That this House has considered the Affordable Homes Programme.
It is a pleasure to serve once again under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am so glad to have secured this important debate on the affordable homes programme, and I am immensely grateful to the House authorities for granting it.
Affordable housing is one of the most depressing and urgent issues facing the good people of Slough and communities across our country. Rarely does an advice surgery go by without a constituent raising concerns about their dire housing situation. Although I commend the bold ambitions of the affordable homes programme, which aims to build 180,000 new homes outside London by March 2026, it is clear that when it comes to delivering on housing the Government continue to fall far short of the mark. The reality is that we face an affordable housing crisis. The basic promise made to each generation that if they work hard they can one day own their own home has been broken.
I speak to young people in their 20s and 30s, often with children, who tell me the same thing: they have as much chance of settling on the moon as they have of buying a home in Slough. This week the estate agent’s window shows a four-bedroom house in Slough for £750,000, a two-bedroom bungalow for £525,000 and a one-bedroom flat for £300,000. Even with an elusive 5% deposit mortgage, those prices are way beyond the reach of shopkeepers, teachers, nurses, home care assistants, police officers, firefighters and even junior doctors.
Since the Conservatives came to power about 13 years ago, 800,000 fewer households under 45 own their home, and 1 million more people are renting—so much for the “property-owning democracy”. The answer would be a renewed social rented sector, but the number of truly affordable homes being built has fallen by 80%. The system is broken and the Conservative Government are doing next to nothing to fix it.
We are all aware of the housing crisis that Britain faces, but I am pleased we have a Labour-led council in Manchester that understands the problem and has set out a plan to build at least 10,000 affordable homes across our city in the next decade, with more than 1,000 affordable homes and 250 new council houses in the coming year. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Tory Government in Westminster are failing to match the vision of Labour councils to tackle the housing crisis?
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I commend Manchester City Council, the Mayor of Greater Manchester—my good friend Andy Burnham—and others who have made sure that councillors and Members of Parliament have come together to have that ambitious house building programme, but it seems the Government are asleep at the wheel. They have made bold statements, but are not following through. I am sure it has nothing to do with the fact that one in four Tory MPs are private landlords.
The much respected organisation Shelter reports that there are 1.4 million fewer households in social housing than there were in 1980. Combined with excessive house prices making homes unaffordable, demand has been shunted into the private rental sector, where supply has been too slow to meet need. That means above-inflation increases in rents, especially in the south of England and in places such as Slough.
On the affordable homes programme, the National Audit Office reports that there is a 32,000 shortfall in the Government’s original targets for building affordable homes. It goes on to say that there is a “high risk” of failing to meet targets on supported homes and homes in rural areas. Ministers’ targets will be confounded by double-digit inflation, soaring costs of materials and supply disruption, yet the Government seem to have no clue how to mitigate those factors. Perhaps the Minister will enlighten us today. As the NAO report outlines, the issue is not just the number of homes, and I share the NAO’s concerns that there is also a lack of focus on the quality, size and environmental standards of the new homes. Perhaps the Minister will also be able to provide some reassurance on those important points.
The NAO is not the only one with concerns about the delivery of the programme. I am pleased that the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), is here for the debate, and I am sure she will attest to the fact that in December the Committee’s report outlined that the Minister’s Department
Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for this important debate. Under the leadership of Ian Ward, Birmingham has committed to having 60,000 additional houses, but unfortunately, as my hon. Friend says, cost rises mean that that will be difficult to achieve. Also, housing associations create traps for people in my community, who are unable to afford to buy their properties or to have their children take them over. That is not the way forward; we need councils to be properly resourced to build the houses.
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I commend the work of Councillor Ian Ward, whom I met recently. During my recent visit to Birmingham, I was able to meet council members, who spoke about their hopes and aspirations, but also to the constraints on them given limited resources from Government—indeed, they alluded to the high inflation they now have to contend with.
People sometimes say, “How can there be a housing crisis when there are cranes on our skylines and new houses and flats going up all over?” But those homes are rarely affordable and are often snapped up by investors off plan. Many remain empty—an investment by overseas property tycoons. That leaves hollowed-out communities with flats but no residents. That is why I am so glad that the Labour party has pledged to close the loopholes developers exploit to avoid building more affordable housing and give first-time buyers first dibs on new developments. I very much hope to hear more about those exciting plans from the Labour party spokesman, my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), later in the debate.
