§
Lords amendment: No. 40, before clause 10, insert the following new clause—
. — (1) The Housing Act 1985 shall be amended in accordance with the following provisions.
(2) In section 58 (definition of homelessness) after subsection (2) there shall be inserted the following subsections—
(3) For section 69(1) (provisions supplementary to ss. 63, 65 and 68) there shall be substituted the following subsection—
(1) A local housing authority may perform any duty under section 65 or 68 (duties to persons found to be homeless) to secure that accommodation becomes available for the occupation of a person—
§ Mr. SquireI beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.
I have been a member of the board of Shelter for the past four years, although I stress that, should anyone be in doubt, I have not had a pecuniary interest. That interest allows me some insight into aspects of housing problems.
740 The law at present defines someone as homeless if he does not have accommodation. If someone is homeless and fulfils certain other conditions, the local authority has a duty to secure accommodation for that person. The Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 says nothing about the standards or appropriateness of accommodation. The code of guidance issued by the Secretary of State to guide the local authorities in their interpretation of the law makes it clear that the accommodation to be secured for homeless people should be permanent housing of a decent standard.
Until the so-called Pulhoffer judgment, a succession of legal cases favoured reading "reasonable" or "appropriate" with "accommodation" in both the intial definition of homelessness and the definition of the local authority's duty to the homeless. The major thrust of the law was clearly that Parliament was determined that families in real and genuine housing need should be helped by their local authority.
In February of this year, the House of Lords judgment in Regina v. London Borough of Hillingdon—Ex parte Pulhoffer considerably changed the interpretation that had previously been placed upon that responsibility. In the Pulhoffer case it was decided that as the legislation did not include the words "reasonable" or "appropriate", they should not be read into it. Accommodation could be statutorily overcrowded, unfit or entirely unsuitable for some other reason, but it did not thereby cease to be accommodation. Lord Brightman said that there were no rules.
We are in a Diogenes barrel. As an erstwhile judge decided, a veritable pigsty would have counted as relevant, proper and reasonable accommodation.
Shelter and other housing groups were very concerned about that, and their concern increased when evidence started to come in that several local authorities—I must be fair and say that it was not the overwhelming majority—were apparently changing their policies to give effect to the judgment and thus reducing the opportunity for people in bad housing conditions to be properly rehoused.
Together with hon. Members from all parties, I tabled an early-day motion drawing attention to this matter, and currently it has 76 signatures. As my hon. Friend the Minister knows, the hon. Member for Fulham (Mr. Raynsford), the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Ross) and I visited the former Under-Secretary in July and expressed our concern about the matter.
Last week in another place, their Lordships saw fit, against the Government's advice, to carry an amendment drafted by Shelter. I do not wish to go into enormous detail about the amendment as it would be unfair to the House to do so. Subsections (2) and (3) tackle, in each case, the two areas which most concern us about the effects of the original Pulhoffer judgment.
It is important to stress that the amendment can in no way extend the rights of homeless persons. It simply restores the position to what it was before the judgment in the House of Lords. The housing pronouncements of my hon. Friend the Minister are attracting great interest. He may have been advised that last week I even expressed a word of congratulation during Prime Minister's Question Time. I congratulate him on the steps he is taking.
I emphasise that the ability of local authorities to meet these responsibilities, particularly in areas of high housing stress, is dependent upon some change in the 741 Government's attitude to investment in housing. I welcome my hon. Friend's comments in that respect, particularly about the necessity to do something about the phasing out of bed and breakfast accommodation for homeless families. I look forward to his proposals in two weeks' time in that respect. Above all, I urge acceptance of the amendment and trust that the Government will accept it.
§ Mr. John FraserThe amendment is a Labour victory. I do not wish to detract from anything said by the hon. Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire). I am glad that he spoke in favour of the amendment which was passed in another place. Until a few days ago, the Government resisted this amendment. Their spokesman in the other place described it as premature. I am glad that, at a late stage, they had the grace to accept it. I agree with the hon. Member for Hornchurch. The measure returns the law to what we always thought it was. First, a person is homeless if he or she lives in outrageously unsatisfactory accommodation. Secondly, a local authority will have a duty under the homeless persons legislation to provide homeless persons with not only, literally, a roof over their heads but reasonable accommodation in which they will be reasonably secure. Therefore, we welcome the late acceptance of what has been called the Pulhoffer amendment. The amendment will be passed now that it has the Government's support.
