Caroline Lucas
Main Page: Caroline Lucas (Green Party - Brighton, Pavilion)
Emma Reynolds
No, I am not suggesting that we go back to regional spatial strategies. We will not do what this Government did and throw all the pieces in the air and see where they land. We will largely keep the national planning policy framework in place. Where local plans come forward and are voted on, they can be successful. There are problems in areas where local plans have not been passed, and there is also a problem with not using common methodology in some of the local plans.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I welcome this debate and the motion is a step in the right direction. The hon. Lady must acknowledge, however, that the previous Labour Administration’s understandable focus on decent homes meant that they took their eye off the ball for council housing. The last year of the Labour Administration saw just 370 council homes built. Will she explain why the official Opposition do not call explicitly in the motion for a complete lifting of the borrowing cap?
Emma Reynolds
We are not calling for a lifting of the borrowing cap, but we think that councils and housing associations have a key role in delivering a step change in the number of houses for social rent—that is real, affordable rent, not the affordable rent that we have seen from the Government.
Kris Hopkins
The hon. Gentleman raises a good point. We have gone through a massive crisis since 2007—I shall say more about it in a few minutes—and responsibility lay solely at the feet of the Government of whom the hon. Gentleman was part. We have been picking up the pieces ever since, and we aspire to deliver the houses that the country needs.
The Government’s affordable housing scheme is on track to deliver 170,000 houses as promised, and the houses committed by the previous Government are already delivered, demonstrating that we have delivered some 200,000 houses to date. We are so keen to accelerate the number of affordable houses that we are bringing forward our 2015-18 affordable housing programme and we want to deliver those much-needed affordable houses right across the country as soon as possible.
Caroline Lucas
If the Minister is really so keen to build genuinely affordable housing, why will the Government not lift the borrowing cap on local authorities? Why are they so obsessed with worrying about public sector debt levels, given that borrowing for council housing is known to be a really safe investment? Other countries do not include it in public sector borrowing, and we should not do so either.
Kris Hopkins
It is clear that the hon. Lady’s party does not care about the economy of this country. It is quite happy to add to the deficit that was created by the last Administration. This Government have taken opportunities to raise the housing revenue account cap by some £300 million, and we look forward to seeing those houses being built.
More council houses have been built in the last four years, under this Government, than were built in the previous 13 years. As a result of the right to buy, some 19,000 hard-working individuals and their families have secured their own homes. That rejuvenated scheme has delivered some 10,000 more homes than was predicted, and we have promised to provide a replacement for every house that is sold. So far, some 3,000 new council houses have been built with right-to-buy receipts.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I very much welcome this debate. The last two speakers have talked about their own constituencies in London. Clearly, my constituency is not in London, but it is experiencing similar house prices and many of the stories that we have heard this afternoon have resonance in Brighton, Pavilion. The failure of successive Governments over the past 30 to 40 years to build anything like enough homes is a scandal that has been ignored by those in power, who have been busy enjoying the short-term economic benefits of inflated house prices. Those prices have skyrocketed in the past year in a market that is both irresponsible and unfair.
I also welcome the motion tabled by the official Opposition. It represents a step in the right direction, but I am concerned that it is quite vague and I hope that they will fill in some of the gaps during the debate. That is why I have amended the motion, and I will say a few words about that in a moment. I want to focus on the issue of council homes, which have not been built in significant numbers for decades. Instead, hundreds of thousands of them have been sold off cheap. On the failure to build, a recent House of Commons Library note shows the long-term steep decline in house building in England over the past 35 years.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Perhaps I can help the hon. Lady. She might have tabled an amendment but it was not selected, and the motion has not been amended. We are dealing with the motion before us and no other.
Caroline Lucas
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I can assure you that I was not speaking to the amendment—perish the thought. I was speaking to the items in the motion—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady said that she had amended the motion, and the problem is that people might therefore think that there is an amendment to the motion. That is all I am bothered about. There will be just one vote.
Caroline Lucas
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I sought to amend the motion—devastatingly unsuccessfully —and I will not mention the matter further. I do, however, want to mention the substantive issues in the Opposition motion, as well as certain things that are not in it but have nothing to do with my amendment—or rather, my proposed amendment that does not exist. It was a figment of my imagination.
On the failure to build, a recent House of Commons Library note shows the long-term steep decline in house building in England over the past 35 years. Nearly 307,000 homes were built across all tenures in England in 1969-1970, but the number fell to just 107,000 in 2012-13. There was a minor increase in housing association building over that period, although it amounted to fewer than 15,000 more dwellings being built last year than in 1969-70. What is most striking is that the steepest decline was in the building of council homes, which fell from 135,000 to 1,360 over that same period.
