§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Durant.]
§ 1.4 am
§ Mr. Jeff Rooker (Birmingham, Perry Barr)This Adjournment debate is about the lack of urban renewal in three small parts of the Handsworth ward in my constituency. I congratulate the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mrs. Roe) on her appointment as Minister. I think that this is her third Adjournment debate in a few short days.
I shall deal first with the easy point—the London housing action area based on part of Aston lane. The area consists of 246 dwellings for which a scheme of enveloping is proposed in respect of only 163 dwellings. The tenure mix, about which the Minister will be interested; is owner-occupation, 52 per cent.; private landlords, 21 per cent.; local authority, 19.4 per cent.; and the housing association, 6.6 per cent.
The London housing action area is one of seven schemes currently submitted by Birmingham city council to the regional office of the Department of the Environment. The Minister will know by now, I think—if she does not, she will soon—that, under the terms of enveloping circular 26/84, the Department of the Environment is given 30 working days to approve such schemes. In reality, only schemes that will be approved are submitted. By yesterday, a decision on the London housing action area was outstanding by 77 working days, having been submitted as far back as 16 March. It was planned that work on that small area would go out to tender on 1 July. I understand that it has now been put off until about October. Notwithstanding the great concern caused to my constituents living in the area, such a delay means that contracts cannot start on time, forcing Birmingham city council to underspend on its housing investment programme, thus creating further cash flow problems. Of course, at the end of the year, the council gets the blame for the delay and the underspend. That is grossly unfair.
As the scheme is an agreed scheme—if it is not, I hope that the Minister says so—my constituents in Aston lane and Railway, London and North roads want to know why there has been a delay in the regional office of the Department of the Environment in deciding whether the enveloping scheme Should go ahead. They want to know what is holding up the London housing action area work. So far as they know, there is no technical problem. They are unhappy, annoyed and unsure because of the rumours that are associated with a delay of this kind.
That is the easy point. Unlike the London housing action area, Charles and Turville—both named, as they normally are, after a local road—are proposed housing action areas. They are larger than the London one, the Charles area consisting of 447 dwellings and the Turville area of about 250. They happen to adjoin and together there are about 700 dwellings.
At present, those proposed housing action areas are an island of unhappiness for my constituents in respect of their housing. It is an island of unhappiness in the Handsworth ward in Birmingham. My constituents feel left behind, as they see the effects of all the urban renewal in nearby roads. I shall name just two. People see work done on the other side of Putney road and on the other end 1108 of Westminster road. But, by and large, their homes are falling apart. They point out at public meetings that most people who are well housed tend to complain about the renewal parts of their area, such as about getting the grass verges cut, the trees planted and the dog mess cleaned up, but the people of Charles and Turville are mainly concerned about the roofs on their homes. They are concerned about the struggle for the work that is needed to keep the very fabric of their homes in good order—enveloping. At recent meetings, I promised them that, if I was successful in the ballot, I would raise the matter in the House of Commons.
The two housing action areas, as I hope the Minister has discovered, are special cases. I do not say that they are ordinary areas like London. Indeed, they have been treated as special cases by Birmingham city council's urban renewal team—a team of first-rate people that has led the way in urban renewal in this country. Many cities in this country have followed the experiments that have begun in Birmingham. The two areas are special cases basically because of the variation in dwelling size and the special mix of tenures. Indeed, those two reasons have caused 700 dwellings to be left behind for so long in the urban renewal programme. If it were easy to deal with long rows of terraced houses, virtually all the same size, they would have been done a long time ago, as indeed nearby roads have been done. Because of the tenure mix and the size of the dwellings, they have been left and chopped off the end of the programme year after year.
A detailed survey is required before an enveloping scheme can take place. One has been completed for Charles but not for Turville. The Charles area survey was completed in July 1986. The problem relates partly to the tenure mix. In Charles, the tenure mix is: owner-occupation 57 per cent.; private landlords 9.6 per cent.; local authority 4.3 per cent.; and housing associations 38.9 per cent. We are talking about 447 dwellings. Only 27 per cent. are classed as satisfactory. It will not be easy to conduct an enveloping scheme because of the size of the dwellings and their tenure. However, it is the considered professional judgment of the Birmingham housing urban renewal team, which invented enveloping, that enveloping provides the best option. The problem is that the Minister does not like the plan and the reginal office will not approve it. Like all good things that were invented in Birmingham, enveloping has been ruined by Whitehall. It could not resist writing a circular about enveloping. The minute the circular was written, the concept of enveloping was killed stone dead. The same thing happened with half-and-half shared housing ownership.
