Budget Resolutions

Debate between Jo Churchill and Lindsay Hoyle

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

I welcome the Budget, particularly on R and D, the enterprise investment scheme and small and medium-sized enterprises, which I hope to be able to address next week.

Today I will concentrate on housing. I am encouraged by the ambition we showed yesterday, and now we need to focus on delivery. It is a sad fact that the average age at which people now enter the housing market is 37, and half of people in their 30s do not expect to own a house like their parents have, so there is work to do.

Some 217,000 houses were built out this year, compared with the woeful 75,000 built out during the last year of the Labour Government, but arguably this is not about more council houses, more of this and more of that; it is about the industry, about housing authorities and about all of us working to deliver what people want, which is homes. No matter a person’s tenure, they want a roof. The important thing is that we get the right homes for people, that we get the right quality of homes and that we get homes where we need them. I am pleased to see that we are looking for density, particularly on urban sites, because that makes a great deal of difference in ensuring that people in cities are near their place of work.

I am also pleased to see that the Homes and Communities Agency will become Homes England, and the £44 billion of capital funding, loans and guarantees is most welcome. The acknowledgement of the importance of small builders is also welcome because they have largely disappeared from the construction industry. Their need to be able to access finance has been acknowledged with a further £1.5 billion for the home building fund and £630 million for the housing infrastructure fund.

We want homes to have quality and to be well designed. We would also like homes to have electric charging points, which the Chancellor spoke about. We want to use R and D and innovation in building. There is no reason why we should not be using robotic bricklaying machines and modular builds, where accessible and appropriate, to ensure that we get on with delivering these houses in a smart way so that we put roofs over people’s heads.

More houses should not mean lower quality. The all-party parliamentary group on excellence in the built environment is considering the possibility of a new homes ombudsman, because 98% of all houses that currently come to market have some sort of snagging issue. I hope to talk to Ministers about that as the idea develops.

There is also £170 million coming into the skills agenda through the industrial strategy, which is most welcome, with another £34 million going into innovation and training. It would be great to see construction colleges at every large construction site, with large house builders basing a training centre at the centre of each large site that could later be redeveloped and used as a community centre.

We need all sorts of approaches to development if we are to build this number of houses. Construction is now a high-tech industry, and it should not be thought of as the preserve of boys at the back of the class who perhaps cannot add up. I would like to see a higher degree of attention on delivering quality training in this area.

We need road and rail infrastructure to connect new housing developments. Overspill from the west-east Oxford-Cambridge corridor will undoubtedly come upon us in Bury St Edmunds. Houses are very expensive in my constituency, and they are often out of reach of people in an area where average wages sit below the national average. I would like us to concentrate on having a planning system that looks across the piece. The current two-tier system is not helpful. Bringing empty homes into use is something we are concentrating on in St Edmundsbury, but the problem is often about discovering ownership, rather than applying the council tax. I do feel, however, that applying the council tax levy will certainly add a bit of weight to encourage people to consider whether their house should be empty or not.

Given that we have little time left, let me end by thanking the Exchequer Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones), for listening to me and my young constituent from the Suffolk Accident Rescue Service, and examining the accident rescue charities grant scheme. We were most grateful for being able to retrieve—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I call Alison Thewliss.