning of a steep downward cycle in its useful life. Properties that are empty for any length of time tend to fall into serious disrepair.
With the former Coal Board houses, disrepair can be brought about even more quickly by the new absentee landlords who refuse to take their obligations seriously. Last month, I received from an environmental health officer at my local council a letter that highlights one of the problems:
Empty and derelict properties also become targets for theft, especially on the estates, where metal fixtures and fittings are sold for scrap. The latest craze on one of the estates is the removing of drainage covers, despite the fact that they are heavier than some of the inside fittings. Of course, the open manholes then become a health and safety hazard. They get filled with rubble, which blocks the drains and causes further environmental health problems.
In some cases, the problems of the estates are becoming so bad that even the infrastructure is failing. A letter from Yorkshire Electricity, which was forwarded to me, says that the company noted concerns about the state of the supply cables, but:
My constituents have had to live with those conditions for years. We have had a decade of such problems on the estates, and they are not nice places to live now; they are certainly not like the place that I moved to in 1955 with the rest of my family.
In some cases, fire damage in empty houses means that the only suitable course of action is demolition. However, because of the way in which the bundles of houses were
sold, it is never certain that a single landlord will own adjacent houses that may also need to be demolished. An argument is taking place now about one house that needs to be demolished but is attached to another. The landlord refuses to do anything about the situation, so we cannot demolish a property that is causing a hazard on the estate.
On two of the estates a scheme is in place to reinstate properties, and the work is being done by a local housing association. I congratulate the housing association, which is doing some magnificent work, especially in view of the circumstances on the estates. In some parts of the estate, schemes have been agreed to new build by both demolition and reinstatement of homes under the Housing Defects Act.
The greatest problem is that money for the schemes trickles out too slowly to cope with the scale of the problem. A scheme gets going in an area, but the following year it has to stop, because we cannot get the funding from the Housing Corporation to the housing association. My local council, which owns houses on the estates, is giving them gratis to the housing association so that the process of regeneration can take place. None the less, the problem is still difficult.
Perhaps the most important factor is the botched manner in which the former Coal Board properties were sold by the Conservative Government. It means that no one organisation has control of the process of regeneration, and no proper sanctions exist to make the various parties work together.
"As houses become empty they are vandalised and frequently set on fire . . . Since March, I have served a stream of Statutory Notices on two landlords to make such houses secure. Most recently, two properties on one road have been boarded or bricked up following such action. One by the Council in default."
My local council has thousands of pounds outstanding because it has had to take action to protect the interests of the people who live on the estates, especially in terms of the safety of young children. It has spent thousands of pounds because we cannot get the landlords to act responsibly.
"There will be a need to take an overview of the best approach to resolving this problem since there are so many interested parties on the White City Estate".
That was a reference to the estate on which I was brought up. A couple of years ago I took Jeremy Walker, who works in the Government regional office in Leeds, to see that estate, and showed him the house that I moved into at the age of eight. It was derelict and had been vandalised. People had been in and stolen all the copper, including the main means of stopping off the water. Water was jetting up into the kitchen ceiling, and somebody had thrown an old mattress down to try to stop the flow. The house next door had been burnt out completely, right up through the roof tiles.
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