Housing (London)

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Local authorities have powers in this respect, if they care to use them, and some authorities do. Indeed, the local authority in my area is extremely proactive in pursuing empty properties and trying to bring them into rented use or have them taken over by a housing association or somebody else. Typically, these are places such as flats above shops. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: there is something criminally wrong about large numbers of good-quality homes being deliberately kept empty across London. Some owners see them as long-term, reserve places that they might live in at some distant point in the future. Some see them as an investment and will wait for property prices to go up. In a society where there is so much homelessness and housing stress, it is simply immoral for places to be kept deliberately empty. I would therefore support effective measures to bring those homes back into use by people who are in desperate housing need.

Where the previous Government did act rather belatedly was on the construction of housing association and council properties. There was an increase in housing association build, most of which came about under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and planning agreements on particular local sites. However, there was not enough intervention, and the previous Government were not proactive enough. Only rather belatedly did we start building council housing. I am pleased to say that my local authority is now building council housing again. That started during the latter period of the previous Government, when the then Liberal-controlled council brought the programme into being. That programme has continued and is being expanded under the current Labour-run administration in Islington. However, the authority lacks the capital that it requires from the Homes and Communities Agency. When the Minister replies, therefore, I hope he will understand that housing and building costs are high in London, that housing need is desperate and that the only long-term, efficient way out of the housing crisis is to construct council housing at fixed rents and with permanent tenure, which gives people a sense of security, a decent home and an environment in which to grow up.

Before I come to housing benefit, let me say one thing. If we go to any primary school, secondary school, police station or social worker in London and ask what the biggest problem is that we face, we will be told that it is related to housing in one way or another. Young people are growing up in small, overcrowded flats, with two or three siblings sharing a bedroom. That is no way to grow up. Young people in those circumstances cannot bring friends home and they cannot do their homework. There are fights over the television, there are fights over when the lights should be switched on and off—there are fights the whole time simply about space. Anyone who goes into a flat where three teenagers are sharing a room will see the arguments that go on and the stress that is caused to the whole family. What happens as a result? The teenagers do not stay home of an evening; they go out. They do not have a lot of money, so they get into bad company when they go out, and problems result from that. These teenagers underachieve in school. Illness runs rife throughout the whole family. The family breaks up. There is a huge cost to us all in terms of wasted lives, underachieving children, broken families, divorce and everything else. We must recognise that unless we provide all our young people with decent, secure, clean, dry and properly repaired accommodation, it is very unlikely that they will achieve their full potential in school, college or university. We are wasting a whole generation as a result of our failure to address the housing crisis in London.

Local authorities have great difficulty fulfilling their statutory housing obligations to house homeless families or those in desperate need. They do not have enough council or housing association allocations to do that. Incidentally, there is a whole science around allocation, with people looking at the choice of bidding or desperately looking on internet sites and reading newspapers to find out how many points they need to get which flat, how many steps are involved and all the other details, which are so important. However, most of those people, most of the time, will be desperately disappointed because they will fail even to be selected to look at a place, never mind to be shortlisted for possible allocation. For thousands and thousands of people, it is like losing a lottery every week, but the consequences are desperate. We therefore need to address the issue.

Local authorities often place families in private rented accommodation. I do not blame them for that; they have no choice. A whole industry has therefore grown up around the housing shortage, with letting agencies and private landlords charging as much as they can get away with. The housing benefit system will usually pay the rent. Although it varies slightly from borough to borough, the rent for a typical two-bedroom local authority flat in central London is of the order of £100 a week. A two-bedroom flat in poor condition in the private sector costs at least £250 a week, and £300 is quite common. For a house, we are looking at £500 or £600 a week. The difference is paid through housing benefit, so we are all paying the exorbitant profits made by letting agencies and private landlords; they are the people who are living off the housing benefit system.

