Jayne Kirkham

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting extra time for a debate that is so important for Cornwall and for giving others a chance for speak about its very particular housing issues. I also thank the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for initiating the debate. As he said, about 27,000 people are on Cornwall’s housing waiting list, and about 800 are in temporary and emergency accommodation. Many of them are families with young children, who are placed in caravan parks and holiday homes that are up to an hour and a half or two hours away from their support networks, their schools, their jobs and where they live. This is really affecting community cohesion, upsetting families and causing real hardship. The council is struggling with the need, and the cost is vast. It is providing bunk cabins in council car parks for people to live in as emergency and temporary accommodation, which is very difficult. So many people in Cornwall are now living in their vans, because they simply have nowhere else to go. I am finding that families are moving into emergency accommodation, and that the single people who were becoming homeless when I was first a councillor in Cornwall are now living in their cars. The situation has become really dire. Businesses are now finding that key workers have nowhere to live, so we have people coming down to work in the hospitality sector or in agriculture. The same is true for professionals, such as teachers, nurses and doctors—a headteacher in Cornwall struggled to find somewhere to live, and she had to give up her job and move away again. There is now a movement called Homes for Cornwall, whereby businesses are coming together to try to find alternatives solutions to deal with the housing crisis, which has become so bad that they cannot find staff. As the hon. Member for St Ives said, we have a very low number of social houses in Cornwall—only 10,300 council homes. I want to talk about the affordable housing programme grant, which a previous Secretary of State, Michael Gove, suspended for Cornwall because of the poor performance of the housing provider Cornwall Housing, which is an arm’s length company owned by the council. That performance has now improved, and the grant is desperately needed for a new social housing scheme in Redruth, but it has not been returned. I ask the Minister to look into that, and to see whether other local authorities in this situation have been treated in the same way and lost their grants. Has that grant moved to other registered providers in Cornwall, or has it left Cornwall completely? Is there any way we could get that back and backdate it? The other issue, which the hon. Member for St Ives spoke about, is second homes and holiday lets, which have absolutely exploded in Cornwall, particularly since covid. The private rented sector has been decimated and is now virtually non-existent. We have struggled so much with section 21 notices, which explains to a great extent why so many of our families are now in emergency and temporary accommodation.