Council and Social Housing

Debate between Austin Mitchell and Simon Hughes

Tuesday 6th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Austin Mitchell]

Of course I welcome the statistic that the hon. Gentleman read so brilliantly from the brief, but those are hypothetical houses not yet built, and the problem is now. The situation now is that starts are at their lowest level since 1923, and that is what we need to deal with.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

May I join in the tributes? The hon. Gentleman has a great record on the issue. However, we all understand the difficult position that the country and the Government are in. The previous Government were hopeless when it came to new council housing build; as he knows, they had the worst figures of any Administration since the war. Can he accept that, given the depth of the recession, the Government’s initiatives are moving in the right direction? We should unite at least in encouraging them to ensure that we have more council and social housing, certainly including at rents that his constituents and mine can always afford.

[Austin Mitchell]

I will come to that point, which is wrong. Hopes are not houses. The Government might have the intention to build an increased number of houses, but the problem is now, and it is getting worse. A crisis is building, to which the only answer is to build more public housing for rent now. That is not being done; it has not even been started. House building is so low that the tragedy will become worse in the next months and years. The right hon. Gentleman is correct in that the Labour Government’s record was pathetic. At the end, we managed to persuade the then Prime Minister—often a difficult job—that we had to build council houses and had to have a building programme. That was initiated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). That was responsible for growth, and for jobs in the recovery from recession, but it was immediately cut by the incoming coalition Government, who had initially promised to maintain that building programme. They stopped it, and began a deliberate policy of diminishing, demeaning, draining and dumping social housing and those who live in it.

I say “diminishing” because of the 60% cut in funding for building social housing. Even that spending is predicated on higher rents providing revenue. That meant that areas such as Grimsby and north-east Lincolnshire got nothing, which is unprecedented. We wanted to build, but we could not, because no money was available as our rents were too low. I say “diminishing” because of the cuts in housing benefit, the cost of which is high only because the building rates have been so low. If we had built social houses over the long term and on a sufficient scale, we would not need to pay housing benefit to the homeless and to move them into expensive accommodation, and would not have the kind of abuses that are serialised every day by the Daily Mail. It is failure to build that has made the housing benefit bill so high.

Other cuts are already affecting new claimants and, from April, they will start to affect those who renew their housing benefit. First, there was a cut for adult dependants at home, which was designed to force kids—adult children—out of the household and into a single person housing market that is not there. The bedroom tax, which comes in in April next year, is a cut in housing benefit of 15% for those with a spare room, and of 25% for those with two spare rooms, to force tenants to move to smaller accommodation, which is not there, or into the private rented sector.

There is the renewal rate for under-35s from April next year, who will be getting the shared-room rate for single people. Then universal credit and caps will come in, which will produce even more difficulties, not so much in Grimsby but certainly in London and the big cities. That is the “diminishing” part of the argument.

The demonisation part is that council tenants are being treated and regarded as subsidised scroungers living on state subsidy. In fact, the Localism Act 2011 ends secure and assured tenancies, which are the basis of establishing a settled community and a good life on a council or housing association estate. It replaces them with short-term tenures. That means that if the family get better off—if the head of the household or members of the family get jobs—and income increases, the tenancy will not be renewed.

[Austin Mitchell]

I am a grateful for that point. I am also grateful that, for a period, in Humberside, we have agreed on the issue of short-term tenancies. I hope that the measure will not be enforced by councils, but several are already making arrangements to enforce it, and others are being campaigned against by tenants who wish to persuade them not to enforce it. We will have a patchwork quilt over the country, but the net effect will be that in many cases, people are forced out, and are forced into accommodation in the private rented sector that is not there.

[Simon Hughes]

rose—

[Austin Mitchell]

I give way to the right hon. Gentleman, who is a member of the council housing group, and has worked on the issue for a long time.

[Simon Hughes]

I want to ensure, following the last intervention, that anybody who reads this debate is clear about the position. It will be up to every council to decide whether all or some of its properties do not have secure tenancies. Southwark council—one of the largest social housing landlords in the country—should, in my view and that of my colleagues, keep the policy that everybody in Southwark council housing should have a secure tenancy in future. If it wants to do that, there will be no risk to any of those people. The scandal is people who have salaries or incomes of £100,000 and are in council properties; some of them are not very far away from the hon. Gentleman and from me.

[Austin Mitchell]

There are problems and abuses in any system; in the tax system, for instance, there are myriad abuses that are not being dealt with effectively. The general principle should be that tenancies should be either secure for council house tenants, or assured for residents in housing associations. It is up to councils, as the right hon. Gentleman says, to decide. I hope that they will decide to maintain secure tenancies; that is the only basis on which one can have a safe, secure, settled community of people who are assured that they will be able to stay in their houses and that their kids will not have change schools.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Austin Mitchell and Simon Hughes

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Austin Mitchell]

Exactly—that is the point. What we want to do in the amendment is quite simple. We want to give the people the choice that the Liberal Democrats did not have the strength or the guts to give them. The Liberal Democrats are in favour of a system to allow people to vote in a referendum on the alternative vote, which is largely irrelevant—it is a system that allows people to list candidates in one constituency in order of preference—because they hope to benefit from the fact that they are everyone’s second preference, but the first preference of very few people.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

As far as I recollect, in New Zealand there were two votes in sequence: one on whether people wanted to have a change, and a separate vote on which change to have. The hon. Gentleman must also recognise what my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) said: in the House, given the way in which the Labour and Tory majorities have voted, there is not likely to be a majority, whatever others think, for a wide proportional system. There is a majority for progress, but not for what we might want. We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[Austin Mitchell]

I know that there are a thousand excuses for gutlessness, but that is just another one. The Liberal Democrats are going to have to live on a diet of their own words for the next few months. It was the leader of their party who called the alternative vote “a miserable little compromise” before the election. Now it is central to Liberal Democrat policy.

The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) is mistaken about the referendum in New Zealand. The first referendum, which I have discussed, gave the exact alternatives that would be given in our Bill. I want to make the case for proportional representation. We are working in a system that has become a multi-party one. Fewer people are voting for the two main parties, whose share of the vote has gone down from about 90% to about 60%. A multi-party system is in the process of being born, with nationalists, including Welsh nationalists, Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence party, and all the rest of it. We are trying to fit that within the constraints of a first-past-the-post system that works well only with two parties. [Interruption.] I forgot to mention the Greens—I apologise, but that is another indication of our multi-party system.

We cannot fit the burgeoning multi-party system into a first-past-the-post system, which works only with two parties. The question is still why did the Liberal Democrats, in pushing for a referendum—I congratulate them on securing one—not give people the real choice between a preferential system, an alternative vote and first past the post, as that is the choice that they have to make? I would want them to choose the preferential system, but it is not up to us. It is not my views that are important, or those of Government Members—it is the views of the people. That is all that we are asking: let us consult the people on a system, and let them have their say. Every Member here thinks that the system that elected them must be the best system in the world, but that is not important. We are prejudiced witnesses, and we should give the people the power to speak. That is all that our amendment does.