Housing (Hackney) (Hansard, 22 March 1991)

§ Ms. Diane Abbott (Hackney, North and Stoke Newington)
When I leave the House this afternoon I shall return to my constituency to hold my weekly advice session. I have held an advice session almost every week of the year for the four years during which I have been a Member of Parliament. Every week there is a long queue. Every week I have to deal with the issues that people raise and the issue most raised is housing. I have had four years to see at close hand the misery, unhappiness, suffering and social problems caused by poor housing. I have had four years to see at close hand the misery, unhappiness, suffering and social problems caused by poor housing. I have had four years to come to the conclusion that nothing less is called for than a new initiative on housing in London.
When I say that housing causes misery, I am not talking about people who are mildly irritated because they cannot have a bigger garden or an extra bedroom. I am talking about the people who come to me every week who live in flats that are riddled with damp and where all the outside walls are covered with black mould on the inside. Whatever wallpaper or paint is put on the walls is overcome by the black mould. How many Members of Parliament would wish to live in damp conditions with mould on the walls?
I am talking about constituents who come to see me and burst into tears because they are so depressed by their housing conditions, including overcrowding. It is not by any means unusual for families of six or eight all to live in a two-bedroomed flat. I have to tell them that there is no immediate prospect of their being rehoused. I ask hon. Members to think what it is like for a child in such a household. It is not just that the child does not have his or her own bed or any privacy, but where is the child to do homework? The effects of poor housing and overcrowding on child development and educational standards in my borough are incalculable.
Constituents who come to me are without hope and at the end of their tether because of the housing in which they are forced to live. The tragedy is that I can offer them no hope. We have problems of homelessness. Some constituents live in severely overcrowded conditions with relatives; others live in hostels; and some have nowhere to sleep but the street. I wish that I had some way of conveying to the Minister personally the misery and tragic circumstances of thousands of people in Hackney. If I could do so, he would not reply, as I fear he will do so today, with the Government's normal platitudes on the subject. For four years I have sat through housing debates in the House and the Government undoubtedly either do not understand or choose not to understand the unique problems of inner-city areas. Inner-city housing is a special policy case to which the Government are resolutely blind.
The Government insist that the solutions to housing problems generally must lie increasingly with the private sector. Anybody who lives in Hackney or who has passed an estate agent's window there knows that that is either sheer callousness or sheer ignorance. The average price of a new house in Hackney is £73,500. To buy a house at that price one needs a salary of at least £25,000 a year. Not a 584 fraction of my constituents and certainly not a fraction of council tenants earn that sum. One eighth of council tenants earn more than £13,000 and there are no figures for the number who earn £25,000 and more. I suspect that it is tiny.
The Government refuse to accept that the private sector is not and cannot be a solution to the housing problems of inner-city areas such as Hackney. Neither now nor at any point in the future can the ordinary person living in the inner cities command the price of a private house. I say that even now when there is a slump in the housing market. When house prices climb again, they will be even further out of my constituents' reach. The private sector, which is the Government's panacea for almost everything, will not solve the housing problem in inner-city areas. There is no alternative to proper public sector provision. A Government who insist, contrary to all the facts and information, that somehow my constituents must pick themselves up and buy a private house show inhumanity that beggars description.
In recent years the Government have put considerable emphasis, on the role of housing associations, but they have also put pressure on housing associations to raise rents. There will come a point when housing associations will have to set rents at a level such that they can repay the loans that they have incurred to build properties, but which my constituents cannot afford.
More crucially for my constituents, the Government, through the Housing Corporation, are putting pressure on housing associations to provide value for money, which for the Government means getting units built as cheaply as possible. That sounds reasonable in principle, but it is impossible for housing associations seeking to build in inner London to offer the corporation value for money compared with developers building on the south coast, in the north, in Scotland and in other areas where the price of land is not so high.
The Government then tell the London housing associations, "If you cannot afford to build in inner London, build outside London and take the inner London tenants with you." That sounds all right, but my constituents who have been born and bred in Hackney and whose families and jobs are in the locality do not want to move outside Hackney simply because it is cheaper to build elsewhere.
I often wonder whether Ministers talk to people who work for, for example, London Transport and the hospitals. Despite the recession, there is still a shortage of labour for employers such as British Rail and London Transport. London workers must live near London jobs. The Government's criminal neglect of public housing and the Housing Corporation's insistence on value for money are making it more difficult for housing associations and local authorities that want to build London housing for London workers to get on with the job.
