Social Housing Bill [HL]

Report (Continued)

Amendment 79

79: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause— “Protections for adapted social housing(1) This section applies where a dwelling owned by the local housing authority or a registered provider of social housing—(a) has been substantially adapted for occupation by a person with a disability or support need, or(b) has been substantially adapted with the use of a Disabled Facilities Grant.(2) Before such a dwelling is allocated through the general housing allocation process, the landlord must take reasonable steps to offer the dwelling to a person whose needs would substantially benefit from those adaptations.(3) In this section, “substantially adapted” has such meaning as the Secretary of State may prescribe by regulations made by statutory instrument.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member's explanatory statement This amendment would require social landlords to protect the pool of adapted housing by giving preference to applicants who could benefit from existing adaptations before allocating adapted homes through the general housing allocation process.

79: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause— “Protections for adapted social housing(1) This section applies where a dwelling owned by the local housing authority or a registered provider of social housing—(a) has been substantially adapted for occupation by a person with a disability or support need, or(b) has been substantially adapted with the use of a Disabled Facilities Grant.(2) Before such a dwelling is allocated through the general housing allocation process, the landlord must take reasonable steps to offer the dwelling to a person whose needs would substantially benefit from those adaptations.(3) In this section, “substantially adapted” has such meaning as the Secretary of State may prescribe by regulations made by statutory instrument.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”Member's explanatory statement This amendment would require social landlords to protect the pool of adapted housing by giving preference to applicants who could benefit from existing adaptations before allocating adapted homes through the general housing allocation process.

My Lords, I am disappointed that a Bill that purports to protect the supply of new homes fails to consider the texture of protecting certain types of adapted homes. We are an ageing nation and nowadays, many more premature babies survive into adulthood with life-limiting conditions. In Committee, I explained how councils might install housing adaptations so that a resident with an impairment can live more comfortably. I explained that it might be as simple as a grab rail or ramp. Half of such adaptations include a wet room, many with wider doors to accommodate wheelchairs.

In preparation for Report, I sat down with Kevin Philcox, the officer responsible for housing standards at South Norfolk Council. He told me that wet rooms are important because poor personal hygiene is a leading cause of infection and hospital admission among the elderly. Keeping yourself clean down there is not just about dignity; it helps keep our hospital wards clear. It typically takes between six and nine months to deliver an adaptation. I will not go into the reasons why, but in my council, we deliver about 150 such projects per year at an average of about £10,000 each.

I feel I have laboured the point, but the simple truth is that we do not have a large enough pool of adapted and improved homes to meet the demand. That is why the state invests in them. The local government department distributes yearly funding of over £720 million to local authorities for the purpose of improving homes and making them suitable for people with limitations. Some councils, such as my own, and other RSLs, top that money up. I suppose that making these improvements adds up to about £1 billion a year.

My amendment is about protecting the adapted stock—protecting that £1 billion per year investment—and about dignity for the most vulnerable in society. I have heard it said that this is an allocations issue and that this Bill is not going there, but I do not see it as an allocations issue in the sense that we are going to give preference to a particular veteran or a certain local person. This is about protecting the generality of the pool of adapted homes as society gets older, fatter and lives longer with debilitating impairments, so that there is a stock of homes where people can make the best of their lives and make their disabilities more bearable. If the state cannot recognise that simple truth, what is it for? Casually dismissing it as an allocations issue is wilful misdirection. We must grab this sufficiency issue now.

My Lords, my Amendment 80 is a retabling of an amendment I tabled in Committee. I will say a few words at the end in support of the amendment to which the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, has just spoken.

My Amendment 80 would require the Secretary of State to review and report to Parliament on the extent to which former members of the Armed Forces are able to access social housing. I thank the Minister for meeting me to discuss this issue and for making clear her commitment to achieving progress on this. I also thank her hard-working officials for sending me a very helpful note about the data that is collected, which I note was sent extremely late in the evening, so I am sure they were working hard in advance of the Bill returning to the Lords today.

The Minister responded to my amendment in Committee and in more detail when we had the chance to meet. She explained that she sees the way of making progress on this as being incorporating it partly within the wider review of social housing allocation. I broadly support that proposal, which I think is a sensible way forward, but I have some questions that I would be grateful if she would respond to. The information that her officials sent me was about data. I was really asking for a lot more information so that we are able to scrutinise how the Government are getting on. The Government say they are making progress on this issue. We need to be able to see the impact of that. Are more of the Armed Forces community able to access social housing or is it having no impact whatever?

The data that was sent to me on local authority housing statistics reported that 2,649 households on housing registers are members of the Armed Forces community and have been given additional preference under local authorities’ allocation schemes and that this equated to around 0.2% of the 1.34 million households on housing registers in England. Do we really think that is picking up everybody who ought to be benefiting from being given an additional preference? How do the Government intend to ensure that all those in need report their need? How are they encouraged to report their need? Is the review being conducted going to meet the gap between the figure that we currently have and the almost certainly many others who are not benefiting from the measures that the Government have already brought forward? How are we going to monitor the progress that is made? How do we know that what gets delivered is going to be successful? How we measure success is an important question here.

My Lords, I tabled Amendment 81 and I support my noble friends on the Front Bench in their Amendments 83 and 84.

