HC Deb 06 February 1967 vol 740 cc1311-22

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Charles R. Morris.]

1.13 a.m.

Mr. Hugh D. Brown (Glasgow, Provan)

The Minister of State and I seem to be singularly unfortunate in the timing of Adjournment debates. We last took part in one at 5.30 a.m., and even with his new exalted position, on which I congratulate him, and the procedural reforms that are supposed to have occurred in the House, we still find ourselves here at one o'clock in the morning. But I had better not waste any more time on that.

I welcome the Report "Scotland's Older Houses". the Report of a Subcommittee of the Scottish Housing Advisory Committee. It gives me the opportunity to use the Report for the subject of this debate. It has occasioned national interest. The Scottish Trade Union Conference has also taken the matter up. It has even brought forth a circular from the Scottish Office, which is no mean feat.

Some people say that there is nothing fresh in the Report. But I think that at least there have been some fresh minds looking at an old problem. For this reason, I certainly welcome it. I have one or two minor observations and criticisms; they are, indeed, minor. I do not like the reference in paragraphs 132 and 133 to cleansing and the lack of liaison between certain unspecified departments in unspecified local authorities. I always feel that that is a most unfair way of presenting something, even though they are trying to shelter a local authority from this public criticism. I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to sort that one out and pass on the criticism to whichever local authority it refers to.

As to the photographs, I can never understand why, when in an official or semi-official document photographs of decaying property are used, the streets cannot be named, because I rather suspect that the property photographed has long since disappeared—at least, I hope so. It is not an uncommon fault, this. It is even found in Life and Work, the monthly magazine of the Church of Scotland; it uses a photograph of the Gorbals and it includes a Labour candidate who was a City Treasurer in the City of Glasgow, and I am quite sure he has been dead almost twenty years. This is the kind of thing which sometimes spoils what may be a worth-while report.

To come to the Report itself and paragraph 1 and the remit: to examine the present statutory provisions relating to the determination of unfitness for human habitation and to make recommendations for amendments. Paragraph 2 points out the difficulty of this when it says: We have had to interpret our remit widely. … Furthermore we could not isolate the issue of unfit housing from that of the improvement of old but ill-equipped houses and that of ensuring that good houses were adequately maintained. Finally we had to consider all these issues within the framework of the national housing programme, and the adequacy of the resources currently being devoted to housing. In other words, it is almost quite impossible to deal with this subject in a narrow way, and one has to wander a wee bit, and perhaps I will be doing the same, too.

I want to deal with this in three parts: first, the role and responsibility of the central Government—and central Governments; second, the problem of Glasgow and its efforts to solve its problem; and third, slum clearance and the question of unfit houses and tolerable standards.

So far as the central Government are concerned, paragraph 73 of the Report really, as it says, constitutes "an indictment of Government policy", and it goes on: We place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the central Government…The central Government have failed to provide the necessary leadership and the resources to encourage, assist and (in places) to compel local authorities to tackle the problem with the drive which it requires. I know that the Report really refers to the previous central Government—

Mr. George Younger (Ayr)

Why?

Mr. Brown

—because in this regard we hear a lot of talk about figures which can be obtained of completions in Scotland: 40,000 is accepted as a realistic figure, or a not unreasonable figure. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes. Hon. Members opposite will have plenty of time to argue this one out, including the Pollok by-election. In the ten years when Members opposite were in power, I reckon they lost the people of Scotland on the average 10,000 new houses per year for 10 years.

Mr. Gordon Campbell (Moray and Nairn)

Nonsense.

Mr. Brown

In only one year did they exceed 30,000 houses completed from all sources, at a time when labour and materials were plentiful; in other words, when the pressure was not on labour and materials, as it is today. The Advisory Committee's Report itself is a result of this Government's action in reconstitut- ing the Advisory Committee which had been allowed to go into disuse.

May I refer to the Scottish Development Department's Report for last year and quote some of the wonderful overspill successes which were expected under the previous Government's legislation. In Alyth an agreement was concluded with Glasgow in 1959 for 250 houses. The total completed up to September last year was nil. In Forfar the figure was 150 houses, and the total number of houses completed was nil. In Perth the figure was 200,000 houses and the number completed was nil. In Stranraer the figure was 600 houses and the number completed was nil.

These were all good, solidly Conservative-held towns which were supposed to be going to co-operate in making the overspill effort a success. If, when they were in Government, hon. Members opposite had applied half the energy and drive to solving the housing problem which they applied to pursuing rent increases and the policies which followed the Rent Act, we might have had more houses now. The crocodile tears of some Conservative Members when writing articles about this report for the Press are fantastic.

