Housing — House of Commons, 2015-12-15
Topic: Housing
Karen Patricia Buck (Labour, Centre-left): No, I will not give way, because too many Members want to speak What we have seen under this Government—although it did not start in 2010, of course—is an erosion of the principle of security. That erosion reached its nadir with the proposal to scrap the security of tenure for social housing. The proposal to scrap secure social tenancies will mean an intrusion into the lives of the poorest, and only the poorest, every few years as they are required to justify their home The principle of security is being eroded in many other ways. There has been a doubling in the number of families who are bringing up children in private rented housing, where they can only rely on a 12-month assured shorthold tenancy. The Government refuse to do anything to address the desperate need for longer security for people in the private rented sector. There has been an increase in homelessness. It was coming down for many years from too high a peak under the last Labour Government, but it is soaring again. There has been a fantastic 820% increase in the number of families being held illegally in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Families are living, sometimes for years, in nightly booked temporary accommodation after they have been homeless. That has happened to my constituents. Insecurity is the new normal, but only for the poorest. Far from addressing that crisis, the Government plan to extend it and entrench it even more widely The stories of my constituents and the constituents of everybody on the Opposition Benches—and, quite possibly, the stories of the constituents of Government Members that go unheard—are stories of people torn away from their children’s schools, torn away from their parents, torn away from the people they have caring responsibilities for, torn away from the volunteering they do, torn away from their part-time or even full-time jobs and torn away from their communities. It is their children, above all, who suffer. The hyper-mobility that is forced on families at the moment is bringing about worse physical health, worse mental health, higher suicide risks and worse educational achievement. We are entrenching that into the lives of the poorest. Sadly, I do not have time to tell some of those stories, although I would love to be able to do so. We know not just from the anecdotes, but from academic research that has been done in Australia and America, just how damaging this is. Communities suffer as well as individuals when the people who are the building blocks of communities—people who are registered to vote and who are civic participants—can no longer be so because they are forced again and again to move house. They are forced to move house every six months or every year, and now social tenants will be forced to move house every three or four years I will finish with a quotation from Professor Steve Hilditch, who for over 40 years has been an academic, a manager and a deliverer of housing. He says in respect of the end of secure social tenancies: "Social rented housing is our most precious housing asset. Its existence broke the historic inevitability that people on low incomes and vulnerable people would also endure homelessness and dreadful housing conditions. It removed the blight of bad housing from generations of children. In my view it was the strongest mechanism of all to achieve genuine social mobility and to give children born into poor families similar opportunities to those enjoyed by better-off families."