§ 3.5 p.m.
§ Mr. Clifford Kenyon (Chorley)The question which I wish to raise this afternoon is in the nature of a domestic problem. It concerns the Ministry of Supply, Chorley Rural District Council, Chorley Borough Council to a small extent, and 20 tenants of the Ministry of Supply.
In the Royal Ordnance Factory area at Euxton the Ministry have a number of service tenancies. When an employee comes into the works he sometimes receives with his employment a house, and when he leaves that employment, either to obtain another job or for other reasons, he is expected to give up the tenancy of the house.
Over the past few years the Ministry has been fairly lenient. It has allowed many tenants to remain in the houses and in a case where the husband has died it has allowed the family to continue as tenants in the house. The position has now been reached in which the Ministry has given notice to 20 tenants in order to obtain possession of their houses, so that workers in the factory can have service tenancies.
The difficulty which now arises is that Charley Rural District Council is responsible for rehousing the displaced tenants, because the Euxton area is within the area of the Chorley Rural District Council. Chorley Borough is affected only to the extent of two of the present tenants, and as that council has a rule that a tenant must be resident within the borough for five years before he can obtain a house, even those two tenants are ruled out because they are at present resident in the rural district.
The position is difficult because the housing situation in the Chorley area is very difficult. A large number of tenants are waiting for houses, and they are all people who have been on the list for three, four and five years. The rural district council is in the impossible position of finding houses for 20 tenants who are under threat of being turned out in March. It just cannot do so.
Therefore, I want to put one or two points to the Minister to see whether some compromise can be reached. In July of 2091 this year, the officials of the R.O.F. approached the Chorley Rural District Council officials with a proposition that they should build 10 houses for these displaced tenants, that in the 1956 programme they should build a further 25 houses for their workers in the factory, and in the 1957 programme they should build a further 25, making a total of 60. The rural district council was quite willing to fall in with that proposition, provided that the Ministry would meet them on the rate subsidies, but since October that appears to have fallen through. That was due to the Ministry not being able to meet the financial position of the district council and also to the change in the housing policy of the Government.
The position is that 20 tenants are to be displaced and no houses are ready for them. That is most unfortunate. The rural district council cannot meet the situation at all When the Minister sent me his letter of 7th December—for which I thank him—I had already been acquainted by some of the tenants who had received notices with the impossible position in which they found themselves. Over the years they had been trying to obtain other accommodation in the area, but they had always been up against this difficulty.
The rural district council could not take a family out of a house and transfer it into a new house, or a house it had to let, because the family was not overcrowded or in difficult circumstances. They were families living in full-sized family houses. Although it had these applications, the council had of necessity to put first in its list of tenants people living in overcrowded circumstances or other difficult circumstances. The result is that now it has no houses in which to put these tenants and the tenants cannot find homes.
I ask the Minister, first, whether he will suspend these notices and try to come to some arrangement with the rural district council for the further provision of houses in which to put these tenants. I think that he will find that the rural district council is quite willing to talk on it. Secondly, if it is necessary for him to take action and to take the matter to court and obtain ejection orders, there is in the area a large hostel, the Woodlands Hostel, which is now empty and 2092 which has been vacant for 18 months or two years. I ask him to try to find out from the Ministry of Labour whether it is possible to take that hostel over temporarily in order to accommodate these tenants so that they would have somewhere to go and the families would not have to be divided.
This matter arises from actions of the Ministry. I recognise that the difficulty has been caused by the leniency of the Ministry. If, as the tenancies became vacant—as men left their employment—the Ministry had compelled the families to find other accommodation in accordance with their service tenancy, the local authority could have found houses for one family at a time. It is easy to absorb one family over a period, but to absorb 20 families at once is impossible.
Hard though it may seem on the individual family, I suggest that when these people leave their employment the Ministry should see that at the first opportunity the family is found accommodation within the area of the Chorley Rural District. It would also be better for the rural district council periodically to build a small number of houses to accommodate these displaced tenants than, as at the moment, to try to find occupation for a large number.
There is another point in regard to the employment of people at the R.O.F. factory. I urge upon the Minister that whenever possible the people employed should be local people. There are many local people who could undertake many of the jobs that are not technical, or skilled, such as policing, caretaking, and so on. If people in the area could take over these jobs, they would not require service tenancies. They already have houses in the area and this difficulty would not then arise. When they undertook work at the R.O.F. factory and went into these houses, a number of people gave up existing tenancies of their own. Now they are asked to leave and they simply cannot obtain tenancies in other houses locally. This position causes great hardship.
My next point is a criticism of the Department. When some of the people have been in these houses for so many years, why give them notice just before Christmas? It is not a happy situation for families, less than a month before Christmas, to be faced with being told 2093 that they must find another house. The whole of the festive season is disturbed for them and although they are not expected to leave until March, nevertheless this feeling is hanging over them all the time. It would have been far better to have waited until the New Year, even though it would not have made such a happy New Year present.
I recognise the tremendous difficulty that faces the Ministry, but I hope the Parliamentary Secretary recognises also the difficulty facing both the tenants and the rural district. I hope he will try to come to some arrangement with the rural district council so that it can build and provide houses for the tenants who are to be displaced in its area.
§ 3.20 p.m.
§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply (Mr. F. J. Erroll)I am grateful to the hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Kenyon), not only for having given me some indication of the matters he was going to raise today, but also for the frank and fair way in which he has shown his appreciation of the difficulties which are all too obvious to the Department in this complicated matter of the housing of our employees and former employees. While he has criticised the Department and made some suggestions, they have been extremely fair criticisms and suggestions, which I shall certainly consider most closely.
