Boris Johnson
Main Page: Boris Johnson (Conservative - Uxbridge and South Ruislip)
Greg Clark
The Labour party’s approach, not just in this area, but to our devolution proposals, is genuinely disappointing. I and my colleagues have found that it is entirely possible to talk to and to come to consensual agreement with people who have the same interests as us. The Labour party, however, seems to set its face both against that kind of dialogue, whether it relates to devolution or the matter under discussion, and against our approach to establishing consensus on the best way forward.
Boris Johnson
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the arguments he is making. Does he not find it perverse and incredible that the opposition to extending the right to buy to people on low incomes in this country should be mounted not just by the Labour party, but by people who are overwhelmingly owner-occupiers of their own homes?
Greg Clark
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. For anyone who has any doubt about the policy’s personal impact, I will illustrate it by reading an email I received from a young mother on the day on which our right-to-buy agreement with housing associations was announced last month. She wrote that,
“during the middle of the economic crisis in 2009…I was…made redundant from a job that I had been in for twelve years. I was left with a six year old, a three year old and a newborn baby and life was pretty much as grim as it could get.
For the past five years I have lived in a housing association home. At the time—it was very much a lifeline and I am enormously grateful for the safety, security and peace-of-mind that it brought me.”
She went on to say that,
“up until April of this year—I had simply accepted that this was my life now and would always be. I would forevermore be ‘just about’ comfortable: ‘just about’ paying the bills, ‘just about’ paying for Christmas. ‘Just about’ living.
But in late April that completely changed for me. I heard somewhere that the Conservatives were going to allow housing association tenants the right to buy their own home…I had completely written off ever being able to achieve that goal.
I voted Conservative in May because of that hope.”
She continued:
“I watched and read intently all about the Conservative’s crazy, ridiculous policy. I read the negative fall-out from Housing Associations, from Labour, from literally everywhere…And of course—all of these associations, politicians, media have far bigger voices than people like me. By September I had resigned myself to the fact that this looked like a lost-cause.
I am absolutely eternally grateful to everyone in the Conservative government that helped push this forward. I absolutely cannot wait until the point, hopefully in 2016, where I can be holding the keys to the house that I own. A house that will be my savings for the future. A house that will allow me to pass something onto my three girls.
Please, please pass on my very heartfelt gratitude to everyone involved in ensuring this was made a reality. For me, it’s life-changing.”
As this lady made clear, this policy, agreed with the housing associations, is giving people up and down the country the chance to fulfil a dream they thought was beyond them. As my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) said, it is disappointing, therefore, that the Opposition are turning their backs on such people’s aspirations and trying to take away the hope of home ownership that they have nurtured and which the Bill introduces.
Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Con)
Labour is making many mistakes in opposing this excellent Bill. It is wrong to say that this is a national problem. I could take Members to some parts of our country, to some great cities, where there is not a housing crisis in the way that it is expressed in London. According to local papers—I have no reason to doubt them—there are homes for sale for less than £10,000. There are huge expanses of brownfield sites available in some urban areas in this city. In spite of all the excitement about the northern powerhouse, the population of Manchester is still a third lower than it was in 1931. I make that point to show that the crisis, which does affect us all, is overwhelmingly expressed in the south-east and, above all, in London, where it is at its most acute, as we have heard from Members from across the Chamber. The shortage is excruciating for those trying both to rent and to buy. That suffering was well articulated in the previous speech as well as by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), in particular. It is vital, as everybody has said, to continue with our exertions to build record numbers of new homes and affordable homes in London.
I remind the House, despite the frenzy that we have just heard from Labour, that this mayoralty has worked flat out over the past eight years to make up for the passivity and inertia of the previous Labour Government and the locust years in which they failed to build enough affordable housing. If we were to have another Labour Mayor, which I devoutly hope we will not, I remind Labour that the previous Labour Mayor, at the height of the boom and at a time when the public sector was flush with cash, came absolutely nowhere near our record of building affordable homes. We have beaten him by 25% of our total, as my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park said, and this year more new affordable homes have been completed than in any year since records began.
