Andy Sawford
Main Page: Andy Sawford (Labour (Co-op) - Corby)
Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)
We are in the midst of the biggest housing crisis in a generation. I am sorry that the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) finds it miserable that I am pointing that out, but many people in my constituency and across the country are suffering. Under this Government, house building is at its lowest level in peacetime since the 1920s. Since May 2010, the backlog in demand has reached 500,000.
Today, we have heard the latest stats, and clever words from Government Members that are, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) said, designed to dazzle, and to distract from the Government’s poor record. There was certainly an attempt to distract at the start of this debate, but there was not much dazzling. The number of announcements the Government have made about housing is about the same as the number of homes they have built. The impact that the housing shortage is having on the financial security and the hopes and dreams of millions of people across the country is rightly a concern for this House.
In a typically excellent speech, my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) showed how the Government have totally failed on housing. For his sake, the whole House was relieved when he gave way to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck). She was keen to intervene because she is proud of his record. Millions of people live in decent homes because of his focus on improving the housing stock, and we should pay tribute to him for that. The Government of which he was a member built 2 million new homes, including, as he said, half a million affordable homes.
The hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View, spoke powerfully about the contrast between the approaches of the current and previous Government. The current Government’s first decision on housing after taking office was to cut the affordable housing budget by 60%. The number of homes built for social rent fell to 7,759 last year—the lowest number since records began, and a fall of 75% from 2009-10, the last year of the Labour Government. The number of affordable homes built fell last year to the lowest in at least five years; that represented a fall of 32% from 2009-10. Overall, home ownership fell to its lowest level in 25 years—it is lower than in any year under the last Labour Government. The latest English housing survey showed that the proportion of homes lived in by owner-occupiers had dropped to 65.2% from 71% in 2003. It is at its lowest level since 1987.
Many Members have raised the issue of affordability. The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) said that house prices in her area are not affordable. I agree that we need to deliver more affordable homes, and different types of homes. I reassure her that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East said, we do not intend to impose housing targets of the type that she fears, but of course we want people in all areas of the country to think about the relationship between house prices and the availability of houses. That is as important in the hon. Lady’s community as it is in mine.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) called for all-party agreement on increasing house building and on the need to build social homes. He has done much work to build that cross-party agreement through his chairmanship of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. The hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) spoke of his private Member’s Bill on social housing. I know that the shadow Minister will talk constructively with him about that Bill. He talked a great deal of sense about the bedroom tax, which he opposed, and he highlighted its consequences. Of course, his party is accountable for that policy, and we have used Opposition days to give it many opportunities to overturn it, but it does not take the opportunities that we present.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) spoke about the deliberate demolition of council properties in his area, and why voters at this year’s local elections rejected that social cleansing so comprehensively. I pay tribute to him for highlighting the issue so consistently in the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) talked about the same issue—what he sees as social cleansing—but he also mentioned his concerns about the need for reform of the private rented sector.
It is clear that the Government are failing. House building is at its lowest levels in peacetime since the 1920s, and the number of completions has been lower in each year of this Government than in every year of the last Labour Government. The Government cannot continue to claim otherwise. The number of homes built for social rent is at its lowest for 20 years, home ownership is down, and millions are facing insecurity in the private rented sector as house prices rise faster than wages. The Governor of the Bank of England says that housing is the biggest risk to our economy, and the Opposition recognise that risk. That is why we are putting policies in place to tackle the housing shortage that is so central to the cost of living crisis.
I came back this morning from Bournemouth, where I attended part of the Local Government Association conference. I spoke to a lot of Labour councillors; many of them were familiar faces, but there were many new faces, following our success in this year’s local elections. Many of them told me proudly about the homes that they are building for their communities. Councils such as Southwark, York, Exeter, Leeds, Nottingham, Ipswich and Stevenage are all using the new financing agreed under the Labour Government to push ahead with building more council houses. Overall, five times as many social homes are being built in Labour authority areas as in Conservative ones. Of course, I welcome Conservative councils that are building—the hon. Member for South Derbyshire spoke about how her council is building homes and bringing others back into use. Of course we want to work with councils of all political types to bring forward new homes across the country, but it is clear that Labour councils are already showing the commitment that the next Labour Government will show.
In contrast to the current Government’s failure, we will tackle the housing shortage. We recognise that there are deep structural problems in the land market and the house building sector. As the number of small builders has declined and the big firms have grown even bigger, it has become easier for the dominant firms to buy up land. The truth is that to get the number of houses built that we need, there has to be a change in how the housing market works, but Ministers have simply failed to acknowledge that.
We must get more firms into house building to build homes and provide greater competition, because as we know, the high cost of housing is driven by the high cost of land and the shortage of housing supply. That is why Labour set out plans to boost the role of small and medium-sized house builders and get them building again. We have proposed a “help to build” scheme, which would help small and medium-sized builders to access finance through the banks. Those builders tell us that access to finance is a key barrier to getting homes built, and we will help them overcome it.
Access to land is another key barrier. That is why we have set out plans to ensure that a higher proportion of small sites are allocated in local authority five-year land supplies, and we will give them guaranteed access to public land. The system is not releasing enough land for housing development, and by the time land is given planning permission it is often prohibitively expensive. That creates an incentive to bank land, rather than build on it.
According to documents written by the Minister’s Department and obtained by “Newsnight”, there are 9,000 sites with planning permission to build 350,000 new homes that have not yet been started. Under the current system, however, there is little that local authorities can do about land banking. That is why we would create greater transparency by ensuring that developers register the land they own. We will also give councils and communities the power to charge developers escalating fees for sitting on land with planning permission, to incentivise them to either build or release the land to someone who will. As a last resort, we would give local authorities the power to compulsorily purchase land, so that they could assemble the land and we could make progress.
The purpose of those measures is to address the imbalance of power between local communities and developers. There are also issues to be resolved between authorities. Where local authorities are landlocked but their communities need to expand, the Government’s duty to co-operate is nothing more than a duty to talk and talk. In my area—in Corby and East Northamptonshire—the two neighbouring district authorities have worked well together. There is a huge amount of house building—indeed, both Ministers on the Front Bench have been to see it—and Corby is set to double in size by 2020 because of that co-operation between neighbouring authorities. We need to have that all around the country, and that is why we will give communities the right to grow.
After four years of promises but inaction by this Government, we welcome the proposal for an urban development corporation to support the building of Ebbsfleet garden city. We are disappointed, however, that the Minister says there will not be a requirement for affordable housing. Garden cities can offer a considerable amount of social and affordable housing; that is part of the principles behind them. Labour is determined to bring forward plans to deliver a new generation of new towns and garden cities as part of fulfilling our commitment to build 200,000 new homes a year by 2020. The right to grow; use it or lose it on land banking; reform to the housing revenue account; backing small and medium-size builders; tackling empty homes; reforming the private rented sector; scrapping the cruel bedroom tax—those are serious measures to bring about the step change that we need to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance of having a good home. I urge hon. Members to support the motion.