Housing

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point that I hope will be a point of debate this afternoon. A serious question that must be asked in respect of the plans before us is whether it is the right use of public money to subsidise the demand for new housing, at a time when the housing market in many parts of the country is already out of control.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Healey]

No, I will make some progress. If the hon. Lady really wants to intervene later, I will give way.

At this point in the political cycle, we need to look at what is ahead. Two areas demonstrate the direction that the Tory Government are taking on housing and serve as a warning of what is to come. The first is a systematic attack on housing opportunity for young people and families on ordinary incomes, the very people the housing market is failing most at the moment. Ministers have launched a full-frontal assault on council and housing association homes which will hit those on low and middle incomes hardest. The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that the result of both the Budget and the autumn statement together will be 34,000 fewer housing association homes built. Meanwhile, the Housing and Planning Bill strangles the ability and obligation of both private and public sectors to build the affordable homes to rent and to buy that are badly needed in both urban and rural areas alike.

In addition there is an extraordinary forced sell-off of council homes to fund an extension of the right to buy, with no prospect or commitment, as Labour has urged, of like-for-like, one-for-one replacements in the local area. I have to say that in many areas of the country, both rural and urban but especially in London, these council homes will go not to families struggling to buy, but to speculators, second homeowners, and buy-to-let landlords—and of course the greater the demand for affordable housing in an area, the higher the value of the houses, and the more the Chancellor will take in his annual levy.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Brandon Lewis)]

I warmly thank Her Majesty’s Opposition for choosing the subject of today’s debate. It is an important subject, and I am always eager to compare and contrast our records on housing. It is now five months since the previous such debate, and much has changed. In that time, we have announced the largest Government house building programme for 40 years. And of course, we now have a new shadow Housing Minister, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). He was briefly Minister for Housing at the end of the last Labour Government, so this is rather a “Back to the Future” experience. I think I am now on my third shadow Housing Minister.

If we continue with that “Back to the Future” analogy, I recall that it is the third part of the trilogy—the one about cowboys—that nobody really likes very much. The question is: which “Back to the Future” film are we dealing with here? I hope it is not the cowboy one, but I also hope it is not the Soviet version from 1973. I should warn any hon. Members who do not have this kind of film library at home that that is a terrifying tale, in which Ivan the Terrible is accidentally transported into the future to become the superintendent of an apartment building in Moscow. Who knows? Stranger things are happening in the Labour party.

Shadow Ministers might come and go, but one thing remains the same: the curious phenomenon of Labour Members claiming that their record is preferable to ours. The right hon. Gentleman condemns our plans to support the aspirations of home buyers but, in a speech lasting more than 32 minutes, he did not suggest any alternatives. He talks about a housing crisis yet fails to admit who created it. And he claims that he will take Labour’s record over ours without any rational justification for his preference.

[Mrs Main]

Has my hon. Friend given any thought to the fact that when Labour estimated in 2003-04 that only 5,000 to 13,000 Polish migrants would come in, more than 100,000 actually did so? Where did the Labour Government think those people were going to live? Does my hon. Friend think that might be part of the issue?

[Brandon Lewis]

The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne has put on record his views on home ownership and house building, certainly going back to 2005. Obviously, we have challenges going right across as our population grows.

Let me remind the House of the situation we inherited in 2010. Perhaps some of my hon. Friends who were not here before then will be interested to know about this. We inherited: a housing bubble that burst with devastating consequences; an industry in debt; sites mothballed; workers laid off; skills lost; a loss of 420,000 affordable homes; rocketing waiting lists; and collapsing right-to-buy sales. In their 13 years in office, the Labour Government built only one home for every 170 that were sold. There was a sustained fall in home ownership. To be fair, the right hon. Gentleman knows that very well, because he himself said,

“I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing”.

It was no coincidence that that disregard for aspiring home owners was matched by chaos in the regulation of lending, a planning system in disarray controlled from the centre, a post-war low in house building by councils and the lowest level of house building since the 1920s.