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Localism Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the London Assembly and the Metropolitan Police Authority. This amendment seeks to deal with the nature and extent of overcrowding and to highlight why the present law is inadequate and needs reform. Overcrowding is an invisible problem compared with homelessness and rough sleeping. Consequently, it tends to be viewed as less of a priority. But overcrowding has a serious impact on children, especially their health and educational attainment, and it disproportionately affects larger households. Overcrowding is a major problem in London. In 2008 London had more than 200,000 overcrowded households, almost 7 per cent of London’s homes. That was an increase of one-third over the previous decade. About half of these overcrowded households are in the social rented sector; overcrowding is worse in that sector than in any other form of tenure. London has over 40 per cent of England’s overcrowded households in the social rented sector, and nearly 400,000 London children live in overcrowded conditions. The overcrowding rate for black and minority ethnic households in London is about four times that for white British households. There is no doubt that overcrowding is largely a consequence of housing supply shortage. Therefore this amendment is not a complete solution to overcrowding. For that, we need to build many more homes and, in particular, larger family homes. But this amendment is intended to deal with the abuse of the existing housing stock. Breaching legal overcrowding standards is a criminal offence, but the official definition of overcrowding has survived unchanged since 1935 and is seriously outdated. Relatively few households are legally overcrowded even though some people have to sleep in living rooms and kitchens. There is little incentive for local authorities to tackle the problem if the law is not actually being broken. This amendment meets the need to provide an updated definition of statutory overcrowding based on the bedroom standard. This would realign the law with the actual problem and would therefore provide local authorities with an incentive to reduce overcrowding. Once there is a serious legal incentive in place for local authorities to tackle overcrowding, it may force them to reorder their priorities when it comes to housing allocation policies. Overcrowding is a very serious issue. So if the Government are not minded to accept this amendment, perhaps my noble friend the Minister could outline what the Government propose to do to update the official definition of overcrowding, which has not changed for the last 75 years.