I have tried to explain how ludicrous it is to expect the ordinary folk of inner London to look to the private sector for housing. We in Hackney have a larger proportion of council housing than probably any borough in the country. We have 41,000 tenants, 8,000 people on the waiting list and 3,000 homeless. The Minister and others may wonder what problems council tenants can have in relation to housing. Our estates in Hackney are crumbling around us and the council is not receiving nearly enough money for repair and renewal. We have thousands of pre-1909 houses on which millions of pounds must be 585 spent to repair and convert them into flats for occupation. The council does not have that money and the Government have no itention of providing it.
We have many thousands of pre-war flats. The Minister would not dream of living in them and he would be shocked if his relatives had to live in them. They have substandard room sizes, many are without central heating, there are no lifts, they are without fitted bathrooms, they have poor insulation, there are archaic refuse disposal systems and there are walkways which cause all sorts of public order dangers. We need hundreds of millions of pounds to bring our pre-war estates up to scratch.
I live in my constituency and walk through it every day. One has to see the estates crumbling away to appreciate the scale of the problem. Increasingly, because of the right to buy, the better quality council housing is being sold off and my constituents are being left with a ghetto of housing in which no hon. Member would wish to see any of his relatives forced to live.
In addition to the pre-1909 houses and pre-war estates, we have problems with what, on the face of it, would appear to be more acceptable housing. I refer to the newer system-built housing created in the 1960s and 1970s. The Minister may be aware of the enormous asbestos problems that occur with that type of housing, because asbestos was used for insultion. It will cost millions of pounds to remove that asbestos properly.
That type of property suffers from terrible systemic infestation. I am not sure whether the Minister has children, but how would he feel, on waking in the morning, to find ants and cockroaches crawling over his children in bed? That is the type of problem from which we suffer in many estates in Hackney because the system-built estates have heating ducts that run right through the blocks of flats and become infested with cockroaches and ants. As soon as one flat is fumigated the pests get into another, and even if the entire estate is fumigated they soon return. In this day and age, why should decent families have to go to sleep knowing that cockroaches are crawling over their kitchens and their children?
System-built flats also have problems with window renewal and with roofs. It costs money to make them fit to live in, but the Government resolutely refuse to accept the need for that money. Therefore, even the 41,000 people whom the council is able to house are, by and large, living in housing which is in an increasing state of disrepair and which is crumbling around them. The council does not have the money that it needs to repair that housing.
Those 41,000 people may live in appalling, infested and overcrowded housing, but at least it is housing. What cheer can I give to the people on the waiting list who may have amassed hundreds of points? Last year—as in previous years—Hackney built hardly any new homes. The Government must consider that issue, because the hopes of the people on the waiting list of being housed rests on the council's capacity to build new homes.
I want to make a point that is not party political because all councils would say the same. When will the Government allow councils to spend all the money that they make from council house sales on their capital and revenue programmes? At the moment, councils are allowed to spend only a quarter of the money that they make from such sales. If they were allowed to spend it all, perhaps Hackney might be able to start building houses again.
586 There are more than 8,000 people on the waiting list in Hackney. I have to say to them that because of our shrinking housing stock, the fact that the council does not have the money to build new property and the fact that we are losing property through the right to buy, the prospect of their being rehoused this side of the churchyard is nil. That is an awful thing to have to say. It makes me feel hopeless and helpless and reduces my constituents to tears. What Government could know that that situation exists, but refuse to do anything about it?
There was some progress in the treatment of the homeless in the inner city. For many years, boroughs such as Hackney had to put the homeless in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. It was hopelessly expensive and many operators ripped off local authorities and made millions of pounds out of people's misery. The conditions were often appalling—one family with perhaps two or three children had to live in one room. Families were forced to leave their rooms during the day and women with children had to walk the streets because they were not allowed to go back.
There were also problems with fire regulations in bed-and-breakfast hostels. There was at least one fire in a hostel in Bayswater in which people died because the person operating the hostel did not follow the proper fire regulations. The hostels provided accommodation that was overcrowded and squalid and which presented fire risks. Meanwhile, the landlords were making millions of pounds.
