Andy Slaughter
Main Page: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith)
Jeremy Corbyn
Obviously people on what are seen as relatively high incomes do have housing needs and are paying, as I outlined earlier, incredibly high levels of rent in order to survive, as a result of which they cannot save and therefore, even if they wanted to get into the owner-occupied market, simply could not do so. A young couple or single person in London earning £25,000 a year and paying £500 a week for a flat has only a limited ability to save and so will stay in the private rented sector for a very long time, if not for ever. People who do buy into the owner-occupied market usually rely on modest levels of inheritance to put down the deposit to do so. We are making housing unattainable for people on relatively high incomes, as the hon. Gentleman points out.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The definition of “affordable” in Hammersmith and Fulham now goes up to £80,000 a year, and I am sorry but I do not accept that that is reasonable. Let us put one myth to bed today, and that is that Boris Johnson is in some way committed to affordable housing in London. His own figures show that there will be fewer than 2,000 affordable housing starts this year and none next year.
Jeremy Corbyn
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the way in which he has represented his constituency and pointed out what the council in Hammersmith and Fulham is doing, and what he is trying to do to meet the needs of people who are in desperate housing need.
I come back to the issue of people on housing waiting lists. What is the route for a homeless family, or a concealed homeless or about-to-be-evicted homeless family, in an inner-London borough, or probably any other London borough? If they go to the council and present themselves as homeless, they will probably get a hostel place. Hostels are grim places and have a devastating effect on the psychology and well-being of children who go into them. If they are there for a long time, it is an awful experience. If they knew it was for one, two, three weeks or a month, and that at the end of that they would have a secure council flat, that would probably be bearable. But if they are there for six months or longer and are told that the only pathway out is to go into private rented accommodation, and they ask me as their MP whether to accept that, I have to say that they must, because if they do not the council will have absolved itself of its responsibility to them.
A member of that family will say, “But Jeremy, housing benefit will have to pay this huge rent, and that means I can’t get a job, otherwise I will lose the housing benefit.” They are moving into the most awful bind. Quite often they are placed in flats in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton—no reflection on him; quite the opposite—and they then come and tell me what the flat is like: slum landlord, inefficient heating, badly maintained, possibly vermin infested. They can get no redress from the landlord because the landlord knows for certain that there will be no problem in renting it again through an agency. We report the matter to the local authority but this can go on for years. They move from one private rented property to another until, perhaps five or 10 years down the line, they achieve the gold medal of a council flat. That is a lifetime for a child. They will move primary schools several times, lose their friends and social contacts, their youth club and their networks. That is what is happening to dozens and dozens of children and families all over the city at this time.
I ask the Government: please think through what is happening. Think of the desire for somewhere safe and secure to live. Think of the housing benefit that is being wasted in excessive rents to private landlords, and allow local authorities to do what the old London county council, the Greater London council, and lots of London boroughs of all political parties did, which was to invest in good-quality bricks and mortar of secure housing for people to live in, which they could call their own home and know is their own home. That is what brings about stability in communities. The alternative leads to underachievement, homelessness, crime and the misery of unsustainable communities.
I do not call such building a waste. I listen with interest when building workers tell me that they are being laid off because there is nothing for them to do. There is a housing crisis out there that can be solved by the building of new properties that can put those people to good work and solve the social problems at the same time. London is crying out for a socially responsible approach to housing. Let us not leave it all to the market; The market is what created the problem in the first place.
Mary Macleod
That question is best directed at the Minister, who will, I think, disagree. I am sure that he will respond to it at the end of the debate.
The new homes bonus shows the concept of localism in practice, with local communities, local government, business and the third sector coming together to make decisions that will bring real benefit to the local area. The Mayor of London has made a commitment to deliver 50,000 new affordable homes by 2011, of which 30,000 will be social rented homes; the remainder will be for low-cost ownership. He is on target to deliver his manifesto by the end of his mayoral term, despite the biggest downturn in the market for many years. By the end of the financial year 2010-11, 40,000 homes will have been completed, with a higher proportion of social rented homes being family sized than in any previous mayoral term. The Mayor has also fulfilled his manifesto commitment to invest £60 million in bringing 3,142 empty homes back into use.
Secondly, let us consider the increased use of the private rented sector. We have been used to an “Englishman’s home is his castle” approach to housing, but it is clear that we need to move more towards a European model, whereby long-term renting is much more the norm. Private companies can play a role in that, and several are now developing models that provide grant-free housing for economically active families who find that they are unable to get social housing or who have no realistic prospect of getting on the housing ladder—the so-called sandwich class. Those companies work in urban areas to develop brownfield sites and provide good-sized family accommodation for under the £340 a week housing benefit threshold.
For example, the London Rental Housing Company intends to build 2,000 private rented units in the next five years, and it is currently searching for 10 sites across London that can accommodate at least 150 three-bedroom apartments. It also intends to build larger units for families and sharers. That is part of a new, emerging build-to-let sector, which is entering the market to build purpose-built mass housing. Perhaps one of the greatest indictments of the Labour years is the previous Government’s rigid adherence to political dogma and their ignorance of the private sector’s potential to help solve some of the problems.
The Mayor of London believes that, by attracting institutional investment, there is significant scope for the private rented sector to play a bigger role. He is also committed to ensuring value for money in the private rental market and introducing the London rents map, which enables prospective tenants to see the going rental rates for any given postcode area in the capital.
Thirdly, let me deal with increased mobility. The majority of tenancy agreements are currently made on a lifetime basis, with no regard for future needs. Indeed, tenants can leave properties to family members after their death, with no regard to their housing needs. Although I understand that it would be difficult to change the arrangements for existing tenants, and I appreciate why the Government have decided not to do that, the suggested changes for the future represent a much more realistic model for moving forward.
Mr Slaughter
I am listening carefully, and I have heard about no under-occupation for social tenants, so long-standing families will be forced to move out of their homes. I have heard, “Let’s rely on the private rented sector”, of which, as a west London Member of Parliament, given our heritage from Rachmanism, the hon. Lady should be ashamed. I am now hearing that lack of security is a benefit. I hope that she tells her constituents what she believes about housing policy in London, because, given the size of her majority, I would like to see how they vote next time.
Mary Macleod
I take every single person who comes to my surgery with housing problems extremely seriously, and I deal with them, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman does, too. That is what a Member of Parliament should do.
Joan Ruddock
I do accept that, but the fact is that before Ken Livingstone there was no such requirement—no aim, no goal—so there was no provision. The hon. Lady might want to acknowledge that any politician who aims for 50% and achieves 36% is actually doing rather well. Having had that experience, Ken Livingstone is now clear that a 50% target could and should be achieved. That is why he wants it to be a target once more. He suggests changes to allow public bodies such as the GLA Group and London boroughs to borrow against their assets on the bond markets in order to invest in the development of new affordable housing. He also suggests raising money on the bond markets to build affordable homes, including for rent, to break the back of the housing shortage and create work, and, as I have said, restoring the target that 50% of new housing provision in London should be affordable.
Mr Slaughter
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it ill behoves the Tories to be smug about the achievements of Labour Mayors in London? Any failure to achieve was almost inevitably due to the failure of individual boroughs—particularly boroughs such as Wandsworth and Westminster, which have had a disgraceful record on this over many years—to build any affordable housing, even in single figures. The former Mayor’s achievements over that time working with Labour boroughs were actually extremely significant, which is of course why the targets were abolished.
Joan Ruddock
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Indeed, I pay tribute to the Labour administration in Lewisham for working so hard with the Mayor of London and social housing landlords in the borough to achieve considerable levels of new build, an effort that was defeated at times only by the price of land, which was often difficult to acquire.
Let me conclude. My greatest fear is that by the time I leave this House, we might have come full circle. We might be back to the kind of housing conditions that I saw and experienced through my constituents when I entered this House in the 1980s. At that time, Londoners and visitors to London were used to seeing those cardboard boxes under the arches on the south bank. There are some people here who will not have those memories, but they are so powerful for those of us who lived in London at the time. I have a terrible fear that instead of getting people into work and making London a better and more prosperous place, where people are properly housed, all the Government’s changes, along with the cuts and everything that goes with them, will return us to those terrible times.
Tom Brake
That might well be among the solutions that the hon. Member for Westminster North will list later. I should point out, however, that over the course of this Parliament, we will raise at least an extra £10 billion from the banks through the taxation measures that we have already introduced, and that there might be a limit to how much one can draw on that source of funding.
I want to move on to the specific points that Centrepoint raised in its briefing. I am sure that the coalition Government will want to monitor those issues, and to assess whether our proposals have had any unintended consequences. If that is the case, there might be a need to show flexibility further down the line. On social housing tenancies, there are clearly different views in different organisations on the idea of minimum fixed terms. I know that some Conservative and Liberal Democrat local authorities are reluctant to introduce them. Centrepoint says that, while it does not oppose them, it is crucial to have a degree of flexibility in the system, in particular for young people who might need more stability as they start out, and that tenancies should reflect people’s individual circumstances rather than acting as a straitjacket that constrains everyone in the same way.
Centrepoint also raised concerns, as have Members in previous debates, about the shared room rate, particularly the risk that as this applies to people up to 35, even more pressure might be put on properties currently going to younger people. There might be a tendency to give priority to the older person seeking a shared room, perhaps because they are more settled, which might have a displacement effect on younger people seeking shared accommodation. I hope the Minister will respond to that particular point.
