Housing Benefit

Debate between Clive Efford and Lord Lilley

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

As the Secretary of State responsible for introducing the regulations in 1996, which interacted in an unforeseen way with the regulations last year, I must seek the House’s indulgence at not having recalled the detail of their text and drawn any possible problem to the attention of my successor. However, I assure the House that there was no intention of granting any long-term relief from a change of policy that I envisaged introducing if we had been re-elected and I had remained Secretary of State.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Lilley]

I will give way not at the moment.

The problem that we face is a huge shortage of housing. We have 1.85 million people on council waiting lists, up 800,000 since 1997. That should be no surprise, given that the previous Government allowed the population to increase by 3 million during that period, with virtually no addition to the housing stock.

The symptom of such a shortage is overcrowding—a word which did not pass the lips of the Opposition spokesman in her speech. During my period as a Member of Parliament, many people have come to my surgery to seek help about a change in social housing. Overwhelmingly, they have been people living in overcrowded accommodation who want a bigger property and seek to move out of a one or two-bedroom property. I have therefore been surprised by the general approach of Opposition Members and by some of the media in saying that no one wants to move out of small properties into big ones and that there are therefore no small properties to be moved into by those affected by the removal of the spare room subsidy.

By chance, I bumped into an old friend who is now the chairman of an organisation called HomeSwapper. Some 80% of local authorities belong to it, and hundreds of thousands of tenants have registered on it that they want to swap.