Hunt’s pledge to families after seeing mouldy home pictures
Chancellor was shown images of flat while visiting Solihull hospital
CHANCELLOR Jeremy Hunt has pledged he is working to ‘help families like that’ after the Birmingham Post shared with him pictures of a mouldy council flat where ill kids are living in the city – one case among many, according to campaigners.
The Post flagged up to Mr Hunt the story of a mum and her two young children, living in a seventhfloor flat in the city, where mould and damp appear endemic.
Health professionals agree the living conditions are worsening their ill health – but their landlord, the city council, say there is nowhere else to house them.
Showing the Chancellor the photos of the mould on the walls, we asked what he and the Conservative Government was doing to help children living like this, and what hope they could give their families this winter.
Mr Hunt, a former health secretary, was touring Solihull Hospital during a visit to the region.
He viewed the images and listened as we explained the context – including that redecorating by a repair team had not resolved the problem.
“These are cosmetic things,” he said of the repairs. “We have to think practically what we can do that will make the biggest difference – one of the biggest things we can do to help families like that is to help them bring down energy bills, and with better insulation.”
He said his Cabinet colleague Michael Gove, the Housing Secretary, had voiced his fury at similar examples of long-standing mould and damp issues following the tragic death of twoyear-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale. Mr Gove said he was acting swiftly to ensure councils, housing associations and other landlords were aware of their responsibilities.
“He [Mr Gove] has withdrawn government funding for that particular housing association (in Rochdale linked to the twoyear-old’s death) and we are changing the law to give the (social housing) regulator more powers in this area (he was referring to the Social Housing Regulations Bill,
going back to Parliament next week),” said Mr Hunt.
“But we recognise the Government has a role to play in this too.” On plans to upgrade poor quality homes across the country, the Chancellor said: “Some £6.5 billion is there now for retrofitting (with £6 billion planned for 2025 onwards) and we are doing it as fast as we can. But there is a limit to how quickly the supply chains (on cavity wall insulation, solar panels, retrofitting) can go.
“A national energy efficiency plan aims to reduce our entire national consumption of energy by 15% which is very ambitious.”
When challenged on the terrible
statistic that 43% of Birmingham’s children – around 110,000 – are living in poverty, he said the Government was committed to making a difference.
“One of the best things to help children living in poverty is to make sure one or both of the adults in their household are in work, and there has been a very big fall in the number of children in workless households,” he said. “But there is a particular problem now – that’s why the big increases in energy bills and the cost of weekly shops is where we have focussed a lot of measures. This includes upraising benefits in line with inflation, an extra payment of £900 for people on Universal Credit and other means-tested payments, support for people with their energy bills - £900 this year, £500 next – and capping rent in social housing – a lot of measures which will help people through.
“But if you speak to families who are struggling, with children, the biggest thing on their minds is the increase in the cost of food and the best thing I can do is get inflation down. That is not an immediate thing but we will see it broadly halve next year so we will make some real progress towards that.”
Birmingham Fair Housing Campaign, a people-powered campaign to drive up standards in housing across the city and speak up for residents, is pressing to meet the leader of Birmingham City Council and all social housing chief executives to discuss how to work together to prevent what happened to Awaab happening here.
They say they have been inundated with stories from campaigners, many of them tenants themselves, about the current housing crisis, which they say is at the point of being ‘a critical emergency’.
Birmingham City Council was approached for comment.