My Lords, this is a very different sort of amendment, and it is about a different sort of priorities. Our decisions, wherever we make them in government, should be about giving priority to people whose needs are evidently greater than ours and whose potential is diminished because those needs are not met. One of the many failures of the current Housing and Planning Bill, as has been pointed out over many days now and with regard to many aspects of the Bill—from starter homes to pay to stay—is that it marginalises people who are in real need and who cannot take advantage of market forces. This amendment is about one such group: disabled people with mobility difficulties, whose outstanding need is for accessible and adaptable homes.
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In the debate so far, noble Lords such as my noble friend Lady Lister, who is not in her place at the moment, have raised extremely important questions about the housing needs of disabled people and the need to ensure that the existing stock is protected. But we have heard very little indeed about the need to plan and provide for the needs of disabled people in the present or the future. There has been no place for them so far in the debate on starter homes, let alone when it comes to planning for the needs of the whole community. I am bound to reflect on the fact that in this week of all weeks, when the position of disabled people has come under such scrutiny in relation to tax breaks for better-off people, yet again we have an instance where the thrust of policy is towards those who can afford a
reasonable amount of money for a starter home and where a Bill is silent on the needs of people who have no voice.
There have been few opportunities so far to address the needs of working-age families, let alone the predicament of elderly and disabled people. The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, will speak to her amendment, which in a way is twinned with mine. We have done so much together in recent years on lifetime homes and we are in harness here. To give a very short background, it is only when one has experienced limitation on mobility that one understands the nature of the obstacles, which are everywhere, to having a full life. I have not, and therefore I can only imagine the frustration and anxiety, and we are not short on imagination and data. The most recent data consistently show that the majority of housing in England has very poor levels of accessibility. The English Housing Survey 2012 found that 95% of the total housing stock—that is, 21.5 million homes—is not fully visitable by disabled people, and are hardly compliant with lifetime homes standards in their lack of basic features. In short, disabled people are simply shut out of 21.5 million homes in this country.
What is a nuisance for many is infinitely worse for disabled people, and the situation is deteriorating. The number of disabled people waiting for a home that meets their needs has risen by 17% in the last five years. Aspire, which has been very helpful in framing this amendment, has found that 86% of people with a spinal injury are unlikely to be discharged into a home that meets their physical needs, and 300,000 disabled households live in accommodation that is simply unsuitable. That comes from Leonard Cheshire Disability. Some 24,000 wheelchair users are in urgent need of wheelchair-accessible social or affordable housing. Many others, of course, need to be able to rent or buy suitable homes.
We all know that it is a truism that poor housing means poor health, but for disabled people living in places that reduce their ability even further it has a massive impact on their physical and mental health. I refer noble Lords to a recent report by Loughborough University, The Health and Wellbeing of Spinal Cord Injured Adults and the Family: Examining Lives in Adapted and Unadapted Homes. What is described in that report makes for pretty dreadful reading: the anxiety, the loss of independence, the loss of opportunity and the sense of despair. One person simply says:
“It’s depressing living in here, like this, in a house that doesn’t meet my basic needs … I’m at rock bottom … I just sit here. I can get to the back door but that’s as far as I go”.
Those of us who have the luxury of free movement should try to imagine that. Living in an unadapted home means not being able to do the necessary things, let alone the desirable things such as getting out and about, and 30% of the research participants in this study reveal that they had even contemplated suicide.
The other thing we know is that the costs fall on the NHS and the social care budget: there are more weeks in hospital waiting for suitable accommodation; a bed in an NHS spinal unit costs £960 a day; the cost of one hour’s social care a day is £5,000 a year. But if the kitchen and bathroom are inaccessible, it is a lot more than that. Some 200,000 starter homes are being planned
without the slightest reference to what local people with disabilities might need or make use of. It is that lack of awareness and of ambition that prompted me to table the amendment.
The Minister will no doubt tell me that the NPPF requires local planning authorities to meet the housing needs of disabled people in their local plans. Will he tell me how many LPAs have actually identified this need and reflected it in their local plans? How many local plans are still incomplete or not signed off? How many LPAs actually know how many wheelchair users they should provide for?
There are some outstanding local authorities. Brighton & Hove, for example, has used Section 106 to require developers to include accessible affordable homes in their schemes. Another, Dartford Borough Council, has in the past enabled the development of accessible, affordable homes through granting exemption or relief from CIL, and, of course, the GLA has been an outstanding leader. But they are the exceptions. The fact that they have to use Section 106 and CIL to incentivise the development of accessible homes demonstrates the extent of market failure and the market’s inability to develop such housing.
It is a simple argument: if one council can do it, all can. All local authorities need to know the extent and diversity of the need in their local area and be able to plan how best to meet it. Some are better at planning and providing than others. The amendment we tabled is very simple: it seeks to raise the debate by seeking to impose a duty on all local authorities specifically to assess the level of need for accessible, adaptable and wheelchair-user dwellings, and make this explicit in local plans. This would establish a statutory footing for the future supply of what is so desperately needed. I beg to move.