Mr Slaughter
Moving on from the Centrepoint briefing, does the hon. Gentleman support the removal of security of tenure for social tenants or only for some types of social tenants? If so, what types—older people or families, for example? He mentions young people, who might have insecure lifestyles, but what advantages does the hon. Gentleman see in taking away the security that social tenants have been used to for the past 50 years?
Tom Brake
I am happy to give local authorities and others the powers to change the terms of tenure and I hope the hon. Gentleman would agree with me that there is an issue with some people having security of tenure who, from a financial point of view, could afford to live in their own accommodation or in the private sector. Perhaps Bob Crow springs to mind as one such example. By continuing to occupy council or social housing, those people are not making that accommodation available to others in greater need. The hon. Gentleman might not want to draw the line in the same place as me, but I hope he will acknowledge that it could be argued with considerable justification that people at the extremes should not have security of tenure in premises that could be more appropriately given to people in far greater need.
A further point raised in the Centrepoint briefing was the issue of the uprating of the local housing allowance and the move towards basing it on the consumer prices index. It is argued that using the CPI figure could cost the Government money if there has been a drop in the rental markets locally. The Minister might want to look at that from a Government spending point of view.
The final point in the briefing is the issue of direct payments. I fully support the concept that people should take more responsibility for their expenditure, so I have some reservations about paying money directly to landlords. Centrepoint’s view is that there are circumstances—this might be particularly true for young people—where people might prefer to have the money paid directly to their landlord because they do not feel they are ready to take on that financial responsibility. Some flexibility there might help.
My final point is not one that Centrepoint raised; it is about arm’s length management organisations and I would like the Minister to update us on his view of them. Other Members in their places may well, like me, be members of the all-party ALMOs group. Members will recall that when tenants were given an option to transfer to an ALMO, a consultation process had to be gone through. The concern of the all-party group is that the travel nowadays is in the opposite direction and that some local authorities are seeking, perhaps precipitately, to bring ALMOs or social housing back under their control without going through the anticipated process of consultation. I hope that when the Minister responds—or, if necessary, in writing—he will pick up on that point and let us know whether he has heard those concerns and raised them with local authorities, as it is important to ensure that tenants are given a fair outline of their options and are fully consulted about the process. They can then make a decision with the full facts in hand on whether they want the responsibility for the management of their properties brought back in house or to retain the ALMO.
This is an important debate. I have been a Member for 14 years and I have spoken in about 25 debates on this subject during that time. It is a particularly critical issue in London. I do not believe that there is much difference between us about the need to tackle the problem, although there are big differences in approach. I hope that in the months and years to come, my Government will demonstrate by the measures we are introducing that we are tackling the problem, growing the amount of social housing available and starting to address what has proved to be a real dilemma for Londoners for the last 30 or 40 years.
John McDonnell
I was head of the Camden council’s policy unit during the 1980s. I remember with pride the engagement and investment in developing tenants’ associations. They gave us a hard time—they were in your face—but they played an important democratic role in the raising of standards. In the case of the larger housing associations, that whole ethos has completely gone.
Mr Slaughter
My hon. Friend has hit a rich seam, which I shall develop when I have an opportunity to speak in the debate. Not all housing associations are bad, even in terms of tenant involvement. The tenant chair of the Shepherd’s Bush housing association in my west London constituency does a good job. However, I am afraid that most of them, particularly the large ones—the Notting Hills of this world—are, as my hon. Friend says, corporations in all but name. The trouble is that, while they would like to think that they are out there wheeling and dealing in the business world, they are very poorly run and are doing a very poor job for our tenants. It is a disgrace. They are worse than the Tory councils in many respects, because their actions are not politically motivated. These are people whose only job is to provide affordable housing for people, and they simply are not doing it. That is a scandal which should be exposed.
John McDonnell
I entirely agree.
I want to be able to attend my other debate so that I can say wonderful things about the British Airports Authority, so I shall move on to the subject of the second source of housing supply in my constituency. There have been a number of new private developments there in recent years. Thanks to Ken Livingstone’s policy of trying to create a social mix, we have gained a combination of private and social housing on individual sites. The problem is that the area is infested with a number of developers who are seeking to impose the highest possible housing density. In reality, they are building the slums of the future. I will name one company, Inland Homes, which is developing properties that not only fail to meet existing need but undermine the quality of housing in the area.
Let me give two examples. One is West Drayton in Porters Way. The Government have a role in that development, because it is a former Government site. It was the air traffic control centre for Heathrow and an RAF camp before it was handed over to the private sector for development. High-density, barrack-like accommodation was constructed, with inadequate parking facilities so that the parking spills on to the rest of the estate. It consists of flats which do not blend in with the houses with gardens on the rest of the estate. There is inadequate provision of social facilities— there are none at all for young people—and the local schools and medical facilities have become overloaded. The amount of traffic has increased, and even the drainage system cannot cope with the new development. The section 106 planning agreements have failed to deal with the costs and burdens placed on the local infrastructure.
The other development is on the old railway estate in Hayes, which was built for employers of British Rail and was sold off after its privatisation. The Glenister hall site—the former site of Hayes working men’s club—was sold to Inland Homes. Glenister hall was a community hall with playing fields and a football pitch on which the local team played, as did local kids, but the site has now been allowed to deteriorate. Inland Homes has made two planning applications for an intensive development. It lost the first, but Hillingdon council has approved the second. No alternative place has yet been provided for the kids to play football on. The company has offered to improve one site, which is already a football pitch, but it is literally a mile away, across busy roads. So we are now to have another intensive development. The local residents campaigned against it but were overridden by the council, and we are now hoping that the Secretary of State will call this in. One leaflet was put out anonymously by a local resident and the company is threatening legal action against the chair of the residents association, Peter Robinson, an elderly gentleman who is not in good health. He is being threatened with libel action, even though he did not put out the leaflet. This sort of ruthless developer is taking over entire sites in my area to build the slums of the future.
Under the previous Government—I hope it will not happen under this Government, but I think it will go on—the buy-to-let landlordism in my area grew massively. Individuals—this mainly involved individuals, rather than companies—bought up small property empires. They offer these places at high rents, often to families on housing benefit. Some of the properties have been developed into illegal houses in multiple occupation—they are not registered. These places are not maintained and people are living in appalling slum conditions. We are talking about Rachmanite landlords who threaten and abuse tenants whenever they make any complaint, and then evict them illegally. In many cases, these landlords fail to abide by even basic housing legislation, in respect of providing rent books and so on. People are evicted when they complain and if they seek to take legal action, they have neither the resources, nor the ability to do so—now that there are restrictions on legal aid, they will have even less ability to do so.
Hillingdon council uses local estate agents to push people into the private sector. We have discovered that the estate agents it has been using have often used these buy-to-let slum landlords. There is a belief that in Hillingdon an informal agreement exists whereby the estate agent will seek properties in the south of the borough, in my constituency—the working-class, multicultural area—and not look for them in the rich north of the borough. So an apartheid regime is developing with regard to housing homeless people in the borough—of course it is not that the north of the borough is represented by Conservatives who are protecting their own patches. This has resulted in families living in appalling conditions and overcrowding on a scale not seen in my area since the second world war. Some families are living in almost developing world conditions because some of the properties are so poor.
The housing shortage has also resulted almost in a planning free-for-all. There has almost been a breakdown in local planning controls, enforcement and monitoring in my area: extensions are put on properties; new units are put up in gardens; and new buildings are created with no control whatever. The council fails even to acknowledge a number of the developments and does not seem to be aware of the developments that have gone on. When these things are reported, the council gives retrospective planning permission.
A resident in my constituency, Brian Duffy, has led a campaign on the issue, working with Councillor Jaz Dhillon and others. They have looked on Google Earth to see what properties have been developed. We have seen a new phenomenon in my area: leisure rooms. These are, in effect, sheds built in gardens. They are given retrospective planning permission and are supposed to be used for leisure purposes, but on inspection— like many of my colleagues, I carry out walkabout inspections—we find that curtains have gone up, bathrooms and toilets have been installed and whole families are living in these “leisure rooms”. I understand that a large family might be desperate and might feel that this is the only way in which they can put a roof over their heads, but that is not what is happening in most cases. What is happening is that landlords are constructing these leisure rooms and getting families to live in what are, in effect, garages. In some instances we have discovered these places only when the family have turned up to register for council tax and we have found out that they are living in a shed or a garage as a result of these illegal developments.
There has also been an increase in people sleeping rough in my area. A large number of people sleep rough by the Grand Union canal and I tell the police that I do not want them moved on, because I do not know where else they could go. If they are seeking warmth and security under the bridge by the canal and that is the only place they can find, I cannot see what other option there is, because my area has no rough sleeping provision. The only option would be to send them to central London but there is barely any provision for them there either.