When the Government say, as the previous Government did, that they have to address the problem of the cost of housing benefit, particularly in London, I absolutely agree, because pouring money into the private sector in this way simply is not a good use of public funds.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

A two-bedroom flat in the private sector in my constituency would actually be about £350 a week, so it is even more perplexing that the Government insist that the rent in new social lettings will be 80% of market rent. That means that the rent payable by new tenants will be three to three and a half times what it would be in existing social tenancies. That, of course, will have to be covered by housing benefit in many cases.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a good point and is extremely experienced in dealing with those issues, both as an MP and as the former leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, where he did a great deal to try to improve the quality and quantity of the housing stock.

We all do advice surgeries and hear sad and difficult cases. I was talking last week to a lady in my constituency who has discovered that her private sector rent has gone up from £315 a week to £475 a week. I do not blame the local authority, because the housing benefit that she is paid is fixed by the Government through the local housing allowance. My constituent is not in work and receives benefits, and she has been told that she must contribute £145 a week to make up the shortfall between what the local housing allowance will pay and the rent that is expected or demanded from the landlord. She is expected to pay more than the rent that she would pay if she lived in equivalent council accommodation. It is clearly impossible for her to find £145 a week, which is more than her benefits. She would have nothing to eat and nothing for the children, so the only solution is to move away.

What effect will moving away from the area have on my constituent, her family and all the rest of us? She will lose her place and will have to try to find, if she can, a two or three-bedroom flat, probably in the far suburbs of London or outside London. She will lose her family network; her children’s education will be disrupted; she will not have access to the doctors, hospital or community network and support that she is used to; her whole life will be completely uprooted. Wherever she goes, she will have no security of tenure. She will have six months, or perhaps a year if she is lucky, before the landlord decides to allow her to stay or increases the rent because it is possible to get more in the private sector, in which case she will have to up sticks and move on again. Imagine how that feels for the children—the insecurity, changing schools, mum and dad moving the whole time and nowhere permanent to stay or build up a network of friends. It is that sense of insecurity that is so bad for the children of many families living in London.

The Government have decided to address excessive housing benefit costs, and I agree with them. There are two ways of doing it. One is to let the market sort things out, and the other is to bring in some form of regulation, so that there is permanency of tenure and greater security, and so that we spend less money. Unsurprisingly the Government have decided to go for the market option, so they have set local housing allowance limits. I have some figures from James Murray, who is the executive member for housing in Islington and does an extremely good job in difficult circumstances. Bizarrely, Islington falls into four broad rental market areas—inner-east London, central London, outer-north London and inner-north London. The figures for a two-bedroom flat vary. In inner-east London, the figure is £300 a week; in central London, it is £500 a week; in outer-north London, it is £230 a week; and in inner-north London, it is £329 a week.

James Murray also makes the point that in the past 10 years

“demand for private rented accommodation in the borough has gone up by about 20%”.

My observation is that it continues to rise very quickly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is difficult, at a time when attacks are being made on the national health service and on state education at every level—from Sure Start to tuition fees—and when we are having to deal with the big society cuts to the voluntary and advice sectors, for housing to be given sufficient attention for us to see exactly what is happening as a result of Government policy; but what is happening in housing is as disastrous in its own way as it is in those other areas. I am therefore grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) for securing this morning’s debate, as it gives us an opportunity to talk at greater length than usual in Westminster Hall about the Government’s housing policy and its effect on London.

I shall not repeat what my hon. Friend said; he has many more years’ experience as a constituency MP and in dealing with housing problems in London than I do, but I adopt entirely the arguments he put forward, in particular regarding the pernicious effects he spoke of—the bad, insecure, inadequate and overcrowded housing that all London MPs must see every week in their surgeries. Those effects go far beyond housing conditions; they cover health, education and quality of life. It is a national scandal that they have been allowed to develop over far too many years.

I shall deal briefly with four aspects of housing. The first is the private rented sector; the second is the effect of housing benefit changes; the third is the Government’s policy on social rented housing; and the last is planning policy. One of the early decisions taken by the coalition Government was to abandon the previous Government’s proposals that resulted from the Rugg review—a national register of landlords, regulation of letting and management agents, and compulsory written tenancy agreements. When the Government made that announcement, the Association of Residential Letting Agents said that it was extremely disappointed. It said:

“This move risks seriously hampering the improvement of standards in the private rented sector, the sector's reputation, and the fundamental role it plays in the wider housing market as well as failing to protect the consumer who has nowhere to go when there is service failure or fraud”.