My amendment is trying to bring a bit of accountability back into housing associations. An issue that has been well described during various stages of the Bill is that housing associations are becoming enormous, with no connection to local areas. As a consequence, I thought—especially in line with the vibe of the new Prime Minister about devolution, local decision-making and people feeling involved—that it was time to get some democracy and democratically elected people back on these boards. Specifically, Amendment 81’s proposed new subsection (3) says:

“Regulations under subsection (2)(b) must ensure that no private registered provider’s board is comprised of a majority of elected local councillors”.

I anticipate that the Government will try to say, “This will put it back on the balance sheet”, but the answer is that it will not. The ONS—and I know this because there are some excellent officials over there; I have worked with some of them in the past—only puts things on the balance sheet because you have to have a majority. Control has to be with local government, which is why having a minority, not a majority, specifically in primary legislation, is key to that.

It feels that the direction of several housing associations is not going in the right way. The new Prime Minister has certainly been keen to talk about council housing—more so than social housing, although I appreciate that both will be in his mind—and that is where people would expect that, where there are special situations or a special kind of social housing or council housing, somehow there would be local involvement, not somebody who might be a couple of hundred miles away deciding what houses get sold, what get built and where they get built. For that reason, I hope the House may consider this during its consideration of the Bill.

I have great sympathy with the intention behind Amendment 81 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. I have spent many years working with housing associations and the best were excellent partners, rooted in their communities and closely engaged with local government. But that was not always the case, and I think sometimes we have a few bad eggs spoiling it for the rest of the fruit bowl. As some housing associations have grown larger—and I have expressed concerns before about the number of mergers going on, including my own Watford Community Housing Trust—there is a danger that they will become more remote from those communities. At times, to be quite honest, there has been a tendency to view councillors not as partners with valuable local knowledge but as people who interfere. That is a mistake. Councillors can and do bring something important to the table.

I thought the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, might like to speak first to tell us about his amendments so that we could respond, but I will go first.

While they are all on the same theme, these amendments are all different so I will take each of them in turn. As usual, the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, sounds totally sensible, but I have checked this with three allocations officers in three different councils—so I have top trumped his single one—and the conclusion was that this is not an issue. Councils have the power to do what they wish with homes that have been adapted. They can leave them as voids, or they can rip out adaptations if they feel that they are too niche, but the reality is that they rarely have to do that because demand is so great. In fact, one officer said to me that the longest they have ever had to wait to re-let an adapted home is three weeks. I suppose I am saying that they would agree with the noble Lord that they care about protecting their precious adapted stock, and they do so.

My noble friend outlined the case for her Amendment 80. She said that many councils do this, but she is seeking to broaden our data about who accesses social housing, particularly veterans. The reason why that is important, as many of us know, is the high incidence of ex-military who end up homeless. My noble friend made a pertinent point about the wait that people have in order to get their adaptations. That is a far more serious point, and it could be to do with the availability of funding.

I have great sympathy with the intention behind Amendment 81 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. I have spent many years working with housing associations and the best were excellent partners, rooted in their communities and closely engaged with local government. But that was not always the case, and I think sometimes we have a few bad eggs spoiling it for the rest of the fruit bowl. As some housing associations have grown larger—and I have expressed concerns before about the number of mergers going on, including my own Watford Community Housing Trust—there is a danger that they will become more remote from those communities. At times, to be quite honest, there has been a tendency to view councillors not as partners with valuable local knowledge but as people who interfere. That is a mistake. Councillors can and do bring something important to the table.

Looking at the composition of boards—and this is purely anecdotal—I have also noticed that there is a lot of recycling of housing people on housing boards. Some may argue that that is a good thing, but a heck of a lot of it goes on: if you are a CEO in one, you will be a chair or a board member in another. Therefore, it is healthy to have outside expertise and different people, but I genuinely believe that that is for the housing associations to decide for themselves. They need boards with the right mix of skills and experience, and those operating across several council areas may find representation difficult to balance. However, and there is a legitimate question as to whether Parliament should prescribe board membership in statute, I am not entirely convinced that mandating a specific number of councils on every board is necessarily the perfect solution. However, I strongly agree there is a problem that this amendment seeks to address.

I turn to Amendments 83, 84 and 85 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. I would have liked to have heard about these amendments before commenting, but following similar amendments in Committee, noble Lords will not be surprised that we strongly oppose them. Amendment 83 would make British citizenship a condition of access to social housing. At a time when people are anxious about housing, it sends a deeply damaging message to those who work in our NHS, care for our elderly relatives or educate our children—the many who contribute every day to our communities while paying their taxes. It tells them that, somehow, they do not belong. Politicians should be building bridges, not drawing lines between neighbours.

Amendment 84 points in the same direction. Of course, local connection can matter, and many councils already take it into account, but social housing must remain a lifeline for those fleeing abuse, leaving care, returning from military service or moving for work. We believe that need must come before notions of who is “local enough”.

Amendment 85 would, as we have mentioned before, in effect tell social tenants that if they work harder, earn more and improve their lives, the security of their home may come under question. That is the wrong message entirely—we should reward aspiration, not punish it—and not one of these amendments would build a single new home.

Taken together, these amendments focus on who can be excluded from social housing rather than how we solve the housing crisis. They risk fostering resentment and division at a time when our duty as political leaders is to bring communities together, show leadership and tackle the real problem. The housing crisis was not caused by people waiting for homes; it was caused by years of underbuilding. The answer is not suspicion, exclusion or scapegoating; it is more homes, more opportunity and stronger communities. For these reasons, these Benches cannot support these amendments.