Politicians don’t understand housing and asylum seekers will pay the price
The government wants to temporarily scrap HMO licensing for asylum seekers’ accommodation. It risks creating a set of dangerous sub-standard homes unfit for the future, writes Elena Siniscalco
Amid the migration figures causing spasmodic twitching within the Tory party last week, there was a remarkable one: the backlog of asylum cases in the country hit a new record high. At the end of March, more than 172,000 people were waiting for an initial decision on their asylum application. That is an increase of 57 per cent compared to the same time last year.
The UK has a legal obligation to provide adequate accommodation for these people – but during a housing crisis like the one we’re witnessing, it’s difficult. The Tories have resorted to putting asylum seekers in hotels – a practice with many flaws, including its cost of £6m a day. The latest proposal is to temporarily scrap basic housing regulations to free up housing quickly, and more cheaply.
Earlier this month, while Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove was unveiling new laws protecting renters’ rights, somewhere else in the rooms of Parliament his colleagues were debating the government’s intention to scrap HMO licensing for asylum seekers’ accommodation. HMO stands for “houses in multiple occupation”, a term used to describe a property in which at least three people who come from different households live and share communal spaces like bathrooms and kitchens.
To be rented, houses occupied by five or more people need a special licence granted by a local authority. This is because historically, HMO has been more dangerous and more open to abuse. Because so many people live in these homes, the risk of dying in a fire is six times greater than in other types of rented properties, and 16 times greater if the property has three or more floors. In March, a man died in a fire at Maddocks House, in Shadwell. More than fifteen people were reported to be living in the three-bedroom flat, which Tower Hamlets council had previously denounced as overcrowded. “It’s a real criminal end of the market, the bottom end of this”, says Ben Reeve-Lewis of the Safer Renting programme.
Licensing was introduced in 2006 to ensure strict fire safety and space standards were respected. According to Reeve-Lewis, there are many rogue landlords, refusing to put fire doors and make repairs, operating under the radar in this sector. Some of them will look at the government’s proposal and lick their lips.
Scrapping licensing for two years for asylum seekers’ accommodation is “being done by regulation, not primary legislation, which is a lot easier to get through Parliament without proper scrutiny”, says Giles Peaker, a housing solicitor. The risks are two-fold: there’s the immediate risk to the health and safety of asylum seekers and the communities around them, and the long-term risk of creating a set of sub-standard, unlicensed housing stock.
It’s unclear what the government plans to do with these homes after the two years window – unless the policy gets extended. Does creating poor one-use housing ever make sense? The government could decide to bring the properties back into licensing. But if that doesn’t happen, it will have created substandard housing in communities all over the country. “There are unfortunately going to be desperate people who are willing to rent these properties”, says Bridget Young, director of the No Accommodation Network.
Without a licence list, local authorities will struggle to even know these properties are there. The responsibility of enforcement will then be on the Home Office, but the record on enforcement of standards on governmental contracted accommodation is very poor – think of the conditions at the overcrowded Manston centre. Private HMO landlords, often based abroad, will rent their unlicensed properties to government-contracted providers like Serco and Clearsprings Ready Homes, creating a murky chain of responsibility. Both Serco and Clearsprings refused to comment.
A government spokesperson ensured “the changes will not compromise standards and all properties will be independently inspected to ensure they continue to meet national housing quality requirements”. They pointed to the need to end “the use of expensive hotels” to house asylum seekers. HMO will undoubtedly prove cheaper, but one wonders at what cost, given the dangers of living somewhere that lacks gas safety certificates and carbon monoxide alarms. “It’s really a dangerous precedent, encouraging landlords to avoid existing schemes”, says John Perry, policy adviser at the Chartered Institute of Housing.
Ultimately, all this underscores a broader problem: the government is unable to look at migration and housing as two interlinked issues. The necessity of housing asylum seekers is not that different, in practical terms, from the necessity of housing homeless households. The problems with supply, quality and affordability of our homes are ubiquitous. Only a failure to grasp this and look at policy-making organically explains how a government could think creating unsafe homes for the long-term and putting asylum seekers in them was ever a decent strategy.