That is the view of the industry. My view, as a constituency MP, is that we are seeing a return to Rachmanism in parts of London, with appalling conditions of social rented housing. Perhaps the difference this time is that local authorities are colluding with bad private landlords, with things such as direct letting schemes and, now, the ability to discharge their obligation to the private sector permanently rather than temporarily.

I hear what was said by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). He is no longer in his place; he tends to pop in and out of these debates. I hope that Members on both sides will try to mitigate the effects of the housing benefit changes that his Government are introducing. It would be better if the Government were to withdraw and review those changes than to give a sop to those who, in their thousands, will be forced to move out of their homes from April onwards. I do not know how we are going to find adequate replacement housing for those hundreds of families in areas with property prices at the levels of Islington and Hammersmith—unless it is in more overcrowded, less salubrious streets and flats. There are few of those, however, because gentrification in inner London has meant that there really are no places where cheap property is available to rent.

It is social engineering. It is gerrymandering. It will force out poorer families who have made their homes in wealthier areas, perhaps over generations; gentrification has crept up on them, and they are now being told that they are not welcome in those areas but must move further out. I hear what the right hon. Gentleman had to say, but they are crocodile tears and warm words from the Liberal Democrats.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

On the subject of crocodile tears, does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that it was his party’s policy to consider the level of housing benefit? I presume that that review was intended not to increase housing benefit but to decrease it.

[Mr Slaughter]

I have heard the hon. Gentleman many times try to cling to the Labour party as a way of excluding his lamentable failure in supporting a Government who are systemically attacking poorer constituents.

[Tom Brake]

Is it true?

[Mr Slaughter]

The hon. Gentleman must have some poorer constituents, even in Carshalton and Wallington, but perhaps not as many as I do. It would be better if he kept quiet in these debates rather than making such inane points.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Robert Neill)]

Will the hon. Gentleman answer my hon. Friend’s question?

[Mr Slaughter]

I see the coalition in action.

[Tom Brake]

He’s not going to answer.

[Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Mr Slaughter]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that, of course, budgets and housing benefit would have been reviewed, but he is wrong to think that a Labour Government would have been party to the mass eviction of hundreds of families from areas in which their children attend school and they have low-paid jobs. We are talking not about indolent people but those doing low-paid essential jobs in inner London. Before the hon. Gentleman gets on his high horse, he should think about the consequences of his Government’s policy.

Far more fundamental in the long term will be the review of social housing policy. I almost admire the speed at which the Government have moved to ring the death knell of social housing. There has been consensus on that policy certainly since the second world war, and in the charitable sector since the beginning of the last century. That, however, is not good enough for this Tory-led Government.

There are four principal changes. The first is the introduction that I alluded to earlier of near-market rents for new lettings. In London, they will effectively be unaffordable, even to those on average incomes. Rent for two and three-bedroom flats in Hammersmith will rise by three or three and a half times. The second is the two-year tenancy. The speed of their introduction is amazing. I printed a leaflet to warn tenants that the Government might be introducing five-year tenancies, but before I was able to deliver it they had introduced two-year tenancies. The third element is the almost complete collapse of capital funding for the social sector.

As I mentioned earlier, there is the end of the requirement to provide permanent housing in the long term, with the private sector being used to discharge housing need obligations. If, God forbid, the Government were elected for another term, within 10 years there would not be a recognisable social rented sector left in this country. The proud tradition of providing affordable good-quality homes for people on low and average incomes will be gone, and a fundamental part of the welfare state and the post-war settlement will be gone with it.

Finally, let me turn to planning policy, which is a slightly trickier area to consider. I accept what Government Members say about the previous Government’s record in this regard. Over the past 40 years, our record on building sufficient numbers of high-quality affordable homes in this country has not been good. It is almost as if we lost the will to build such homes in the 1970s. In my constituency, we have good examples of the estates and properties that were built in the 20th century: the “homes for heroes” in the 1920s, the “garden” estates in the 1930s and the good quality brick-built council estates of the 1940s and 1950s. We even have some 1960s properties, which, although they have gained a bad reputation, are generally solidly built to Parker Morris standards. They are popular with people who live in them, even if they have not been maintained properly over the years.