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. It is not just Labour councils but Conservative-controlled councils that give land to the developers. There is one development on Broadway where the average house costs £800,000, which is way beyond the reach of most of my constituents. Does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as putting targets on developers, we must give housing associations the freedom to build houses? We see people at our surgeries crying out for homes. We must look at the need and then give housing associations the freedom to build those houses.
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. The experiences she has at her advice surgeries talking to her constituents chime neatly with what I am being told. Yes, we must empower housing associations and others to build homes. The focus especially on building council homes is incredibly important, because that is where we as a nation are failing. There is huge demand for council housing in particular, not just in Walsall but in my constituency, but there is just not the supply to go around. That must urgently be looked at. Those targets are being missed.
I hope that Labour will end the scandalous practice of foreign buyers purchasing swathes of new housing developments off plan before local people can even see them. We will strengthen the rights of tenants with a new private renters charter. Only a generation ago a couple in work could aspire to get on the property ladder, to eventually pay off their mortgage and to give their children a helping hand. Today, that dream is out of reach for millions thanks to the utter failure of this Government. The Housing Minister, the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), is the 15th since the Tories came to power and the sixth to hold the post in the past 12 months alone. What hope do ordinary people have with such chaos at the very heart of Government?
Labour will build the homes that people need. We will take steps to meet demand in the decades to come and we must also boost social housing, as I said to my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz). That is how a Labour Government will fix Britain’s broken housing market for people in Slough and across our nation.
If the Government cannot, or will not, commit to matching Labour’s focus on this vital issue, if they cannot deliver genuinely affordable homes and if they continue to let this programme fall even further behind, they should just admit that they have given up trying to help the millions struggling with housing across our country.
I commend my hon. Friend on his speech on this really important issue. Does he agree that language is very important and that the word “affordable” suggests something that people on a normal income could afford? However, we all know that the word “affordable” in housing circles actually means 80% of market rent, which is unaffordable for most people. In some of the constituencies represented by Members present, that is unaffordable even for the Member themselves.
I thank my hon. Friend for that very valid point. It is one that many of us have been making for years. Definitions are incredibly important. What is affordable to one person is unaffordable to another. That is why a laser-like focus, on social housing in particular, is incredibly important; many people cannot afford to get into the private rented sector, let alone buy their own home. I fully agree with my hon. Friend.
The Government must act urgently. If they cannot, perhaps they should step aside for those of us who want to, and can, deliver the transformative changes needed to guarantee that home ownership once again becomes a reality for all generations.
The debate can last until 4 pm. I am obliged to call the Front-Bench spokespeople no later than 3.37 pm, and the guidelines are that the Opposition spokesperson and the Minister should have 10 minutes each. The mover of the motion will have three minutes to sum up the debate at the end. Until 3.37 pm, which is just under an hour away, we are in Back-Bench time. I am confident that everyone will get in if no one speaks for too long.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for securing this debate.
Britain’s housing market is broken. Renters have been priced out of the cities they have called home for their entire lives. Young people cannot get a foot on the ladder, and most of the homes that are built are unaffordable. Research by Crisis and the National Housing Federation found that, over the next decade, 145,000 affordable homes must be built each year, with 90,000 of those for social rent, if we are going to meet housing needs in England alone. The truth is that we are nowhere near meeting the overwhelming need that already exists. With only 13% of homes built between 2021 and 2022 designated for social rent, it is clear that the Government are not taking this crisis seriously. The scale of the challenge ahead is monumental, and Ministers have their heads in the sand, hoping it will all just go away.
Let me demonstrate the problem to the Minister, using statistics from my constituency, which has been badly affected. The statistics clearly outline how the housing crisis in this country has spiralled out of control over the past 13 years. In Coventry, the number of new social housing lettings has fallen by more than a third over the past decade. Looking at the most recent figures, 1,939 of the new social housing lettings were in the most affordable category, down from over 4,000 10 years ago. We have nearly 6,000 households stuck on the waiting list, chasing the handful of homes that ever become available.
Behind those numbers are the lives of thousands of constituents whose futures are being robbed from them by a lack of decent housing. I want to give three examples of constituents who have been affected. The first has four sons, who are cramped into one bedroom, denied any privacy or space to revise for next month’s exams. The lack of any ground-floor flats has left the second constituent, crippled from a lifetime of hard physical labour, sleeping on his sofa and doing his washing in the sink. My third constituent is a cancer patient who needs round-the-clock care but who is trapped in a tiny bedsit up a flight of stairs he can barely climb, with no facilities for anyone to stay with him overnight and nowhere to move.