In the heads of households count in the Charles area, 45 per cent. are unemployed, and 45 per cent. are on supplementary benefit. The majority—68 per cent.—are euphemistically classed as ethnic minorities. Old-age pensioners comprise 18 per cent. of the count.
The neglect that has been caused in the small area of Handsworth by delaying the decision—which amounts to a flat refusal by the Minister—is causing the area to deteriorate fast. The city council housing department cannot now let its own dwellings in the area without great difficulty. Basically, only homeless families will accept dwellings in the area. For one of the major housing associations in the area, the average tenancy turnover is three months. Many large houses in the area are being 1109 converted into flats by housing associations. That got so bad that the city council has put a block on that type of policy. There is now some reconversion to family housing.
There are advantages and disadvantages in such a policy. On the one hand, the housing association brings about renewal and more homes are created—housing associations get the same subsidy for a flat as they do for a house. On the other hand, flats definitely mean a more transient population and can dislodge community spirit. That is not a criticism of housing associations. Indeed, the financial structure is such that that is bound to happen in an area in which there are many large houses and where there is a shortage of local authority capital funds. Because local authorities lack funds, the housing associations move in at their request, and larger houses are ripe for such development. The tragic result is that public investment by housing associations in their refurbishment programmes is wasted if other properties in an area—mainly the owner-occupied sector—are not to be dealt with.
I invite the Minister during the summer recess to visit St. Peter's road, Rodhut road, Crompton road and Churchill road, where she will see almost derelict homes alongside homes that have been refurbished following flat conversion programmes. She will see pepper-potting at its worst. It is crazy and it does not make any economic sense.
For some reason, the regional office of the Department of the Environment disagrees that enveloping is the required option for the area. On the evidence of my experience in the city of Birmingham, I back the view of the professional Birmingham urban renewal staff against the regional office, which seems to be running rather a vendetta against the city of Birmingham.
I corresponded briefly on this issue just prior to the election with the former Minister for Housing. The new Minister will have seen his letter to me of 14 May in which he pointed to the difficulty of too many housing association dwellings. He also said, unfairly in my view, that the blame lay partly with Birmingham city council because it had not sent any housing action area declaration documents to the Department. Of course it had not. As I said about the London situation, the only documents and applications sent in were those for which approval had been organised in negotiations with city council officials and regional civil servants. The system will not work in any other way.
If a housing action area made a submission and it was rejected, it would require to be redefined geographically, and that would put the programme back at least a couple of years. How could a little pocket of 700 dwellings—two housing action areas, an island, as it were, in the middle of Handsworth—be redefined geographically when all the areas around it had been dealt with by way of enveloping schemes? There would be no practical way of redefining it, so that is not an option for the regional office or the city council.
The detailed study of Charles was completed a year ago. My constituents in the Charles and Turville proposed housing action areas have suffered considerably because the area of Handsworth in which they live—the vast majority of them live there from choice; they like living in the inner city, where there is a vibrancy of life that is missing from the outer suburbs—is mixed by size of dwellings and ownership. It is the very tenure mix that Ministers, and I as Labour party spokesman on this 1110 subject for some years, have sought to promote. Yet that mix is being held against the sort of enveloping scheme that has been proposed.
Ministers, not Birmingham, wrote the enveloping circular. Department of the Environment officials do not make themselves available at public meetings, both before and after proposals are submitted for urban renewal. That sort of consultation is left to the city council's urban renewal teams. Those teams also take the blame, and in this situation it is unfair that they should bear that blame. That is why I decided to raise this matter on the Adjournment. I want to stop the buck-passing.
I appreciate that a difficulty exists and I do not deny that there is a special case. Certainly we do not want to create another special case, since there is only this island of two small proposed action areas in this part of Handsworth, although others may exist in other parts of Birmingham. I am speaking tonight only for my constituents. Others can speak for the rest of the city, though I appreciate that the Minister must take a more strategic view of the position.
My constituents have every right to feel frustrated, annoyed and angry. They are not receiving full information about who is making the decisions and the basis on which those decisions are made. One of those decisions represents the rejection of the proposed action areas, with Birmingham not yet having been able to submit the relevant documents. If they were submitted, it is known that they would be rejected. For that reason I hope the Minister will answer the questions I have asked tonight.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mrs. Marion Roe)I thank the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) for his kind remarks on my appointment. I am grateful to him for this early opportunity to speak on a subject that I know is dear to his heart and one that is right at the top of the Government's agenda—housing in the inner cities.
