Social Housing Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Bird and Lord Fuller(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I am very pleased that I am being given the opportunity to speak to these two interesting amendments, Amendments 89 and 90. They are very simple. They are nowhere near what I want to achieve in life, but they are, in a sense, a halt in a becoming. In 1998, we had a situation where under the Blair Government—
Lord Bird (CB)
Shall I talk louder? The rain in Spain goes mainly down the drain. Sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. You are on my side.
Tony Blair or somebody in his Government had the idea that, if a house was empty for six months, it should be available for the local authority to turn it into some social usefulness. After the Second World War, Abbé whatever his name was said that because of the crisis of homelessness every empty property should be used by the local authority and the national Government to get people out of homelessness.
The Blair Administration said that if a property was empty for six months then it was important that it should be available so the local authority could say, “We will utilise it and return it back to you when you need it if you want to sell it, move your family in or whatever”. That referred to local authority housing, which at the time had in the region of 20% of voids. It was a period when many buildings that had been social housing had been rubbished and were not used properly.
I am here today partly to try to get the Government to move from the situation that we are now in. We know that the coalition Government, shall we say, kicked the can further down the road when they changed the period from six months to two years, so a property had to be empty for two years before the local authority could take it over. In my opinion, we should return to six months. I have had discussions about that with this wonderful Minister, and I hope she is in government—I really do. If we have the opportunity of returning to that time period then we could start kicking holes in the fact that there are so many empty houses out there, and that we have 160,000 children and 174,000 families in temporary accommodation. Would it not be brilliant if we could use empty homes as part of providing that need? That is one of my amendments; I cannot remember whether it is Amendment 89 or Amendment 90—forgive me my trespasses.
The other thing is that I want to invest in social housing. I should declare my situation: I am a social entrepreneur, a social investor, who runs a business, The Big Issue, which deals with the crisis of homelessness in the streets but also runs an enormous social business. We invest in 600 social businesses around the UK. Last week, I had the great pleasure—I am sure your Lordships cannot imagine me crying—of opening a school. I had to cut the ribbon of a school for disabled children down in Sunbury that Big Issue Invest had put £3 million into. So I am interested in the use of social business. Where do we get our money from? We get out money from the City of London, from family offices and from high net worth individuals. I am trying to bring two things together: one is the need for social justice around social housing and the other is freeing up the way that businesses can invest in social housing so that we can remove the anomalies that Governments have thrown up. We want to get into a situation where you can make money out of social housing but for the benefit of the most disenfranchised people in British society.
I am glad that Mr Burnham has taken as his first wonderful option the ending of rough sleeping. As an ex-rough sleeper, I have been campaigning for 35 years to get rid of rough sleeping. I have been campaigning to get rid of people leaving prisons and ending up on the streets. I am an ex-offender, and I was blessed that I did not end up on the streets. I ended up on the streets because I was running away from not just the police but my family.