The consensus on the will to build good quality council and housing association properties in sufficient quantities has gone. Individual local authorities—including, I hope, my own when it was under Labour control—did their bit and had to be resourceful in doing so. For example, there were the infill developments. We saw building on existing estates, public land being given to people who were prepared to build affordable housing, and building on top of supermarkets. We managed to build about 3,000 good, affordable units over a period of years, but it was a struggle. I do not pretend that it is easy to build social rented houses in areas of high land prices. Nevertheless, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North said, for many people—even those on average and above average income—social rented housing is the only type of affordable housing. The definitions of affordability in London have been stretched to ridiculous lengths. The Mayor and some councils say that an income of £70,000 to £80,000 qualifies under the affordable definition, because the types of discounts available on properties for sale or for rent in new developments demand such an income. I am sorry, but I do not accept that people who earn £80,000 a year are in housing need—even in London—which is the perverse definition of my own council.

The problem of planning development is slightly more complicated. At the moment—and the debate is opportune for this reason—London councils are going through their process of approving local development frameworks, which replace the unitary development plans. In preparing for this debate, I looked at my own borough’s LDF, which may or may not be typical, and it appears to give good news. It seems to say that it will build 13,000 houses over the next 20 years, with a maximum of 20,000 allowable. However, when I examined those figures I found that what is actually planned goes well beyond them.

Perhaps the biggest new development under planning consultation in London is the Earl’s Court and West Kensington Opportunity Area, which the LDF says could provide about 2,000 new homes, at least in Hammersmith, over the next 20 years. The developer says it will provide 8,000 homes over the next five to 10 years. The Hammersmith town centre development, which is somewhat misnamed because it includes areas way outside the town centre, including the historic riverside—the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) may be interested in this because he has written about it—is not one development but a string of developments along the riverside. The traditional low-rise buildings of this historic area are being converted into hideous tower blocks of luxury one and two-bedroom apartments. We have seen such developments springing up along many parts of the river on the south side of the Thames. The apartments are built principally for people coming from abroad or for those who wish to have a London pied-à-terre in addition to accommodation elsewhere. We are talking about buildings that are not just at the top of the market, but above it. The LDF for Hammersmith says that over 20 years, up to 1,000 new homes will be built in this area. Some 1,300 homes are currently being built or are under planning consideration for this area, so that target appears to have been exceeded already.

What we are seeing in planning terms, certainly in central London and in my part of London, is a development grab. Those parts of land that might be available for affordable and sustainable development in the future are being cannibalised for luxury high-rise blocks. Some of the blocks on the riverside are up to 15 storeys, and some in the west Kensington area are up to 30 storeys or more. That is a massive increase in residential units, but they are exactly the wrong type of residential units for the local population and will not meet housing need in London. That is a scandal and a misuse of planning powers. Of my local authority, the developer of the Hammersmith riverside says:

“Now the council says it is ‘open for business’, and I think they are—that’s why the development community has embraced the new administration”.

You bet they have. Helical Bar, the developer of the Hammersmith riverside development, has a dispensation to have no affordable housing in it whatever; in fact, there will be a net loss of affordable housing because trust properties for visually impaired people will be demolished to make way for the skyscrapers.

Mr Slade, the founder of Helical Bar, gave £20,000 to the Mayor in the run-up to his election campaign. He made this very prescient comment:

“You do run the thin line of someone saying: I am doing this to have access and influence, but that was what politics was always about. It is a little unfair, but there must be 20 per cent truth in it.”

Helical Bar wants to build high-rise flats in outer London. It now has that consent on the way despite the opposition not just of the hon. Member for Richmond Park, but of almost all my constituents, who do not want to see the destruction of their living environment and of the things they hold dear. They want to see not luxury high-rise flats, but affordable homes for themselves and their children.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I absolutely share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about the nature of this development. As he knows, I have spoken on the record about it and submitted a number of objections. However, is it not true that the decision comes from the local authority and is not one over which the Mayor has any influence at all?

