Housing: Impact on Child Development

Debate between Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Baroness King of Bow

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness King of Bow]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of low-quality housing on child development.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will open the debate on behalf of my noble friend Lady King of Bow. Her surrogate is presently in labour so she cannot be in the House this afternoon.

When my noble friend was first elected to the other place 15 years ago, she was inundated with pamphlets and reports from her constituency and beyond. One grabbed her attention. It was called, I Mustn’t Laugh Too Much.

Now I, like my noble friend, like to laugh a lot. She wanted to understand why anyone would post such silly advice to people. As she read the report, she discovered that the title was based on advice given by a doctor to a young woman in a cold, damp and overcrowded flat at the top of a tower block on the Ocean estate in Stepney. The report went on to detail the housing conditions that the family was living in. Despite the heating being on constantly, everyone suffered from the cold in the winter and frequently fell ill. There were no drying facilities and clothes had to be dried in the bathroom and hallway. There was severe damp which produced black mould and the windows were always dripping wet. The three eldest children had asthma and used inhalers; the youngest boy had heart trouble and had suffered from persistent colds and coughs since birth. The doctor warned the family that asthma attacks could be precipitated by fits of laughing—hence the doctorly advice.

My noble friend grew up in north London. She had already seen plenty of run-down housing before becoming Labour’s candidate in Bethnal Green and Bow in 1997. Families on low incomes are as proud as anyone else and always tried to put on a good show when visited during that first election campaign. The intense and grinding daily impact of living in such conditions was really only truly brought home to her for the first time on reading that report. In surveys of 100 families on the Ocean and Limehouse Fields estates, it calculated the number of days lost in work or school through sickness and described the extent of damp throughout badly constructed and poorly maintained tower blocks. It revealed that many buildings were running alive with mice and cockroaches; exposed that the lifts were constantly broken and took weeks to repair; and showed that the stairwells of those blocks were plagued by drug users. Most of all, it painted a vivid picture of how bad housing affected the health, education and well-being of children and undermined their long-term life chances. At that moment my noble friend became a complete convert to the central importance of decent, secure and affordable housing in ending child poverty.

In the years that followed 1997, the blocks in which the young woman and her neighbours lived were demolished and replaced by excellent, family-sized social housing built by Bethnal Green & Victoria Park Housing Association under the single regeneration budget programme—the kind of homes Nye Bevan would have been proud to be associated with.

In 2000, my noble friend received a follow-up research report, A Drop in the Ocean, which showed that the health gain of the families who had moved into the first new homes on those estates was already dramatic. Finding and staying in work continued to be a problem, but the children were healthier and doing much better in school. Its most important recommendation was that that the SRB needed to be extended to benefit families in the rest of Stepney too.

My noble friend was delighted when the Ocean estate was included in the New Deal for Communities programme, with a £55 million budget to transform the area. Thanks to that initiative and much extra schools funding besides, the exam results at Stepney Green and Sir John Cass secondary schools are now well above the national average. Those children have a real chance to fulfil their potential.

The ideas behind the single regeneration budget and the New Deal for Communities programme were not new or even very innovative. The East End is the birthplace of council housing; many of you will have heard of the Boundary estate. Some of you even may have read Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago, which was based around life in the Old Nichol slum on which the estate was built. The London County Council built the Boundary estate out of its desire to improve the squalid and overcrowded housing conditions in which children were growing up. The challenge then, as now, was how to roll that out borough-wide, city-wide and nation-wide. Our predecessors in central and local government determined that a decent, secure and affordable home was essential for children to fulfil their potential. The funding followed that political priority.

At some point in the 1980s or 1990s, however, those governing our country—and some local authorities—lost sight of that objective. Investment was salami-sliced away and councils stopped building. I would be the first to admit that it took the Labour Government whom I supported far too long to rediscover that objective. However, rediscover it they did, especially after the 2004 spending review, to the extent that almost 50,000 new social homes were completed in England in 2010-11 —more than 1,000 of them in Tower Hamlets alone. Tower Hamlets Council was granted a further £43 million to complete the physical regeneration of the Ocean estate and was promised £222 million to bring its remaining council homes up to a decent standard.

My noble friend tells me of the Liberal Democrat MPs who stood alongside her in many debates, calling for Labour’s Ministers to increase investment in housing. All that makes the housing policy and budgetary decisions taken by this coalition Government the more dispiriting. There has been a two-thirds cut in the Homes and Communities Agency’s budget; a benefit cap that punishes tenants for the greed of their landlords; “affordable” rents at 80% of market levels, which most of my noble friend’s former constituents who are working cannot afford to pay and so do not bid for; and an end to proper security of tenure in social housing.

There are clearly individuals in this Government who recognise the value of building social housing to give children the home they need to succeed in life. But the Deputy Prime Minister’s hopelessly inadequate announcement last year of just £300 million—a fig leaf for tearing up Section 106 agreements for social homes—shows that he is not one of them.

This country urgently needs a proper housebuilding programme. I am delighted that the leader of the Opposition, in his excellent speech to the Labour Party conference last month, promised that we will deliver it. Two hundred thousand new homes a year is double the number achieved by the coalition in any of its years in power.

The report to which I referred at the beginning of my speech was written by Professor Peter Ambrose. Some of your Lordships may know Peter through his tireless work and support for the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust campaign on behalf of families in poverty. Sadly, Peter passed away last summer. His passion and compassion are sadly missed, especially in Stepney, but I and my noble friend are confident that his work will continue to inspire a new generation campaigning on behalf of homeless and overcrowded families. Over the summer, my noble friend received a briefing note from the Zacchaeus Trust reminding us that 2 million children still live in bad housing. They live in cold, damp homes that result in their missing far too many school days off sick and falling behind in their studies, or growing up in overcrowded conditions of three or four children to a bedroom, with no quiet place in which to study. For those children who go on to secondary school, the overcrowding at home will make it almost impossible for them to find the quiet space that they need to concentrate on their homework properly and study for exams.

The cuts to housing benefit mean that homeless families are again spending months on end in totally unsuitable bed-and-breakfast accommodation, cooped up in single rooms where babies do not have even the space to learn to crawl and toddlers are at risk from all sorts of hazards in the communal areas, as well as inside the room. The previous Labour Government banned that practice for a reason, but the coalition Government allow it to arise again and again. Mr Pickles’s offer of £1.9 million to all councils struggling with the pressures of increased homelessness was totally inadequate. It was no surprise that Ministers gave Tower Hamlets not a penny, while Westminster Council got another big wodge of cash.

I am very grateful for the chance to initiate this debate on behalf on my noble friend and look forward to the contributions of others. I urge Ministers to think again about the devastating cuts to the Home and Communities Agency budget and to start building the homes that our children need so that the next generation of children does not have to worry about laughing too much.