I thank my good and hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for securing such a vital debate on affordable housing. I echo a point made by Members across the Chamber. My definition of affordable housing, and certainly that of my constituents, is somewhat different from the Government’s definition of 80% of market rents. That is certainly not affordable for people in many cities, including those in the south-east, London, Birmingham and Manchester, or for people in parts of my constituency. It is beyond the reach of far too many people. All we have to do is look at the evidence, with 1.2 million people and rising on the housing need register and the 300,000 children referenced by the National Housing Federation living in cramped accommodation, sharing beds with siblings. It is simply not good enough. It demonstrates that the housing crisis is one of affordability up and down the country.
I could also refer to the pitiful number of homes—7,400—built for social rent last year. When we take into account those lost through right to buy and demolition, we see that the actual figure for last year was minus 14,000. If we map every year over the last 13 years, we see that the average net loss is about 12,000 homes, which is simply not good enough.
The evidence from the National Housing Federation and Shelter, which was referenced by my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), shows that about 90,000 homes for social rent should be built every year over a decade. How could the Government fund that? They could reconfigure the affordable homes programme of £11.4 billion and stop much of the £23 billion of housing benefit going to substandard housing, as evidenced in a City Hall report last year.
I want to focus on a particular development in the Weaver Vale patch that could be completed if a Government Minister were to intervene. Homes England is involved in the development. A number of developments are taking place across Weaver Vale in Helsby, Sandymoor and Hartford, which will result in more than 1,000 properties being built. A number of them will be built through section 106 in terms of housing associations. The properties are probably three-quarters completed, but they are now subject to vandalism because Lane End Developments, which was based in Warrington, has gone into administration. The same is true of other market-led developers, given the downturn in the market and the fact that planning applications are down by 16%.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) on securing this vital debate. He highlighted that the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office have looked into this issue. I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and declare that I am the landlord of a property in the private rented sector.
Affordable housing is critical for my constituency. Many of my constituents live in very overcrowded conditions, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) highlighted. Every week I am out on doorsteps, doing surgeries and visiting people where they live. There are many examples of four children sharing a bedroom, and of a family living in the living room and another in the bedroom. Families are experiencing severe overcrowding without any hope of moving out. I will touch on that in a moment. Too many people just cannot afford to rent in the private sector or to buy, given that rates are very high, and the Government have changed the definition of “affordable” repeatedly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) highlighted. Crucially, we are just not building enough housing.
The record of the affordable homes programme speaks for itself. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, on whose behalf the Minister is here to answer, set out to deliver 180,000 homes in 2021. It has already downgraded that forecast to 157,000 homes, but half of them will be for ownership, not rent. I am not someone who wants to get in the way of home ownership, but it is not even a distant dream for those of my constituents for whom renting privately is not an option. They just need somewhere to live, so we need social housing in London. Of course, the impacts of inflation and construction challenges put the figure of 157,000 at even more risk. The Government’s original intention was to build 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s. Some of them were to be affordable homes, but we have not been given a figure, so I want to delve into that.
20 of 52 shown
“does not seem to have a grasp on the considerable risks to achieving even this lower number of homes, including construction costs inflation running at 15-30% in and around London.”
Exactly when will the revisions to the 2021 plan be published, as recommended and agreed by the Minister’s Department?
The fact is that we need a renewed national effort to fix the housing market and fulfil the promise of owning one’s own home to the next generation. That national effort may well have to wait for the election of a Labour Government, which will have a target of 70% home ownership.
What more evidence do the Government need to accept the scale of the housing crisis that has grown and grown since they came into power? Change is overdue. The inaction of Ministers has left us gripped by a planning and development free-for-all where developers hold all the power. They decide which type of homes are built, where they are built and the prices they are sold for. They are accountable to absolutely nobody—not residents, not local councils and not even the Government in Westminster. Even as we speak, thousands of Coventry families are being denied a modest social home, while historic hedgerows and badger setts are being torn out in Keresley by developers constructing half-a-million-pound executive mansions, which are irrelevant to local need and built solely for private profit.
