My Lords, it is a great honour for me to pilot this ground-breaking Private Members’ Bill through your Lordships’ House. I declare my interests as on the register, including as chair of the council of the Property Ombudsman for the private sector, as a past president and vice-president of the Local Government Association, as a member of the Crisis external advisory board and from nearly 50 years of working with housing charities and housing associations.
The Bill, which has been guided so expertly through the other place by its sponsor, Bob Blackman MP, is indeed ground-breaking because of the fundamental change it brings to the way that homelessness is tackled in this country, but also because it has followed a unique route through Parliament. The story began two years ago with a report from an inquiry initiated by the well-respected housing charity Crisis, chaired by the leading academic in this field, Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick. This report showed that very many of those becoming homeless were not receiving the help they needed and that some people were being treated very badly.
The Select Committee for Communities and Local Government in the other place, chaired by Clive Betts MP, took up the story and made proposals for action to stem the rising tide of homelessness. By great good fortune Bob Blackman, who as a London MP has a keen interest in this issue, secured second place in the ballot for a Private Member’s Bill and, working with Crisis, choose the homelessness theme. Most unusually, under Clive Betts’s leadership the CLG Select Committee then undertook full pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill. Important changes to the original version were agreed on a cross-party basis. Next came the all-important decision of the Government to back the Bill in principle. All this was just the start because an extensive and robust Committee stage followed the lengthy debate at Second Reading, with its 39 Speeches. With its seven sittings and 15 hours of discussion, the Bill Committee agreed amendments which returned for a five-hour Report, with a further 21 amendments, and Third Reading with speeches by 20 honourable Members. I suspect that no Private Member’s Bill has ever had quite so much attention and scrutiny and, ultimately, so much cross-party support in the other place.
What was achieved was the reconciliation of the conflicting interests and concerns of all the key parties. The list of these different bodies is extensive. First, there were the charities representing the interests of
the homeless people they serve: alongside Crisis, there was St Mungo’s, Shelter, Centrepoint, Homeless Link and others. Secondly, there were the vital local government interests, represented by the Local Government Association in particular. Local authorities will have responsibility for implementing the new legislation and, naturally, councils have been anxious about taking on new duties and the cost of paying for them. Thirdly, there were the interests of the organisations representing private landlords, since the private rented sector is now the source of homes for so many households, having doubled in size since 2000. Fourth and finally, there were the interests of central government, which must find the funding for the extra burdens placed on local councils. Here the lead was taken by the DCLG Minister Marcus Jones, who has proved immensely skilful—not least, I feel sure, in difficult behind-the-scenes discussions with HM Treasury.
The end result of all the negotiations is a Bill which delicately balances the interests of these different parties. It has proved acceptable—this is pretty remarkable—to all the political parties, to central and local government, to the housing charities and to the landlords’ representative bodies. I congratulate Bob Blackman, Crisis and all involved in this mammoth effort. I believe that the Minister will shortly spell out the new measures in the Bill in more detail but perhaps I could briefly summarise what it aims to achieve.
Exactly 40 years on from the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977, a landmark in itself, the Homelessness Reduction Bill seeks to build on that foundation. It reaches out to the homeless people who have not been helped by the earlier Act because they have not been deemed as in “priority need”, mostly because they are single or in childless couples with no specialist problems. For these people, a new duty on councils is introduced to provide them with the advice and support that can get them off the streets or prevent them ending up there in the first place. For those families and vulnerable people who are regarded as in priority need, for whom the 1977 Act has been invaluable in requiring councils to find them somewhere to live, the Bill now goes further: it ensures the process of assisting them starts earlier, two months before they seem quite likely to become homeless, most often because they have been given notice to quit by their landlord. Again, the aim is to prevent homelessness rather than to pick up the pieces too late in the day.
In so far as prevention succeeds, the Bill will bring down the cost of homelessness in terms of human misery, as well as in hard cash. Costs follow directly from a priority household having to be found temporary accommodation and indirectly from a non-priority household being forced to sleep rough with all the attendant health and social costs that brings. These measures bolster the Government’s important homelessness prevention programme, for which extra funds have recently been found.
Some exemplary local authorities are already engaged in strenuous efforts to help potentially homeless households. I recently saw the work being done by the London Borough of Lambeth against almost insuperable odds. Lambeth has a big team dealing sensitively with heart-breaking cases, as I know from sitting in on
interviews there. The caseworkers will refer those who are non-priority cases to specialist support services; they will mediate with landlords, maybe helping tenants with a deposit or organising discretionary housing payments to top up inadequate rental entitlements; sometimes they will even pay off some rent arears; and always they will treat people in trouble with respect.
Sadly we know there are also councils that seem to do as little as possible to assist people before a real crisis strikes. Bad practice too often takes the form of telling those tenants who have been served notice that they cannot be helped until that notice has expired, until court action against them has been taken, or even, in the worst cases, until the bailiffs are at the door. A family that has been forcibly evicted will find it virtually impossible ever to secure a new tenancy elsewhere. The trauma and disruption will stay with them, particularly for children, for years to come, and then follow the cost and distress of temporary accommodation, perhaps in an awful, unsafe bed-and-breakfast hotel.
Sometimes, moreover, it has seemed that certain local authorities have used the excuse that someone has failed to co-operate, even if they have only failed to attend an interview, maybe for very good reason, to refuse them any further help. For some councils, a whole cultural shift is needed to go from finding reasons for doing nothing to making efforts to help people pre-empt, prevent and avoid homelessness, with proper assessment of their requirements and a formal plan for their future. The Bill includes a provision for new codes of practice, which would be the subject of extensive consultation and parliamentary scrutiny, to up the game of everyone.