To their credit, the last Labour Administration did attempt to address the chronic backlog of repairs and maintenance left after 18 years of deliberate Tory neglect. It is just a shame that this was done at the expense of building the council homes that were needed. For example, only 60 council homes—a tiny number—were built nationally in 2001-2002. By 2008-9, the figure had gone up, with 490 council homes completed in that year, but that was still fewer than one per constituency. The number of housing association homes was higher, with 14,000 in 2001 and 26,500 in 2008, but the numbers were still woefully low. The current Government are clearly worse; they have cut funds for social housing by 60%. The need for strong solutions to get the council and social housing we need built is an absolute priority in our discussions this afternoon.
I see the reality of the housing crisis every day in my constituency. The chronic long-term lack of housing supply is evident everywhere in Brighton, Pavilion and I am regularly contacted by people in despair and in real housing need. Our local paper, the Brighton Argus published a housing special last Saturday entitled “Can you afford to live in the city?” This was a rhetorical question, because for most people in housing need, the answer is a very clear no: the average price in the city has been driven up to more than £367,000. We have seen a 13% increase in house prices in the last quarter alone. Therefore, it is no surprise that we have 18,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list.
The city’s housing market is fast becoming known as a “mini-London”, with average house prices in Brighton nearly twice the national average. Young Brightonians who do not have rich family backers have no hope of getting on the housing ladder. The combination of stratospheric rent and price rises and policies such as the pernicious bedroom tax—which appear to be designed to push people in need of housing benefit, particularly those with disabilities, out of desirable areas—has created a situation in which people on low incomes and those on average wages are being pushed to the margins.
The motion does not say very much about how the Opposition would achieve the aims that they are putting forward. Those aims are laudable, but where are the means? I would like the unfair restrictions on local authorities to be lifted. Housing associations are allowed to borrow against their assets to build but councils are not, despite being able to do so more cheaply. That makes no sense. We must fully lift the borrowing cap to get council homes built again. Councils suffer unnecessary restrictions. They are bound by prudential borrowing rules anyway, so the cap is arguably unnecessary; it is just stifling the building of local authority homes.
Using the Department for Communities and Local Government self-financing model, a joint report published in 2012 by the National Federation of ALMOs, the Local Government Association, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Association of Retained Council Housing and many others showed that if the borrowing cap were fully lifted and councils were able to make prudential use of their borrowing potential, they could borrow up to £20 billion over five years. That extra borrowing could enable between 170,000 and 230,000 extra homes to be built.
The main justification for the imposition of borrowing caps on local housing authorities is that the additional debt incurred by councils would add to the overall Government debt, but that need not be the case. The UK is unique in Europe for classifying a wide range of bodies as coming within the definition of “public sector” that is used to measure public debt. No other EU country treats social housing investment in the way that happens in England. There is a strong case for local authority borrowing for housing not to be counted towards the public sector debt. Local authority borrowing for housing would be largely self-financing in any case, and it is transparent and low risk.
I would be the first to admit, however, that lifting the borrowing cap will not be enough on its own to replenish our social housing stock following the giveaway of council houses under right to buy and the failure to build. A significant increase in grant funding is needed if we are to begin to reverse the chronic failure to build the housing that we need. That money would also create the benefit of a multiplier effect, generating jobs, apprenticeships, an increase in tax revenues and reduced welfare spending. Shelter has said that £1.22 billion extra, on top of the current £1 billion of Government grant spend, could be sufficient to get us building enough homes if it was combined with a package of reform. That would certainly be a good start. Serious consideration should be given to channelling some of the huge windfall increase in stamp duty revenues predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility into building new council homes. That would be one way of using some of the tax proceeds from our distorted market to increase social housing supply.
Mr Deputy Speaker, you are looking a little fidgety, if I may say so. That indicates to me that you would like me to wind up shortly, and I will do so. However, I just want to mention one other matter, which has not been raised this afternoon. The increase in housing supply that we need must involve housing that people can afford to run, as well as buy or rent. This is an opportunity to tackle the scandal of fuel poverty and the rising cost of living. We must use house building to reverse this Government’s weakening of energy saving, water efficiency and other standards. This Government have acted to prevent local authorities from going further than minimum national standards for energy efficiency, despite those standards looking weaker by the day.
Given the scandal of fuel poverty and the hardship being caused by high energy bills, as well as the urgent need for radical cuts to carbon emissions, new homes must be built to a genuine zero carbon homes standard. The Government’s exemptions for small developments mean that around a third of all homes could be exempted altogether. If the Government were sticking to the original zero carbon homes standard, the situation would not be so bad. Under the original standard, annual energy bills for residents in new homes would be under £300, but the Government are again capitulating to big business, watering down the standards and creating loopholes, so energy bills will be around £800.
In summary, we need sufficient homes, which means lifting the borrowing cap and ensuring that imaginative sources of revenue such as stamp duty funding are properly ring-fenced. It also means ensuring that our homes are fit to live in.