The hon. Gentleman has rightly drawn the attention of the House to the housing conditions in the Charles, Turville and London areas in the north of Birmingham, and to the strong wishes of the residents in those areas that those conditions should be improved. I shall deal later with these specific areas and explain how improvements to the housing stock may be achieved. I think, however, that that needs to be viewed in the context of the many housing and inner-area initiatives which have been instigated or supported by this Government since 1979. Many of them have benefited inner-city authorities, and Birmingham is no exception.
The hon. Member has, for example, mentioned enveloping and has rightly pointed out the many benefits of that technique. For those hon. Members who may not be completely familiar with the term, enveloping is a technique pioneered in Birmingham that secures the wholesale improvement of the external fabric and frontages of private housing that is old and has fallen into disrepair. Work is carried out by the council, with the consent of the owners and at no cost to them. It involves the replacement or repair or roofs, chinmeys, guttering, windows and doors; and work to external walls and curtilages. Whole terraces or blocks of houses are dealt with at a time. Indeed, during the course of the work, the 1111 whole street takes on a quite extraordinary appearance—the houses are shrouded in scaffolding, to emerge a few weeks later in something like pristine condition.
The point that I would make about enveloping is that, whilst Birmingham undoubtedly pioneered the technique, the Government have consistently provided the council with backing and financial resources. In the early days when enveloping was in the experimental stage, Government funding was provided under the urban programme through the Birmingham inner-city partnership. In 1982, when the scheme had been evaluated and had been found to have proved itself, we acted to incorporate enveloping as an important component of mainstream policy for the improvement of private sector housing. As a result, housing authorities throughout the country that wish to adopt enveloping as a means of securing the improvement of private sector stock in housing action areas may do so, and may apply to the Department for Exchequer subsidy to cover 75 per cent. of eligible costs. One hundred and thirteen such schemes have now been approved, 38 of them in Birmingham.
More substantial in cash terms has been the urban programme itself. Birmingham has benefited to the tune of approximately £160 million under the programme since 1979. Handsworth has been a priority from the start and has received urban programme funding in the order of nearly £30 million. Apart from enveloping, Birmingham urban programme has supported many innovative and exciting housing projects and many of these have been directed towards privately owned housing in the inner areas. Recently, for example, the Department has approved a pilot project of security works to houses in the Westminster road area, some of which are in the proposed Turville housing action area; and the Broughton road local labour project in Handsworth has involved the collaboration of Government Departments with the city council and Tarmac in an extraordinary housing improvement scheme designed to provide training and employment, and housing for inner-city residents. The scheme, which involves enveloping and other internal and external improvements, will provide about 100 units of accommodation, and will create 40 local jobs and 24 additional places for local trainees. The overall cost of the scheme is approximately £1.6 million, of which the DOE will fund about £1 million covering house refurbishment costs.
§ Mr. RookerI should make it absolutely clear that Broughton road is not in Handsworth ward and is not in the Perry Barr constituency. It would be quite irrelevant for me to go back to people in Charles and Turville and tell them to look at what is happening in Broughton road in the Ladywood constituency.
§ Mrs. RoeI shall come to the points raised by the hon. Gentleman. I said that I would come to them, but it is fair to put into context the Birmingham scene as a whole.
However, there is more to helping inner-city residents with repair and improvement than total resources allocated to housing. In November the Government announced that they would meet half the costs of a new £6 million scheme to help poorer home owners identify and secure repairs and improvements. Fifty new agency service schemes are to be established in partnership with Neighbourhood Revitalisation Services and Care and 1112 Repair Ltd. I expect a number of these to be in the inner cities, but this is not an initiative exclusive to them. They will provide a total service, if one is needed, including advice on what work needs to be done, what builder to use, how to finance the work and how to ensure that it is done properly. We believe that this important initiative will not only help to target better the standard local authority grants towards those who need them most, but will also succeed in attracting other sources of finance. We shall be monitoring the initiative closely to assess its success in meeting these objectives.
I shall now return to the particular points raised by the hon. Gentleman in relation to the proposed Charles and Turville housing action areas and the London housing action area in north Birmingham. I will deal with London first. Birmingham declared this a housing action area on 17 November with a view to improving the area through a variety of means in a concerted plan of action over five years. This would include enveloping, internal and environmental improvements, traffic management and clearance of substantial numbers of unfit houses. Although the area contains a high proportion of local authority and housing association dwellings—about 26 per cent.—we decided in the circumstances that the housing action area should be allowed to stand. Birmingham was notified of this and, on 16 March, the council submitted an enveloping scheme for 120 dwellings at a total cost of £906,780, or £7,557 per dwelling. We had been awaiting from Birmingham clarification of the cost of works to the curtilages to some of the houses. That information has just been received, and we shall so be in a position to issue a decision very soon.