[Mr Slaughter]

The developments I am talking about are of sufficient size and scale to require the Mayor’s approval, or the Greater London authority’s dispensation regarding factors such as their height and their not containing affordable housing. In addition to the town hall development to which the hon. Gentleman refers, there are other developments along the river. St George has just decided it wants to build 750 similar properties with no affordable housing in them just south of Hammersmith Broadway, and has its eye on redeveloping a council estate, which the council may wish to demolish, for luxury housing. We are not talking about not enough being done to promote affordable housing in London, or about neglect or negligence. We are talking about a concerted policy to socially engineer areas by demolition, and the removal of social housing units in London and their replacement with luxury, small high-rise developments. The ability to build in London for London’s population will not exist again for another generation. That is the real damage being done by this Tory-led Government and their creatures in town halls around London. I am afraid that that is the depressing message.

I entirely endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North said. I fear that the news, when one looks at the situation on the ground, is actually worse than inaction: it is the deliberate destruction of the consensus on housing policy that has sustained this country for many decades.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, as it was to serve under Mr Turner’s chairmanship before he left Westminster Hall.

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on securing this debate and on making an extremely powerful and cogent speech. He made a number of pertinent points. In the first part of his speech, he referred to the record of the previous Labour Government, including the decent homes investment, which made a big difference to many households in the capital, and the rough sleepers initiative, which did so much to address the problem of homelessness in London. He also mentioned the new build programme. Towards the end of the previous Labour Government, that programme had also started to make an impact on the housing crisis in London. It is regrettable that the policies that are now being pursued by the Conservative-led Government are going in the opposite direction to those Labour policies.

Pertinently, my hon. Friend identified the fact that homelessness is now increasing again in the capital. The scourge of homelessness is an issue that should unite parties across the House, so that we can take the necessary measures to reduce the growing number of people who are forced to live on the streets, which is a stain on our national character. If homelessness in London has increased at the end of this Government’s tenure in office, that will be a very poor statement about their record on tackling this issue.

As my hon. Friend mentioned, it is also clear that the number of people who are forced to sleep on a friend’s sofa—I think that it is known colloquially as “sofa surfing”—is growing. That is because it is simply impossible for those people to access accommodation, as there is such an inadequate supply of housing in the city and the housing that is available in the private sector is beyond their means.

There is also a big problem with the housing benefit system. The system is wasteful, and I agree with my hon. Friend that there is a great need for much more regulation. He called for four areas to be addressed, one of which is changes to the housing benefit system. I agree with that, because there is perversity, but I do not agree with the changes that the Government are pursuing. Regulation needs to be introduced. We need to build more council houses, and I concur with my hon. Friend’s comments about the banks being forced to provide mortgages for people who would like to, and have the income multiples to enable them to, access private sector owner-occupied accommodation.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) spoke eloquently about the gentrification of many neighbourhoods in the capital leading to an inadequate number of affordable houses. That contributes to the overall problem in London, and the Government’s policies are effectively leading to a clearance, with people on low incomes being forced out of many boroughs. That is completely wrong, and the Government need to think again. My hon. Friend also identified the fact that much of the housing being built is inappropriate, and I have seen figures that suggest that about 80% of it is only one or two-bedroom units. Clearly, there is a need for much more emphasis on family housing, for the very reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North gave. A whole host of problems are related to people being forced to live cheek by jowl in accommodation that is too small for a growing family.

There is a need, particularly in the capital where house prices are much higher, for the Government to deal with the problem of people accessing mortgages, and pressure needs to be brought to bear, possibly with regulation to ensure that banks do not insist on people finding massive deposits. That problem is in desperate need of attention, because it contributes to building up the current housing crisis in London.

The proposed changes to social housing tenancies simply will also make matters worse, with the expectation for people to move on if their earnings exceed a certain level, forcing them into an even more precarious and difficult situation. In addition, the housing investment cuts have hit London hard, and they exacerbate the problem to which my hon. Friends have referred.

The amount of housing currently been built in London is inadequate and much of it is inappropriate for family needs, but another problem is that about 50% of it is located in just three boroughs, and there needs to be some attempt to ensure that there is building right across the city.