The big picture is really bad. The specifics of the planning system, however, are even worse. Take housing targets. Coventry has long been singled out for unfair treatment by this Government, who demand that more and more houses be built every year but do nothing to ensure there is enough social housing for those in need. For years, Whitehall ignored Coventry’s residents and councillors, who said time and again that the projections were wrong. Time and again our concerns were cast aside, with Ministers simply too gutless to order an investigation that might uncover an inconvenient truth. Tacked on to this is the 35% uplift—a further inflation of figures that bear no relation to the lack of brownfield sites in our city or the housing mix Coventry residents need.
Thanks to the census, the facts are now clear. The Government’s population estimates were wrong by a massive 30,000 people, rendering the plans drawn up as a result of those figures virtually worthless. Now our councillors are left having to revise the local plan to make up for the unforgivable errors of Ministers—errors that the council reported long ago and that were ignored by those in Westminster, despite the fact I raised the issue on several occasions with the Minister’s predecessor.
As it stands, the planning system is a shambles. A complete overhaul is desperately needed, with local communities and local government in the driving seat. That way, they can set the direction of travel for new developments in their neighbourhood, delivering affordable homes for families exactly where they are needed. The housing crisis will only get worse unless the Government reform planning and deliver for the needs of people up and down the country. I hope the Minister will outline what steps the Government are taking to achieve that reform.
My plea to the Minister, who is currently rather busy on his mobile phone, is for him to intervene on the development. [Interruption.] Yes, thank you for taking notes. I have written to Homes England. The development would meet targets that the Government no longer seem to have, but it would also, importantly, ensure that constituents in my patch could fulfil their dreams and hopes. It would enable some to get on to the property ladder, some to go into shared ownership, and others to get homes under the current definition of affordable rent. Of course, what we need is 90,000 houses a year and a generation of social housing. I look forward to the day when we have a Labour Government who can realise that ambition.
Let us pick up on the issue of definitions. Perhaps the Minister could take away the thought that we are conflating or confusing a multiplicity of markets. We have the full ownership market, but we also have affordable home ownership and shared ownership, which poses challenges for many people because they are liable for the whole property but own only part of the equity and pay rent on the rest. The term “affordable” was defined by the previous Mayor of London and former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), as 80% of private rents. Well, good luck with that in Hackney, where it is simply unaffordable for many people.
There are various definitions for key worker housing, depending on where the development is—the term is very ill defined in law and regulation. At least social rented housing has a rent escalator model set out in law, so tenants have an idea of what they will be paying. That has, of course, been capped because of inflation rates. I welcome that for residents, but it does also create a problem for properties in desperate need of investment. There is also, of course, the private rented sector. Although it has been subject to more regulation, there is nothing about the level of rent and it does not have anything like a rent escalator model. That means that tenants can find their rent going up exponentially after spending only a year in their home. We are increasingly seeing that across the piece in my constituency and throughout London.
Social housing is critical. There are people in Hackney who work hard in good jobs, such as the hospital porter I visited, who is renting a room in a private home. He was living with his daughter, and they rented a room each in a private home. When the private landlady put up the rent from £400 to £550 a month for each room, they could no longer afford to rent two rooms, so he was living with his then 17-year-old daughter—she is now nearly 20—in one private room, because he could not qualify for social housing. As he was not homeless, he would not even get into temporary housing—not that that is a pathway people want to go down.
Five years ago, if people had been in temporary housing for six months I would encourage them to hang on in there because a prized council or housing association property would eventually become available. It is now increasingly the case that people spend more than three years in temporary housing. Recently, a family I was dealing with were rehoused from Hackney to Wellingborough. There are other examples, with the excellent head of homelessness at Hackney Council, Jennifer Wynter, saying that this is the worst situation she has known in her long career, and warning all of us not to raise people’s hopes that a home in Hackney will be a real possibility.
The Department’s own figures show that homes built for social rent provide higher value for money than those built for ownership. This thoughtful Minister used to be a member of the Public Accounts Committee. If he looked at the figures, I think that he, along with the Secretary of State, could be an advocate in his Department for social renting housing. The problem is that the Government, who are not meeting their targets, are chasing numbers, which means fewer social rented properties for the money. We want to see more homes, but we need social rented housing, and it is no good building homes that people just cannot afford to live in. We have a sore need for such properties, yet the Government rejected the Public Accounts Committee’s recommendation to assess the demand for social rent.
Sometimes the Government also respond to reports in a confusing way. A recommendation report notes:
“The government will work with delivery agencies to confirm the 2021 programme’s capacity to deliver homes for Social Rent as part of the review”
of the delivery of housing, and that they
“will confirm the programme’s ability to deliver an increased proportion of homes for social rent to Parliament at the same time as confirming the programme’s overall delivery targets.”
