Extract from Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee session on the Work of the Department - Nov 8

Witness: Michael Gove - Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

Chair: Let us move on to another important issue that happened during covid: the issue of homelessness and evictions.

Q57            Ian Byrne: Speaking as someone who has served on the Building Safety Bill Committee over the last three months, the direction of travel you are moving in here is very welcome. To echo what Bob said, we look forward to Report stage. It has been a very interesting hour listening to what you have been saying after sitting on that Bill Committee for three months, worried about what was actually getting said in that Bill Committee.

Research from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests that renters and families in the private rented sector are now facing eviction for covid-related arrears. Will the recently announced £65 million support package for low-income renters in arrears be enough, when this Committee estimated that a fully funded relief package is likely to cost up to £300 million?

Michael Gove: I hope it will be enough. It is certainly the case, without wanting to put words into their mouth, that Shelter and others welcomed the additional funding. It is not the only way in which local authorities can help and not the only means by which we can attempt to deal with problems of overcrowding, homelessness and the fragility of people who find themselves in reduced resources as a result of covid. I hope it will be enough, but I am open-minded about what other steps we might need to take.

Ian Byrne: I want to move on to something that goes to the heart of where we are now. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: “One in five cases involved the controversial Section 21 ‘no fault eviction’ notice, which states that landlords do not need to give a specific reason for wanting a tenant out. Lord Bird, founder of the Big Issue, told the Bureau: ‘It’s clear that the government must act now to suspend no fault evictions. We need to keep people in their homes at all costs—or we risk facing a mass homelessness crisis like never before.’”

Given the repeated commitments to end section 21 evictions and reform ground 8 evictions, why has your Department now announced a delay to the renters reform White Paper?

Michael Gove: We are not intending to punt it into the long grass, for all the issues that you mention. I want to make sure that we take the right approach towards the private rented sector. We were discussing only today within the Department what we can do in order to better regulate the private rented sector, while at the same time not disincentivising people from providing decent homes at a fair rent to those who need them. There is not just scope; there is urgency in the need for reform, but I am just reviewing if what we have in mind is sufficiently comprehensive.

Q58            Ian Byrne: Where we are now, going into the winter, you understand the consequences of that being kicked down the road. How are we going to deal with that?

Michael Gove: The £65 million is there to help to deal with coming out of covid. More broadly, we need to address the position that people in the private rented sector find themselves in, but when it comes to legislation, it will take just a little bit of time to get that on to the statute book and in a position that will provide them with protection. The £65 million is there to deal with the acute issue; we then need to deal more broadly with the degree of reassurance about their future that people in the private rented sector need.

Q59            Ian Byrne: Can I also invite you to look at the success of Liverpool’s landlord licensing register scheme, which was scrapped, unfortunately, and the success that it had in shifting that power imbalance between landlord and tenant? In your new role, it would be good if you could visit that, speak to people in Liverpool and readdress the removal of that licence.

Michael Gove: Absolutely. I know that similar schemes operate in Scotland and Wales, and people speak well of them.

Q60            Ian Byrne: The Everybody In campaign was a significant move to support those facing street homelessness during the pandemic and was recognised as a huge success. This Committee has repeatedly flagged the internal conflict between your Government’s commitment to end rough sleeping and their policy on no recourse to public funds. What is your Department doing to ensure that limiting access to benefits for non-UK nationals does not lead to street homelessness?

Michael Gove: Two things. Thank you very much for your words about Everybody In. They give me an opportunity to say that Robert, my predecessor, did an amazing amount to deal with the pressures that covid placed on local government and some of the most vulnerable in our society. It was a public policy success that he drove and that he led; I just want to emphasise my appreciation to him for that.

You quite rightly raise the issue that a significant number of people who find themselves sleeping rough do not, because of their migration status, have recourse to public funds. We want to work with the local government sector to make it clear that we can provide appropriate accommodation for those people who are at risk of destitution.

There is a broader question, though, which the Home Secretary and other members of the Government would want to emphasise alongside what I am about to say. While we want to treat everyone decently, we also want to make it clear that taxpayers and citizens in this country expect us to be vigilant in making sure that people who may have come to this country by routes that are not legal do not feel that they can then have access to funds and resources that people who are here legally, and who have been paying their taxes, have set aside to help the most vulnerable. It is a balance.

Everyone should be treated decently, but there is a difference between people who arrive here legally and who are in need, and people who arrive here by other routes, to whom we must show compassion but who are in a different type of category.

Q61            Ian Byrne: A recent report from the Kerslake commission argued for a cross-governmental national strategy and a new interministerial group to bring an end to rough sleeping. Do you think these are necessary to deliver on your Government’s commitments?

Michael Gove: Lord Kerslake’s report had a lot in it that was good. Eddie Hughes and I are looking at it. Eddie has just done a great job in making sure that other Government Departments support the work that he is doing. Indeed, the money was available in the spending review as a result of Eddie’s work to ensure that, for example, resources were there for people leaving custody and for people living with substance misuse issues, so that appropriate prevention could be there and appropriate accommodation could be found. Yes, there is more to do.

Q62            Ian Byrne: There are nearly 60,000 households with children in temporary accommodation, and over 4,000 families are accommodated in B&Bs or hostels across England. What are you doing to help those families trapped in unsuitable temporary accommodation? You might answer some of this in section 8 on social housing.

Michael Gove: The key thing that we need to do is build more homes where they are needed. I am in favour of helping to provide people with decent accommodation by any means necessary, so I do not have any problem at all with supporting local government to provide social housing for those most in need.

Q63            Ian Byrne: There is no ideological block on council housing or social housing?

Michael Gove: Absolutely not at all.

Ian Byrne: Good.

Q64            Florence Eshalomi: As someone who grew up in social housing, I am glad to hear those words coming from your mouth, Secretary of State.