[Mr Slaughter]

Another part of the Riverside development that I have mentioned is being developed by a housing association, which is building £1 million two and three-bedroom luxury flats with river views, so that it can take the profit and build in east London. That is good for the people of east London, but there is already a lot of affordable housing there, and it does not help people in desperate need in west London.

[Chris Williamson]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. It is not really the business of housing associations to build luxury multi-million pound accommodation. Their whole raison d’être should be to provide affordable housing, which is why they came into being in the first place. They have lost sight of their original purpose when they start engaging in market-led developments, such as the one that my hon. Friend has mentioned.

I referred earlier to the difficulties that people have in raising deposits, and I have seen figures that suggest that it takes more than 14 years on average for someone to save for a deposit, assuming that they can keep pace with house price inflation. It is completely wrong that people are forced to rely on relatives to get a foot on the housing ladder, because it disfranchises tens of thousands of people in London whose families do not have the wherewithal to provide them with the deposits needed to purchase the houses that they aspire to own.

The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) said, I think, that the economic background was one of the reasons why the Government had made some of their decisions on housing and cutbacks. I assume that he was referring to the finance that has been made available for housing and the cuts being made in housing benefit. I disagree with him, because it is really important that the Government seek to invest in the housing market and in providing houses, because that is a way of addressing the very problems that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Using the construction industry is an excellent way of assisting a private sector-led economic recovery. Most of what is procured for the construction industry is sourced from the UK, which provides a huge number of jobs in areas where housing construction and other building is taking place. It is mistaken to suggest that the economic circumstances that the country faces in some way justify the cutbacks in housing.

The hon. Gentleman also referred to delays in planning, and I agree that more needs to be done in that regard. I am concerned, however, that proposals in the Localism Bill might add delays, or will certainly make it more difficult in many circumstances to provide the houses that people desperately require.

It seems to me that the biggest reason for this housing crisis in the capital is an obsession that can be traced back to the early 1980s and the introduction of the right to buy, with its emphasis on a personal subsidy rather than a subsidy on bricks and mortar. That was almost inevitably going to end in tears, which is where we are today. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North pointed out, many landlords—I accept that it is not all of them—have sought to exploit the housing benefit system and to maximise rents. That has led to rents in the private rented sector going up and up to a point at which the Government—the same Government who introduced the obsession with personal subsidies in the first place—are now reining in those subsidies and forcing the poorest people and those on middle incomes in the city to bear the burden for their policy mistake, which can be traced back 30 years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill]

Those decisions were very much of their time and in response to it. I am not sure how much that in itself contributed, but I accept that, in the current age, we need a flexible approach to giving local authorities and housing associations the ability to build as is appropriate. That is why we are where we are now. It does not undermine the thrust of a policy that I think was necessary at the time.

[Mr Slaughter]

The average price of a property in Hammersmith is now more than £500,000, and 40% of my constituents have incomes of less than £20,000. It will require quite a degree of flexibility if the Government’s policy of prioritising home ownership is going to go ahead. They are just empty words, are they not?

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Gentleman is as specious as ever. I am sorry that he has managed to lower the tone of the debate, while his hon. Friend the Member for Islington North dealt with the issue in a serious fashion, as usual. The contrast between the two hon. Gentlemen is always instructive. Of course, as I have said, there will always be those who will not be able to own their own homes—the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) rightly recognised that as well—so we need a policy that embraces that, but I shall not go down the route of point scoring which is so characteristic of the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter). The fact is that it is by no means incompatible for us to encourage home ownership and also deal with those who, for a number of legitimate reasons, will never be in a position to own their own homes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill]

It is worth looking at the fact that we are consulting on and overhauling the way in which rough sleepers are counted. We need to get a better and more complete picture of the issue, because the previous system did not do it effectively. It is also worth saying that, although there has been fluctuation, the current figures suggest that, overall, statutory homelessness remains at historically low levels. However, I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point that we need always to press down on the issue. It is not an easy area to cover accurately, and I know that the Department will happily keep in touch with him on this serious and important issue.

