Clive Betts
Main Page: Clive Betts (Labour - Sheffield South East)
Kris Hopkins
What we do is add up all the numbers of houses that have been built; and more have been built since 2007. As I said, planning consents have now reached 216,000, and the top 10 building companies are at their maximum capacity and are planning to grow a further 15% in the next year.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Let me ask the question in a different way. The Minister’s predecessor said that the Government’s target was to build more homes than were being built before the recession—not in 2010, but before the recession. Will the Minister explain in which year of this Parliament the Government have achieved that target?
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.
Kris Hopkins
The reason house building is still a challenge is that the Government of which the hon. Gentleman was a member broke the economy, borrowed too much, crashed the banking system, and wiped out a quarter of a million jobs. That is why it is taking so long to put house building back on track, but it is becoming stronger.
As a direct consequence of our extending Help to Buy to 2020, we will deliver some 120,000 new homes. Help to Buy will continue to be a success. Some 30,000 homes have already been delivered, 87% of them to first-time buyers, and 91% are outside London. The average house price is about £151,000, well below the average price of a house in this country at the moment.
Kris Hopkins
The total Help to Buy figure, covering both guarantee and equity, is some 36,000. I was talking about the number of new homes built, which is 30,000. Those 30,000 houses have been built because businesses have taken up the Help to Buy scheme. Again, this intervention—this building of new homes—is specifically to help hard-working individuals get on the housing ladder. This intervention is there to help people who could not secure a mortgage or get a deposit together, but it is not only helping the hard-working individual; it is also supporting businesses. For every house that is built, a new job is created. The 30,000 that have come directly from Help to Buy contribute to the 1.7 million private sector jobs this Government have delivered.
As much as the small and medium-sized businesses are really important, and as much as the top 10 builders out there are extremely important in terms of capacity, we also need to expand our large-site developments. So far, our large-sites programme has provided some 80,000 new homes, but unlike the last Government with their failed eco-towns, which failed to deliver a single home, we will listen to local councils, we will support local plans, and we will encourage locally led interventions to deliver housing at scale. The garden city proposals were published in April and we look forward to continued discussions with localities about driving out those houses.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Suitably admonished, I shall keep my remarks brief to allow other colleagues to get in, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I wished to pick up on the comments made by the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) about what is “affordable”, because in an area such as St Albans house values and land values are so high that it is genuinely difficult for any local authority and any house builder to deliver social housing and affordable housing. That is why I wanted to ask him whether he supported considering some form of means-testing for those currently occupying social housing. I just wanted to throw that into the mix.
My council in St Albans has the second oldest district plan in the country. I brought my council leader, Councillor Julian Daly, to meet the Secretary of State because I wanted my right hon. Friend to have a sense of the pressures on a place such as St Albans. There is high demand to live in our beautiful area. It is very commutable to London. It suffers similar housing pressures to London and has similar prices. The average house price in St Albans is £401,811. That is a massive sum for any young family to afford. The average mortgage repayment in St Albans is £738 or 16.1% of average income.
Another part of the mix, which has not been mentioned today, and about which I put in a plea to the Chancellor, is stamp duty. That has not been considered by the Opposition. In high-price areas such as mine, we have the Help to Buy scheme through which the Government are helping young families and young people to get on the housing ladder. Those people are saving hard for deposits, yet they have to give over a large whack in tax. Stamp duty has not been considered by the House since 2003 and I make no bones about the fact that I am trying to lead a charge on the matter.
Stamp duty means that some people are unable to trade down and free up homes for other couples because their house values have risen so much that they would pay a large amount of tax. It also makes it difficult for expanding families to move up. It is a barrier to fluidity in the housing market and to young people moving. It seems rather odd that we as a Parliament want to get young people on the housing ladder, yet we are happy to take large sums of money off them in areas such as mine. The cost of an entry-level property in St Albans is probably more than the national average house price, so for the many people trying to get such a property in our area, stamp duty is a big deal.
The reason for our having the most out-of-date district plan is not that we have a slovenly and lazy council—far from it. Our planning department is the busiest in the country. A huge number of people want to build in our area, and we have loads of challenges from developers. My council regularly spends large amounts of money fighting off predatory developers. The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), smiles at me—I will be making my rail freight point—but it has cost my council millions of pounds to fight off inappropriate development applications.
The reason we have such an out-of-date district plan is that my council, along with other councils in Hertfordshire, was desperately trying to resist the high housing targets that were imposed top-down by Labour. If the Opposition go back to imposing top-down targets, there will be sclerosis in planning departments again. I welcome the fact that the Government have taken by the horns the point that local areas should decide. Local areas know their housing need best.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
We need to build 250,000 new homes every year, probably for the next 20 or 30 years, if we are to address the housing crisis properly. That is the scale of the challenge that faces us collectively. In order to do that over that period, we probably need buy-in to such an approach from all political parties. That is a further challenge. I admitted in the Queen’s Speech debate that the Government whom I supported for 13 years did not build enough homes. The problem is that the present Government are building even fewer.