We are compensating for the instinctive hostility to home ownership exhibited by Labour, with 52,000 people helped into part-buy, part-rent schemes. That is why I so warmly welcome the provisions in the Bill. I am glad to hear the support for right to buy expressed by some hon. Members and it is right that we should give housing association tenants that right. We are righting an historical injustice and we deserve to hear whether those on the Labour Front Bench support the Labour Back Benchers who support our policy of extending the right to buy. We have heard some passionate defences of it. Symmetrically, it must also be right where possible to sell off high-value council homes and use the proceeds to fund not just the subsidy but the construction of new homes.
Members might not be aware that London already has a huge stock of social housing, with 33% of homes in the centre of the city social homes of one type or another, compared with only 7% in Manhattan and 17% in Paris. Across the whole of Greater London, the figure is 24%. High-value council homes could be sold, with the proceeds used to build more low-cost homes in London. Given what I have said about the geographical location of the housing crisis and given that it is in the capital where we have the demand, I am grateful for what we are hearing from the Government and from Members who spoke supporting this argument. It would be the height of insanity to take the funds yielded by those council home sales and spend them outside London on the right-to-buy subsidy without ensuring that we get at the very least a legally binding and funded commitment to a two-for-one replacement for those homes in London. I know that that is what we are working on and that it is widely supported by Members across the Government Benches. That would help us to build the 50,000 homes a year that we can build. We have the brownfield sites to do it.
I welcome the changes to the planning rules in the Bill and the continued support for the London Land Commission. We are working flat out to build more homes in this city than at any time since the 1930s, keeping pace with demand. The Bill will streamline planning, help us to assemble the public land we need and give tens of thousands of people the joy and pride of home ownership, a right that they are at present unfairly denied, and the opportunity that is at present most bitterly contested by bourgeois lefties, almost all of whom already own their own homes.
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
This has been a very interesting debate on the Bill, with an unofficial London mayoral hustings thrown in for good measure. We can clearly see how important housing is for Members from the fact that 48 Back Benchers took part in this debate. The hon. Members for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) and for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), and the hon. Members for Kensington (Victoria Borwick), for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) and for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) made a number of interesting suggestions as to how to make the Bill’s proposals on the private rented sector and starter homes more effective, to negate some of the more centralising aspects of the Bill and to improve the quality of housing that is built. I hope we hear more from them in Committee.
Not surprisingly, given the severity of the housing crisis in London, we heard from a number of London MPs, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), my hon. Friends the Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), and my hon. Friends the Members for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), and for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry). They raised their concerns about how measures in the Bill will not deliver more genuinely affordable homes, will further socially segregate communities and will leave too many Londoners in high-cost, private rented housing with little hope of ever owning a home in the area in which they wish to live.
A number of Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), and my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), for Workington (Sue Hayman), for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for Redcar (Anna Turley), for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), for Bootle (Peter Dowd) and for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), provided a very effective challenge to what the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) said about housing problems existing only in London. They spoke up strongly on behalf of their constituents, saying that more good quality, genuinely affordable housing in properly planned and mixed communities based on local decision making is needed everywhere and that the Bill represents an attack on social housing and does little to make home ownership a reality for many people on low and middle incomes.
As Members from across the House are well aware, we are facing a housing crisis in this country. We have the lowest level of home building since the 1920s, completions have fallen off a cliff edge since 2010 and the housing benefit bill is ever increasing. We have seen five years of failure from the Government, and on the basis of this Bill I fear that we are about to see five more. Home ownership has fallen every year since 2010, declining by more than 200,000, whereas under Labour the number of homeowners increased by 1 million. Between 1997 and 2010, we built almost 2 million homes. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) pointed out, in the year with the lowest number of homes built under Labour, 2009, we still built 125,000 homes. That is still more than were built in the year with the highest number of homes built under the Tories, which was 2014, when there were just 117,000 completions. Last year, the Tories built the fewest affordable homes for more than two decades—fewer than 11,000 homes for social rent compared with 33,000 in Labour’s last year in office.