Enveloping schemes are only considered within the 30 working days set down in the enveloping circular and when they meet all the criteria. The majority of Birmingham's proposals and the schemes currently with the Department are outside the criteria on a number of counts, and it is considered that in its enveloping applications Birmingham has not fully justified these schemes being approved at the level of subsidy applied for.
The position with Charles and Turville is slightly different in the sense that the city council has not yet declared the areas as housing action areas. Last year Birmingham informally approached the Department with a view to declaring both areas housing action areas in order to carry out enveloping. It was felt that this approach was not really appropriate and that Birmingham should consider an alternative strategy to secure the improvement of these areas. Housing action areas are intended to deal with the improvement of private sector housing and both Charles and Turville contain a high proportion of local authority and housing association property for which there are other more appropriate sources of funding such as, for example, housing association grants. In addition, the dispersed nature of the private sector properties would probably have led to ineffective enveloping proposals. Accordingly, the Department wrote to the city council suggesting that it should rethink its strategy for these areas. We have seen no further proposals from Birmingham to date, but the Department is willing to discuss a range of options with the city council if it so wishes. They might include, for example, the declaration of smaller areas as housing action areas or general improvement areas, individual improvement grants, limited block repair schemes, and the selective employment of agency services to encourage 1113 effective take-up of grant or loan facilities. I must emphasise, however, that the decision whether or not to declare a housing action area, and over what area, is for the city council to take. The Secretary of State does, of course. have the last word on declarations, even if he chooses to exercise his right to intervene very occasionally.
§ Mr. Rookerrose—
§ Mrs. RoeI shall be happy to follow up further points in a letter, but I want to conclude my remarks and answer the questions that the hon. Gentleman has asked.
I do not underestimate the difficulties that the council faces or the size of the problems to be tackled. It is worth remembering, however, that enveloping represents a substantial public investment in private housing. Birmingham's schemes approved so far have cost over £50 million at an average cost per dwelling of over £8,000. By any acount that is a substantial commitment of public subsidy to the individual owners. That is why each scheme needs careful scrutiny. The House would not wish it to be otherwise. Schemes must be cost effective and represent good value for money. I make no apology, therefore, for this level of scrutiny, or the care with which we examine the council's future proposals. Although the residents of Charles, Turville and London have made plain their desire to have their houses and areas improved — and I understand and respect those wishes—as taxpayers, like all of us, they would I am sure be equally concerned that the Government should spend public money wisely and carefully.
Earlier, I mentioned some examples of the work that is being undertaken by the Government to improve housing in the inner areas of Birmingham and elsewhere. As to the future, we intend to strengthen local authorities' ability to direct resources at the areas of worst housing need. The Government's Green Paper on home improvement, published in May 1985, proposed that a single form of 1114 statutory designated area should replace the present housing action areas and general improvement areas. We intend to legislate, as part of the general reform of the improvement grant system, to give more freedom to local authorities to designate renewal areas. Both renovation and redevelopment will feature, depending upon a full appraisal of the different options available.
We also intend to tackle some of the shortcomings of enveloping. At present, this is carried out in housing action areas only under environmental works powers. We shall build upon the lessons learnt over the past years in using these powers, and introduce new powers of group repair which will enable local authorities everywhere to carry out the renovation of blocks of poor quality housing. Provided that schemes meet certain basic criteria as to stock condition and tenure, authorities will be free to exercise such powers without requiring the specific approval of the Secretary of State. This will greatly strengthen Birmingham's and other local authorities' ability to tackle serious disrepair in the private sector in co-operation with owners, occupiers and financial institutions.
In order to make progress, I suggest that the hon. Gentleman should encourage Birmingham city council to submit to the Department of the Environment regional office fresh proposals on the Charles and Turville areas as soon as possible so that they can be scrutinised without delay.
§ Mr. RookerIs there a minimum size of housing action area? I have seen a housing action area in the north which consisted of only about 15 houses in a terrace. Would that kind of thing be acceptable?
§ The motion having been made after Ten o'clock on Tuesday 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 twenty-six minutes to Two o'clock.