Councils such as Hackney have gone some way to taking homeless people out of bed-and-breakfast accommodation by going in for private sector leasing. The advantage of leasing from private landlords was that the council could offer halfway decent conditions. The scheme should have pleased the Government because it also saved money. However, the Government's response to the council's efforts to devise ways of housing homeless people and to stop ruthless hostel owners from making a fortune was to block the initiative. They tried to remove the subsidy for private sector leasing.
The Government have partially backed down in response to pressure from local authorities and they will allow local authorities to renew the leases. However, they should fully restore the scheme because if one child in Hackney dies in a fire in a ramshackle bed-and-breakfast hostel when he could have been in decent accommodation leased from the private sector, it will be the Government's responsibility.
How dare the Government try to force the homeless back into bed-and-breakfast hostels? I urge them to reconsider the scheme and to return a full subsidy to it. It is much more cost-effective than any bed-and-breakfast accommodation and it guarantees the homeless decent conditions. Whatever the Government might think, the homeless are not criminals and they are just as entitled to decent housing conditions as anyone else.
I have tried to outline the crisis posed by the housing problems in Hackney. I have tried to explain that the private sector is not the answer, no matter how much the Government try to delude themselves. Council tenants in Hackney face problems because of the quality of the housing stock, while those on the waiting list face difficulties because no rebuilding is taking place. I have already outlined the problems faced by the homeless. The Government, however, will turn round and talk about the way in which Hackney manages its housing.
587 My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) and I do not pretend that Hackney's housing management could not be improved. I have just come from a meeting with the director of housing in Hackney where we discussed the problems and the steps that he is taking to try to deal with them. He is the new director of housing and I assure the House that he has the energy and commitment to right some of the wrongs which I found impressive.
I admit that Hackney has the highest number of voids in the country, but, for better or worse, all those voids are not unoccupied. We have more than 4,000 voids, but 1,300 are squats and another 1,000 are occupied by those with short-life tenancies.
Hackney has a problem with rent arrears, but it is attempting to reduce those arrears. This year Hackney has achieved a 95 per cent. collection rate. I accept that that collection does not relate to rent arrears that have accumulated in the past, but the officers and councillors of Hackney are aware of the problem and are in the process of dealing with it.
The problems associated with housing management in Hackney, however, do not excuse the Government's wilful refusal to accept that inner cities have particular housing problems and their insistence on gimmicks rather than on making money available.
I do not want to be party political or argumentative, but let us consider the Government's housing action trust scheme. That was supposed to be the answer to the problems on housing estates that I have described. The HAT scheme collapsed because inner-city council tenants were not interested. The Government could not get a single estate in London that was prepared to get involved in a HAT. Tenants do not want private-sector landlords for the sake of it, they want decent quality housing. The problem does not rest with the council; ultimately it rests with the Government.
A society that can mobilise thousands of millions of pounds to spend on the Gulf war, but cannot mobilise the money to give my people a decent standard of housing, must have something wrong with it. I believe that the Government wilfully refuse to accept the serverity of the housing problems in Hackney and other areas. The Government are callous because they are not making resources available.
It will not do simply to engage in party-political abuse of the local authority. The problems faced by public housing in the inner city are systemic and deep-rooted. Those problems are causing misery to thousands of people every day. They cause more misery to more people in Hackney than almost any other issue. They cause me more thought and worry than almost any other issue. Even if every housing management problem in Hackney was ironed out today that would not detract from the Government's duty to provide the money and accept their responsibilities for housing all their people in decent conditions.
I am here to speak out for my council tenants in Hackney. The Government have done U-turns on many things and I beg them do one in their attitude to public-sector housing. They should launch a new initiative 588 with real money, a real commitment and a real understanding of the problems—the people of Hackney deserve no less.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Robert Key)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms. Abbott) on securing the debate. I am relieved that it will be a debate, although I have only a few minutes in which to reply.
I hope that the Government will not do a U-turn, as the hon. Lady suggests, because her constituents would be among the first to suffer if the increased investment in housing were stopped. I promise the hon. Lady that I will not offer the platitudes that she fears. I do not wish the debate to be sour, because I recognise that Hackeny is making renewed efforts with its housing policy, which has gone astray in the past few years, as she will admit. I am glad to see that the hon. Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Mr. Sedgemore) is also present. I assure both hon. Members that my reply will not be a handbagging exercise in any sense.