There is no denying that this Bill places extra burdens on local authorities. It will cost millions to implement even if, in the longer term, a reduction in homelessness leads to savings. I congratulate the Minister, Marcus Jones, on securing £61 million, which represents the Government’s estimate of costs over the next two years, but many in local government, while not wanting to avoid the new duties the legislation will bring, believe actual costs will be a lot more. Pressure from the Local Government Association and the Opposition Benches in the other place has led to the Government agreeing to a full-scale review before the initial two-year funding runs out. This is a very important commitment by the Minister. With councils suffering badly from inadequate resources, particularly for social care, it is extremely important that this funding is at the right level. If costs turn out to be more than the Government anticipate, I would certainly expect additional resources to be forthcoming, since that is the commitment which this Bill implies, but I realise the Treasury will make no promises for a period more than three years from today.
It is not for me to try to unpack or disturb the agreed content of the Bill after all that has gone before, but this is an opportunity to air some wider thoughts about homelessness in the UK, about the context for this new legislation and about the issues yet to be resolved alongside the implementation of the Bill. This brings me to two wider policy points, and I feel sure other noble Lords will add their broader comments on issues of homelessness.
It is obvious that problems of homelessness will continue so long as there are not enough homes to go round. Addressing the chronic housing shortages with which we are now all so familiar is clearly a prerequisite. I commend the Government’s determination to get far more homes built, and I think the housing White Paper takes us in the right direction, not least in its central recognition that new homes to rent are needed as well as new homes to buy.
Increasing supply to match demand is a five to 10-year project that calls for all hands on deck, no longer relying on a handful of big housebuilders but backing councils, housing associations and build-to-rent developers as well as smaller building firms, retirement housing providers, self-build, custom housebuilding and new garden villages and garden towns. We cannot conquer homelessness or even reverse its alarming growth while, year after year, we have more new households formed than new homes built. The Bill can give councils new responsibilities to guide, advise, help and support but, if there are not the homes available, we will still see families moved to other areas, people sleeping in doorways on our high streets and people impoverished by their housing costs. It will take every new measure in the housing White Paper and more to tackle this underlying, abject deficiency in this country’s housing system.
If my broader comment is one of encouragement for the direction being taken by the Department for Communities and Local Government, I am afraid that is not the case for the actions of the other key government department, the Department for Work and Pensions. In its understandable but unrealistic efforts to cut the cost of housing benefit, the DWP is busy undermining the efforts of the DCLG and local authorities and, indeed, of this new Bill.
Our Shelter briefing on this Bill says that:
“Housing Benefit is one of the best tools to improve affordability and prevent homelessness by allowing those on low incomes to house themselves without having to turn to their local authority”.
Cuts to housing support accelerate and exaggerate current homelessness problems because they block off opportunities for accommodation in the private rented sector. I must leave on one side the DWP’s unfortunate plans to limit rents charged for specialist supported and sheltered housing where, in theory, DWP funds via local authorities will top up local housing allowance payments. That issue is a big worry in the homelessness sector, but I have a bigger concern about rent ceilings, benefit caps and freezes on the local housing allowance. These cuts mean fewer and fewer landlords will take in anyone who relies on government help with housing. Increasingly, there is a widening shortfall between the rents which landlords can obtain from those not reliant on any housing benefit and the rents which housing benefit will cover. Shelter figures show that, by 2020, the local housing allowance will not cover rents for even the cheapest properties in over 80% of local authority areas.
These real-term rent reductions come on top of the hazards for landlords from the difficulties poorer households face in finding deposits and rent in advance, as well as the DWP’s insistence on paying housing support to the tenant not the landlord. The result is
not simply that, in seeking to prevent homelessness, councils and charities will find fewer and fewer landlords willing to accept the people they want to assist; the bigger problem is that, gradually, more and more existing tenants will find their landlords ending their current shorthold tenancies because reduced housing benefit support means those tenants can afford a rent only well below that available on the open market. As Shelter says:
“By far the largest cause of homelessness is people being unable to find somewhere else to live when their private tenancy ends”—
out goes the mother with two children; in goes the two-earner couple or even the three students. It seems quite likely that over the next couple of years, we could see a large proportion of the 800,000 or so households who are currently in the private rented sector and receiving housing help from the DWP being asked to leave. This will create a crisis indeed. I simply ask DWP Ministers to recognise that they cannot buck the market: if the least affluent are to be housed in the private rented sector—as they must be, because there is a woeful lack of available council and housing association accommodation—then the DWP must return to paying the same rent as the landlord can get from other tenants. The freeze on local housing allowances must go.
The Bill is not going to end homelessness. That will require, first, massive efforts to ease housing shortages—on which an important start is being made, I hope—and secondly, a better understanding by the Department for Work and Pensions that it is creating the problem, not the solution to homelessness. Nevertheless the Bill can, and I believe will, reduce homelessness, reduce the numbers suffering the horrors of living on our streets and reduce the far greater numbers of people who, in the absence of relatively inexpensive guidance and concrete support, are forced into hidden homelessness—sofa-surfing or living in ghastly conditions. Although this occasion brings the opportunity for us to put our wider concerns about the housing scene firmly on the record, I hope very much the Bill receives strong support from your Lordships. I warmly congratulate Bob Blackman and all those who have brought this ground-breaking Bill before us. I beg to move.
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