Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding Debate
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Dawn Butler
Main Page: Dawn Butler (Labour - Brent East)Department Debates - View all Dawn Butler's debates with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Inner-London Local Authorities: Funding
Dawn Butler Excerpts(1 week ago)
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Helen Hayes
I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.
Helen Hayes
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The maths on temporary accommodation costs simply does not add up at the moment. I have more to say on that a bit later in my speech.
Dawn Butler
I thank my hon. Friend for her important speech today. Brent council, which covers my constituency, spends £100,000 a day on temporary housing. We have around 40,000 people on the housing waiting list. It is impossible to match that need, but it is also important to understand that councils, as my hon. Friend has said, are trying to innovate. Housing costs in inner London need to be taken into consideration with any calculations.
Helen Hayes
My hon. Friend makes the point very well. It is the reality of people’s lives. People come to all of us who represent constituencies at the heart of the housing crisis in the most desperate of circumstances—in circumstances that everybody would agree are completely unacceptable—and there is no relief for them, because the options that are on the table are simply unaffordable, and what is affordable is unacceptable.
I am grateful to the Government for listening and for changing the deprivation criteria to include housing costs. I also completely recognise the very deep poverty and deprivation that affect other parts of the country. I grew up in the north-west and before I was elected to Parliament, I worked with communities all over the country. This should be about not pitting different areas of our country against each other, but resourcing and empowering local authorities right across our country to meet the needs of their communities. Some of those needs are universal, and some are specific.
While I welcome the changes made to the formulae in recent weeks, inner-London councils will still remain in a very difficult financial situation as a consequence of the settlement that was finalised yesterday.