HC Deb 10 June 1980 vol 986 cc461-9

' Section 10A(3) of the Housing (Scotland) Act 1974 is hereby repealed.'—[Mr. Cook.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Cook

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The clause repeats the terms of an amendment that I moved when we considered the Housing (Financial Provisions) (Scotland) Bill in 1978. As some hon. Members are present who did not sit on the Committee, including the Minister with responsibility for housing, I may be forgiven for giving some background to the nature of the new clause and the amendment, that I moved two years ago, and what it would achieve.

In the course of the passage of the 1978 Act, the previous Labour Government created a new repairs grant that was available to owners of property, not necessarily within a housing action area, in order to assist them to carry out improvements to their property. It was aimed at repairs that are desperately required, in tenemental areas, to stairs, roofs and, where necessary, sound proofing. There is enough background noise in the Chamber at the moment to merit some sound proofing here.

The trouble is that the 1978 Act, as well as intending the repairs grant to be an incentive to encourage owners to carry out repairs, particularly to the mutual parts of the property, applied a means test for eligibility for the grant. This is objectionable, because there arises a confusion of two separate principles. The grant attempts to provide an incentive to owners to carry out repairs while carrying out an income support function in combating the hardship that would arise among owners faced with carrying out repairs without assistance from public funds.

That confusion of purpose is undesirable. It defeats the object of the whole exercise. If the object is to provide an incentive to owners to carry out repairs, the incentive should be provided equally to all owners irrespective of whether they can satisfy a test of hardship. The terms of the statute refer to hardship. They do not seek simply to exclude those who are comfortably off and can afford to carry out the repairs.

The grants are confined solely to the small number of owners who can establish that they are unable to pay the bill without hardship. The trouble is that the provision has frustrated the purpose of the grants to provide an incentive and has not provided the stimulus for repair of tenement areas that is desperately required. In providing for the test of hardship, the Government, at the time, were short-sighted. If the Government resist this amendment they will be equally short-sighted. In the longer run, there will be real savings to the public purse if the present owners of tenement areas can be persuaded to carry out reasonable maintenance.

Improvement grants were created in order to encourage owners to improve their property so that the property did not decay into a slum that would have to be cleared with the result that the owners would be rehoused at far greater expense to the public purse than arises from the provision of improvement grants as an incentive to the owners to avoid that situation. In five or six years' experience of operating the housing action areas it has become clear that the threat to tenemental areas arises not so much from lack of internal approvals as from the crumbling structure of the tenements and faults in the drains and the roofs, which threaten the long-term stability of the tenements.

It is anomalous that improvement grants should continue to be made available for internal improvements that are not subject to means test—it is appreciated that such a test would frustrate the incentive—although a grant is not provided for repairs to the mutual parts, essential to the stability of the building, without a means test.

Other difficulties have flowed from a means test in a repair grant intended to provide an incentive. The first is that the test of hardship is left to be defined by the local authority. That is unsatisfactory, and amounts to passing the buck of a decision to the local authority. It is particularly unsatisfactory at a time when housing authorities are no longer the social work authorities and have no staff or expertise to make a judgment on what is hardship and what is the right level of income support.

More seriously, it is difficult for a local authority to apply the test of hardship in connection with a grant that relates to repairs that may stretch over one or two years. It is comparatively easy to apply a test of hardship in assessing income for the purposes of supplementary benefit, rent allowances or rebates, because those calculations are done on a week-to-week basis, depending on the income of the claimant in the week of application. But with repair grants, the owner applies for a grant, receives approval, and then sets out on the lengthy business of obtaining contractors, persuading them to start work, getting the work completed satisfactorily, having it inspected by the local authority and persuading the authority to pay the bill. That process can take anything up to two years.

Mr. McQuarrie

Rubbish.

Mr. Cook

It is not rubbish. I have considerable experience of the difficulties involved.

Mr. McQuarrie

So have I.

Mr. Cook

I do not deny that the hon. Gentleman has considerable experience. I merely assert that I have considerable experience of the problems of owners in tenement areas who seek to get repairs carried out. I shall refer later to a case that has been going on for three years, where the work has still not yet started.

The process can take two years and at the end the income of the owner can be radically different from his income when he started on the process two years earlier. In Edinburgh there have been cases of undergraduates who owned properties in tenemental areas applying for repair and improvement grants while they were students but who, when the point of payment came round, had qualified and were earning reasonable salaries. That poses for the local authority problems that do not arise in any other test of means applied for income support functions.

A number of practical problems have arisen from the conflation of the purposes of a repairs grant as an incentive for repairs to be carried out and as an income support because it is means tested. That is why I sought to delete the provision from the repairs grant proposed by the Labour Government two years ago. The attempt commanded support that went wider than merely the Labour Benches. A letter from COSLA to all members of the Committee indicated that it supported the deletion of the test of means on the grounds that the purpose of a repairs grant should be to preserve the property and that the financial position of the applicant should not be relevant in considering an application for grant. The hon. Member for Southend, East (Mr. Taylor), as he is in his new translation, was the Opposition spokesman on the Committee. He said : it worries me that there is no standard grant for repairs. There is a standard grant for improvements which everyone, irrespective of income, can get, and that undoubtedly encourages people to apply for improvement grants and to undertake improvements. I think that there is a case for having a modest standard repair grant which would be available to everyone. That would undoubtedly result in a greater incentive to carry out repairs."—[Official Report, First Scottish Standing Committee. 2 February 1978 ; c. 237.] Of course, it is a favourite tease of hon. Members to produce quotations made by Opposition spokesmen that they are not carrying out in government, but there is considerable force in the views expressed by the hon. Member for Southend, East.

