---

Rented Housing

Absolutely; that is a point I wanted to make later, so I may as well cover it now. It is an issue raised by people who come to my constituency surgeries, and I know it arises elsewhere, because other hon. Members have mentioned it in parliamentary debates. Shelter and other bodies working in the sector have a lot of documentation about it. Private rented accommodation is often inferior and substandard anyway, but even when it is good it is often offered on very short-term tenancies. With the present incidence of repossessions and negative equity more and more families will become homeless. For families, especially those with school age children, the impact on family life, education and social stability is appalling when they move into short-term private rented accommodation and must move on three or four times within a year, 18 months or two years, so that the children suffer disruption and may have to change schools, depending on where the family ends up after each move. The Government need to return to that issue, which they did not do at the time of the Housing Bill. The summary of the report comments:"““More family homes are needed in the social rented sector to address overcrowding.””" It could have gone a bit further, because the issue is not just overcrowding but the non-existence in many areas of family houses for social rent. To take the example of Chesterfield again, last year—I keep saying things happened last year, but now I probably mean the year before—in a period of 12 months in the whole of Chesterfield, where there are roughly 50,000 houses, 100,000 people and 10,000 council properties, exactly 49 three-bedroomed family homes became available from the council to let to social tenants. However, the number of families who applied from the waiting list, who were in flats, sofa-surfing at their in-laws and so on, and needed that family accommodation, massively outstripped the 49 houses that became available. It is not just a matter of making more family homes available in the rented sector to ease overcrowding; it is a matter of making more available to get people out of one-bedroomed flats, or situations in which they are sofa-surfing at relatives' and friends' homes. Those situations have led to marital breakdown in some cases that I have heard about at my constituency surgery, because of the tensions affecting young couples with children, who sleep one week at the home of one set of in-laws, and the next week with the others, or who move into the houses of their brothers and sisters. That creates immense pressures. Massive neglect of the situation is creating huge social problems, with all the knock-on effects on children's education, including failure in schools. Again, I speak as someone who was a teacher for 22 years who as a head of year with pastoral care responsibilities often had to deal with some of the results. The summary goes on—and this is one of the few parts that I disagree with:"““An increase in the supply of social rented homes of some 50,000 a year will be necessary to reduce significantly the backlog in demand.””" I am not quite sure what figures that statement is based on, because the Barker report, for the Government, said that an absolute minimum of 46,000 new socially rented homes a year was necessary simply to stand still—not to reduce the backlog. According to those figures 50,000 homes a year would not significantly reduce the backlog. It would make a small inroad into it. However, perhaps we may make a comparison with what has been achieved in the past 11 years: councils have stopped building entirely; they built 4,000 houses in the past 11 years and 300 last year, which is the lowest number since before world war one. The Government say, ““It is okay, the registered social landlords—the housing associations and so on—will fill the gap from the private sector or semi-private sector.”” They have not, of course. They have built an average of 22,000 a year in the past 11 years. That is nowhere near the 46,000 minimum that the Barker report says is needed, the 50,000 that the Select Committee report says is needed, or the average of 100,000 to 120,000 that councils built in the first 50 years after the second world war. The housing associations have failed, and they are the flagship of the Government's policy in the past 11 years. They failed remotely to replace the houses that have been lost, let alone to get waiting lists at a steady level or start cutting them. Those waiting lists have nearly doubled from 1 million in 1997; they will approach 2 million in the next year or two—very rapidly with the negative equity and repossessions that we are now experiencing.