We must recognise that the homelessness problem is the rotten, inhumane consequence of the Government's housing policy. It is not a mere accident from which the Government can divorce themselves. It is the result of the Government's repressive attitude towards local authority housing construction and rented housing. The words "crisis" and "catastrophe" are often over-used but I do not think that they are over-used when applied to the problem of homelessness in the United Kingdom, particularly in London. Figures published only this morning by the Association of London Authorities gave some idea of present and future homelessness in the capital. The Association of London Authorities comprises only 16 of the 32 London boroughs, so the figures that I shall give are a gross underestimate of the extent of homelessness in the capital.
In March 1986, 3,558 homeless families had to be supplied with bed and breakfast accommodation. By August 1986, the number had increased to 4,742. The Association of London Authorities forecasts that by March 1988 the total number of homeless families in bed and breakfast accommodation will reach 9,138 in the 50 per cent. of boroughs that it represents. The association predicts that the number will increase by a further third by March 1989. Some 12,637 homeless families will be in bed and breakfast accommodation at enormous expense to the ratepayer and divorced from any kind of permanent attachment to their homes. That is a disgraceful figure. If it is projected to the whole of London, it would not be unreasonable to estimate that in 1989 20,000 families will be in bed and breakfast accommodation. If one includes single homeless people living rough or in grossly unsatisfactory accommodation, there could be about 40,000 units without any kind of permanent shelter in our capital city. That could be nothing but a disgrace and a reflection on the Government's housing policy.
The bed and breakfast homeless are only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, the homeless figure is only the tip of the 742 iceberg. The number of people accepted as being homeless rose from 50,000 a year in 1979 to 100,000 a year at present, and even that is an underestimate of the grave housing need in this country. We must not only look to the redefinition of the legal duties of local authorities but recognise the full extent of homelessness, especially bed and breakfast homelessness.
Last Monday, I talked to the new leader of Lambeth borough council, Councillor Linda Bellos, who told me that the cost of providing bed and breakfast accommodation for 362 families in Lambeth alone—my borough—is sufficient to underwrite the building of 1,000 new homes a year. Homelessness, especially bed and breakfast homelessness, affects ethnic minorities very harshly. I am sometimes told off for using the expression "ethnic minorities". I am told that "black" is the right word to use in some places. Ninety per cent. of the homeless in bed and breakfast accommodation are black or of Asian extraction.
More resources must be allocated to housing. At Prime Minister's Question Time last week, the Prime Minister boasted that the Government had built one million homes since she came to office. She went so far as to say that that was the largest number of homes ever built in an equal period. If that is what she meant to say, it is what Londoners would call a pork pie. If she had continued building at the rate which prevailed under the Labour Government, at least 1.5 million homes would have been built since 1979. There must be a restoration of Labour's housing resources.
The Government have to drive home to some local authorities the seriousness with which they must take their housing responsibilities to the homeless. It is not insignificant that the name of the case that we are debating is Pulhoffer v. London borough of Hillingdon, a borough which seems to believe that one should draw a cordon—I am not sure whether it is a cordon sanitaire or a cordon doctrinaire — around the pools of homelessness in London. At present—I have checked this—Hillingdon borough council is a hung council. When it was controlled by the Conservative party, it held the homeless and its housing responsibilities in such contempt that it did not even bother to send homelessness statistics, house building statistics or any other kind of housing statistics to the Department of the Environment. The Minister does not know what is going on in Hillingdon because the borough council is not prepared to provide him with information.
I am sorry to talk so much about London, but I do so because we were provided with some London figures this morning. We must treat London and the other conurbations as single strategic areas in which to deal with the problems of housing and homelessness. One cannot simply divide the capital city or other large urban areas into segments in which some local authorities discard their housing responsibilities altogether while others such as Lambeth, Southwark and Birmingham take their responsibilities seriously.
