Cherilyn Mackrory – 2022 Speech on the Supported Housing Bill

The speech made by Cherilyn Mackrory, the Conservative MP for Truro and Falmouth, in the House of Commons on 18 November 2022.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for bringing the Bill forward and for his long-term commitment in this sector. It has taken a lot of work for him and his team to bring the Bill to this point, and I congratulate them all on the work they have done. I welcome the Minister to her place. I know from the work she has done with her constituents that she is also committed to this sector and will bring some much-needed conscientiousness to the passage of the Bill.

The driver for most of us in this place—in fact, pretty much all of us, on both sides of the House—is that we want to protect the most vulnerable people in our communities. If we do not agree on that, we will not get anywhere fast, but I think we do. What we disagree on, perhaps, is how we get there. If we can keep that at the heart of all our debates, we will not go too far wrong.

Cornwall has long had a shortage of affordable housing, and it will come as no surprise to anyone that I will concentrate my remarks on that. Housing supply for local people continues to be squeezed, with more and more properties being held as holiday accommodation. The growth of the online short-term holiday lettings sector and the prevalence of second home ownership in the area has led to a shift in the rental market, with an acute reduction in the number of tenancies available for local people. This is important, because that sector is being squeezed the most in our towns and villages, and where the local council and providers cannot find suitable accommodation, that is relevant to the context of this discussion.

Cornwall is on a peninsula. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) talked about licensing needing to be consistent in all the local authorities in the surrounding area, but we do not have that luxury in Cornwall. We are a peninsula, and we need to get it right. We have a finite amount of housing in our area, and therefore we need to make sure that all the housing is being used for the right purposes. That is why I always bang on about second home ownership and holiday lets—not because I want to demonise any one community, but so that everybody understands the fight we are fighting in Cornwall.

The Conservatives took control of the council a couple of years ago, and I pay tribute to our new portfolio holder for housing, Olly Monk, who has worked tirelessly on this. We had over 1,000 people in temporary accommodation, and he purchased SoloHaus homes, which provide safe, comfortable and sustainable dwellings for homeless people. There was the Everyone In initiative during the covid pandemic, and we are trying to keep that going in Cornwall. SoloHaus offers safe homes with their own front door for people who are in crisis. Homelessness has been growing in Cornwall for a number of years. That was brought sharply into the spotlight during the covid pandemic, as it was in many areas, and local authorities had to do something quickly.

We have a lot of these types of home in Old County Hall in Truro, and they are working. They give somebody a place to go. They have their own front door, they are welcoming spaces, and they are built to the highest standards of sustainability, safety and durability. They are designed with leading homelessness charities and stakeholder groups. They have a considered layout, an abundance of natural light and good storage. Most of all, they mean that we know people are in a safe space.

Nearly 3,500 households received support from the local authority last year through either homelessness prevention or temporary accommodation. There are over 650 households—approximately 1,200 people—still in temporary accommodation. Some 21,000 households are on Cornwall’s social housing waiting list, which is about 8% of our population. There is precious little data on the number of people who live in precarious housing situations or are sofa surfing, but we know that more than 700 of the people who have received help from the local authority stated that family and friends were no longer willing or able to accommodate them. We believe that that is just the tip of the iceberg and that significantly more people are vulnerably housed in Cornwall.

Many people who find themselves homeless or at risk of homelessness are not entitled to any support from the state, hence where we are today. So I want to pay tribute to a local charity that is beloved by many in Cornwall, St Petrocs, which helps to step in to offer support and advice. St Petrocs currently manages and provides accommodation for about 150 people throughout Cornwall; every one of those properties is very different, with a variety of locations and tenants, but the properties are all a step up from homelessness and help with integration into society. St Petrocs deals with a lot of addiction issues and a lot of vulnerability from other areas of people’s lives. Although the properties are all set up differently, all residents have their own bedroom, with shared communal facilities, and the residents take responsibility for making their own food and maintaining a clean home. The houses are managed by their accommodation officers, who, crucially, provide support and guidance in person, as well as via a 24-hour on-call system. Many residents are given an old brick mobile phone with the phone number of the accommodation officer, which means that if they find themselves in crisis, they have somebody on hand they can call, who understands their case and situation, and knows them. That crisis can come in any way, shape or form, be it because of substandard accommodation or people taking advantage of them.

Together with the accommodation officer, the residents agree a pathway for their time at the house and they prepare themselves for moving on. They learn to cook, gain budgeting skills and prepare themselves for work, by taking part in a vocational development project. They are also encouraged to have hobbies and to engage with the wider community. I am going into such detail on this because I want to share with the House what I believe is best practice and should be the gold standard for people who have been struggling in this way and for those trying to get them back into society. I am sure there are many other providers that right hon. and hon. Members can highlight, but that one is beloved in Cornwall and does a huge amount of good work,

One reason I want to draw attention to the good work is that one other vulnerability we have in Cornwall is that we are at the end of the lines for the county lines scourge on our constituencies. A few years ago, we were finding that our vulnerable residents not being cared for by people such as St Petrocs were being cuckooed in accommodation such as that to which my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East has referred. This was a real scourge in our towns and villages. Drugs gangs from cities think that we are an easy target and I suppose that at one point we probably were. Devon and Cornwall police have been brilliant on this in the past five or six years, and have given a lot of good advice to people—to neighbours and communities. What we do well in Cornwall is having great communities, still, so people can look out for unusual activity, which we need to do. Where the Bill will help, particularly though clauses 7 and 8, is on the licensing.

I go back to the parallel that I started with, which is that of a housing crisis in Cornwall. One thing we want to achieve in Cornwall is a similar licensing scheme for the short-term holiday lets. The right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) intervened to say that some of these rogue landlords were registering places as holiday lets, which provided a loophole. That interested me because in Cornwall we want to make sure we know where all of our short-term holiday lets are and exactly where the types of accommodation we are discussing today are too. We need to look to the Minister to combine these licensing schemes, so that local authorities can have a bit more control over what is going on and where. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East in everything he is achieving today. I absolutely support clauses 7 and 8, which deal with planning and draw the same parallels with what we are trying to achieve in Cornwall on change of use. My Cornish colleagues and I are campaigning for the autonomy for Cornwall Council to make these decisions itself. We are looking towards a county deal in Cornwall and I understand that a lot of what we are calling for needs changes to be made in primary legislation, but actually if we incorporate this into a licensing scheme, rather than go through the planning process, perhaps we can start to achieve some of these things more quickly.

I pay tribute to what my hon. Friend is attempting to do through his very well-thought-out Bill. It goes to the heart of what we need to do in our communities, which is to support the most vulnerable people whose voice often goes unheard. We are here today to speak up for them, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.