Mr. G. Campbell

rose—

Mr. Brown

I will not give way during an Adjournment debate.

May I refer to paragraph 64 of the Report. The efforts which Glasgow has made come out well. But the Report says: Glasgow has a reputation for bad housing conditions, and despite great efforts by the corporation we have found that this reputation is unfortunately justified. We have seen conditions in Glasgow that can be described only as appalling. Families are condemned to live in atrocious conditions which should shock the national conscience, and we believe would do so if they were better known. One of the unfortunate aspects of the problem is that even in Glasgow many people do not know about the bad housing conditions.

Not enough credit is given to the positive achievements of Glasgow and the number of houses which they have completed. I pay tribute to past and present conveners of Glasgow Corporation. Glasgow is often maligned. The Corporation's solid achievements are overlooked in focussing attention on the foul conditions that cause mental and physical deterioration to the minds and the health of people, with all the results of escapism that one associates with slum conditions.

In Glasgow there were 5,000 completions last year, and they have an estimated programme of 6,000 completions a year from 1967 to 1970. That is not just outstanding, it is magnificent considering all the difficulties that Glasgow has to overcome and the lack of sites. Glasgow has to deal with roughly 1,700 unfit houses per year, and in a voluntary way it has had to accept over 3,000 houses as gifts from owners who wanted to get rid of them; they had no great expectation of life, but the Corporation has had to spend over £100,000 in keeping them in a habitable state, to keep them going for a few years. The Corporation has experimented with the Kent Road and Tollcross Road schemes, which, I must confess, for a variety of reasons have not been very successful.

There are serious implications in this housing shortage. Overspill takes some of the best citizens of Glasgow away. We cannot indulge in housing co-operative schemes and we cannot have any owner-occupation in the City. In 1965 the proportion of houses built for owner-occupation in Glasgow was 3.5 per cent.; in Scotland 27 per cent.; and the average in England, 50 per cent. If owner-occupation is desirable—and I think it is—why should not Glasgow have its share? The housing shortage is responsible for teachers and policemen leaving the City. They cannot get decent houses or houses of their own choice within the City. We can hardly even afford to contemplate taking advantage of a local broadcasting station because of the burden that we face with redevelopment and other efforts which add charges to the rates. I think Glasgow has done a magnificent job in extremely difficult circumstances.

What about slum clearance? Paragraph 74 of the Report makes reference to this problem and it suggests that some of the figures given by Glasgow in response to a circular from the Government in 1964 are meaningless because they under-played or under-estimated the houses that were unfit. I think 11,000 unfit houses was all that Glasgow said they had in 1964, but of course this was nothing like the number of unfit houses. This was what Glasgow reasonably expected to be able to do in the period covered, and this is a serious matter which is covered quite fully in the Report. It is one of the suggestions, or recommendations, of the Report that those trying to decide what an unfit house is should look at the matter with greater definition.

I cannot possibly hope to cover all the points in the Report, nor all the suggestions, comments or recommendations made in it. But to summarise what I think should be done, I am suggesting that the Government should accept an eight-point programme.

First, there should be a full inquiry into the overspill arrangements, a look at the agreements that have not worked and the payments that have to be made by Glasgow, which I think are completely out of order. Last year only 1,400 families were rehoused through overspill outside the City, when the target was 3,000 families. The programme should by now have been up to about 24,000 families rehoused, but it has only rehoused about 13,000 families.

Second, I should like another look at the land use inside and outside the City, for example Cowlairs being accepted as an industrial estate and Queenslie, where almost 90 acres is going begging, might be sufficient justification for the Department to have another look at land use.

Third, there should be an examination of out-county estate arrangements. I am not happy about this if it increases the problems in Glasgow. Fourth, what about another new town? Fifth, what about a Committee to examine the social and economic effects of overspill, redevelopment and bad housing, and the effect that they are having on the financial structure in Glasgow?

Sixth, what about a pilot scheme for declining areas such as Dennistoun or Queens Cross? If we need to grasp the thorny nettle of rents, let us do so. Let us not hand out any more public money to private landlords.

Seven, if present legislation is not flexible enough, let us have new legislation that will give effect to the promises that were made to give special assistance to the areas with the greatest need. And eight, why not have some kind of public discussion with the Scottish Office, the Corporation, Members of Parliament, and the S.C.T.U., to air the problems of Glasgow, which can only be solved if a Scottish effort is made to solve these problems?

