Contribution
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, with his very moving personal story of the impact that homelessness had on him as a child. It is worth placing on record that 175,000 children today are living in temporary accommodation and going through what the noble Lord described.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on his choice of subject and share his frustration that so many homes lie empty when there are so many people in housing need. Like the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, I pay tribute to his work on tackling homelessness over 30 or 40 years.
The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, took me back about 30 years to the first time I met him. I visited the new distribution centre for the Big Issue in inner London—I think it was legally occupied then—and made a speech, which probably lasted more than eight minutes, commending his initiative. After that, when I was Housing Minister, I always bought the Big Issue when I met a seller on the streets. In those days, it cost 35p; today, it is £5 and still a bargain. However, I did not always read the editorials because, when I did, I found some searing criticisms of the Government’s housing policies. As such, I tended to give the content a miss.
I will briefly mention three initiatives that I launched over 30 years ago to deal with empty homes. I do so not to seek commendation but to make the point that this issue has been with us a long time and many Ministers have had a go at tackling it. In 1992, I launched the Empty Homes Agency—now called Action on Empty Homes—in response to exactly the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, including the sheer waste of homes lying empty. At that point, it was 700,000. That was driven forward by one Antony Fletcher, who launched me into a series of turf wars with my ministerial colleagues because it was the Department of Health, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office that were the guilty parties. But we also worked with local authorities—they were in many ways easier to get on with—and we got their numbers of vacancies down by 40,000 over a five-year period. Action on Empty Homes is alive and well, doing valuable work under the leadership of Rebecca Moore and Chris Bailey. That was one initiative.
Another initiative that I launched in 1991 involved flats over shops. At that point, there were 100,000 empty flats over shops. We embarked on a three-year campaign to bring them into use, putting £25 million on the table for local authorities to adapt the schemes, in many cases providing separate entrances to the flats above the shops. Again, that had a big impact.
Many of the solutions either existing or suggested by noble Lords involve an element of compulsion—empty dwelling management orders, CPOs, works in lieu, enforced sale—or they involve public expenditure. Being a Conservative, cautious about increasing public expenditure and about more regulation, the third approach I tried was different: making the owners of empty properties a deal they could not refuse, but with no compulsion and no extra public expenditure. It was called Housing Associations as Managing Agent, or HAMA. The deal was that a local housing association would say to somebody who owned an empty property, who did not want the hassle of renting and did not want the risk of a tenant who did not pay or who might trash the property, “We will manage the property for you. We will find a tenant, we will guarantee the rent, we will return the property to you in the same condition as we found it, and we will remove the tenant at what point you want the property back”. If the property needed some work, and some of them did, the housing association would do the work then recoup the money from the rent. The rent that the owner received was below market rent because it was a fantastic deal, as there was no risk. The lower rent saved money for the housing association or the local authority, which might otherwise have had to pay a market rent for a similar property.
We launched five pilot schemes with housing associations, and I recall going to the first property in Paddington, in conjunction with the Notting Hill Housing Trust. I was then either sacked or promoted, and I lost sight of the scheme. I did some googling yesterday, and it seems to have sunk without any trace at all. The Minister, whose heart I know is in the right place on homelessness and empty properties, might just ask her office to look through the records and see whether this is something that might be resuscitated. If it is, I would like to go to the first launch of it.