Going back to temporary accommodation, the key problem we have—I am sure that this is the case across many constituencies—is the sheer state of the temporary accommodations that councils are having to essentially force residents to live in because they just do not have enough stock. I am sure you will have seen the presenter Daniel Hewitt’s report, Britain’s Housing Shame, about the sheer squalor that we are asking people to live in. What more can be done now to address the state of the temporary accommodations that councils have to pay private landlords for people to live in? It is taxpayers’ money. That should not be happening.

Michael Gove: You are right to draw attention to it. It goes to the whole area of the quality and decency of homes. We can make sure that there is appropriate regulation in place, but the fundamental problem—you are right; Ian is right; the Committee is right—is in making sure that there is appropriate high-quality accommodation for people to move into with appropriate security of tenure. That can come through councils and housing associations providing new stock.

I recognise it is a huge leap, if you are in temporary accommodation, to imagine that you could own your own home one day. But if you get someone in social housing, that individual is then no longer reliant on housing benefit in the same way. The cost of their housing is lower, their capacity over time to save is greater, and their capacity over time to move into ownership is greater.

That is not going to happen overnight, by definition, but one of the reasons why I said to Ian that I do not have any objection to social housing—quite the opposite—is that it is urgently needed in significant parts of the country. There are partners who can provide it and we need more of every different type of housing, with respect both totenure and to appropriateness to the position in life that someone is in. At different times, people might socially rent; then they might have shared ownership; then they might go on to own themselves, and then they might in due course downsize later on. When we are looking at housing policy overall, we should all try to rid ourselves of positions that date from the ’80s, which reflected a very different world.

Q65            Bob Blackman: I have two quick questions on homelessness. I asked you during the Budget debate about the rolling out of Housing First.  Given the success of the pilots, it seems to me absolutely right that we orientate not only providing someone with a roof over their head, but the support that they need to overcome why they ended up sleeping rough in the first place. What is the plan for rolling out Housing First now?

Michael Gove: I absolutely agree with you. We are just reviewing the success of the pilots to see what the next stage is. When I first arrived in the Department—it was not that long ago—one of the thoughts in my mind, and I have changed my mind in the period, was that rough sleeping in particular is not primarily a function of housing. Rough sleeping is a function of catastrophic life events that mean that people find themselves on the streets because of being overwhelmed by a perfect storm of unhappiness, whether those are catastrophic financial circumstances, mental health or whatever.

One of the things that being in the Department has made me see the light on is that if you can get someone into a secure, warm, decent place, it is then much easier to provide the additional support that means that they are less likely to find themselves back in difficult circumstances. I am doing no more than recycling to the Department the rationale and the principle behind Housing First and other initiatives. That is what we need to do. It is not enough on its own, but it is a very powerful example of a useful, potentially transformative social policy intervention.

Q66            Bob Blackman: The other issue I want to touch on, which Ian referred to, is the position in relation to those people with no recourse to public funds. When we were doing our report on this, your colleague came in front of us and said that the Department did not have the data on the number of individuals with no recourse to public funds who were brought in under Everybody In. I do not know if anything has changed, but without the data it is very difficult to do anything about this.

Michael Gove: That is a very fair point. We should give you that or do our very best to. I do not know the answer; I do not know how effectively that record keeping exists. We know, as everyone on this Committee does, that rough sleeping is concentrated in urban areas, particularly in central London, with a significant proportion of people from EU accession countries, so we must be able, by some means, to provide better information on that. If we cannot, I will explain why.

Q67            Bob Blackman: Moving on to social housing, I completely agree that we need to build more homes, and clearly more social rented homes. It is not just the quantity, but the quality of those homes that matters.

Michael Gove: Absolutely.

Q68            Bob Blackman: You have said already that in some parts of the country the quality is “scandalously poor”. The key then is that the social housing White Paper set out plans to improve the regulation of social housing. When are we going to see those proposals implemented?

Michael Gove: Shortly—I know that that is a politician’s answer. But you are right: we need more. The biggest problem in terms of quality is in the private rented sector, not in the social housing sector. Yes, we do need to, and there will be more detail shortly about the legislation that we aim to bring forward in this area.

Q69            Bob Blackman: Is that a ministerial “shortly”—soon, the spring?

Michael Gove: As soon as we possibly can, but as this Committee session has shown, there is a lot of work to be done. I do not shy away from the fact that it has to be done. I am not making excuses yet.

Q70            Bob Blackman: I am not sure if you saw the ITV report on the Eastfields estate in Merton, which is obviously part of London. The regulator told ITV that it does not have the power to carry out visits or proactively seek tenants’ views. When you are introducing those reforms, will you make sure that landlords can be held to account for these poor conditions? Frankly, you talked about city challenge earlier. I was leader of Brent Council when we won city challenge and implemented it. We tried to make sure that tenants’ views on everything associated were taken into account before we made decisions. It seems scandalous that this is still going on.

Michael Gove: I agree.

Q71            Bob Blackman: Obviously one of the other issues is cladding remediation. Social housing providers told us that their being excluded from the building safety fund means that they have to divert funds away from building more social housing and maintaining existing homes, to deal with the safety issues. What is the Department going to do under your leadership to redress this so that we get on with building the homes we need?

Michael Gove: I sympathise with housing associations that feel they are caught in a Sophie’s choice between dealing with safety and providing new accommodation. Without prejudice to the fact that safety needs to be dealt with, as I mentioned earlier, we need to be clear about where the catastrophic risk is and clear where other risk can be managed. We also need to be clear about how we can provide the money in the spending review, which is designed to do this, and work with housing associations to increase housing stock overall.

Q72            Chair: Does that apply to working with local authorities as well?

Michael Gove: Yes.

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