I do not want to be cynical, but if Glasgow were 350 miles nearer London, I would hazard a guess that we might have made more progress. And if it were 30 miles nearer Greenock or Kilmarnock we might get more attention to it.

When one looks at this Report and looks at what has been done in a short time, and pinpointing the weaknesses of the present legislation and pinpointing the social conditions that should be of concern to us all, I am confident that we shall get some action from this Government because we certainly did not get it from the last one.

1.30 a.m.

The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Dr. J. Dickson Mabon)

I am obliged to my hart Friend for initiating this short debate on this very important Report. Due to the Secretary of State's decision, I have had the privilege of being Chairman of the Scottish Housing Advisory Committee since we reconstituted it in 1965. I have never understood why all these Committees were abandoned in 1951 and 1952. They were casualities of the change of Government in 1951. All the Committees and the previous ones did excellent work, including "Choosing Council Tenants", which is still the standard text-book on housing allocation. This subject will be dealt with in the next report of the Advisory Committee.

The terms of reference of the Sub-Committee were agreed upon by its members, most of whom are also members of the main Committee. We took no exception to the way in which they interpreted them so widely—quite rightly. We agreed that the Sub-committee should write its own report based on its work and present it to the mother Committee, which would advise my right hon. Friend as to whether it should be published in the public interest by the Advisory Committee. That is what the prefatory note means at the commencement of the Report.

We have sent a copy to each local authority and to many other bodies which gave advice. They will make their comments, particularly on those provisions which would have to be translated into statute if my right hon. Friend were to accept the burden of the Report. There are some very good recommendations in it. The Committee put much hard work in to and I pay tribute to Mr. Cullingworth and his colleagues, who worked like beavers for nearly a year to get the Report out to the rest of the Committee in time.

I shall not comment now on the major recommendations which would entail reform of the public health laws and many housing Statutes. Nor shall I comment on the need for definition of "unsatisfactory environment" or "minimum desirable standards" or "satisfactory standards" in present Statutes. All this will involve legislation.

But there is this to be said at once, particularly about the crocodile tears in some newspapers.

The problem of housing in Scotland has existed for decades. Anyone would think from these comments that slums had existed only under this Government. Some of the newspapers appear to have discovered them only since the Report. One commentator, not renowned for his lack of partisanship, has written: Action is needed now on a scale never before envisaged by the Scottish Office. That is patent nonsense. These slums have been there for very many years. In our 1965 White Paper, we said that up to 500,000 houses were needed to renew sub-standard housing. But we confessed that this figure was a guess. One of the extraordinary things I discovered when appointed a junior Minister at the Scottish Office was that we had no measurement of the problem. Lord Kelvin said that if one wants to study a problem one must first measure it. Mr. Cullingworth is one of our principal lieutenants in this matter and we commissioned the Scottish Housing survey. I hope that the results will be available to the House by the mid-summer or autumn, giving the first comprehensive assessment of what is the position not only as regards the slums but also of all standards of housing.

We can therefore look forward to a few more "bombs"—if this is a "bomb"—bursting on the political scene when we tell the people the cruel facts about Scottish housing. I do not want to follow too much the points raised by my hon. Friend at this stage but to put on record one or two facts about slum clearance in Glasgow. The Corporation has always fulfilled its obligations to the Government. When it has said that it would clear slum houses it has done so, and I cannot say that of everyone. And it has done so on time. In the years 1955–67, to the end of this year, it promised to clear 23,000 slums.

Up to September 1966, in other words with 15 months still to go, the Corporation has cleared 34,784 slums. We are not satisfied, and neither is the Corporation, with this rate of demolition. We have seen a very significant increase in the clearance of slums in Glasgow and in Scotland generally. If one takes the available figures—we do not have the figures until the end of last year—for slum clearance for Scotland as a whole, one sees that the average in the last five years of the previous Government was of the order of 12,000 a year. In 1965 we cleared 15,534, and up to the end of September last we cleared 12,428. This year we hope for the highest figure of clearance since the end of the war.

We are in the fortunate position in Glasgow of seeing the Corporation embark on its C.D.A. programme, involving for example the clearance of Anderston and Cowcaddens and some of the worse parts of the old city. The clearance is bound to get rid of a great number of slums. A lot of sub-standard housing will be swept away in addition.

In our two Measures so far in dealing with the financial aspect of the programme we have faced up to the introduction of a new comprehensive development grant contained in the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1966. This gives local planning authorities help towards the cost of acquiring and clearing slum areas suitable for redevelopment.

