Housing

Debate between Kit Malthouse and Anna McMorrin

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

That was a remarkable example of a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge and conviction about what my hon. Friend rightly says should be not only the Government’s top domestic priority but the entire country’s primary moral mission: to build the homes that the next generation need and which are currently denied to them.

It is unusual for me to hear strains of my own speeches read back to me. I know that my hon. Friend has not been to listen to many of my speeches, but what he said resonates strongly with me: many of the themes he laid out in his preamble and diagnosis I am myself going around the country promoting—not least the dysfunctionality of the house building market. The one element that he omitted, but that I am sure he is aware of, is that the situation is not helped by the fact that in the crash of 2007-08, 50% of all small house builders were wiped out—removed from the market—having produced, as my hon. Friend said, more than half of all new homes. That proportion has now dropped to about a third, I think.

Both in coalition and since, the Government have done their best to try to push output up from a low of 124,000 in 2012 to 222,000 last year. The forward indicators for next year are looking pretty good as well.

[Anna McMorrin]

Why did the Government scrap the requirement for homes to be carbon neutral, when that would go a long way towards helping with living costs and budgets, as well as meeting climate targets?

[Kit Malthouse]

I totally acknowledge the role that high environmental standards have to play in a sense of social justice about housing. I went to a factory run by Accord Housing, which produces 1,000 modular homes a year. So good are the environmental standards in those homes that they have lower arrears because people can afford to heat them. That is definitely something on which I want to focus.

I want to address some of the questions that my hon. Friend raised. He is right that we need to do something about the way in which the house building market functions at the moment, and my job is to wander around being disruptive, supporting new entrants and players to create the competitive landscape that he is looking for—competing on quality and type; being disruptive on technology and encouraging modern methods of construction, including off-site manufacture and new techniques, so that new entrants find it easier to overcome the barriers to entry that he mentioned; and being disruptive on finance.

My hon. Friend is a little negative about Help to Buy, but I ask him to take care. Many tens of thousands of young people have accessed homes for the first time when the market was denied to them before, because of a Government-backed effective bank of mum and dad. While there will be assessments of that scheme, there is no indication at the moment that it has pushed up prices.