Housing

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend represents with great distinction a constituency with a council that has been a laboratory for some of the most right-wing, ideological Conservative thinking on housing. He is right to challenge that and to say that the rhetoric may be that of localism, but the practice is more like Leninism.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is right to focus his devastating attack on the coalition Government’s record on housing starts. When it comes to localism, they have also undermined local authority attempts to improve local housing markets. In Newcastle, 9,000 people are on the council house waiting list and there are 4,000 empty homes. Some 99% of those are in the private sector, yet the Government are making it harder for local authorities to bring empty private sector dwellings into public sector use.

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend speaks with passion about her constituency and the problems she faces. All over the country, it is typical for there to be enterprising Labour local authorities. Would that we had an enterprising central Government who really believed in local government and its capacity to help build Britain out of recession.

I return to where I was. Perhaps I am being unfair on yesterday’s Minister for Housing. It turns out that he took it on himself to build, and with a dedication and passion that many would find hard to understand; he hid it, but he was beavering away, busy building—building up his following on Twitter. I hope that the new Minister for Housing will spend his time dedicating his full attention to the job. I advise him not to be obsessed with sending out press statements, as his predecessor was. If there were a new home for every press release from the last Minister for Housing, there would be no housing crisis. Perhaps he was trying to prove his prophecy, made from opposition:

“it’s easy for a housing minister to catch your eye with a headline, but much harder to deliver more homes.”

For once, he was absolutely right.

The new Minister for Housing is taking on a position of huge responsibility and national importance. Every Member knows the scale of the housing crisis and will have stories from their own constituency. I have never-ending queues of heart-breaking cases—young couples paying a fortune in the private rented sector, often in sub-standard accommodation, desperate to get a mortgage, which, if they could get it, would mean that they would pay less to buy a home. But they cannot get a mortgage.

Those on ever-lengthening council waiting lists are desperate to get decent accommodation. A couple with two young children came to see me; both burst into tears because of the impact that where they were living was having on their children. There are also the local small businesses. In my constituency, a man from the local construction company—a decent man, who had been in business for 25 years—came to me and said, “We just can’t get work any longer.” One in four young people in Castle Vale, an admirable community, is out of work. They are good young people, desperate for an apprenticeship in the building industry, but all their hopes are being dashed. They will find that this is a Government in complete denial as they spin a line that things are getting better; a Government who promised to get Britain building but are in denial about falling housing starts; a Government who promised to unlock the mortgage market but are in denial about the millions locked out of home ownership; a Government who promised that rents would come down but are in denial as they hit record highs; a Government who promised an “affordable housing revolution” but are in denial, with the previous Housing Minister hailing a 68% fall in affordable home starts and a 97% collapse in social housing starts as “rapid and dramatic increases”; a Government who once promised not to

“produce endless policies and initiatives that…lead to inaction”

or to

“repeat these mistakes of the past.”

The time for half measures and half-baked schemes is over. The CBI was absolutely right when it said that we face a national economic emergency. Rising to that challenge starts with the political will to put housing centre stage, both to meet growing need and to get a sluggish economy moving. The Government must put jobs, homes and growth at the heart of everything they do, not least because history tells us that economic recovery requires us to build our way out of recession, whether it was the eventual revival from the long depression of the 1930s or Britain’s post-war recovery when we built homes for our heroes on a massive scale. I know that on this, at least, the Business Secretary, the new Minister’s former departmental colleague, will agree with me, because he has said:

“Recovery requires a big expansion in social and private house building.”

He is in government, so the question is why are they not getting on with it?

The Government need to show the same determination that a Labour Government showed in 2008. When faced with a global crash as a consequence of the bankers crisis, we acted to keep people in their homes, unlike in the 1980s when the Tories presided over the heartbreak of mass repossessions, and we acted to build new homes.