The Government recognise fully that they have the ultimate responsibility for housing people in this country. To that end, as an inner-cities Minister, since Christmas I have visited the sort of housing estates with which the hon. Lady is familiar, in Dundee, Glasgow, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Barnsley, Bristol, Plymouth, Southwark, Greenwich and Tower Hamlets. Given the opportunity, I would not mind visiting Hackney. The Government are determined to tackle housing problems in partnership with local authorities. It sometimes has been difficult to act in partnership with local authorities. I shall refer later to the problems that local government officials working in the housing departments have had for many years.
Hackney has had to deal with homelessness and general housing problems but, at the same time, it has 1,680 empty homes and 1,300 occupied by squatters. It is not easy to reconcile that problem with constituents who bring their homelessness problems to the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington. I often see such a phenomenon when I travel around the country speaking to housing officers.
The hon. Lady criticised much of the Government's housing policy. We are trying to liberate people from monolithic, unimaginative, inhuman solutions to housing problems. Solutions were often tried and introduced with good intentions, but the problems were often compounded by the appalling results. The hon. Lady will be familiar with the huge, Stalinist concrete people's palaces of housing estates with which this country is littered. The problem of insect infestation is rooted in the design of those estates, and it is tragic that estates which were built with such imagination in the past 20 years or so—in the years since the hon. Lady attended a good school in the leafy suburb not 100 yards from the school at which I taught in Harrow—are now being torn down.

§ Ms. Abbott
The Minister talks about Stalinist estates. I was in east Berlin last year. If my constituents could live in the estates that I saw there—presumably built under Stalin—they would be grateful and happy.

§ Mr. Key
I have not seen estates in east Berlin, but I have seen them in Moscow and I assure the hon. Lady that, given the choice, I should rather live in Hackney than in Moscow.
In place of the old solutions, we have sought to offer tenants greater choice, more direct involvement in management and a choice of alternative landlords. We have also tried to increase public sector resources and have done so. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced that gross provision for Housing Corporation's approved development programme for 1991–92 would be £1.5 billion, rising to more than £2 billion in 1993–94. That is a 65 per cent. increase over the current year. In the past 11 years we have enabled local authorities to spend approximately £36 billion on housing capital works. In that time, Hackney has been able to spend £475 million on housing. London receives an increasing proportion of that larger programme. The Hackney housing investment programme allocation for 1991–92 is £32.8 million, an increase of 14.8 per cent. on the previous year and the second highest HIP allocation In London.
The purpose of estate action programmes is to improve the quality of life of people on problem estates. We recognise that there are enormous social problems associated with difficult housing estates, but we are trying to bring together action for cities initiatives and estate action initiatives to include management, employment and enterprise initiatives and, above all, the involvement of tenants.
I wish that Hackney would encourage more sales of housing, which would help to generate new funds. I take the hon. Lady's point about 25 per cent. of receipts being able to be used on new housing provision, but Hackney's record on the right to buy is pretty terrible. I am glad that the council is putting up rents, which were unrealistically low for far too long, and low rents have never been a solution to such problems.
590 In the few minutes remaining, I wish to be positive about the reorganisation of the housing directorate in Hackney. From travelling the country and seeing housing problems, which I acknowledge exist, I have learnt that the staff of housing departments often do not have the necessary training or motivation. They therefore lose their sense of professionalism, recruitment is difficult and retention is poor. I want far better management of housing. The biggest single problem is not the lack of housing, but poor management. I hope that Hackney will address seriously the problems of management, and that it will ensure that staff are properly trained and motivated under the new director, as that will help the hon. Lady's constituents.
We have come a long way in policy and decision-making, and in management. What we now need is the best use of what we have. We must ensure that flats do not stand empty, and that rents are collected so that the money can be spent on services. As the hon. Lady will recognise, the refuse which accumulates in corners on so many estates must be collected. We need to ensure that the management on the estates is sufficiently good that repairs are done quickly. Above all, as I am sure the hon. Lady will agree, Hackney must ensure that tenants are not only chatted to but listened to. The area housing managers on the estates have a real job to do. It should not be a question merely of picking up notes from tenants and passing them back to someone at the town hall. We must improve the housing management system.
It is my duty and privilege to travel the country listening to local authorities and housing departments, and seeing for myself the problems that undoubtedly exist. I hope to find time to visit Hackney in the near future.