The Housing (Financial Provisions Etc.) (Scotland) Bill which we will discuss again very shortly, I hope, will provide local authorities with a much greater housing subsidy on all houses approved since November, 1965, and a large number of others approved since 1st January, 1965. In effect the new subsidy will double the present amount of grants and just as significant, it will peg the rate of interest.

The Report suggests three things where action should be taken. The first calls for quicker demolition of the worst houses. The expanded building programme and the financial measures to which I have referred are the prerequisites to this. It also demands the streamlining of the procedures to get on clearing these slum houses and the clarification of the law. This requires a lot of discussion with local authorities and we have given them until October to give their advice.

The second proposal was for a programme of the essential repair and immediate improvement—that is, a programme of "patching". This is very difficult in Glasgow. The commentators in the Report talk about Birmingham, saying that it had done better than Glasgow. One has to be fair in this and look at the standard of housing being improved in Birmingham, compared with that in Glasgow, where we are cursed with the old-style Victorian tenements of the 1880s which are very difficult to modernise. In Birmingham, even though the houses are bad, the structure of them was not of the kind which did not allow reasonable patching.

In Scotland we have something like a limit of expenditure of £1,400 to modernise a house and that is in excess of the figure in England, but even with that sum it is difficult to bring tenement houses up to modern standards. Many people do not want to return to houses which have been patched up, and have to live in a slum for 15 to 20 years. Many would prefer to wait for a council house. This is a proposition we want to discuss with the authorities outside Glasgow. We are in a good position because we will also discuss it with Glasgow.

I have not time to deal in detail with all the points raised by my hon. Friend, but my noble friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State will meet housing convenors in a few days' time to discuss how we can implement the Cullingworth Report in Scotland. In conjunction with that, he will be having discussions with the Convenor of Housing in Glasgow. I have been in the fortunate position of discussing with Glasgow for nearly two and a quarter years the problems arising out of housing and planning. We have managed to extend our idea of the five-year programme to what happens beyond 1970, after the five-year programme has elapsed.

I take the second point made by my hon. Friend concerning land use inside and outside Glasgow. We have examined that. I shall examine the two points specifically mentioned by my hon. Friend, certainly about examining land use outside Glasgow. We hope to have a meeting with Renfrewshire County Council and all other authorities in Renfrew-shire on 3rd April to discuss land use in the county. We discussed this matter with Lanarkshire on 13th January. I hope that we will be discussing it with Stirlingshire on 3rd March, which will settle, I hope, the position in Stirling-shire for at least the time being. We have had discussions with Dunbartonshire and I shall be continuing them on Friday. In other words, I have for some time been active on this second point.

There is, however, the question of overspill. My hon. Friend is quite right. There is great concern about this. The previous Government, for all kinds of reasons—some good, some not so good—did not manage to get up to the figure of 3,000 families a year which was intended to be a running average over ten years. It took them almost 10 years to get up to a figure of 3,000. Last year—we all regret it—the overspill was less than 2,000 within the conventional agreements. We are, therefore, substantially in deficit. Hence the reason why we have gone into the question of out-county additions—they can only be additions—to the conventional overspill agreement.

I admit that there are financial implications, which, perhaps, are unfair to Glasgow, but I promised Glasgow Cor- poration that we will do a proper financial analysis with them in time for a meeting with the Corporation on 9th June. I have told the local authorities in Scotland that we will report back to them as well as to Glasgow our findings concerning the financial implications for the city. which may mean some readjustment of financial grants in Scotland, with particular reference to the new burden on Glasgow.

We can go no further than that at present because, as the right hon. Member for Argyll (Mr. Noble) would be the first to acknowledge, there is a lot more to this than simply consulting local authorities. There are the Treasury and other agencies of government which have to be consulted if one is to proceed a step further.

We have inaugurated a fifth new town. It is salutary to realise how long the process takes from the pronouncement about Irvine, getting the area designated, the procedure of public inquiry and the rest. I think that it was started when the party opposite were in office. I do not complain of that. It was announced just before the election—[Interruption.]—in August, 1964. But it has taken a considerable time to go through all the statutory procedures.

It is certainly fair to say that we may need a sixth new town in Scotland, and perhaps sooner than we think. We have, however, to get on with the fifth new town, to get building started there, get on with the out-county estates and then give thought as to whether—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock on Monday evening, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at seventeen minutes to Two o'clock.