I could read that in all sorts of ways. I like to read it positively, as saying that the Department is determined to see an increased proportion of social rented housing. I hope the Minister can clarify exactly what the Government mean in that response.
It is worth putting the challenge in Hackney in context. I make no apology for repeating these figures. There are currently 3,100 households in temporary accommodation, 51% of which—more than half—are housed outside the borough due to a lack of supply. There are 3,528 children in temporary accommodation. That is enough to fill eight primary schools and is equivalent to 1% of Hackney’s population. We are having to close primary schools because of falling numbers. Many of those families would love to send their children to school in Hackney, but they cannot live there because there are not enough permanent homes. I have had so many tragic conversations with constituents in my surgeries or the living rooms of their temporary accommodation. They think that if they hang on, they will get a property in Hackney, where their kids are still at school, but I have to say to them, “You are not going to be in Hackney for some years. You have a five-year tenancy somewhere else so you need to think about moving your children.” They are aghast and upset, but that is the reality. Children are being shuttled around to schools where there are places; they are not going to schools their parents choose.
Average waiting times for council and housing association housing for homeless households is now nine years for a three-bedroom property—of course, that is a notional figure—and 12 years for a two-bedroom property. That is a lifetime for a child. Children are growing up in massively overcrowded conditions. They often live in a single room in accommodation or, if they are lucky, a couple of rooms in a hotel. Sometimes, they are in temporary, rented accommodation elsewhere, but with no certainty and, even if their parents are bidding for properties, no real prospect of getting a home anywhere near any time soon.
Homelessness in the borough is increasing rapidly. The number of households seeking support increased by 44% between 2017-18 and 2021-22. Hackney Council anticipates that the number will continue to increase by about 8% a year. That is just one London borough, but I am sure my colleagues across London will say the same. It was interesting to hear that in Coventry the experiences are very similar. In Hackney, that would be considered cheap housing, compared with what we have to deal with.
I pay tribute to the Mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, who is doing his utmost to build council housing—affordable, secure homes—but for pretty much every one he builds, he has to have one for sale to cross-subsidise because there is not a Government subsidy, despite the Government’s own figures showing that investment in bricks-and-mortar subsidy is the most cost-effective way of delivering these homes.
I am sure the Minister is thoughtful enough to take on board the cost of poor housing to the Exchequer. The Public Accounts Committee looked at the private rented sector. In my constituency, ownership is out of reach for so many people—average house prices are at ridiculous levels—so people are living in the private rented sector. The National Audit Office concluded that 13% of privately rented properties—589,000 of them—pose a serious threat to their tenants’ health and safety. The Committee and the National Audit Office estimated the cost of that to the health service to be £340 million per annum, so it really is spend to save. I know it is difficult for any Department to sell that to the Treasury, but I am sure that if the Minister wanted to join forces with us on this issue, we could all work together to persuade the Treasury that spending money, investing in people’s homes and getting them on a stable footing is better for everybody.
This is not rocket science. We need more homes to be built, and we need to unblock the logjam that is stopping that. We do not have the time to go into all the reasons for that, but we need more social housing that is actually affordable for people on average wages—people who work hard every day but have no prospect of buying a home. Some even find it hard to afford council rent. There are issues there, but we certainly need council rented housing and housing association housing. We need pathways to home ownership, but every time someone buys under right to buy, that is another home lost to the local council or the housing association, and that is not a path that many people can pursue.
Many years ago, when I was a councillor in Islington, we would pay people about £16,000 to move from their council property to help them buy a property elsewhere, so they freed it up. That is actually good value for money. Who would have thought that the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee would be standing here saying, “Give tenants who want to move the money to do so”? Sure, home ownership is understandably a dream for many people, but it should not be a dream that is out of reach. We could free up the housing we have for those who have the wherewithal and ability to move into other homes.
We need better rights and stability for private tenants. People live in a home with a year’s tenancy, perhaps, but cannot be sure from year to year whether their children can stay at the same school. It is an upheaval in a family’s life. Now, increasingly, as people are evicted, rents are going through the roof, as many landlords exit the market. In summary, I believe firmly—I hope that the Minister concurs and will tell us how he will help to achieve this—that people need a safe, secure and long-term home as the foundation for their life and, crucially, the springboard for opportunity.