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I hope that as a consequence of the reversal of the decision in Pulhoffer v. London borough of Hillingdon the Minister will look carefully at the operation of policies in boroughs such as Hillingdon and elsewhere, where local authorities neglect their responsibilities to the most vulnerable in the housing market. I hope not only that there will be a change or a re-clarification in the law, but 743 that more resources will be devoted to housing. I hope that there will be a purge by the Department of the Environment on local authorities that callously disregard their housing responsibilities, and that the Minister will take that seriously.
As I go around the country I come across housing authorities, some of which ace quite small, which have never before known the problem of putting homeless families into bed and breakfast accommodation. Gravesham is one of those councils. Medway is another, where the local council demolished 400 homes, blowing them up in a sort of celebration of doctrinaire anti-housing ideology. Many local authorities, which have never before known the problem, are now having to place homeless families in bed and breakfast accommodation. The Government's policy is coming home to roost. We should regard the amendment not just as a clarification of the law, but as a challenge to reallocate resources to badly needed homes.
§ Mr. CartwrightLike other hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, I welcome the Government's acceptance of the amendment carried in another place. However, I agree with the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) that it will not solve the problems of homelessness. Every day of our lives those of us who represent inner London constituencies are made all too aware of the problem.
I should like to deal with the concluding point of the hon. Member for Norwood. The London borough of Greenwich, in which I live and which I represent, has always been a rather strange London borough in that it has never been a housing stress area. Therefore, in the past we have never had the problems of bed and breakfast accommodation, and we have not had a major problem with homelessness. However, we have that problem today, and about 40 per cent. of all the vacant property in the borough goes to homeless families. If we add the problems of the break-up of relationships and the need to decant for major renovations in local authority housing, we find that virtually no families are being housed and taken off the waiting lists because of the overriding priority that must be given to genuinely homeless families. That means that our waiting list continues to be about 15,000. It also means that we must face the problem of people having absolutely no hope of being housed by the local authority. For example, there are about 200 cases of husbands and wives living apart. They can no longer look forward to the priority that they had in easier times, when they could be virtually guaranteed local authority housing. There are no longer any hard-to-let properties because the depth of the housing problem means that they are taken by people in serious need.
As other hon. Members have said, the figures are bad enough on the basis of those accepted under the legislation as being genuinely homeless. The young single homeless are a non-priority group who in the past. have been regarded as a central London problem—young people attracted by the bright lights to the centre of the city. It is no longer only a central London problem. It is an unusual Friday evening if I do not see at my advice service a young person who is utterly homeless, moving around from one 744 friend's home to another, sleeping on the floors of relatives' homes, sometimes sleeping in cars and sometimes sleeping rough.
Sometimes young people are homeless because they have fallen out with their families. The lifestyles simply do not gel and the parents have to face an awful choice—they cannot have the kid in the family because it is causing so much trouble, but they know that if they put the kid out he or she will be homeless. That is an awful decision for a parent to have to take, but I meet it all too often in my constituency. Sometimes a young person is homeless because the family has simply moved away, having decided to go back to the West Country, to the north or to Ireland or to retire away from London. That leaves 18, 19 or 20-year-olds high and dry because all their friends and their jobs are in London and they have nowhere to live. It is almost impossible to overemphasise the problem of homelessness now afflicting areas that never had difficulties in the past.
Another problem about homelessness is the lack of choice that we are forced to present to homeless families. The "one offer" situation is a heaven sent opportunity for a local authority to get rid of property at which other people turn up their noses because of its condition or its location, and it is no longer confined within one borough boundary. I am finding increasingly that homeless families are rehoused in my constituency and in my borough, miles away from their home towns—for example, people from Croydon who have no connection with my constituency. They have no friends, relations or other contacts in my constituency but because the London borough of Croydon says, "There is only one offer—we can get you housed in Greenwich and if you do not go there we shall have nothing more to do with you", they are forced to accept housing in an area that is entirely alien to them. That causes all sorts of difficulties for social and family life.
§ Mr. Tony Favell (Stockport)A dilemma faces a housing authority as to whether it encourages—and in certain cases it does encourage — the break-up of a family by making it too easy for children to leave their parents, wives to leave their husbands or husbands to leave their wives. How many cases has the hon. Member for Woolwich (Mr. Cartwright) come across where the boy, the wife or the husband has been genuinely without a home?