Before I reply to the hon. Member in detail, let me say a few words about the housing policy pursued by the Ministry of Supply, because it is in the context of our general policy that the issues at Chorley must be viewed. The Department owns or controls just over 6,000 houses in different parts of the United Kingdom. Those houses provide accommodation for two classes of Ministry of Supply employees.
First, there are those such as constabulary and firemen who must live close to the factory or other establishment if they are to carry out their duties efficiently and properly. Secondly, there are those for whom the provision of accommodation is essential, if the Department is to secure and retain their services at the establishments in question. Many of those establishments are situated in out-of-the-way parts of the country, and we have had to build substantial numbers of houses if we were to hope to attract and retain the 2094 workpeople and staff necessary for the manning of those establishments.
The houses owned by the Ministry of Supply are allocated on account of the employment of the occupiers themselves, and in the normal way tenancies are ended by a week's or a month's notice. Legally—and I must stress the legal position—we are entitled to recover possession of our houses when the tenants leave our employment. The present policy, however, is that the Department seeks to regain possession of a house from a former employee only when the House is needed for a key worker who would otherwise be lost to the factory or establishment, or to house an existing employee living elsewhere in conditions of real hardship. In practice, therefore, we have exercised our rights sparingly, and in only nine cases since the war has it been necessary to serve notice to quit in order to regain possession for one of our own employees, and in only four cases have these notices been followed by court proceedings. I am speaking of instances in which the former employee had continued to live in the premises. I am not here considering cases where it has been necessary to obtain the removal of an employee who was unsatisfactory either at his work or in his conduct. I should also mention that I am not here including the military and police personnel of the Department, who are required under the conditions of their service to give up their quarters when they resign or retire.
Of our total of 6,000 houses, about a quarter are at present occupied by those who no longer work at a Ministry of Supply establishment. The Department tries always to follow a generous and fair policy towards the occupiers, its former employees. There is a long history of this matter, but following the war, when defence production was reduced, many former employees were permitted to stay on, because it was felt that in this way the Department could make a contribution to overcoming the housing shortage at that time. By the time rearmament started in 1951, however, the Department found that nearly half the houses built during the war to cater for Royal Ordnance Factories had been lost to the Department in this way. The hon. Member can see, therefore, that the Department has been faced with a very sizeable problem.
2095 With the expansion of the factories arising from the rearmament programme, many more houses were required for workers who had to be brought in from all parts of the country. The Department, nevertheless, was successful in satisfying that need without resort to notice to quit or legal proceedings, without hardship to former employees and without need to carry out new building. This has been achieved partly by the cooperation of our tenants in seeking and finding other houses, but, in the main, credit is due to the local authorities who, in many parts of the country, have given us most valuable and co-operative help. We are indeed grateful to the local authorities, and we hope that they may continue to be a help to the Department in future.
After those few general remarks about the Ministry's housing policy, I should like to turn to the position at Chorley and deal with some of the points made by the hon. Member. At Chorley there are two sites, one at the R.O.F. itself and the other at Leyland. On the R.O.F. site there are 105 tenancies for police and essential service occupiers, such as firemen who have to live on the site. There are 11 tenants in these houses who no longer work for the R.O.F. and these have all been warned recently to find other accommodation. They have been told that if they cannot give us vacant possession within three months we shall have to consider further action.
The hon. Member said that it was unfortunate that these warnings should have been sent out on 30th November, before Christmas. I should make it quite plain that these are only letters of warning and not notices to quit. It is only the first stage in the proceedings. If we had waited until the New Year the hon. Member might have come along and said that it was not fair to issue these warning letters just before Easter or, later, just before Whitsun or, later still, just before the summer holidays. It is always inconvenient for the recipient to receive a warning notice of this sort, but I think that 30th November was sufficiently in advance of Christmas. Bearing in mind the lenient and humane policy which the Department has always followed, I think that it was quite in order for us to warn the tenants on that day.
2096 The hon. Member also referred to the possibility of our suspending these notices. I should stress once again that these are not legal notices to quit. They are mere warnings that in the course of three months we shall expect the tenants to have found alternative accommodation and that if they have not been able to do so at the end of that period we shall have to think again. The notice to quit itself is, in any case, only one stage in the comparatively long proceedings of obtaining an eviction. Therefore, I do not think that the Christmas spirit of these tenants need be unduly dampened by receipt of these warning letters, particularly since, if they had so wished, they could have quite well consulted the housing manager of the site concerned and learned from him the purpose of the warning order.
I should like to say here and now that even if we have to go through the procedure of a notice to quit, followed by the obtaining of an eviction order, we still allow the tenant further time, after an eviction order has been obtained, if we are satisfied that he has made genuine efforts to obtain accommodation elsewhere or if we know that in a few weeks' time the local authority or some other body will be able to provide him with a house.
One must say here, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, that a local authority can scarcely rehouse individuals who are already satisfactorily housed. The local authority very often requires a court order to have been secured before it will consider the rehousing of the individual or family concerned. Therefore, the very humanity of our policy leads us into difficulties. We are reluctant to take court proceedings, but at the same time we know that very often, without those court proceedings the local authority will not be armed with the necessary power inside its own council to give a deserving family the accommodation which it needs.
That is why I should like to stress again that the co-operation with local authorities has been particularly valuable, and we hope it may continue. We have been able to explain our policy to local authorities, and, in particular, to the local authorities with which the hon. Gentleman is concerned, and they have been able to make their plans in advance to a certain extent.
2097 I must refer also to the other estate with which the hon. Gentleman is concerned, the Leyland bungalow estate, where there are fifty tenancies. Nine of the tenants no longer work for us; they left our employment at various dates between December, 1943, and March, 1951. The families concerned are quite small. Two of the tenants are living alone, in two cases the family consists of a man and wife only, and the other families have one or two children but not young ones. There is no question of our attempting to evict families with a large proportion or young children. In this case, the families were visited—