Housing Market Renewal

Alison Seabeck Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mrs Riordan, for your chairmanship—albeit rather briefly—of the debate. I draw hon. Members’ attention to the entry in the register made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) in which I have an indirect interest. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) on securing the debate. It has been marked by excellent contributions and a strength of feeling expressed by my hon. Friends, whose constituents are most affected by the Government’s complete volte-face on funding for the housing market renewal programme.

The Minister should not be surprised by the anger and frustration voiced today, when the messages from his colleagues indicate yet again that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. The decision to cut half the money promised by the Government at the Dispatch Box by the Minister for Housing and Local Government as recently as October 2010 has been devastating. Many hon. Members have commented on his absence today. I can tell hon. Members that, as we speak, he is busy tweeting about holding a round table on social mobility. In that round table, I hope that he is talking about HMR and the impact of his policies on social mobility.

It is worth noting and repeating the precise words that the Minister for Housing and Local Government used:

“We will complete all the committed HMR schemes, and we will then roll the funding up into the regional development fund to continue the good work.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 1114.]

Is that not pretty unequivocal? He then confirmed the position in a letter to local authorities, in which he said:

“we will also provide access to the Regional Growth Fund to fund capital projects which could support housing growth”.

I suppose we should be getting used to Ministers saying one thing in Parliament one day and then changing it the next. Most recently in fact, just a couple of weeks ago in a debate on social housing in this Chamber, the Minister for Housing and Local Government made a number of statements that he has subsequently had to correct or elaborate on. There were seven such instances in all, including one policy change. I hope that the Minister responding today will not find himself having to come back with a stream of corrections. There is a question of competence here.

It is therefore a shame that Lord Heseltine, who has been tasked with heading up the independent approval panel for bids to the regional growth fund, does not appear to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Perhaps he is as confused by the Government’s constant chopping and changing as the rest of us. When he was pressed by the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, he was very clear indeed that the regional growth fund is not in any way a replacement for housing market renewal funding. What happened to the circular that the Minister put out? Did Lord Heseltine simply ignore it, or perhaps the status of the edict from the Department for Communities and Local Government was simply lost on the chairman of the approval panel. To his credit, Lord Heseltine has a considerable understanding of regeneration projects and, after the Toxteth riots, he got heavily involved in trying to make significant changes and improvements to some of the country’s most run-down communities through regeneration. There were, of course, two housing-related bids in the first round of bidding with one in Hull and one in Wakefield, but since then the emphasis has clearly changed.

It is telling that the Localism Bill does not mention the importance of regeneration to some of our poorest communities. However, let us be honest. That is not the Government’s vision for the new powers that the Bill will introduce. The bids already in for neighbourhood forums support the view that those powers are largely for affluent areas in the south-east or in the suburbs of our major towns. Neighbourhood forums are not being set up in Hyndburn, for example. Perhaps those marooned local residents should be thinking about setting up a neighbourhood forum in order to try and have a say in how their community might be shaped in the future—not, I hope, under a Tory Government.

Why did the former pathfinder chairs feel the need to press the case for the full £60 million to remain committed? They know, because they have worked on the ground, just how important it is to rebalance and invest in these communities. They also know the cost of not proceeding and the waste of investment that has already been put in. Perhaps the Minister should read his own Department’s discussion papers in which it is clear that in order to tackle worklessness the lack of aspiration needs to be dealt with. Part of that is about people feeling valued. Someone’s home and their wider environment play a significant role in that. Let us imagine waking up every morning in a semi-derelict landscape, where all the community facilities and local shops are closed. It is almost impossible to conceive how dispiriting and demoralising that must be. If the Government are serious about the private sector stepping in to support new jobs, they need the conditions for that to happen. The private sector will not move into derelict sites where no one, including their potential workers, wants to live. There needs to be some pump-priming.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright)—a former very respected Housing Minister, who understands the nature of the problem—set out clearly the reasoning behind the scheme and, most importantly, the economic benefits. The Government have taken a number of decisions that have impacted seriously on house building, regeneration and, as we have heard, the construction industry. This Government’s decision arbitrarily to select just five areas for continued investment and to allow councils to ignore the regional house building targets resulted directly or indirectly in plans for more than 200,000 homes being dropped.

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree has highlighted the problems and has mentioned some of the excellent work using previous funding to try to lift some of the affected areas. During the recess, I hope to see at first hand some of the problems that she has described so vividly. My hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) gave a wide-ranging and expert analysis of HMR and its importance to the area that he represents.

My hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) and for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) described how the scheme was just starting to have an impact. Clearly the rug has simply been pulled from under the feet of those concerned. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North made a plea for a cross-cutting approach. Sadly, I have to tell her that the Government are simply doing the cutting part. She also touched on business rates, which are extremely relevant. That was a point very well made. I hope that the Minister will take that away, because the impact on areas such as hers could be significant if, again, the decisions taken are the wrong ones. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) is an assiduous debater on this and related issues. He flagged up an alternative, more pragmatic approach that the Government might have followed and pointed out that they simply chose not to do so.

Labour Members have tried hard to clarify this matter and have raised the issue on the Floor of the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), who is in this Chamber today, has—I hope he will forgive me for saying this—been like a dog with a bone. He, too, has written to the Minister for Housing and Local Government, most recently on 29 June, but there has been no answer. Perhaps the Minister for Housing and Local Government has been too busy writing corrections to the previous debate. My hon. Friend asked some straightforward questions in his letter, many of which have been asked again today by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree, and I shall add to her list. Will the Minister make it absolutely clear whether Lord Heseltine is correct in saying that the regional growth fund will not cover HMR or anything of that sort?

Importantly, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree also asked whether bids, which have been prepared at some cost to local authorities, will be considered at all by the approval panel. If not, will local authorities be reimbursed, given that they were quite clearly sold a pup by the Government? Perhaps in the absence of a written reply from the Minister for Housing and Local Government, the Minister can, in summing up, answer all those questions, because he will have adequate time to do so. I hope that we get good, full, oral answers and that we do not have to wait for updated written answers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Stunell]

The hon. Lady’s point is thoroughly understood. I do not think that she will be disappointed, but she is tempting me on to territory on which it really is not right for me to advance.

[Alison Seabeck]

Just for absolute clarity, I would appreciate it if the Minister would clarify something that he said. He stated that authorities would not be disadvantaged in the first year. Given that many of these housing and regeneration projects are much longer programmes, I think that we would all have serious worries if, after the first year, those authorities were disadvantaged as a result of the changes.

[Andrew Stunell]

I was responding to the suggestion that Stoke-on-Trent might lose £26 million. Stoke-on-Trent will not lose £26 million. I think that I have already made our intentions clear. There have been some other statements, but the detail of the scheme will be well debated when it is published, so I think it is best if I go on to respond to several of the other points that were made in the debate, if I may.

It is way over the top for the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) to say that the Government’s decisions have set areas back by decades. That is absolutely not the case. Investments have been made and, even in this debate, reports have been given of their success. It might be said that there is a greater belief in the successes among Opposition Members than Government Members. It is absolutely not the case that such work will be set back as a result of the decisions that have been made.

I want to link that to what the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) brought to the debate. I leave aside his dismissal of deficit reduction, because that sensible Government aim underpins our whole financial strategy. The hon. Member for Hartlepool must be well aware of the deficit problems found by the incoming Government. However, the hon. Member for Hyndburn cannot have his argument both ways: it seemed to be that the fundamental difficulty in east Lancashire was too many homes and not enough people, in which case it can hardly be wrong if the new homes bonus generates more houses in places with more people than it does in places with an excess of houses. I want to tell—