Opinion: Lost in space

The fact that a family can be as chronically overcrowded as my constituent featured last week (and, sadly, there are plenty more where that one came from) – yet still not fall foul of the legislation governing statutory overcrowding – illustrates the fundamental flaw in the system.

Those of us arguing for reform of this legislation – seeking to bring rules framed in the 19th century into the 21st – are hoping to achieve two things. The first is recognition

of the scale of the problem and the ODPM is now conducting research into overcrowding. The second is a commitment to removing the 1935 standard from the statute book.

Unless the standards that housing and environmental health officers have to work with are removed, it will be impossible to improve them without further primary legislation. So my parliamentary colleagues and I are arguing that the opportunity presented by the current housing bill must be seized.

We are already approaching the seventh year of the Labour government and – to its considerable credit – we are now on the fourth housing bill to reach parliament. It may, therefore, be years before there is another chance to signal the need for change – however incremental this may have to be – by taking the first step in the current housing bill and removing the 1935 standard.

Substantial amendment to the existing law cannot happen in a day. The root causes of homelessness and housing need, such as overcrowding, lie in the shortage of affordable housing. The shortage has built up over a quarter of a century, and reversing it will be a long haul. Yet we have to start somewhere.

My amendments to the housing bill, introduced during its committee stage, introduced a new bedroom standard based on a statistical measure used in the Survey of English Housing, and updates the existing space standards by counting all children under five as half a person, and everyone over that age as one person. At present, babies do not count at all until they reach the age of one, and children only count as half a unit until they turn 10.

This is why a parent with four children aged nine, eight, seven and one in a one-bedroom flat could be deemed as not living in an overcrowded dwelling. Such overcrowding would have been bad enough 100 years ago, but the simple truth is that children are now bigger, mature earlier and attain puberty earlier than they did, so the pressures are actually far more intense.

A dwelling will be counted as overcrowded where the number of bedrooms allocated to them is less than that which can be determined by a simple formula. Very small rooms (less than 50 square feet) and rooms available for other purposes (such as living rooms and kitchens) would not count at all, as they do at the moment. The proposed formula allows for young children to share, of course, but otherwise adjusts for factors such as adults other than partners and the gender of children once they reach a certain age, or where there is a particular defined age difference. Such formulae are in common use in local authority allocations procedures, but cannot be used to give priority on the grounds of chronic overcrowding.

Detailed changes should be developed in the guidance that could be introduced in stages in consultation with local councils and the Housing Corporation. Yet none of this can happen until the mantle of change is taken up. The 1935 standard should go, and the current housing bill is the vehicle to achieve this vital first step. Then we can start entering the 21st century.