We can now see what has happened in the two years since we deliberated in that Committee. We must accept that the uptake of the repairs grant has been appalling. If hon. Members ask their local directors of housing and directors of building control they will receive the almost unanimous advice that the uptake of the repairs grant has been derisory. The simple reason is that the grant applies only to those who satisfy the test of hardship. In any tenement that is likely to apply to only two or three of the owners. Those owners can obtain a grant to carry out repairs, and may be willing, indeed enthusiastic, to do so, but they will be unable to persuade other owners in the tenement, who will get no grant, to carry out repairs.

As a result, few grants have been made under the repairs grant provision and, therefore, the state of the roofs, the stair wells and the drains of the tenements in our inner urban areas is, arguably, worse than it was two years ago when we made this provision.

11 pm

The longer we delay providing proper, reasonable provision from the public purse to encourage investment in the repair and maintenance of those buildings the faster they will continue to crumble. We are laying up for ourselves a substantial bill in the future.

I accept that if my amendment were carried there would be a modest increase in public expenditure. It would not be that much, because one of the problems facing directors of building control at present is the enormous growth of bad debts. At the end of the day it is those directors who have to authorise the carrying out of the essential roof repairs in default of the owners, and they frequently find it very difficult to recoup the expense.

The cost to the public purse would not be a gross cost. It could be set against the cost at present incurred by the inability to recover bad debts. In the longer run any public expenditure that we undertake in this context will be more than recouped in the investment that it will represent in giving a longer life to those tenement areas. If we fail to take that step now I must warn the House, from what I see in my constituency every weekend, that it is only a matter of time before we are faced with another major spasm of demolition such as we faced in the 1960s. That will represent a far greater cost to the public purse than the modest change that I am now proposing in order to forestall that situation.

Mr. Rifkind

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will agree that the repair and maintenance of property must continue primarily to be the responsibility of the owner of the property. That is not a particularly radical proposition, but I am sure that it will have the agreement of the whole House. The hon. Gentleman will also accept that the effect of his amendment, if it were to be approved, would remove any question whether the applicant for a grant requires financial help or whether he could carry out the necessary work without the grant.

I accept that there are individual cases where the view on the question whether hardship would be caused if a grant were not made might be debatable and doubtful. I am happy to look at the general question that the hon. Gentleman has raised—whether the way in which the grant is implemented in various parts of Scotland could be improved, and where there are particular difficulties, but I cannot accept his amendment, because that would make the grant available irrespective of the needs of the applicant. I shall consider the specific points raised to see whether the application of the system can be improved.

Mr. Cook

I put it to the Minister that his Department encourages local authorities to disburse improvement grants daily that are not in any way means tested. We accept that as a necessary price in order to provide the incentive to owners to improve their property.

There is no test of income for the 50 per cent. improvement grant. I complain about the anomalous position that the test of income is applied to the repairs grant, which is copied from the same provisions as those for the improvement grant. I find that unsatisfactory. It is not a matter of some local authorities interpreting the provisions in an unduly harsh way. By and large, local authorities try to make a go of it, but as it stands the provision is nonsensical.

The Minister said that the responsibility for maintenance must primarily be that of the owner, and that this measure is intended to assist only those who experience hardship. But those who may suffer hardship, pass the test, apply for the grant and are pronounced to be eligible for it, find that other owners who are not eligible will not join in the repair work. Thus, nobody gets the grant. That is why there has been such a meagre uptake.

If the Minister wishes to rescue this repairs grant provision from remaining other than a dead letter in housing law he will have seriously to amend it. He should consider the matter soon and look with favour upon the issue being raised in another place. One of our colleagues there might be motivated to raise the matter. By the time that the issue is raised in another place the Government may have given more thought to the matter, reviewed the experience of the past two years and come to the same conclusion that has already been reached by every local authority administering it, which is that, as it stands, the provision is profoundly unsatisfactory.

Mr. Millan

Some of the arguments of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Cook) are valid, but basically I accept what the Minister said. There is a difficulty in saying that the repairs grant should be paid regardless of the means of the owner. The hon. Gentleman spoke of the possibility of a standard grant of a fairly modest amount. That possibility is worth considering. If the Minister is not able to go the whole way I hope that he will give further thought to a standard grant of the sort that he indicated. It would not be an open-ended commitment, and the public expenditure involved would be limited. It might lubricate the machinery in certain instances.

Mr. Rifkind

There may be a case for arguing that the availability of the improvement grant, irrespective of need, is itself an anomaly. That is no argument for extending the anomaly as the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Cook) urges. I have indicated that I am happy to consider the hon. Gentleman's argument and the suggestion of the right hon. Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan). I see no case for removing the basis of need as the criterion on which the grant is paid. I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman recognises some strength in that position.

Mr. Cook

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Forward to