On average, year by year, fewer homes are being built under this Government than were built under the previous Government. That is a fact, however the Minister tries to dress up the figures. If we are to get that long-term buy-in to building sufficient homes, it has to be through all-party agreement, because the construction industry cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Another challenge is to train and keep construction workers to deliver the homes we need. As the Select Committee report in 2012 said, there is no single silver bullet—we need a range of different measures to provide a range of different homes.
We need the volume house builders to build more, of course. That is a challenge for them as well as for the Government. But we also need other forms of building, including building houses for social rent. We cannot simply build houses at 80% of market rent to help everyone in this country. There are people who not only cannot afford to buy, but cannot afford market rents, so we need a social house building programme as part of the total number.
Let me be clear to Front Benchers on both sides of the House. I support the campaigns of the Local Government Association and of the National Federation of ALMOs to lift the borrowing cap on local authorities. That could build us at least 60,000 new homes, but that does not go far enough. In this Parliament we have had a 60% cut in the funding for social housing. Some, if not all, of it will have to be restored if we are to build sufficient social homes in the future. Whether we are talking about local authority homes—council homes—or housing association homes, we will not get them built without more public money being put in. That is a fact of life. It is uncomfortable at a time of stringency and constraint, but that is a reality and we all have to address it.
Another uncomfortable issue is the right to buy. The Government’s policy envisages a one-for-one replacement. In many parts of the country, such as my constituency, there is no point selling a family home and offering to replace it with a one-bedroom flat. The demand is for family homes. Like-for-like replacement is what is needed, and even that is not sufficient in some areas. If there is an acute shortage of social housing in particular localities, or there is not the land to replace homes that are sold, we may have to give local authorities the powers to restrict the right to buy.
Again, that is uncomfortable. It is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is about true localism and recognising that there are particular circumstances and particular housing markets where the problems are so difficult that that is what we may have to do. That, again, is something that the Select Committee report addressed and the Government dismissed. It is a factor if we are to deal with the acute crisis faced by many people who cannot afford to buy and cannot afford to rent in the private sector.
There are two other issues that I shall address. If we are to build sufficient homes, we all want to see a brownfield-first policy. The Select Committee is conducting an inquiry into the national planning policy framework and we look forward to the Minister coming before us. We may be slightly less harsh on him than some of his own colleagues were this morning in the Westminster Hall debate, which I chaired. If we have a brownfield-first policy, we will have to deal with the question why the proportion of houses built on brownfield sites appears to be declining. It is difficult to know because the figures are available only up to 2011. There is a gap in the figures, which is not helpful.
Perhaps there has been decline because of the problem of paragraph 47 of the NPPF and developers claiming that brownfield sites are not viable. Perhaps it is because we have lost the grants that the regional development agencies used to put in to deal with contamination and other problems on brownfield sites that made them easier to develop. Perhaps it is a bit of both. We face that challenge if we are to get brownfield development going. We must also be honest with people. Even if we build on all the available brownfield sites, we will still have to build on some greenfield sites in this country. We must be honest about that and face up to it.
Then we come on to the further challenge: how do we sign up local communities? The principle of the NPPF is to support sustainable development, which is consistent with the local plan, so putting in place local plans is absolutely vital. There may be some authorities that are dragging their feet, but there are some that are genuinely struggling to get local plans in place. That is what we are finding in our inquiry, and we will produce our findings on that in due course. There are a number of other issues that the Minister will look at in due course; perhaps he will do it when he appears before the Committee.
Let us return to the viability of brownfield sites. Is that an issue that needs to be addressed? It is stopping some local plans being put in place, as authorities are being forced to go back and relook at greenfield sites. What about the duty to co-operate? Those authorities are trying to co-operate, but cannot get a local plan in place because their neighbours will not co-operate with them. How do we deal with that challenge?
Finally, one issue that has come up time and again is the assessment of housing need. Many authorities are unclear about how they should do their sums. The planning inspector could come in at the last minute and say that they have got them wrong and that they should go back and start counting again. Although I am not generally in favour of heavy-handed centralism, should there not be a bit more guidance at the beginning of the process so that local authorities are clear about the numbers they are trying to address, and their local plans are not held up at the last stages?
I hope that those are helpful points that will help to move this matter forward. We must all face up to the fact that over the past 30 years we have had a collective failure to build sufficient homes in this country. If we are to address that collective failure, we need some collective agreement across the House about how we will proceed to build those homes over the next 20 or 30 years.