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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. Opposition Members are not in the Chamber to listen to this important debate. There is a younger generation who rely on us to ensure that more homes are built so that they have somewhere to live. If we do not do that, we are selling short the future of a younger generation. Let us ignore the nimbys and get on with it. Let us just build. We want not just more housing, but better run housing. I do not agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher). I welcome the provisions of the Bill. We need housing associations to be more accountable locally. In my experience housing associations can have an excellent national reputation and in some parts of my constituency may be running estates well, but in other parts the estates are a disgrace. Let me give the House an example. I did a survey recently of housing association tenants. One of the questions that I asked was whether they were satisfied with the level of service that they were receiving. Peabody appeared at the top of the league tables, but it also appeared at the bottom. In Farringdon lane, the tenants all said that the service was okay, good or excellent; yet on the Priory Green estate 64 per cent. residents rated Peabody as poor or very bad. When an estate is badly run, there seems to be nothing that tenants, councillors or the Member of Parliament can do about it. I visited Priory Green with the chief executive, Steve Howlett, in early 2006. Priory Green was built by Lubetkin. It was one of the jewels in the crown of the old borough of Finsbury's social housing. In 1998 it was transferred after a vote of tenants, who said that they wanted to go to Peabody. About £10 million of Government money was spent on the estate. Government and public money was spent on security works and on improving the structure. When I went to see it with Steve Howlett, the place was dire. We could just walk in, because the security gates did not shut. We climbed over piles of rubbish and through pools of fetid water. We chatted with residents about rats and mice and lack of hot water. We smiled sweetly at tenants climbing through a broken window, which seemed to be the quickest route to a working lift. A long list of improvements were promised. Last week I had a coffee morning and four ladies from ground floor flats on that estate came to see me. Two years have gone by and they still have no reliable hot water or heating. There are rats nesting in the basement and coming into their flats. Another resident stopped my assistant in the street. That resident is 67 years old. He has no heating, little hot water and a pile of rubbish outside his door. ““It's not fit for dogs,”” he said. I visited another lady on the top floor, the seventh floor, where she lives with her elderly mother and two small children. She has no hot water either. She has been told that the pipes do not work that high up. When the lifts do not work, she is stuck there all day. I asked my coffee-morning ladies whether they had complained. They told me in great detail that they had, but that they could never get through on the phone to the person they wanted to speak to and that their calls were never returned. The 67-year-old guy in the street said that he had waited in all day on a cold day in November for a plumber who did not turn up. Those people should be able to hold their landlords to account. In my private Member's Bill, the Housing Association (Rights and Representation of Residents) Bill, I proposed that tenants should be able to report their landlord, demand improvements, and, if no improvements occurred, swap their landlords for someone better. Hon. Members will therefore be able to imagine how delighted I was when I saw a similar proposal in the Bill. The Bill will allow the people of Priory Green to trigger an inspection if things do not improve on that Peabody Trust estate. I want the Bill to go as far as the suggestion in the Cave review, in which case if Priory Green were not to improve, the Peabody Trust would lose it and another housing association would take over. I am pleased that the Bill does not include any attempt to remove security of tenure for tenants. I understand that that was never considered seriously, but I want to put on record my complete opposition to it, because it would penalise social tenants who work and exacerbate the poverty trap. I approve of incentives to help people move out, if they want to, but I am certainly against means-testing. A possible addition to the Bill is a provision on overcrowding. We have a Dickensian definition of overcrowding from 1935 that excludes babies who are less than 12 months old. When mothers come to see me, they say, ““My baby does not count! Of course my baby counts.”” The definition also includes kitchens and living rooms as rooms that people can sleep in. Nearly 500,000 households are overcrowded in Britain under the current definition, and 8,000 households in Islington are overcrowded. Shelter has done a lot of work on the effect of overcrowding on children's health and life chances. We need a modern definition, and then we must work to end overcrowding. We can mess around with measures such as making sure that voids are given over quickly to new tenants, but in the end there is one major solution: we must build more and ignore the nimbys. Housing is a grave social problem. We have the solution; we have the vision; let us get on with it.