An element of squatting is breaking out in London again. That is understandable, because people have nowhere else to go. I am anxious about the Government’s proposals to introduce tighter legislation on squatting—I would certainly be anxious if they are cutting back on housing investment alongside that. I believe that their policies will make things dramatically worse. I do not wish to rehearse all the arguments I have put forward so far, but the benefit cuts, the increase in social housing rents and the cuts in the capital programme spell absolute housing disaster for my area. There will be an increase in problems such as homelessness, housing need and overcrowding. The tragedy of all this is that homeless people and the people living in these conditions have no political clout; they are largely voiceless. Therefore, it is our responsibility to use every platform we can to speak up for them, which is why I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North.
What is needed in this area? It is blindingly obvious that we need an emergency housing programme on a scale not seen since the second world war. We have to treat this situation as a crisis and put all the resources into it, and that means an emergency housing purchase programme. I want councils to be given the powers and the resources to buy vacant properties in my area that are on the open market and use them to house families—that is how critical the situation is. They must buy the properties and manage them directly. We can then develop for those properties schemes of small co-operatives, perhaps see a return of the housing association movement and break up the overly large, bureaucratic corporations. Perhaps we could see a return of that movement to its origins, but in the meantime we need an emergency housing purchase programme.
On new builds, I would like councils, particularly those in my area, to be given the opportunity of compulsory purchase and be allowed almost to commandeer sites for building. We should of course protect the green belt and the open spaces—I am worried about the Government’s threats to allotments—but to establish a new building programme we need to give the councils the powers to sequestrate sites to bring them into use, particularly industrial and commercial units, and the empty shops and properties above shops in town centres. Of course we can use creative design and creative construction techniques but, above all else, we just need to start building council homes again.
I also want an emergency programme of refurbishment. I want the decent homes programme to be not only maintained, but extended and intensified. I want higher standards and I want to ensure that these are green homes. I want them to be insulated and warm. I want renewable energy to be used and I want us to minimise the waste. In that way, we can find the funding—we could also end the tax breaks to the buy-to-let landlords, which they have used so extensively to profiteer over the past 14 years.
I was the Greater London council’s chair of finance and we had a capital pool. We had the most efficient borrowing scheme in local government in this country and possibly in western Europe. It had cross-party support and I believe it was started by a Tory administration and then maintained through a cross-party agreement throughout the life of the GLC. It enabled us not only to build, but to give mortgages.
I would like to see local authority mortgages brought back again. The London county council started them and because of the scale of London and of our resources, and therefore of our capacity to borrow and lend cheaply, the LCC and GLC mortgage was often the first mortgage that people took. It was an affordable mortgage that enabled people to get on the first rung of the housing ladder. People may recall that we developed, at that stage, our own part buy, part rent schemes, but they were affordable. Some hon. Members may also recall that we freed up properties through the seaside homes programme, whereby we bought and built properties in seaside resorts outside London where people wanted to retire to. Those people gave up their council properties and we were able to put families back into them.
We should be looking at creative incentive schemes such as those, rather than penalising people or limiting their ability to maintain their council house based on their wage or a particular time period. I agree that part of that proposal concerns the self-build projects that we launched and they should be built on. We need to use all those inventive and creative ways to tackle the housing crisis.
The most important thing to recognise—for everybody, but for this Government in particular—is that there is a crisis that cannot be ignored. In past debates and under past Governments, the whole point of housing policy has been not merely to paternalistically hand down housing from Government to people in need, but to be one of the most effective stimuli to the economy to get us out of recession. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington North mentioned unemployed workers in the construction industry and that industry is one of the sectors of our economy that are faring worst at the moment. Whenever we have seen any lift or recent growth in the economy, the construction sector has held us back. If we could launch an emergency house-building programme on some scale, it would put people back to work, and a housing purchase programme would lift asset values. In that way, an emergency housing programme could help this country to tackle the recession. We could be lifted out of the recession on the basis of investment for social need rather than investment for greed and profit.
Mr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
Today’s debate is very valuable and I congratulate the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on securing it. I do not always agree with everything he says, but on this point there is a lot of common ground between his party, mine and that of my colleagues in the coalition Government.
Labour Members speak about housing as though it is an issue that affects only them and their constituents. We are demonstrating today that there is a housing problem across London that is experienced by all Members, particularly in their surgeries and postbags. People regularly come to see me about this in my surgery and I feel a fraud in many ways because they are concerned and upset about their housing or lack of housing and I know that we will not be able to do anything to help. I feel greatly sorry for them and we recommend that they go to the private sector in the knowledge that we have nothing in the public or social rented sectors.
I want to cover a few points that the Government are addressing as well as to speak about my experience. Some people seem to think that all London is completely the same, but it is not. We have diverse areas and different experiences, which is exemplified in the housing crisis across the city. It is a crisis; we have a problem. Many people are not only unable to afford their own homes but have a problem housing themselves in the type of quality accommodation we would expect all our families to live in.
That is why it is vital that the Government and local authorities continue to promote the development of attractive mixed-tenure communities in our local areas instead of the monolithic estates about which many of us have been concerned. We have seen not a rush but an agenda to knock those estates down, and they are crime-ridden in many parts of London. Promoting such a development is the only way we will help people into home ownership. At the very least we should change their tenancies so they are better suited to individual needs. That is how we will stop people being trapped in that vicious dependency cycle.
I shall not reel off a lot of statistics, but one thing that I am very keen on—I spoke about it in my maiden speech—is social aspiration. I do not believe that people who go into the social rented sector lack social aspiration, but I do think that they have it hammered out of them. In 2008-09, only 49% of tenants of working age in the social rented sector were in work, down from 71% in 1981. I have heard the comments about cardboard boxes under Blackfriars bridge, but they do not stack up with the statistics. In comparison, in that same year, 89% of home owners, and 75% of private renters, of working age were in work. About 60% of social rented households report that they are in receipt of housing benefit compared with just 20% in the private rented sector. I would not say that people in the social rented sector were failures, but I believe that they certainly end up feeling that they are at a disadvantage in comparison with other people who are perhaps attracted to, or able to afford, the private rented sector.
Mr Slaughter
I am just glancing through a report from Family Mosaic, a large housing association that is very good, on the whole. It states that
“setting rents at 80% of market rent would increase our clients’ requirement for housing benefit by 151%”.
What does the hon. Gentleman think of that policy?
Mr Offord
We should allow the social rented sector to help the people who really need that help. The hon. Gentleman asked the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) who should be thrown out of their homes, and it is quite clear that no demographic section of the community should be thrown out, whether that is the elderly or people with children. It should be done on a financial basis to people such as Lee Jasper and Bob Crow, whom I read about in the paper today and who earns £145,000. If we removed people such as him, we would open up the social rented market to the people who really need it. That is what I think of that policy.
The point I want to make, which helpfully illustrates that answer, is that social landlords are required by inflexible and centrally determined rules to grant lifetime tenancies in the vast majority of cases, and I presume that someone like Mr Crow would have that sort of tenancy. There is no account of how their individual and household circumstances have changed and they cannot be removed. I spoke to my office today and I have received a telephone call from a lady in my constituency who said that she urgently needs to move house as her husband has become disabled, but she is unable to do so because of the rigid rules and structures that I have just described. In shocking contrast, other people’s tenancies can be inherited by family members who might no longer be in need of the housing that they have been allocated. That is clearly not a system that helps to serve the people we represent.
Labour Members have spoken about the development proposals in their local areas and how they feel that the local authority alone should be allowed to develop. That has not been the experience in my constituency.
Mr Offord
I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once, so I am going to continue with my speech.
My experience has been very good. Large elements of the constituency certainly need development—I am thinking of the West Hendon estate and Perryfields, as well as areas of Burnt Oak and, significantly, the Grahame Park estate, of which some hon. Members might be aware. It was the site of the old RAF Hendon base and it is a location that has now changed to allow development from the private sector. That has been a great success and many of my friends live in that area, which is proving to be a real boon to the local economy.
I was pleased a couple of weeks ago to attend the first phase of Choices for Grahame Park, which is a separate phase of development in Colindale, with the mayor of Barnet, Councillor Anthony Finn. When that is completed, it will form a central part of the Colindale area action plan and will create a new community in my constituency, providing greater transport links on the tube, greater community health facilities and a radical rebuilding programme that will transform the estate, which has been a blight for many years. This will happen in the next 15 years and we expect to see about 3,000 new homes as part of this new heart of my constituency.
The regeneration of the area will also provide retail facilities and 25% of the existing homes are built in a traditional layout, instead of like the cardboard boxes and rabbit hutches that some hon. Members have described. In total, we will demolish 1,314 outdated and overused homes and replace them with 2,977 brand-new, purpose-built family homes that will revolutionise life in the Grahame Park area and in my constituency as a whole.
Clive Efford
I agree. Buy to let has not been the success that some thought it would be in providing rented accommodation and encouraging people to enter the private rented market; that idea has been consigned to the history books. I hope that we do not go back down that route again.
We need to deal with the problem of the supply of social rented accommodation. I point out to the Minister, before he attacks the previous Mayor of London’s record, that thanks to the last Government’s subsidy, the number of affordable house-building starts in 2009-10 was 16,000. Last year that was down to just over 2,000. This year, 2011-12, the figure is 2,000. From 2012-13 it is zero. I do not know how the Minister will explain at the Dispatch Box how the Mayor of London will hit his 50,000 homes target without building a single home in 2012-13 or 2013-14—unless, that is, the Mayor moves a whole host of Bob Crows. [Interruption.] The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), is waving an informative graph at me; coincidentally, I happen to have a copy. It is from the Homes and Communities Agency, and she will no doubt refer to it in her speech. It officially confirms the figures that I gave; they come not from a Labour party press release, but from the Homes and Communities Agency. Boris has clearly failed in his objective and his promise to provide affordable housing for people in London.