Spending on housing benefit has risen by £4.4 billion since 2010, because of ever increasing rents. It is the same old Tory story: a 36% increase in homelessness and a massive increase in rough sleeping.
Dr Blackman-Woods
I am sorry, I would normally give way to the hon. Gentleman, but we are very short of time.
At least we on the Labour Benches recognise the scale of the task at hand. Current rates of house building in England are running at about half the level needed to meet existing and anticipated demand. We need to deliver an average of 240,000 to 245,000 homes per annum, of which 78,000 must be in the social sector, to meet housing need. That is a very long way from where we are at present, and measures in this Bill do little to address the task at hand.
Looking at right to buy, Labour is not against measures that would increase access to home ownership, but we have always said that the extension of the right-to-buy scheme to housing associations funded by the mass forced sale of affordable council homes is unworkable and wrong. It would lead to a severe and irreversible loss of affordable homes at a time when they are most needed, because there is no plan for a genuine one-to-one, like-for-like replacement.
According to figures estimated by Shelter, 19,000 council homes could be sold by 2020, with a further 113,000 at risk. In fact, since 2012, only one in nine council homes sold under the existing right-to-buy scheme has been replaced, so we can only estimate that the loss of socially rented stock will be substantial, with high-need areas of the country especially badly affected. The right-to-buy policy also leaves many questions unanswered, including whether all 1.3 million tenants will get the right to buy next year as promised.
We do of course also welcome the principle behind starter homes allowing those who can afford to do so to climb on to the property ladder. However, they are not, and should not be, a substitute for low-rent affordable housing. The proposals in the Bill to change planning obligations under section 106 agreements to prioritise the delivery of starter homes mean that they will simply replace the building of affordable rented housing.
There is a further problem with the starter home proposals. Put simply, starter homes are not affordable for many, even by the Chancellor’s own standards. A family living on the Chancellor’s new minimum wage of £9 an hour in 2020 would not be able to afford a starter home in 98% of the country.
The pay-to-stay measure to charge higher rents to some tenants is also extremely problematic. The very idea that a household income of £30,000 outside London, or £40,000 in London, is high is questionable at best, but as the income needed to sustain a basic standard of living varies hugely by household type—for example more income being needed for a family with two children than a single person—the proposals are ludicrous. We know from the Government’s own consultation that we are not the only people to think so. The Government’s 2013 consultation on pay to stay found that, even with much higher threshold levels, only 25% of respondents were in favour of the policy.
Labour supports measures in the Bill to crack down on rogue landlords and letting agents, but they fall far short of ensuring that England’s 11 million renters have a more secure, affordable home.
We wish to thank the Minister for adopting some of our proposals from the Lyons review, and the measures to speed up neighbourhood planning, to require local plans to be made, to streamline the compulsory purchase system and to prioritise building on brownfield land are to be welcomed. We have concerns about wider changes to the planning system and we will raise questions on them in Committee.
This Bill should be a Bill to tackle a crisis faced by thousands—a crisis in which people cannot afford a home, can barely afford their rents and, in the worst cases, are sleeping rough because they simply do not have a home. Instead, this Bill is an all-out assault on social housing, a smash and grab on council stock and a power steal from local authorities and councils. Under the previous Labour Government, home ownership increased, but it is falling now. The Bill does nothing to address five years of failure; indeed, it does not detail how a single affordable home will be built. Frankly, I am appalled that the Bill, which has 106 pages, does not mention homelessness once. We need a Bill that will increase the number of homes built across all tenures and I urge colleagues to vote for our reasoned amendment.