amendment of the law

Bob Russell Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I draw the attention of the House to an indirect interest, declarable but not registerable, as my wife receives rental income from a property.

We welcome this opportunity to discuss the Budget and housing. The housing crisis has come upon us over many years—people living longer, a rising population, the breakdown of relationships and new families looking for a secure home. There is rising demand but not enough supply. The well housed—the majority—are affected only when they think about where their children can afford to live, whether they want to rent or to buy; while the younger generation, priced out of the market, see their dream of home ownership recede into the distance.

The Minister responsible for planning, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), expressed the consequences eloquently in his Policy Exchange speech earlier this year, when he talked about the misery of young families forced to grow up in tiny flats with no outside space, and working men and women in their 20s and 30s having to live with their parents or share bedrooms with friends. Doing something about that is a task for all of us. We have to harness land, money and consent to build the communities we need so that young people and families can build a better future.

Ministers have made big claims for what was announced in the Budget. Of course we welcome steps that will enable people to get a foot on the housing ladder, and where they work, we will support them; after all, helping people to get a home is exactly what we have been calling on the Government to do. But the proof will lie in the detail of the schemes and on progress in actually managing to build more homes. As always with the Secretary of State, the issue is not so much his stated intention as his delivery. Perhaps that explains why we have had four major housing launches over the past three years and more than 300 announcements on housing; and why, in his recent speech to the Conservative spring conference on what he had actually achieved, the Secretary of State devoted three words to building more houses, and 194 words to talking about closing down a bar in the basement of his Department.

In the past few days, headline after headline has queried the Government’s grasp of the detail of its latest scheme. The Chancellor did not seem to know, and neither did the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, whether the scheme could indeed act as a spare-home subsidy, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor memorably christened it; whereas they certainly know that they are forcing social tenants out of their own homes because they have a spare room.

Let us begin by examining the facts about the Government’s record. Housing starts fell by 11% last year to 98,000. The number of private homes started was down; the number of local authority homes started was down; and the number of housing association homes started was down—indeed, the figure of 19,460 was the lowest for eight years.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that in 13 years of Labour government fewer council houses were built than in the entire period of the Thatcher Government?

[Hilary Benn]

I will happily confirm that we did not build enough council houses, although that began to change in 2007. Indeed, 70,000 affordable homes for which this Government have tried to take credit in their target of 170,000 were started by the Labour Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

The announcement to help first-time home buyers is great, but the wording needs to be tight to prevent it from being misused as a licence for people to buy a second home or to add further to the buy-to-rent racket that has led to so much misery for those trapped in the private rented sector, while others have become property millionaires by sponging on funds from housing benefits paid for by taxpayers to help people who cannot afford to buy or who cannot get a council house. It would make more sense to spend this money on new council houses—or social housing as it is now known.

Next, there are mixed messages on alcohol tax and the coalition Government’s desire to tackle binge drinking and improve the health of the nation. One minute there is disagreement about whether there should be a minimum unit pricing of alcohol; then the Chancellor knocks 1p off the price of beer, rather than raising it by 3p, as would have happened under the ever-rising structure inherited from Labour. Thus the cost of a pint of beer has gone down by 4p on Labour’s pricing policy. This is not going to help tackle binge drinking or the growing health problems associated with excessive drinking.

We need a variable price structure to help traditional, community and village public houses, which would fit well with the coalition Government’s localism agenda and the last Government’s sustainable communities legislation. Tax on beer and lager should be raised significantly in the mega-pubs and to stop irresponsible discount pricing in supermarkets, but reduced in our neighbourhood public houses, which are closing at a rate of 18 a week, owing, in no small part, to the lack of a level playing field. It is these neighbourhood hostelries that, in the main, are less likely to cause antisocial problems. On 1 November last year, I told the House:

“We need to amend the tax levy on beer sold in our traditional public houses. We should have a tax-neutral approach to keep the Treasury happy and bring huge social benefits, including job retention and creation, rather than there being the loss of jobs that we continue to witness in the sector. Most publicans of neighbourhood and village public houses run responsible establishments. Their customers should be rewarded, not financially penalised because of the irresponsible marketing carried out by supermarkets and mega-drinking establishments.”—[Official Report, 1 November 2012; Vol. 552, c. 429.]

On tackling binge drinking and the often associated incidents of people being injured, deliberately or accidentally, from broken glasses or beer bottles, sometimes used as weapons in fights, I urge the Chancellor to give a tax discount to brewers who put their product in plastic bottles—more accurately polycarbonate bottles. Likewise, I urge him to encourage major drinks venues to use the same material for the glasses in which alcoholic drinks are served. This would dramatically reduce the number of people taken to hospital for injuries caused by broken beer bottles and glasses. I refer the House to the ten-minute rule Bill in the name of the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), which he brought in on 4 September last year. In his speech, he pointed out that according to the Home Office there are about 87,000 violent incidents involving glass every year. Just think how much it costs the NHS to deal with the vicious wounds inflicted.

I urge the Chancellor to introduce a levy on football television rights. There is already too much money sloshing around in professional football, and it is only going to get worse. The next television deal will bring in £5 billion to inflate still further the obscene payments to premiership footballers and a big creaming off by their parasitic agents. I suggest a 20% levy, which the Chancellor could ring-fence and direct to be spent, as a £1 billion Olympic legacy, on school and grass-roots sport.

Thank goodness we have not had a repeat of the pasty tax nonsense, although we are left with the unfairness of VAT being levied on the Subway toasted sandwich. I urge the Chancellor to try a little harder with his attempts to be the common man and axe the 20% tax on toasties and the like.

Finally, how about this for a new income stream? I am grateful to Mr Richard Spendlove, doyen of the BBC evening radio airways across the eastern counties, for this suggestion. He points out that people will pay a small fortune for so-called personalised or elite registration number plates for vehicles, so why not, he asks, re-issue all those abandoned and forgotten numbers from the early years of motoring? Whenever such live number plates come on the market, they can fetch as much as £4,300, which was the asking price yesterday for registration number 88 VR. Mr Spendlove suggests that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency dusts down its records, identifies the tens of thousands of similar historic numbers that decades ago ended their days in the scrap yards of yesteryear and makes them available. The revenue generated could, I suggest, be used for road safety measures outside schools.

If the Chancellor wants to be popular, he should adopt all those suggestions.