Another policy that we must confront is the one that Boris described as “Kosovo-style social cleansing” when it was announced. I have never agreed with him more—but unfortunately, the following week he went on to say:
“My consistent position has been that the government is absolutely right to reform the housing benefit system which has become completely unsustainable. I do not agree with the wild accusations from defenders of the current system that reform will lead to social cleansing.”
Boris says one thing in front of a microphone when the policy is first announced, but he secretly makes those comments at a later date. When the matter is in the media and it is discussed on the 6 o’clock news he appears to stand up to the Government, but after he has been sat on by the Minister and everyone else, he sneaks out a press release a week later saying that he absolutely agrees with their policy—a policy that will result in people on low incomes being moved from large areas of inner London to places outside London where private sector rents are lower.
There have been huge clearances of estates, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) will doubtless refer, as perfectly good council housing, in which millions of pounds has been invested under the decent homes programme, will be knocked down to make way for private luxury developments. The Conservatives just do not get it when it comes to housing. Surprisingly, the Liberal Democrats do not get it either. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made a point about how essential it is that people on low incomes should be able to live in mixed communities across the capital. During the earlier spell of cold weather, my local authority kept the roads clear so that people could get to work. I am sure that that was true, too, of Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea and other areas.
There is affordable housing in those areas for people who do all sorts of jobs in the local economy, from driving refuse lorries to sweeping the roads and pushing trolleys in local hospitals or even cleaning floors in posh houses in the leafier parts of central London, but those people will have nowhere to live in those communities if the Government continue to pursue their policies. Those people will not be there to do jobs such as stacking shelves in supermarkets. They are an essential part of our local economy, but they will disappear from many of our communities. The biggest effect on the Tories will perhaps be that their cleaning costs will go up, because of the shortage of cleaners, pushing up the hourly rate.
During the crisis in the freezing cold weather, many of us could get to work only because fairly low-paid people in local authorities across the capital got into work early in the morning, driving gritting lorries, clearing roads and so on, so that buses could run and other people could keep the economy moving. Those people are an essential part of our economy. I suspect that they will not qualify, even if they can afford it, for key worker schemes, to buy properties in those areas. They will be forced out by higher rents and the lack of housing benefit designed to support part-time workers who provide essential jobs such as child minding and caring and other roles. Under the policy, they just will not be there.
Social housing is not just a benefit that is means-tested and provided by a welfare cheque. It is an essential part of our communities and economy. To get rid of it in large parts of the capital is a hugely retrograde step that we will all come to regret. Social housing is also essential not just for people on low incomes, but for those who aspire to buy their own homes. We know now that the house lending market has changed—probably for ever, but certainly for a long time. It will no longer be possible to gamble on the future value of a house to borrow 100% of its cost on the understanding that we know that it will be worth more in the future; 100% mortgages are a thing of the past. Any bank or building society will make it clear that no one is lending 100% mortgages any more, and they do not foresee that happening. That means that people will have to be savers for a long time before they can become home buyers. Even people in social housing who aspire to buy their own home will have to save for a long time.
In a study published in October 2010, the Home Builders Federation came to the conclusion that
“In London, first time buyers aged between 22 and 29 cannot pay their rent and save for a deposit—this would cost 10% more than their net monthly income.”
It goes on to state:
“The average deposit across the UK is 230% that of average salaries—almost 300% in London.”
Even if people wanted to become home owners, if they are forced into the private rented sector they can never save enough money to do so. That tells us that affordable rented accommodation is not just about people on benefits or on low incomes, people who lack aspiration or are in a crisis in their lives, but is essential to the future of the housing market, particularly in London where deposits will be high. If we do not provide affordable housing at levels at which people who may aspire to become future home owners can reasonably be expected to save at a decent rate, we are undermining the future of our own housing market. To have a home construction industry in the future, we will be relying on developers of schemes, such as mine in Kidbrooke, where they sell to people not from the local community, not even from the UK, but to business people from abroad. That cannot be right. That is not right for the future of our city, and we should not encourage it.
My final point concerns the social management of council rents and registered social landlord rents in order to create mixed communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) said, we have debated that for many years and it has never worked. When I grew up in rented accommodation in Southwark, surrounded by friends who all lived in rented accommodation, we had mixed communities. In those days, under a Labour Government, unemployment was not prevalent. Under the most recent Labour Government we increased employment enormously, and that is the policy that we need to return to, rather than the huge cuts that we see from this coalition Government.
The idea that we cannot create mixed communities because we have social rented properties is something that we should put behind us and never return to. It is not a matter of the tenure, but the people who live there. If we provide employment, we provide mixed communities, whether Bob Crow lives there, the local GP or shop owner, or someone experiencing a temporary period of unemployment. We need a Government who are prepared to stand by people and help to create jobs in those communities and invest in them in order to ensure that we do have mixed communities. They will not be created by flexible rents and social engineering.
Mr Slaughter
My hon. Friend has made an important point. I do not believe that the Government now believe their own rhetoric on mixed communities. The estates that Conservative councils are demolishing are mixed communities; mixed communities are made up of rented, owned, freehold and leasehold properties, with mixed income levels. Those estates are being replaced not with mixed communities, but with exactly what my hon. Friend described—ghettoes of the rich. They are properties that are advertised abroad or go for prices far above what ordinary families can afford. That is the future for housing in London. “Mixed communities”—
Mr Slaughter
“Mixed communities” is now a euphemism for building the poor out of London.
Clive Efford
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend.
It is a fool’s paradise to suggest that we can continue with the policies of the last 20 years or more and just build social housing as a fag end of private sector development. We need to make local authority land available for development, build social housing and create mixed communities by encouraging employment within communities, without messing around with flexible, temporary or probationary tenancies.
That is the way forward for housing in London; it is essential for future generations, whether they aspire to be homeowners or not. Affordable rented accommodation, even in communities where property values are extremely high, are absolutely essential if we are to have a thriving economy and thriving communities in those areas. We need to return to that situation, and I hope that the Government will reconsider their policies on the cuts in housing investment under the Mayor and the cuts to support to new council housing building programmes. I hope that we can start to build the houses that future generations need.
Heidi Alexander
It does not, which is partly why I am making this speech in the House.
When Boris Johnson stands there and looks proudly at new homes, I feel like saying to him, and to the public, “Those new homes are a result of the Labour Government’s investment in housing. They are a direct result of the national affordable house building programme.”
I have been involved in regeneration and attempts to build new homes in Lewisham for a number of years, and I know how long it takes to get new developments off the ground. Any homes that are being built at the moment probably went through the planning process three or four years ago, and the commercial viability of the scheme was probably assessed and agreed three or four years ago. For Boris Johnson to stand there and claim this as his victory is entirely wrong. His record will relate to what happens in the years to come. As we have heard, the Homes and Communities Agency predicts that in a couple of years no new affordable housing will be being built in London. It will fall off a cliff face. Boris Johnson should bear in mind that that will be his legacy for London, not the legacy left by the last Labour Government.
Another thing that I wish to say about my experience of trying to deliver regeneration in Lewisham is that no thanks are due to the Liberal and Tory councillors in this regard. As soon as there was the faintest whiff of local opposition to a new housing scheme, whether it was a private sector development or affordable housing, they generally chose to vote against it. Some of the plans in the Localism Bill will make it easier for some of those nimbys to block development. If we really are going to build more homes, we need to be thinking about how the planning system works.
I have talked a little about the fact that the capital grant programme has been slashed and the Government seem to be moving to a way of funding new homes that relies on the future rents that they will get in from properties. The approach of allowing housing associations to build and charge 80% of market rents seems to relate to an argument about why capital grants are being reduced. My big problem with that approach is that I fear we are simply not going to build the type of housing that Londoners, including my constituents, can afford.
I have done a bit of research on the average rents in Lewisham in the private rented sector and for housing association properties, and I have thus been able to work out what 80% of market rent would mean. At the moment, the average median rent for a one-bedroom flat in Lewisham is £170 a week and the rent in a housing association for such a property is about £80 a week. An increase to 80% of the market rental value would make the cost £136 a week and would mean a weekly increase of about £55.
That is bad enough, but the average market rent for a four-bedroom flat or house in Lewisham is £300 a week. Someone living in a similar London and Quadrant property would pay, on average, £114 a week. If London and Quadrant builds new homes in Lewisham and charges 80% of market rent, that figure would increase to £240 a week, which is an increase of about £125 a week. That represents a monthly increase of £500 and an annual increase of £6,000 in someone’s housing costs. If someone is lucky enough to be in full-time work in Lewisham and they are on the minimum wage, they will be earning less than £12,000 a year, so how on earth are they going to find £6,000 extra to pay towards their housing costs? I cannot see how that will happen and the London Council agrees with me. Its recent briefing produced for councillors in London on the affordable rent model states:
“There is already a widespread recognition that the ARM will fail to deliver on larger sized family homes; and that, at 80% of market rates, the model’s maximum rent level will be unaffordable in the capital”.