To return to the point that I was addressing before the hon. Member for Hammersmith intervened, I accept that poor affordability and difficulties with affordability create a gap for aspiring first-time buyers, which is exactly the point made by the hon. Gentleman. Average house prices have increased, so we need to address that. I believe, however, that the way to do that is not necessarily through more and more intervention—although some intervention is always appropriate—but through giving communities control of development in their area and greater freedom, which is the reverse of what the hon. Gentleman was advocating. That is the way forward and I have more faith in the ability of Hammersmith and Fulham council than in that of the hon. Gentleman to tackle their area’s housing needs.

The Government are determined to encourage local authorities, developers and housing associations to work together with communities to deliver the homes they need through schemes such as the new homes bonus, which is a powerful tool. The Government have set aside nearly £1 billion for that scheme over the period of the comprehensive spending review. In fact, hon. Members may want to look at the new homes bonus calculator on the Department’s website, which shows how any particular local authority can benefit from it.

[Mr Slaughter]

Will the Minister give way?

[Robert Neill]

In a moment. I would like to make a point, if I may. In addition to that scheme, we are introducing the community right to build, which will streamline the arrangements where there is local support for neighbourhood planning. That is often thought of in terms of rural and parish areas, but there is no reason why it should not also apply to communities in London and our other great cities.

Yesterday, my Department, together with the Homes and Communities Agency, published the affordable homes framework. It sets out details on giving housing associations much more flexibility on rents and use of assets, for which they have been asking for some time. The key part of that is the new affordable rent model, which will be a constructive and useful tool that is expected to deliver up to 150,000 new affordable homes over the next four years. The old, rigid models did not always work. We need to be prepared to think more imaginatively.

[Mr Slaughter]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. He is right that Hammersmith council knows how to co-operate with developers. The west Kensington development that I spoke about earlier is a joint venture between the council and Liberty International, which is one of the biggest property firms. It will see the demolition of 750 good quality, newly modernised council homes, and the building of up to 8,000 luxury, high-rise, 30-storey blocks. Last year, the Minister said:

“Instead we want to see communities coming together to take responsibility for meeting their own housing ambitions…This is about giving communities real power and real influence.”

In the community under discussion, however, 80% of the tenants do not want their homes demolished. They want the power from this Government to take over their homes in the way described by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake). Will the Minister support the tenants rather than the property developers who want to destroy their homes?

[Robert Neill]

As usual, the hon. Gentleman makes a serious issue simplistic. The Government are determined to make sure that those precise issues can be determined at a local level. He knows that it is probably not appropriate for Ministers, particularly in our Department, which has responsibility for oversight of the planning system, to comment on developments that might go through the planning process and end up being considered by our Department. It is appropriate to have a greater degree of nuance and flexibility in the system than was the case in the past, when rather rigid developments sometimes imposed unacceptable developments upon communities. The hon. Gentleman will, therefore, understand why I will not go down the same route as him.

The affordable homes framework is a bold initiative, and I believe that it will enable communities. It is also worth remembering that this Government are providing considerable funding towards the issues. We are investing more than £6.5 billion in housing, and we are investing considerable moneys in London, which has particular pressures that we all recognise and with which we seek to deal. That is why we are handing the Mayor of London the ability to take over the Homes and Communities Agency operations in London, so that he can align delivery more effectively with the strategic housing pot available, in co-operation with the London boroughs. That seems to us to be the right thing to do.

We need to address the issue of overcrowding. As the hon. Member for Islington North has rightly said, there are a significant number of overcrowded households. Although that applies to the private sector, I would not seek always to run it down, because responsible private landlords have a key role. There are also some 258,000 overcrowded households in the social rented sector, while 430,000 households in that sector are under-occupied by two or more bedrooms. That is why it is wrong to rule out our proposal to look at issues such as flexible tenancy. In some cases, people’s housing needs will change as their life histories progress, and it is sensible to give them the means to reflect that. It is not the right approach to have too rigid an adherence to subsidy based purely on bricks and mortar.

I have been generous with interventions, but I am running out of time, so I will write to hon. Members on the other specific and important points that they have raised.