Until I was elected, I had no particular interest in housing, except perhaps from my own experience of how desperately we need to provide social housing. When I was seven, the bailiffs came. I remember that they wore bowler hats and they chucked us out of our house. We had nowhere to go. Thankfully, we were given a council house. I do not know what would have happened to us otherwise. I hate to think.
I now represent an area which has one of the worst housing crises in the country, and for me housing has become a passion. I do what I can. Sometimes it is hard, and I am willing to admit that some of my housing cases keep me awake at night because sometimes all I can give my constituents is tissues.
Last month a woman came to see me. I shall call her Jackie. She has two little children. She was going to be evicted the next week. The rent that she had to pay on her flat was far too much. She could not possibly afford it so she had got behind, and was about to become intentionally homeless, so Islington council had no obligation to rehouse her and would not do so. She was desperate to stay in the borough where her children were at school, but she has had to move many miles away to a private rented flat. I could not help her and her family get affordable housing in Islington.
I cannot say that that is the hardest case that I have had to deal with, but I raise it now because it reminded me so much of the situation that my mother was in 40 years go. The position has not got any better over 40 years. The overcrowding is worse and homeless families continue to face terrible crises. In Islington there are 13,000 families waiting for housing. Two thirds of those are living in overcrowded conditions. It is estimated that in the next two years 7,000 more households will be created, but the houses will not be built. Islington's housing crisis is desperate. The market cannot and will not provide.
The median income in Islington is about £25,000 a year. The entry level price for a two-bedroom flat is about £300,000, which is 12 times the median income. In this week's paper, the cheapest one-bedroom flat, an ex-council flat, is £250,000. That is 10 times the median income. What about the private sector and private rented homes? Unfortunately, there is nothing there approaching an affordable rent. The cheapest one- bedroom flat in this week's local paper is £210 a week. The person on a median income, £25,000, is taking home £320 a week, so paying £210 in rent leaves only £110 for food, bills, travel, council tax and so on.
Our median person, one of the 7,000 new households, cannot rent or buy in Islington. What will happen to them? Many of my constituents are poorer than the median person. The average household income of people on council estates in my constituency is £15,000 a year, and nearly half of my constituents live in social housing. Many of those households include children.
That brings us back to social housing and the 13,000 families on the council waiting list. Allocations are managed by a system that is laughingly called choice-based lettings. There is no choice and there are hardly any lettings. Only those in the top half of the waiting list are even allowed to bid for properties. The bottom half, 6,500 families, have to hang on until things get better, and they are not getting better.
Perhaps the Opposition Members, none of whom are still in the Chamber, who campaigned so actively to ensure that we do not build any more affordable homes would like to guess where the woman whom I am about to describe is on the waiting list. She came to see me a year ago. She is a single mother with one child. She is homeless through no fault of her own and is living in a hostel provided by the council. Let us call her Fatima. She has one room in the hostel. That is no place to bring up a child. Hostels should be for emergencies.
Where is Fatima in the list of 13,000-in the top 1,000, who might have a chance of getting a home in the next year? No, because she is not seriously ill and nor is her child. Is she in the top 2,000, who could reasonably expect to be rehoused in the next two years? No. Fatima is in the bottom 6,500-those who have no chance of ever getting an affordable house in Islington. She came to see me again in my surgery recently. She still does not have enough points to bid for a home, so she is stuck in the hostel with a larger toddler now. She is on income support. Should she go to a one- bedroom flat in the private market at £210 a week? What would happen if she got a job? How would she feed herself and her child? Surely it makes sense for us to build enough affordable housing for rent so that my constituent has a chance of a home for herself and her child.
My Lib Dem Islington council's record on the matter is a disgrace. Councillors must be disconnected from real life in Islington. I cannot believe that they are intrinsically evil or wicked people, but they do not seem to understand the crisis. They will not stand up to developers and they will not refuse planning permission unless half of it is affordable housing that my Islington families can afford. Instead, only one in seven of all new homes that are being built in Islington is affordable rented housing. It is not good enough. I am pleased that the Government will step in.
People buy up council housing and rent it out at extraordinarily high prices as temporary accommodation. We are expected to foot the bill by way of housing benefit. That is how people get caught in a poverty trap and we must do something about it. The only solution in the end is to build more. In Islington, where land prices are so high, the council could take advantage of that and say to developers, "You can't build here unless half of what you build is for local people. You can make your great big profits on the other half." That takes backbone, which my Liberal council does not have, and it ought to.
The Bill establishes the Homes and Communities Agency, which will be an engine for the Labour Government to ensure that we build more affordable homes, thank goodness. We must make sure that our councils do the right thing. We must build more affordable homes, and we will build 3 million of them. That is such good news. Affordable housing in the Islington context is only social rented, so let us build. Let us build for the sake of Jackie. Let us build for the sake of Fatima. Let us build for their children. Let us build for the younger generation across the whole country, whose birthright was being sold cheap by those who are not on the Opposition Benches but who ought to be. This is a major social issue, but they have all gone off to the bars instead of listening to this incredibly important debate. There is-
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Lady is getting a little carried away. Let us remember that temperate language is the order of the day.
Emily Thornberry: 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.