As I have mentioned, I am also concerned about families living in overcrowded situations. When they are offered a flat or house at 80% of the market rate, how are they going to be able to afford it? If they are going to have to pay an extra £6,000 a year, they are not going to move and so will stay in the overcrowded flat that they are living in.
My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) discussed in an intervention the additional costs that could be pushed on to housing benefit, and that is precisely what the affordable rent model could result in. I recently read an interesting report by Family Mosaic entitled “Mirror, signal, manoeuvre: our drive to provide more social housing”. Family Mosaic did some research on about 50 of its new tenants who moved into properties across London at the end of last year. Some of those people were in work and some had caring responsibilities; the real-life situations of a vast range of people were researched when putting together that report.
Family Mosaic estimates that if every one of those 50 individual households lived in a property at 80% of market rent, the housing benefit bill would increase by 151%. That is a huge amount of extra money that will have to go out in housing benefit and my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North is completely right to say that that is a way not of tackling the deficit but of making it worse.
At the end of the report, Family Mosaic asks what we can do:
“How do we go forward?”
In answer, the report states:
“To mitigate this risk”—
the risk that people might not be able to afford the rents—
“we could change the profile of our tenant group, and not let new properties to those most in need: this, however, goes against our core principles.”
I am concerned about how the affordable rent model will deliver any homes in which people can afford to live.
Mr Slaughter
It is refreshing to hear that from a housing association. The quote is from the same report that I mentioned when I intervened on the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr Offord), who chose, for reasons best known to himself, to answer about security of tenure. The report completely gives the lie to the idea that so-called affordable rent—a piece of Orwellian speak if we have ever heard one—will be in any way affordable. It also states that 60% market rents will not be enough to enable
“a large proportion of tenants…to retain enough income to pay their rent and live according to government standards of affordability”.
Heidi Alexander
My hon. Friend is completely right. Our debate about what it is affordable to pay out in housing costs was interesting. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington North gave scenarios in which people might be spending 50% of their household income on their housing costs alone. I know that the Department for Communities and Local Government, in the guidance it published a number of years ago on how local authorities should carry out strategic housing market assessments—the Minister might wish to comment on this—says that the definition of affordable housing costs is a household paying 25% of its overall income on housing. We are clearly seeing situations in which households are paying much more.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Having listened to the whole debate this afternoon, I hope that the rest of the country leaves us to it more often, because it has been a very interesting debate. I have enjoyed all the speeches, from both sides of the House. I would make particular mention of the contributions from the Government Benches, because we have heard some of the more thoughtful and compassionate speeches from Conservative Members—that is probably why there were only three of them.
I would also like again to thank the sponsor of the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who really does know his onions on this issue. He has driven many debates on the issue over the six years that I have been in this House, and we are all grateful that he keeps it at the top of the agenda.
Without embarrassing him, I would also like to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who reminded us what this issue is all about. Those of us who are housing anoraks can get tied up in housing benefit regulations—particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck)—and how the housing revenue account works, but in the end, this debate is about human beings. It is about our constituents. We would not think of half-teaching someone to read or performing half an operation, so it genuinely puzzles me that we should be content as politicians to leave people living in the most appalling conditions in our capital city. Not only has that happened throughout the tenure of all recent Governments, but it is getting worse. That is why the Government cannot afford to be complacent today.
The period when I was born, 50 years ago in Fulham, was what we would probably now call the heyday of social housing, following the Bevan period, when he was the Minister responsible for both health and housing in the 1945 Government. He genuinely understood the importance of housing as a public service, and although he probably would not have used the phrase “life chances”, he knew that housing is important to people’s life chances, just as it is to their basic health. That period was followed by Macmillan and other Tory Governments who would also have prided themselves on building a sufficient supply of housing—and doing so in what were, quite frankly, much more difficult economic times than today—to meet the nation’s need. Why that is no longer an ambition I do not understand. When I was growing up, council housing was the kind of housing that people aspired to. The houses had plumbing, for God’s sake! They had central heating and running hot water. They had inside toilets. In the ’60s and ’70s in Fulham, those things were not to be found in the private rented sector or even in the owner-occupied sector.
Yes, that was the era of estates, and there were good estates and bad ones, but—to follow up on a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington—they did not start leaking and falling down after four years, as they do now. An example of that is the South Acton estate, which I used to represent. The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) might want to have a look at that. Many of the estates were very good ones, and they are still standing to this day and providing good-quality, affordable homes with a good space standard.
That was also the era of acquiring properties. Councils around London—Hammersmith, Islington and others—bought up private sector slum properties, renovated them and converted them into housing, sometimes with several flats in one Victorian house. There are now thousands of those properties in boroughs around London. Those boroughs are now being targeted by the designated sales policies of Conservative councils, but those were the mixed communities. When we walk down the street in Hammersmith, we see council and housing association accommodation and privately rented and owner-occupied houses next to each other in a row. Ironically, those are the mixed communities that the Government are seeking to destroy.
Fifty years ago, there were also housing action areas. Grants were available not only to private sector tenants but to poorer owner-occupiers to ensure that they had basic facilities in their homes. That was also the era that saw the start of the housing associations.
Jeremy Corbyn
Does my hon. Friend acknowledge that housing action areas came in at the end of the wholesale building clearance policy and did a great deal to preserve London’s Victorian heritage and, at the same time, to preserve communities? They are something that we should applaud and welcome.
Mr Slaughter
Absolutely. Those areas presented a win-win situation. They maintained buildings that we now value, which some politicians and planners in the ’60s and ’70s did not value, and they also provided good-quality homes in which people could live and bring up their families while enjoying the facilities that most of us take for granted today.
Clive Efford
Has my hon. Friend read a book by Professor Peter Hennessy, who is now in the House of Lords? One of the points that he makes in the book is that the soldiers who liberated France after the invasion of Europe found themselves liberating people who were living in better conditions than those of their families back in England. The title of the book is “Never Again”. When those soldiers came back, one of the driving issues in the subsequent election was housing. That led to the era of building the communities and housing to which my hon. Friend has just referred. We have lost that sense of mission, but we need to get it back.
Mr Slaughter
I have not read that particular book, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point. In my constituency, we have what used to be called “homes for heroes” estates that were built after the first world war. There are also 1930s garden estates, such as the Wormholt estate in Shepherd’s Bush. Those are fantastic examples of social housing, but the Tory politicians always seem to overlook them when they are decrying social housing and social housing communities.
Getting back to the subject of housing associations, I am going to read from the “Our history” page on the Notting Hill housing association website. Talking about how the association was set up, it says:
“In 1962…our founder Bruce Kenrick…came to live in Notting Hill in West London. He was shocked by social and financial inequalities experienced by poor and immigrant communities in West London. He later wrote:
‘What struck me painfully was the extent to which people’s problems stemmed from housing conditions. Marriages broke up because one or other partner could no longer stand the strain of living in one room with a stove and sink squeezed into one corner.’
In December 1963 Bruce Kenrick, together with a group of equally committed individuals, formed a new, proactive type of voluntary housing organisation. Notting Hill Housing Trust was born. Within our first year, we had bought five houses and housed 57 people. Within five years, we had become a large presence in west London, housing nearly 1,000 people.”
I shall refer to the Notting Hill housing association later in my speech, in a less flattering light. In those days, however, people aspired to build decent housing for the working poor, and indeed for the ordinary citizens of London.
Twenty-five years ago—I think it was 25 years ago this week that I was first elected as a councillor in the London borough of Hammersmith—we had what we then thought was a housing crisis. Now, however, I think we would be quite grateful for the conditions that obtained then. It was a difficult time. Right to buy under the Thatcher Governments had depleted some of the best social housing stock, and problems of disrepair were growing yearly because of the neglect by Tory Governments and Tory councils of the council housing stock, which was already becoming a feature of the division between the political parties on this issue. Overcrowding was increasingly becoming an issue, too. Even in the mid-80s, however, it was possible to have hard-to-let properties; there was not the same degree of pressure or the same level of market rents or prices that forced people to live in ever-more overcrowded housing.
I have glossed over the period of the Labour Government because it has already been dealt with. I will say, however, that I think it was a mixed record. Decent homes was a good programme, but I am not sure that the voice of London was heard strongly enough in those times. Decent homes became so much of a priority that housing supply, which is such a big issue for us today, did not get a fair crack of the whip. I recall that during some of the years when I was running a local authority, we tried by hook and by crook to build as many socially rented and intermediate homes as we could—and we succeeded as best we could—but housing supply remained a failure overall. I regret that. I believe that the last Prime Minister got it and I believe that the present Leader of the Opposition certainly gets it. Prime Minister Blair, however, did not get it when it came to the importance of housing, not just as a public service but as an important part of the country’s economy.
With that brief history, we come to today. Other Members have mentioned the statistics, which are important. The housing waiting list in Hammersmith and Fulham is the highest I think it has ever been, with 9,361 households—more than 12%—on it, even though it is one of the smallest boroughs in London. Those figures are often manipulated. Over the recess, I spent some days on the public inquiry into the new core strategy —this is how I spend my leisure time—and found the council claiming that there were only 3,000 on the waiting list, which is only a third of the official figures according to the House of Commons Library.
