Budget Statement — House of Lords, 2017-12-04
Topic: Social Welfare
John Lawrence Whitty (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, the news for the Government since the Budget has not been great, and I am not even going to talk about Brexit—I will leave that until later in the week. On the economic side, the OBR projections have shown all too clearly that the austerity strategy has lamentably failed on all fronts: on debt, on growth, on productivity and on living standards. On the social side, the report of the Social Mobility Commission, compounded this morning by the further report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on child poverty, shows just how uneven life chances are in this country. We are greatly divided, societally and geographically. In that view, I have to differ from my former noble friend Lord Balfe. I think he had rather rose-coloured spectacles on today. There is great division in our society and the Budget will not help to address it I pick out three issues. One is the housing crisis, where I broadly follow the remarks just made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. The Government claim to have addressed the housing crisis, but it is a seriously misconstrued strategy, in so far as it has been so far revealed. It has attempted to tackle the wrong problems, mostly with the wrong measures and benefiting the wrong people. The second crisis, which has also been referred to at length in this debate, is the social care crisis. The Government have completely ignored it in this context. I hope the Minister will tell us that we are about to get a new White Paper with a strategy on social care. Both residential social care and care visitors are in colossal crisis Residential homes’ standards of care are diminishing as they cannot contend with the combination of squeezed resources and burgeoning demand. As we have heard in recent days from the CMA, of all people, some care homes are facing closure and bankruptcy. Local authority fees for care are capped too low to be economic for care homes or for care workers to be paid adequately. Private funders, who are often hard-pressed families themselves, are faced with fees of more than £45,000 a year and often forced to sell their own homes or their parents’ homes. In care homes, deteriorating conditions and slashed staffing levels make the final years of many of our elder people, some of our own age, and our parents and grandparents, an avoidable misery. Not all the generational disadvantage is in one direction On housing, I shall not say much more. Other noble Lords have clearly spelled out that if we are to achieve the 300,000 target that the Government now support, there will have to be a substantial increase in council house building. The Conservative Party still seems to have an antagonism to council houses and to local authorities being involved in housing provision. To meet their targets they will have to get over that, because the cut in stamp duty and the other measures announced by the Government do not address the right people. In most parts of the country, people with quite adequate incomes for all other purposes are unable ever to get on the housing ladder. That means we have to provide some form of rented accommodation. We know that the private rented sector has seen escalating rents and deteriorating conditions and security We are going back to a situation that existed 100 years ago, when there were only two forms of tenure: you either owned it or you rented it from a usually grasping, exploitative landlord. In many parts of the country, that spectre has returned already. The only reason people can afford to meet those rents, and in some cases meet their mortgage, is that they are bolstered by social security, particularly in the rented sector by housing benefit, which continues to grow, despite the Government’s attempts to limit it. We are effectively passing money from the state to private landlords. That is not a sensible housing policy, a sensible social policy or a sensible economic policy. We therefore need to follow the well-trodden path of creating greater social housing, through both councils and housing associations, to get decent, well-built, sustainable homes for the majority of our people. The Government are ignoring that at their peril. I hope that the social housing Green Paper, or whatever it will be, calms my fears about that, but I have seen no indication from anything any government Minister has said so far that gives me any cause for comfort I know there are those who will say that I see the housing market through the eyes of a London-based politician, but I do not. The reality is the same in all parts of the country, particularly in the south-east. London prices have affected the whole of the south, including the south-east. They have also affected many of our other great cities. The reality is that this is part of a bigger problem. It is part of the problem that was highlighted to some extent by the Social Mobility Commission: the overheating of the London economy and the relative advantage of people in London as against the rest of the country is causing grave dislocation in our society, our economy and, as the Brexit vote shows—I promised not to mention Brexit—our body politic between those who are benefiting, directly or indirectly, partially or totally, from the London effect and those who are not. The families who live in the Midlands and the north, and in the rural areas of East Anglia and the south-west, where I live, are suffering from the fact that we have an unbalanced economy, yet there is no sign from the Government of developing a proper regional strategy For decades, in the early years of our being in the European Union, we relied on regional funds and structural funds from the European Union as a substitute for regional policy. The very small instruments for regional policy that the Labour Government instituted were abolished by the coalition. We need to go back to an interventionist industrial regional policy as well as an industrial strategy. At the moment we have some commitments towards a northern powerhouse but they have yet to be delivered and we have not even seen the machinery whereby they can be delivered. The third great gap in the Budget, after social care and housing, is the complete lack of any indication that the Government are about to have a rethink on regional policy in England.