My Lords, I want to raise a slightly wider point, as I see the 1% rent cut as the most recent of the attacks on social rented housing. What has triggered my comments is that the Prime Minister announced at the weekend that he wishes to bulldoze sink estates of 1960s tower blocks, where families and the employed had moved out to be replaced—in his words—by “gangs” and “ghettoes”. If that bulldozing is what local communities want, I would cheer him on. Low-rise and higher density housing is what most of us prefer—providing, of course, it remains available for social renting and is not part of social cleansing.
However, anybody who is familiar with the welfare housing of American cities, as I know many of your Lordships are, will begin to recognise his picture. US welfare housing is stigmatised, poorly built and poorly maintained, and if you get a proper job you are required to move on and out. People are therefore locked for life into unsafe streets and unsafe homes. The UK has had a very different history with social housing, ever since it built “homes fit for heroes” after the First World War. Even now, in Norwich, people put carpeting down on public stairways in social housing and carve out flower borders around the base of their flats. In those estates, you do not have a problem with arrears, graffiti or policing. We built some of the best social housing in Europe, which gradually broke the link between poverty and poor life chances in housing. We stayed together, supported each other and policed each other, and that generational stability produced what Nye Bevan called,
“the living tapestry of a mixed community”.
All noble Lords in the Chamber this evening know what makes social housing work, despite the Prime Minister’s comments this weekend. Yes, it is physically decent homes at affordable rents, but also steady jobs, because as Octavia Hill said a century or more ago, you cannot live regular lives on irregular earnings. You want decent homes, decent jobs and stable communities with low turnover. You also need competent management, chasing arrears, responding to the need for repairs and stamping out anti-social behaviour. None of this is rocket science. If that is what the Prime Minister wants, I will cheer him on. However, in my view, his policies are destroying, slice by slice, everything that he says he wants.
What is the point in rehabbing homes if at the same time you undermine the lives of those who live in them? Sink estates are caused by not just the physical fabric but, above all, the social fabric. To that, the Government’s housing policies, including this one, are doing irreparable damage.
7 pm
We know what the effect of RTBing council housing has been in local authorities. In my city, it took out 10,000 of 25,000 homes—the best homes. Most of those sold are now buy to lets, in transient tenure to students or private rented sector tenants, in poor repair with overgrown gardens and costing triple the housing benefit, which we all pay for. Anyone canvassing, as most of us do, can pick out the houses that were right to buy, because they are now the semi-neglected
or semi-derelict properties. No one wants to live next door to them. The result has been severe damage to stable communities which policed each other.
The Government are now extending that—on a voluntary basis—to housing associations, and will spend billions, which could have been invested in new housing, on just changing the tenure label and ensuring that as they, in turn, are sold off to the private rented sector, as they will be, we face another generation of sink houses.
We have had the bedroom tax, a terrible legacy of the coalition Government, imposed despite Britain already having lower space standards than anywhere else in Europe. The bedroom tax either makes rents increasingly unaffordable for those who stay or destabilises communities for those who manage to move. Next, we are going to get limited-term tenancies, so that social housing is treated as a transient, temporary tenure when for most tenants—two-thirds of them are on housing benefit—it is the only possible tenure apart from expensive, substandard and very insecure private rented sector housing.
Now add to that pay to stay: a couple each earning the new national living wage of £15,000 a year—not exactly riches—will find their social rent doubled or trebled to market rents. Even if they wish to, they could not afford to become owner-occupiers. What will happen? They will of course reduce or conceal their income, or their new rent may make them suddenly re-eligible for housing benefit, at a cost to us all. It is deeply perverse. These are the very people working hard who want to stay and who steady social housing communities, who stop them becoming the sink estates that the Prime Minister is concerned about. They are exactly the people we need, but they are the ones who will leave, re-establishing transient communities for so many people who are in need.
Finally in the Bill, we have the 1% cut in social rents, a straight betrayal of the commitments given by the Government just a year or so ago which, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and others said, will permanently lower the baseline of local authorities’ and housing associations’ rental income. That means reduced maintenance and more risk of sink estates, which the Prime Minister deplores, or reduced support for tenants at risk who need supported housing, as well as reduced resources for new build. It is not as though tenants will benefit: three-quarters of this will go straight through to HMRC without affecting tenants’ rent payments.
If the Government, the Prime Minister, DCLG or DWP were even faintly serious about tackling the physical dimensions of sink estates, cutting local authority and housing association rental incomes would be the very last thing they would do. The Prime Minister says that the Government will spend £140 million to rectify mistakes which, in their other policies, they are building in to our current social housing.
I hope the Government will support the amendments, because I worry that if we do not stop this skid, this slide into the welfare housing of the USA, sink estates will not be relegated to tower blocks, they will undermine and eat into the social fabric of our social housing across this country.