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Rented Housing

I do not think that we heard much evidence on that specific point, although the Committee made a recommendation in relation to the single-room restriction for young people. The Minister has been listening to the interventions, and may seek to respond to them. Let me summarise the main points that came out of our work on the social rented sector. The Committee strongly reiterates its previous recommendation that an extra 50,000 social rented homes are necessary every year significantly to reduce the backlog in demand. Building rates are still below that level, and the recent credit crunch has made the situation even worse. The consequences of the shortage of supply include what has been described as residualisation, to which I have alluded. If an individual is to be offered a social rented tenancy, they have to be in extreme need, which can lead to a concentration of individuals and families with extreme need in social rented housing, and has consequences for others who live in that area, as it reinforces disadvantage. Mobility within the stock is extremely low. Tenants who are in a property which may be okay but not appropriate for their needs, either because their family has expanded or contracted or because their employment has altered, find it difficult to move to another property. The Committee wants the Government to explore every possible option to try to ensure that they meet the need for 50,000 extra social rented homes a year. Such an increase could come through planning gain, arm's length management organisations, and councils themselves. Section 106 agreements are incredibly helpful in levering in private money to subsidise social rented and shared ownership housing, in addition to direct housing grant. We were concerned that some section 106 agreements have resulted in too high a proportion of new social housing being built as flats, when accommodation for families is usually what is required. We also believe that the Government should take action to ensure that new affordable housing is directed at the areas of greatest need, and not simply in the areas in which the developers choose to build market housing, although that may be the area of greatest need. We believe that reforms are needed to enable councils easily to reinvest right-to-buy receipts in the construction and acquisition of new homes, and that the Government need to review the effect of right-to-buy sales on individual neighbourhoods. We drew that lesson from the experience in the Netherlands, which has a similar scheme to right to buy for social housing sales, but where localities agree to a strategy. If there is a shortage of social rented family homes, for instance, in a particular area, restrictions are put on the right to buy for that type of property. The scheme does not allow any particular type of property in great demand for social renting to be sold on the private market and lost to social housing. We commend that scheme to the Government as a system that could be used where appropriate. In fact, we also suggested that the Government consider another aspect of the Dutch system, namely giving financial guarantees to social housing providers to mitigate their risks in non-core and income-earning activities. We are pleased that the Government have accepted that recommendation and agreed to look at the Dutch experience to see whether it is applicable here. We also suggested that there is a need for measures to ensure the more efficient use of existing social rented stock and greater encouragement and support for social tenants who wish to downsize. Elderly people are often quite happy to move out of their social rented property into more suitable sheltered housing, freeing up a family home, but the right social rented properties might not be available for them to move into, or they may need help with moving costs. The latter would be a good investment if it freed up a family home. We believe that the Government should make more progress with national mobility schemes and choice-based letting, and that they need to build on the decent homes programme, which has been extremely successful in upgrading social rented properties, to ensure that ongoing maintenance of social rented stock occurs at a standard that maximises supply and minimises the cases in which social properties are left vacant because they are in an appalling condition and the council does not have enough money to bring them up to standard. In the medium to long term, the Government and the wider social rented sector must come to a conclusion about what they believe the role of the sector to be. Is it, as at the moment, simply to provide accommodation for those in the greatest need, or is it to be bigger than that and provide a much wider range of people with security of tenure and the chance to improve their livelihood? Unless the Government answer such philosophical points, we cannot come to a conclusion about how many more social rented houses we need and how important they are in terms of funding.