Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)

My Lords, this seems a strange, intimate place for us to have these formalities, but I am delighted to add my words to the debate on the Question before us. One of the first things I want to do is use this occasion to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for the extraordinary work that he has done in his own extraordinary way over so many years. If that goes on the record as part of my contribution to the debate, I will be very pleased indeed. The Library briefing gives all kinds of information; I will not repeat it here because others have read it too and we can see it for ourselves. One of the difficulties is defining exactly what we mean by an empty home—that is, a home with nobody in it. For how long and under what circumstances has it been empty? What factors are involved? They are not just all of a kind. I did pick up from the briefing some words that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, may be comforted by. It suggests that the Government are “setting out plans to ‘make it easier for empty homes to be brought back into use and expect[ed] councils to use the powers we’ve already given them to ensure that this happens’”. It also said that the Government “noted that local authorities can access funding associated with bringing empty homes back into use”. As an opening statement, as often happens with this kind of issue, I feel the need to start from the other end of the spectrum, having been homeless. I have never owned a home. I live in a little two-up two-down terraced house provided by the Methodist Ministers’ Housing Society. That is the extent of any expertise I might bring on the question of home ownership. I remember a key moment in my early life. When I was 10, my mother suffered domestic abuse of an awful kind, which I remember graphically to this day. She had been pursued through the divorce courts and declared the guilty party. She was evicted from the family home with her two small boys, and we were homeless for an indeterminate amount of time—I was too young to have counted or kept a record. Neighbours put the three of us up. Finally, my grandparents, who were caretakers in a factory and lived within its confines—they had two rooms plus a scullery, and they were very proud of their scullery—said, “Well, we’ve got two rooms. You’d better have one of them”. I was brought up in one room in a factory in Burry Port, so I inevitably come at the question of homelessness from my own experience of being homeless. I spoke in a debate on another issue about the smell of panic. That was about school meals and my mother having to feed her two boys when the school holidays were on. I still associate those words with my memories when I remember, as I do, the smell of panic in my body and my jeans as my mother asked yet another neighbour if they could put us up for the night. These are not things you forget. In 1952, at 10 years of age, I faced stigmatisation, eviction and homelessness. We had been living in one room in a brickyard within a factory. All of that was part of my very being as I grew up, and I cannot for the life of me address this issue without that coming to the surface. As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, noted, 35 years ago, the Big Issue first came out. It has been 40 years, just now, since I took charge of the west London homelessness mission at Seymour Place, which was open 365 days a year. I slept in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the homeless. I tried to get as close to them as possible to see the range of issues that end with homelessness. Therefore, talking about how to bring assets into use makes most sense to me when I think of how far away they seemed from me in my day. I passed the 11-plus and entered a bourgeois world—the bourgeoisie and I were now one. I visited so many of my friends’ homes in my teenage years, but never once could I invite any one of them to mine. Therefore, it seems such a natural thing to ask that a way be found to deal with the problem and crisis of the moment, especially if lazy and unused assets are in question. We must find a way to do that. The matter has become a little complicated for me, because I have just had the most wonderful holiday in Burry Port, at 8 Silver Terrace, which is just round the corner from where I was brought up. It was the most bustling place; it was our Tiger Bay in those industrial days. But now, the whole of Silver Terrace—20 terraced houses—has been taken over by the Airbnb industry. We were there on that ticket and enjoyed it wonderfully, but it has become such an empty, ghost-like experience, at the hazard of whoever is living in houses there at the time. There was no community—and nor could there be a community—and so I became aware of 20 houses in a row that could be used in a different way, if we found a way to do it. For all that, it is a human right for people to have a home—a roof over their heads. I have lived long enough in the company of homeless people to know what wretchedness casts them into the street. If it combines with personal failures of their own, it can be absolutely disastrous. So I am very happy to speak in this debate. I had hoped to speak a little lower down the list, so that those who know the facts and figures and the trends and policies could get in first, but here I am, having to be autobiographical right at the outset, to set the tone. For me, it is a matter of still being able to smell the panic that comes from not having a roof over your head and being desperate to do my little bit to make the world a better place where people do not have to endure that degree of degradation and destitution. Expecting the Committee’s kindness and forbearance for such a note to be struck, I now yield my place to others with facts and figures and with tendencies and policies.