As I look down this list, I notice that the famous Tory boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Westminster appear to have low numbers on their waiting lists—just 4% and 7% of their populations. That is half or even a quarter of the figures for some of the Labour boroughs. It is not because there is no housing stress in those boroughs—on the contrary, there is; they have a worse record on the supply of affordable housing than most Labour boroughs. It is because the lists are manipulated in a most unseemly way. People are discouraged in every way from going on the lists.
John McDonnell
It is a process of discouragement. I know of families in my borough who have been threatened with having their children taken into care if they seek to declare themselves homeless. That has happened too frequently for it to be no more than anecdotal evidence of what goes on behind the scenes when people turn up at a civic centre and seek to be interviewed for housing need.
Mr Slaughter
It is anecdotal, but it is a consistent stream—from the year a Labour administration was elected in Hammersmith in 1986 when I recall that the response of Wandsworth council’s homeless person’s unit was to put up a map on the door outside, showing people in housing need the way to Hammersmith’s housing office, right through to the most recent Tory administration in Hammersmith, which makes people wait outside in the cold if they turn up out of hours. They used to be allowed to wait in the foyer of the town hall, but now, in case they offend or upset anybody, they have to wait outside, even in the middle of winter. As I say, those are anecdotes, but they tell a story. Some estates in my constituency have 20% overcrowding—eight times the national average, and it is a growing trend. That is the position on need.
I do not pretend that it is easy to solve the problems created for low-income families in housing need by the price of land and the price of property. However, I do expect Governments to try to solve the problem, and if the present Government did try, they would have our support. I should like to see less partisanship, but I am afraid that this issue has become one of the most partisan of all.
I have spent some years using the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to get various seedy hidden documents out of Hammersmith and Fulham council in order to discover what it really thinks of its tenants and what its real plans are. I was going to quote from some of them, but I think it more entertaining to quote from press releases issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government, particularly those issued in the name of a Liberal Democrat Minister. They say the same thing, only using more fantastical language.
This is what the Government are offering people in housing need. They are offering “flexible tenure”:
“Landlords will be given the freedom to offer their properties under fixed term tenancies, from a minimum of two years”.
They are offering “affordable rents”, which is a new technical term:
“Affordable Rent properties will offer fixed term tenancies at a rent higher than social rent - with landlords able to set rents at up to 80 per cent of local market rents.”
It is a bit like tuition fees. I suspect that most landlords will go for the full 80% rather than for 40%, 60% or 70% when they set their rents.
The Government are also offering
“greater flexibility for councils to make decisions on how best to help people at risk of homelessness at the local level.”
They say that
“Currently some homeless families are turning down the decent private rented accommodation they've been offered as a settled home, and demanding to be provided with expensive temporary accommodation, at huge cost to the taxpayer, until a social home becomes available.”
The scandal of it! It is no surprise that the Liberal Democrat Benches are empty. A Liberal Democrat Minister has said:
“These changes will lead to a much smarter system”.
As well as those three principles, there are a couple that the Government do not need to make law in the Localism Bill. As was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love), housing grant has already been cut by 63%. He also mentioned the changes in housing benefit. As I do not want to keep Members here all night, I will not go into the details.
The cumulative effect of those five principles—giving councils flexibility to use the private rented sector, which means no more social homes as a permanent solution; flexible tenure, which means no security of tenure; affordable rents, which means no more affordable housing; no more capital investment; and the changes in housing benefit—will be that hundreds of families in all our constituencies will no longer be able to afford to live where their relations are, where their schools are and, in many cases, where their work is, and will have to move out.
If it is allowed to develop over a period of years, the effect of those changes will be the end of social housing in this country. I say that not because I wish to be sensationalist, but because it is the inevitable conclusion, and, increasingly, the conclusion of experts. I think that the Government know what they are doing. I think that this is phase two of the desocialisation of the housing market which began with the right to buy, although this is a much deeper and more profound way of destroying a whole form of housing tenure.
I can speak with some authority about that development, because I believe that much of it originated in Hammersmith and Fulham, the borough that I represent. A document entitled “Principles for Social Housing Reform” contained four of the five principles that I listed—although not the one relating to housing benefit—and was published a year before the last election. When I drew attention to it, I was told that I was scaremongering and that what I was saying was nonsense. The Minister for Housing and Local Government told me on many occasions in the House that this was not Tory policy and would not happen.
The same discussions that led to the development of those principles led to the local policy in Hammersmith and Fulham, which was effectively a policy of removing the bulk of social housing tenants from the borough.
An Evening Standard features article in the middle of 2009 stated:
“Hammersmith and Fulham council is plotting a Dame Shirley Porter-style programme to move out the poor and replace them with private homes and retail developments…new homes will be built to attract residents with higher incomes and areas that have traditionally voted Labour will be broken up as more than 3,500 flats and houses are demolished…One document shows that if rents in Hammersmith were increased to private levels, a two-bed council flat currently costing £85 a week would go up to £360 a week.”
I regret to say that all that is coming true in Hammersmith.
I was amused to find that immediately after the election, in the first interview that he gave to a national newspaper, the Prime Minister singled out Hammersmith and said that he was angry about “appalling” Labour “lies” there. He said:
“They were telling people in Hammersmith they were going to have their council house taken away by the Tories.”
The only thing that we got wrong was that we did not realise that this was going to happen so quickly and that it was going to happen across the country. We certainly did realise what was going to happen in Hammersmith, because we had seen the evidence on that.
Three main local attacks are being used in Hammersmith, and some of them will be familiar to the shadow Minister because we all remember the days of Shirley Porter in west London. We thought that we had got rid of the terms “designated sales” and “building stable communities” in west London, but they have come back to haunt us. Some 64 council properties were sold up to last year, bringing in just over £30 million and, according to a decision taken this month, a further 300 will be sold to bring in a further £107 million. These will not just be sales of the largest properties; a range of sizes will be involved, with one, two, three and four-bedroom flats being sold. As hon. Members will see, these properties will be expensive, selling for about £500,000 each in many cases. More than 9,000 families are on the waiting list, so what is the purpose of deciding to sell 300 to 400 of the council’s best properties? These will be not be sales of estate properties; they will be sales of street properties, which command very high values in Hammersmith and Fulham.
In discussing the second principle, I shall again talk a little about housing associations. For some years we thought that housing associations would save us from the ideologically driven policies of Tory councils and that associations such as Notting Hill Housing Association and Shepherds Bush Housing Association, the two largest in my constituency, would perform that role. As I said, Notting Hill Housing Association was set up, following the Rachman era, to perform that role and ensure that good quality, affordable housing was available.
I shall read just a few sentences from the NHHA’s response to the Government consultation paper proposing the social housing changes. It states:
“We are likely to grant 2 year tenancies to all new tenants of both new homes and existing homes that become available for new letting.”
It goes on to say:
“In appropriate cases we would like to be able to increase rents up to market rents for those who can afford them.”
It also says that
“we may want to sell some voids, or to let them on full market rents”.
It continues:
“The new flexibilities will also enable us to support boroughs’ efforts to create more mixed communities”—
that phrase again—
“reducing the concentrations of deprived often unemployed people found in areas of social housing in London.”
The NHHA response continues:
“we see no need for the Government to specify that particular groups of tenants such as older people or people with long term illnesses or disabilities must be provided with a social home for a longer period than the two year minimum.”
Finally, and perhaps most poignantly of all, given the history of the NHHA:
“We support the proposal…that local authorities should be given greater flexibility in bringing the homelessness duty to an end with offers of accommodation in the private rented sector.”
What I find particularly objectionable about that is, as I said in an intervention, that these organisations were set up purely to provide good quality affordable housing to people.
The chief executive of Notting Hill Housing, who featured in the popular press over the last weekend and previously along with her partner, who was director of housing and regeneration for Hammersmith and Fulham, earns £200,000 a year, whereas he earns £260,000 a year as a consultant. Their jobs have been to run the two main social landlords in Hammersmith and Fulham and they are also the advisers to the Conservative party who contributed to the document “Principles for Social Housing Reform”. So far, he, Mr Nick Johnson, has been paid more than £830,000 as a consultant and director of regeneration in Hammersmith and Fulham.
Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)
Is it true, as far as my hon. Friend believes, that that contract was given to Mr Nick Johnson under a corporate vehicle so that national insurance on those payments was not paid by Hammersmith and Fulham?
Mr Slaughter
Yes. I do not want to get too far off the subject and speaking about individuals can be invidious, but this is an extreme case. The Minister smiles, so let me read him what the Minister for Housing and Local Government said about the case. I should point out before I read that that Mr Nick Johnson retired on a permanent ill-health pension as chief executive of the London borough of Bexley with a £300,000 lump sum and a £50,000-a-year pension that was payable immediately. Within three months, he had taken up his £260,000-a-year job, first running Hammersmith and Fulham Homes and then as director of housing and regeneration in Hammersmith and Fulham. The House can imagine my views on this.
When I raised the matter in the House, the Secretary of State appeared to take Mr Johnson’s side. The council has certainly taken his side, as the Daily Mail reported this week that
“the council defended the move, saying Mr Johnson was ‘excellent value for money’.”
