Social Housing in London
Debate between Stephen Pound and Baroness Bray of Coln
Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Having rightly been chastised by you for allowing my intervention to run a little long, I thought that I would expand it into a very brief contribution in the form of a speech.
I want to reiterate the point that I was trying to raise with my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr Offord). In a number of areas, London has a particular set of circumstances that are not shared by the rest of the country. I sometimes feel that London does not get fully considered in the general policy making of Governments of all persuasions. That is why it is so important that we London MPs should sometimes get together and have an opportunity to raise some of the specific issues affecting our constituencies. What we are debating is a particularly important example.
I want to draw the Minister’s attention to something brought to my attention by representatives of a couple of London housing associations, who came to see me to express concerns. They are very keen to build more family-sized houses, which is what we all want. As I said before, it is fine to have large numbers of the sort of very small affordable flats that the previous Mayor of London was famous for building, but there are not the family-sized homes that we all want.
The issue is that the housing associations would very much like to build family-sized homes, but to be able to—in London, particularly—they will probably have to go to the 80% of market value to generate the kind of funds that will make such building possible. There is concern that they may find it difficult to charge that rate to a number of their tenants, but without that 80% they will find it difficult to deliver the kind of homes that we all want so badly. A bit of a problem has been thrown up through the particular circumstances that pertain in London.
I hope that the Government, particularly the Homes and Communities Agency, will bear those circumstances in mind when making the assessments. I am delighted that the HCA is going to be taken into City Hall, because that will make it a great deal more sensitive to the needs of Londoners. It is important that the gap should be considered properly to ensure that there are family-sized homes in the affordable sector. They need to be built, because they are such an important part of building our communities.
Stephen Pound
I am grateful to the hon. Lady, my neighbour, for giving way. She says that family-sized homes are the homes that “we all want”. May I urge her to accept the fact that not everybody wants to live in a family home? A great many people with disabilities, or widows, widowers or people on their own quite enjoy the small properties that she rather put down and implied were some creation of Ken Livingstone that nobody wanted to live in. Actually, a great many people do.
Angie Bray
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that important contribution. Of course it is true that not everybody wants to live in family-sized homes, but the problem in the past was that small properties were the only affordable housing on offer. A large number of families in our communities need affordable houses, and one or two-bedroom, even three-bedroom, flats simply do not accommodate them properly. It would also be nice to think that families might have a bit of green space outside and not always be housed in large blocks of flats.
Of course there has to be a balance, but in the past family-sized houses were neglected; it was too easy to tick boxes, as the previous Mayor did, to say, “I’ve delivered X affordable homes,” but they were flats rather than the family-sized houses that many of us think of when we hear the word “homes”. My request to the Minister is that he ensures the Government are fully aware that London’s special circumstances make it important to recognise the particular problems of housing associations when they are providing housing in areas where market rents are high.