§ Mr. CartwrightI have come across far too many cases where those people genuinely have nowhere to go. If the hon. Gentleman is saying to me that it is not self-evident that break-up of relationship cases, as they are called in the trade — where husbands and wives part company, or where people who are living together in some sort of relationship part company — should have priority over people on the ordinary waiting list, I have much sympathy with that point of view.
However, that was not really the point that I was making. I was talking about the difficulties of young people in particular who are left high and dry with nowhere to live. I was making a point about young married couples starting out in life who have nowhere to live, other than a home with one lot of parents or the other. That is a dreadful way to try to start married life in 1986; having to make occasional visits to be able to sleep with each other is a singularly unpleasant way in which to begin married life. Unfortunately, that is what is happening in inner London at the moment.
745 In conclusion, I urge the Minister to take notice of that sort of situation. I join the hon. Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire) who paid tribute to the new thinking that we have already seen from the Minister since he took on his present office. Many of his ideas are worth all-party consideration, if not support. I hope that he comes to terms with the extent of the problem of homelessness in our great cities, especially in inner London, because it is one of the most important social problems now facing us.
§ Mr. John PattenI am grateful to the hon. Member for Woolwich (Mr. Cartwright) for his concluding remarks. Tonight is not the night, and I suspect you would not allow it, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for a full-blown debate on homelessness in all its aspects. I shall not seek to make a major speech of some length on the matter, and I see Mr. Deputy Speaker nodding firmly as I say that.
I take on board the comments of the hon. Members for Woolwich and for Norwood (Mr. Fraser), and also the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire) who moved acceptance of the amendment. I am grateful to him for that. In any debate on homelessness we have to recognise that other things have happened in this country since 1979 besides there having been a Conservative Government since then. Major changes have taken place in our social structure. Far more people are asking for divorces. I understand that there were 179,000 in 1985, which is a huge increase on, say, 10 years before. There is considerable all-party support for trying to do something more, if we can, to fill empty homes, whether owned publicly or privately. We could all do much on that matter. We need to do something to make sure that Hillingdon gives us statistics. I shall turn my attention to that.
When the hon. Member for Norwood spoke, I thought that he was speaking about a Labour-controlled council because councils change hands, and I believe that Hillingdon has changed hands recently. I take as my source a report that I read in The Independent, so it must be accurate and true, that about two Thursdays ago the Labour chairman of housing announced the opening of a new housing development near London airport, and said that there should be far more mixed tenure estates. Many of us on both sides of the House could have written those words. I forget whether the chairman was announcing plans or opening the development, but he said that he did not want to see any more monolithic council estates, but he wanted multi-tenure estates.
On that basis, when I approach Hillingdon, rather than a delinquent Tory authority — Heaven forfend! — I should be approaching an authority under Labour or alliance control. However, I shall look into what the hon. Member for Norwood said. I shall do all that I can to bring about what he wants if he, as a quid pro quo, offers to approach, with me, the London borough of Camden, which refuses, persistently and continually, to return the statistics that we ask for. I know that I can look for support on that.
§ Mr. John FraserIf people do not make returns of business statistics, many of them are prosecuted. I have no hesitation in saying that there should be an absolute duty on local authorities to supply the information that is essential for us to make policy decisions, irrespective of political control.
§ Mr. PattenWe are at one on that.
746 I listened with interest to what my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch said about the amendment, and I congratulate him on the way in which he spoke to it. I recognise the strength of feeling that there has been on the matter. That is why we are prepared to accept the amendment, but I do so with the proviso that we shall continue our monitoring exercises of the effects of the judgment on local authorities, through our postal survey of all authorities' practices in operating the Act. Likewise, we have an invitation outstanding to all voluntary bodies to submit to us any further evidence that they consider appropriate from their contacts in the housing advice network. At the end of the day, we shall consider the results in relation to how the amendment works in practice. We shall not hesitate to return to the House with proposals for further amendments to those parts of the Act if that seems appropriate. However, we are content to accept the amendment.
§ Question put and agreed to.