For once—this might be a one-off, so everybody should take note of it—I want to praise the Minister for Housing and Local Government, who said:
“Town hall pensions cost every council tax-paying household over £300 a year. Hard-pressed taxpayers cannot afford to foot an ever-growing bill. It’s not justifiable to have healthy employees working in local government and claiming an ill-health benefit at the same time. Councils have power to stop such payments and should use them.”
What is Mr Johnson being paid to do that means that he is such good value for money for the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham? I think we know why Ms Davies is good value for money, because she parrots every right-wing phrase that is needed to support the Government’s atrocious housing policies and that sort of support from the housing association movement, although shameful, is, I am sure, very welcome in providing cover. She is earning her money all right.
How is Mr Johnson earning his money? As director of housing and regeneration he was in charge—and is still, because even though Hammersmith and Fulham has now appointed a director of housing and regeneration on about £170,000 a year, Mr Johnson is still retained as a consultant to help him out—
Mr Slaughter
It seems okay to me.
Mr Johnson is in charge of some of the most controversial and largest developments not just in this country or in Europe but across the world—that is, the opportunity area schemes in Hammersmith and Fulham that will see the demolition of thousands of units of good quality social housing and their replacement with luxury high-rise housing, principally, as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) said, for the benefit of people living abroad who wish to have a pied-à-terre somewhere near central London.
I have spent many days in the public inquiry dealing with this matter and I shall try not to bore Members with the subject for too long. The core strategy documents, which hon. Members will all have in their various boroughs, are interesting reading if one sits down with them. The housing policy in the Hammersmith and Fulham core strategy, which is the planning document that is supposed to last us for 20 years, states:
“The Council would prefer all additional affordable housing to be intermediate housing unless a small proportion of new social rented housing is necessary in order to enable proposals for the regeneration of council or housing association estates”.
That was amended during the public inquiry to add the words “and affordable rented housing”. That is a bit of a give-away that the Minister might want to blush about. In other words, all the time that the definition of affordable housing was social housing, the council wanted none of it, but as soon as it became 80% of market rent, it was happy to include it in its planning documents. That exposes what so-called affordable housing is about.
I am dealing with dozens of those schemes across the constituency, but let me mention just three of them. There are three opportunity areas in the borough. There are 30 of those large London plan schemes—roughly one per borough—but we have three of them in Hammersmith and Fulham, even though it is one of the smallest and most densely populated boroughs. One of them covers Earls Court and West Kensington, where the proposal, apart from knocking down the historic exhibition centres, is to demolish 750 newly modernised, good quality and popular council homes, half of which are terraced or semi-detached three or four-bedroom houses with garages and gardens, so that they can be replaced with 7,500 luxury flats in blocks up to 30 storeys high. That is described as four villages and a high street. I went to the architect’s premises to look at the plans. He had given nicknames to the high street and the other road that will be built—one was Sloane street and the other was South Molton street—and that is where the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates are at present.
Of those 7,500 homes, the only social rented homes will be for tenants who are displaced because their homes have been demolished who insist on having a new home in the area. I believe that about 250 such homes will be built, and they will be built conveniently just outside my constituency, so that those people will not be able to vote for me anymore.
The White City opportunity area is much larger. It is the area around the BBC site in which at least another 4,000 homes will be built—again, in blocks 20 to 30 storeys high. The planning document contains a little orange circle where it says, “This is where we are going to build just over 1,000 social rented homes.” That sounds like quite an attractive prospect, until one finds out that those homes will be built so that tenants can be moved from the 2,400 homes on the White City, Batman Close and Wood Lane estates in another part of Shepherd’s Bush. In other words, without saying anything about what will happen to the nearly 2,500 families who live on those estates—the document is silent on that—more than 1,000 homes will be built to rehouse them. Well, I might not be Inspector Clouseau, but I can work out that once those families are moved into those 1,000 homes, the leaseholders have been bought out and other people have been discouraged from living in the area, the bulldozers can then go into the White City estate, which is the largest estate in my constituency.
The most controversial site is Hammersmith town centre and riverside, which includes the listed town hall, cinema and flats owned by the Pocklington Trust, which is a trust for people with visual impairments. Again, the ambition is demolition and to build 320 luxury flats and a footbridge over the A4 that will take out a third of the riverside park, so that Malaysian investors can have somewhere with direct access to the riverside to put their money into and perhaps come to when they are in Hammersmith. How that is conceived as providing for all the needs—let alone the housing needs—of my constituents I do not know.
Council officers proudly told me that the Earls Court development is the largest one of its kind—I think that they mean by value—outside China. They are very proud of that. What those developments have in common is that they face the unanimous opposition or near-unanimous opposition of residents and that the council is co-developer. The planning authority is the developer in each case, and hon. Members can imagine how planning committees go in that context.
The key point for today’s debate is that there is no affordable housing—not one new unit of affordable housing, by which I mean social rented housing. As London citizens will say, the only type of housing in London boroughs such as mine that is affordable to people on the London living wage, which is now almost £8 an hour, is social rented housing. That is what there is a need for. Of course, we need other types of housing as well, but they are easier to provide. The function of government is to provide for unmet needs, but those unmet needs are not being provided for. On the contrary, the whole thrust of policy—not just in Hammersmith, although it is more obvious in Hammersmith—is to reduce the quantum of social rented housing, to stop the construction of new social rented housing and in that way to change the nature of housing tenure across inner London.
What is the motivation for that approach? If I am right about this, and I think I am because I have spent a lot of time looking at it, the first motivation of those politicians—principally Conservative, although we must now associate the Liberal Democrats with them—is economic. A phrase that I hear from Conservatives in my area is “sweat the asset”, and a memorable comment from the leader of the council is, “We want to attract people to the area who are very rich.” I think that such people see council houses with affordable rents, on what would otherwise be very expensive land, as an affront to them economically. They think, “This is not what should be done with this piece of land. What we should have here is a 30-storey, Singapore-style tower block or a conference centre or office block. What we should not have is low to medium-rise housing built in the same style as the rest of the district when it was created in the Victorian era.”
The second motivation is, I think, a social agenda. Estates are described in the most disparaging terms in official council documents—as “not decent”, or “inward-looking”. I know that Tory politicians are often not comfortable with council estates, but I do not know whether that is because they think the people who live on them vote Labour or because they do not like the collective ideals that built them. Perhaps they do not like the communities who live there, but they could at least leave them alone. Those communities are often the opposite of inward looking: they are some of the most diverse and cohesive in the country and now, partly because of housing policies, they are among the most stable in the country, but they are pilloried in that insulting language.
The third motivation is a personal objection to people who live on council estates. If hon. Members do not believe me they should go back and look at some of the election literature and what was said in Hammersmith and Fulham about dependency culture and how living in subsidised housing with security of tenure makes people flaccid and unambitious. Some politicians think that such people need a touch of iron and that we should go back to the more competitive and animalistic culture that the Conservatives would like us to have.
Mr Slaughter
I hope that my constituency neighbour, who is not, from what I have heard of her comments, in that category, shakes her head because she does not want to be associated with such people.
I shall close on a point that I think is where this debate, in relation to Hammersmith, started. I shall read a couple of paragraphs from an article on ConservativeHome, of which I am a great reader. I enjoy it and find it amusing—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Hon. Members can make up their own minds about the article, which is about social housing and was written by the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council in relation to a Commons debate such as this one almost exactly two years ago. It reads:
“On the day of the first Opposition social housing debate for three years, we ask here whether this is the time to reform social housing. It may not be an issue for the current intake of Conservative MPs at this time, but it will become an issue for many new MPs elected from target marginals which have far higher levels of social housing. Figures supplied to Greg Hands MP from the Commons Library show that shadow housing minister Grant Shapps’s seat (Welwyn Hatfield) has the highest percentage of social rented housing of any Conservative seat. Some key targets have huge percentages: Hammersmith at 36%, Westminster North at 30% and Birmingham Edgbaston and Battersea both at 29%.”
With the exception of Battersea, what do those other three seats have in common when one looks at the results of the last election?
The article continues:
“Whilst Conservatives are at a highpoint in local government, we still have a mountain to climb in our inner cities. We have no Conservative councillors in Liverpool, Sheffield or Newcastle and just one in Manchester. Many inner London boroughs remain either Labour or Liberal Democrat-run…Finally Boris Johnson’s stunning victory in our capital city was largely a suburban revolt. Why is this? The current state and levels of social housing in our inner cities may provide part of the answer. All our inner cities have relatively high levels of social housing compared to their suburbs. Today social housing has become welfare housing where both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement dominate…Competition revolves around drawing welfare support and taking something out of the system. Conservative principles of freedom, self-reliance and personal responsibility run counter to this culture.”
That is not some lunatic adviser in the Conservative party; that was the head of the innovation unit for local government, who is running the Mayor’s campaign for re-election and is the leader of a London borough council.
I do not make the obvious point, which is that this is all about politics and gerrymandering. Of course it is about that, in a far more profound way than the things that Shirley Porter did. But the fact that we have people like that driving policy within the Conservative party creates a complete divide between the parties that has never existed before, such that it is now impossible for rational voices to be heard—even the voices of people in the Conservative or Liberal parties who know that they have a duty towards people in housing need and ought to be helping them, and that that should be separated from a political argument. This well has become so poisoned now that I believe that, unfortunately, it is Government policy—I have traced in this speech the link from that article through to the “Principles for Social Housing Reform”, through to Government policy in the Localism Bill and the demise of social housing—that is driving social housing policy in this country, particularly in London.
