Communities and Local Government (CSR)
Debate between Clive Betts and John Robertson(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Paul Farrelly
My hon. Friend raises the issue of housing. Does he agree that in order to tide themselves over the transition, many councils will be forced to dip into their reserves? That will clearly have an impact on future income generation. In Newcastle-under-Lyme in 2006, after transferring the housing stock, the Labour party left reserves of over £40 million. Under the Liberal Democrat and Conservative local government coalition, those reserves now stand at £24 million. At that rate of spend, it looks as if the reserves will run out by 2012. There has been no satisfactory explanation of how that situation was reached, or of whether council tax payers have gained value for money. Even though the council has been prudent in dealing with its housing stock, it could face having no reserves to dip into in order to tide it through a transition when the cuts are made.
John Robertson (in the Chair)
Order. Interventions should be kept a bit shorter than that.
Mr Betts
It is a difficult issue. The Minister will say, “Look at all the reserves in local government. They can help mitigate the cuts to services.” They can, but reserves run out; they are spent once and cannot be spent again. During ongoing reductions in spending, reserves can help a council through a problem, but they will not permanently deal with it. Furthermore, reserves are not equally distributed and often they are found in authorities that have made housing stock transfers and have a big dollop of money from that. Some of the reserves cited come from schools and are held at the centre by local authorities, some are housing revenue account reserves with a specific use, and some are needed for the cash-flow issues that councils face on a day-to-day basis. The reserves may help during the first year, but they are not a permanent solution to the cuts.
We know that capital spending on housing will be cut by half in the spending round. We have not been building enough social housing—or enough housing as a whole—in this country, and we can argue on another day about whether the proposals for the new homes bonus and the planning changes will help or hinder that. The Communities and Local Government Committee will produce a report on that issue in due course. Nevertheless, spending will be halved and after the existing commitments to build houses at current rent levels are met, there will be no central Government funding for houses other than those with rents that are linked to market rents—that does not necessarily mean 80% of market rent, but means rents that are linked to the market in some form. Those higher rents will help provide money to build new homes in the future. However, 150,000 new homes will not deal with the waiting list, and of those, any new starts will not have rent levels that many people can afford. That is the real problem.
The decent homes funding is also going to be cut. From the figures provided by the Minister, I calculate that the amount of money for decent homes over the next four years will be just over £1 billion, and the backlog of work still outstanding is around £4 billion. Therefore, it will be about 10 years—probably longer—before all council homes in the country are brought up to a decent standard. That is an awfully long time for people to wait.