Queen’s Speech

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the directly elected mayor of Watford and a deputy chair of the LGA.

Local authorities are seeing an unprecedented rise in homelessness—according to Shelter, a rise of 33% since 2010 in people accepted as homeless by councils, the main cause being eviction from a private sector tenancy. In my own authority, the number of households in temporary accommodation has quadrupled in five years. So it is not surprising that there are concerned responses to the teasing trailers in the gracious Speech and from the Department for Communities and Local Government saying that there will be upcoming measures to work with local authorities, homelessness organisations and across government departments to consider options, including legislation, to prevent more households becoming homeless. It is also rumoured that the current legal duty will be extended to include more people and that council intervention will be earlier in the process, as has been legislated for in Wales, and that this will form part of the life chances strategy. Amen to that. Who would not agree that prevention is better than cure? It could even in the longer term be cheaper, and certainly more effective, in reducing the emotional damage and the social costs to families of the current system. I get the rhetoric and I applaud its intention. I agree with the principle to abolish the invidious division between priority and so-called non-priority needs, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Young. The rhetoric is admirable but, without a full working knowledge of what the reality means and will actually cost in practice, good intentions will turn into empty gestures.

At the moment, councils in England provide what you might call a gatekeeper model for dealing with applicants for homeless housing. Many councils see only the very needy and the most desperate getting help, support and advice and being housed. Most councils see people at the point of no return, when they turn up in the customer service centre with their bags. They are the tip of the housing crisis iceberg. Then, the battle really begins. It can often feel as if the main objective from the council officer’s perspective is to get rid of them if at all possible. That may sound cruel and inhumane, but it is because they know there is often literally nowhere to put them.

I used to get the weekly figures of families we had deemed to be homeless—that is, they had got through our first gate. In our medium-sized town, if the figure got beyond 50 I started to worry, as it meant we were going to have to put families in bed and breakfast accommodation, which for obvious reasons we used to pride ourselves on never using. Call me a total softie, but I wept when faced with the reality that B&B was now going to be used all the time for the foreseeable future, and for a longer time per family, as we contracted with hotels and landlords for even more temporary accommodation in the face of ever rising numbers. Now, a hotel room in Watford is a less bad option than accommodation miles away. With over 250 people regularly in temporary accommodation, it is now our top priority. The average stay has increased from a few months to between one and two years, depending on the size of property needed. The demonstrable reduction in social and affordable units over the last few years has made the wait even longer. The developers’ newly given power to challenge local authorities over the provision of social housing has impacted significantly on our number of homes.

The challenge of actually finding somewhere the local authority can afford to house families has driven us and others to look beyond our boundaries. Yes, I know that that has serious consequences; I have met and spoken with the families. However, with London boroughs housing their homeless in Watford and offering incentives to landlords that we cannot possibly match, a pernicious, vicious circle is created in which desperate families and cash-strapped local authorities are both trapped.

The next battle is the question of whether the families are intentionally homeless—in other words, does the council have a legal duty to house them? This is a nasty, intrusive process, with private lives and bank balances being picked over in order to avoid accepting that responsibility as officers are tasked with sharing out an increasingly scarce resource, making extremely painful decisions that impact on people in possibly the most troubled circumstances of their lives.

We are firefighting a crisis that is fuelled by one major factor: there are just not enough social and affordable homes in many parts of the country. In Wales, where the culture appears to have changed due to this type of legislation, there are certainly lessons to be learned, but evidentially, there is not the same shortage of homes as there is in England, particularly in the south-east. I fear that this new legislation alone will not produce the homes that are vitally needed, and I regret that the measures in the recent Housing and Planning Bill will do little to change the situation at that end of the market. To extend councils’ obligations and duties to support, advise and house an even wider pool of people simply through legislation, however desirable, will not on its own, under current circumstances, find them either a bed for the night or a home for life. I wish it were otherwise.