I do not expect to get a rational response from the Minister to this debate today—or probably ever—but I would like Government Members to think about the implications, not for us in our seats and our livelihoods going forward, but for the thousands of families who are the victims of the very crude political policy that is being pursued, in relation to housing uniquely. We can all have disagreements on other areas of policy, but they do not have such profound effects on people’s lives as this form of experimentation—demolishing people’s homes, making people move away from the communities that they have lived in for generations and separating families.
Those are the policies that are being directly pursued by the Conservative-Liberal coalition Government now. They are shameful policies. They should have received more attention from the media, and I wish that they did, but I think there is enough morality in the governing parties for them to go back and look at what they are doing in relation to housing policy and to think again. We are talking about future generations of people in this country who are growing up in conditions that are wholly uncivilised and wholly unworthy of the country.
Ms Buck
I am sorry; I meant my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown).
All those speeches addressed, with slightly different emphases, the impact of the housing crisis on people—on families in overcrowded accommodation, homeless families and families forced into constant moves and changes of address. The statistics matter, but it is important that we should remember that people are at the heart of the issue. I suspect that most of us in the Chamber, on both sides, have sat in advice surgeries with people weeping with distress as they have talked about the conditions in which they live and the number of times they have been uprooted and forced to move. They crave only a stable home.
Opposition Members drew out something important about social housing policy—that it has come about as a consequence of market failure. It is precisely because the private housing sector could not meet the needs of low-income and vulnerable people that council housing came about—and before that, there were the great social housing developments of Peabody and Octavia Hill. Subsequently, the housing association movement grew up in response to the catastrophe of the private rented market, particularly in places such as my previous constituency, the home of Rachman and Hoogstraten.
As the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) said absolutely rightly, most landlords are not bad landlords at all—I am happy to place that on the record. However, the grim truth is that a substantial minority are, which brings the entire sector into disrepute. We already know from the English housing survey that 40% of private houses are below the decent homes standard and the conditions in the private rented sector are worse across the piece; a larger proportion of them fail to meet that standard. That is a particular challenge if vulnerable people are in the part of the market that has failed. That is exactly why the housing association movement developed. It is sad to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith how some housing associations seem to have strayed so much from their original purposes.
Mr Slaughter
I want to get something off my conscience; I promise that this will be my last intervention. Last Friday, I got a planning application—again, I am afraid, from Notting Hill Housing—for 41 high-quality houses, including four new five-bedroom houses on St Peter’s square. They go for about £3 million each. Not one of those 41 houses will be an affordable home because there is not enough equity in the scheme. That is what some of our housing associations have descended to.
Ms Buck
My hon. Friend is right, and that is extremely sad. In some cases, there appears to be a deliberate straying away from the original aims and objectives; in others, the kind of thing that he describes is a response to the constraints under which housing associations now operate.
All my right hon. and hon. Friends critiqued aspects of Government policy. A number of them drew particular attention to the risks inherent in the cuts to the local housing allowance. We heard from Government Members extreme examples of high-cost private sector tenancies. We agree. Indeed, the Labour manifesto stated that measures would be taken to deal with some of those extremely high costs. I completely accept that, but if it was the objective of Government policy why was it not confined to tackling the relatively small number of high-cost cases? I think I am right in saying that the Government have not even been able to tell us how many, if any, properties cost more than £100,000 a year, yet throughout the country—not just in London—nearly 1 million households will have their local housing allowance cut.
My hon. Friends the Members for West Ham and for Edmonton raised concerns about what would happen when people are displaced, particularly from the central London broad market rental area where only 5% of accommodation will remain affordable, and a knock-on displacement moves those families to highly stressed, poorer communities on the fringes of London and beyond. Many Members talked about social housing investment and tenure, and I shall return to those issues briefly.
We heard thoughtful and reasonable contributions from Government Members. I single out particularly the hon. Members for Ealing Central and Acton and for Battersea (Jane Ellison), not least because they are still here. They made good points. In some cases, there is shared understanding of the impact of the housing shortage, particularly in central London.
From the hon. Ladies and from the hon. Members for Hendon (Mr Offord), for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) and for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), we heard support for Government policy on market rents and the end of security of tenure, which it is asserted, without significant evidence, will deal with the shortage of social housing that we are all concerned about. Frankly, that assertion is a triumph of hope over experience, and I shall spend a moment or two deconstructing it.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Hendon is no longer in the Chamber. He revealed a little of the attitude towards social housing and social tenants that permeates so much of the Government’s thinking about the problem—that secure and affordable social housing traps individuals in deprivation and unemployment, and the language of welfare dependency reinforces that belief. However, as several of my hon. Friends said, the fact that social housing is now such a scarce resource means that people with social problems are concentrated in it. Far from being the problem for many vulnerable and poorer families, it is an essential part of the solution.
We all agree that the problems facing social housing in London are complex, long term and difficult to resolve. Anyone who claims to have a magic bullet is lying. We know that the supply of social housing has been squeezed for decades, principally through the non-replacement of right-to-buy stock during the 1980s and 1990s, but in retrospect it is a shame that more properties were not built under the Labour Government, as several of us have pointed out. It would be hypocritical of me not to say that, as I lined up many times during the Labour Government to make exactly that point. However, as has been said, we can be proud of the substantial investment made during those years in the decent homes initiative, which brought millions of homes to a decent standard.
The decline in supply is not the only problem. London is a global city; foreign, national and business money distorts the market, and the fact that house prices have risen so much over the decades has its consequences. One striking issue about social housing is that between 10 and 15 years ago there was a steady outflow of tenants buying their home, sometimes through right to buy but often in the private market, which has effectively silted things up, as people on modest incomes are no longer able to afford a house. The relationship between the private housing market, owner-occupation and the social market must be properly understood. The Labour Government invested in decent homes and new buildings, so by 2009, the lead-in time for planning and investment led to a high of 16,000 starts in London. We now know that that was the golden age.
The coalition Government have a package of investment and policy suggestions, which are likely to combine to cancel out almost all the hoped-for objectives. They want more social homes—don’t we all?—but they have made, as we heard, a 63% cut in the affordable housing grant. Consequently, the 16,000 starts peaked in 2009-10 and will fall away to nothing, according to the Homes and Communities Agency, in 2012. The Government want housing benefit to take the strain—to fill the gap in the affordable housing grant—but they also want housing benefit expenditure to fall. Those two things are incompatible.
The Government want to improve work incentives—don’t we all?—but they propose 80% market rents, which will make work incentives much harder to achieve. If it is hard to make work pay when rent is £100 a week, how much harder will it be when rent is £400, £500 or £600 a week? They want more social homes, particularly, as the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton said, more family-sized homes, but the overall benefit cap means that housing developers and housing associations do not want to build family-sized homes. The set of policies is completely incoherent. Something has to give.
The Government want mixed communities—don’t we all?—but they suggest throwing people out of their homes when they achieve a certain amount of income. What could be a worse work disincentive than saying, “If you earn a certain amount of money, you’ll be out on your ear”? What nonsense that makes of the concept of mixed communities. However, the Mayor of London proposes a £60,000-plus ceiling for access to socially assisted housing, which cuts across the stated objective of not allowing people with a decent income to be assisted with housing.
The Government want to tackle under-occupation—don’t we all?—but they are doing so in a way that possibly even some of my hon. Friends have not yet fully internalised. They propose doing so through a cut in housing benefit for social tenants who have one or more bedrooms more than they are deemed to need. That will hit 150,000 London households with an average of a £21-a-week loss in benefit. I do not have the London figures to hand, but I know that, nationally, if every single person affected by the proposed cut in housing benefit tried to avoid that penalty, it would mean that every one and two-bedroom property allocated in the social housing sector for the next five years would have to go to those households. That is clearly nonsense and would lead to a catastrophe of homelessness and overcrowding. Indeed, the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) let the cat out of the bag by making it clear that the policy’s intention is not to tackle under-occupation, but to save money. As far as the Government are concerned, the fewer people who move, the better.
The Government also want to end security of tenure. When I, like my hon. Friends, was on the campaign stump last year, and warning people that a Conservative Government would mean a move to market rents and the end of security of tenure, we were howled down and accused of lying. Our only error in robustly defending that position was not realising how quickly it would happen.
I have been remiss in not making the point earlier, but shadow Communities and Local Government Ministers, who are out campaigning today, are rightly opposing those measures in the Localism Bill.
The Government’s policy is fundamentally flawed and deeply incoherent. It will have the opposite effect, almost across the board, to what it seeks to achieve. At the very least, we know that the Mayor of London’s re-election campaign is on a cliff edge as new housing supply drops to nothing. We therefore look forward to a campaign that will replace the Mayor, who has talked the talk, but is not walking the walk. He will not deliver new social housing; he is not standing up for London tenants or those who face a housing crisis.
Although the crisis has been long building and slow burning, it is reaching one of the most critical points that I have ever known. Whether for people in social housing, people in the private sector waiting to obtain social housing, those in the queue or those facing homelessness, it is clear that the Government’s policies will do nothing to resolve that crisis. It will take a Labour Mayor and a Labour Government to resolve the crisis of social housing in London.