Housing

Austin Mitchell Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

We have spent too much time on a tit-for-tat argument about which party has done best by housing. The reality is that both the Conservatives and Labour have done badly by housing, but I proudly say that Labour has done less badly than the Conservatives.

I shall make only two points. First, a housing crisis is building up primarily because we need 240,000 new houses a year but are building only around 100,000 a year. In that situation, we need a big housing drive, for two reasons. First, that is the best possible stimulus to an economy that is bumping along the bottom and which drastically needs to be stimulated by the provision of jobs. People need furniture and many other things when they buy a house—and in Grimsby they need pictures of me to put on the wall. We need that stimulus as quickly as possible. The second reason why we need a big drive is to deal with the crisis, but as other hon. Members have indicated, we need housing of a particular type.

We need a big drive on public housing for rent—I do not care whether it is social housing or council housing. We need to stimulate both those things for the two fifths of the population who cannot afford to buy at current prices. They will not get mortgages, but they need good housing. We save money on the health service, education, policing and social services by putting them in good housing. That should be the prime focus of the drive.

My second point is on how we can raise the money. We could and should issue municipal housing bonds so that local authorities can raise the money and stimulate investment in housing. The return will come from rents in an authority’s own area. That is a simple way of doing things. The bonds could even be bought by the Bank of England, just as it buys Government debt for quantitative easing. That is the drive that we need and we could finance it with municipal housing bonds.

Those are the two points I wanted to make. I welcome the new Housing Minister to his role, but he has a big job. It is important that he stimulates and begins the big housing drive right now.