Housing and Planning Bill

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

We have already heard from my hon. Friends about the negative impact of these proposals on social housing and their illogical nature. These points are well made, and I suspect that some Conservative Members will worry about the dangers ahead. I hope they will ask the Government to think again.

When the Government published the Bill, they said they wanted to transform generation rent into generation buy, but in reality they are creating generation get-by. For young people, this promises a bleak future, struggling to find a home of their own, and too often having to rely on parents either for a place to stay or for finance. That is bad for those young people, and often puts huge strains on families.

Some of these proposals make good quick-fix headlines, but their long-term effects will do real damage to our housing stock and to communities. Most damaging for cities such as Cambridge is this compulsion on councils to sell off their high-value vacant properties and hand over the revenue to the Treasury. This not only completely undercuts the principle of self-financing and the ability of councils to invest in new housing, but is a disgraceful broken promise to boot.

Cambridge city council spent years painstakingly piloting and then working up a long-term strategy to put their housing finances on a strong, sustainable footing. I know, because I helped persuade my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)when she was Housing Minister to include Cambridge in the pilot over a decade ago. It took years to come to fruition, because housing finance is fiendishly complex, but it was finally settled, and it enabled Cambridge to develop a business plan stretching over three decades that would provide housing management services, maintain the stock in decent condition, and enable money to be invested in new affordable housing. The Bill, and the cut in rents proposed in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, are combining to scupper all that hard work. In fact, they are violating what could well be considered to be a formal contract, and I would welcome an explanation from the Minister when he sums up the debate.

Cambridge county council and other authorities bought out their housing debt on the basis of careful forward planning, but that is now in ruins because of a rash, irresponsible change of policy that puts future financial planning in jeopardy—and this from a party that has the nerve to claim financial competence. It is worth noting that, whether the Government are stunning environmental investors with sudden about-turn policy changes on feed-in tariffs or investment institutions which learn that housing associations are now public bodies, their unpredictable actions are tearing up the rule book and leaving budgets, and promises, in tatters. Incidentally, they are also adding some £60 billion to the national debt. This is incompetence on an heroic scale.

Cambridge City Council estimates that the Bill will result directly in the loss of a quarter of our housing stock. Far from securing the city’s housing finances, as was planned, the Bill means that the financial projection is for it to go into deficit. That is where the Government’s so-called long-term economic plan takes us. What does this tell us about the Government’s commitment to localism and long-term thinking? To them, localism seems to mean saying, “You do what you’re told, even if we agreed something completely different last year.” Rather than hammering on with their catchphrases and soundbites, the Government should be hammering walls, and helping local authorities to build the genuinely affordable homes that are so desperately needed in this country.

Let me end by drawing attention to another pernicious feature of the Bill. The pay-to-stay proposal is about as wrong-headed as any housing policy could be. As will be confirmed by any research and any housing officer, what we need are mixed communities, but that is really hard to achieve. What does this proposal do? It makes it harder. When I look at estates in my city, I see communities strengthened by some wonderful, hard-working local people. I shall not name them, because others know who they are. I do not know how much they earn—nor, interestingly, does the council—but some households in cities such as Cambridge certainly have an annual income of £30,000, and I would pay them to stay. They are worth their weight in gold in their communities, and we should all pay them to stay rather than punishing them and encouraging them to go. What a disastrous policy! And what about the people who put in a few extra hours that take them over the £30,000? They are punished for doing more. This Government are the enemy of aspiration. [Interruption.] Think about it.

I sincerely hope that the Government see sense, rethink, and go back to the drawing board in respect of their housing policy. Of course my hopes are not high, because this is only one part of a much wider set of rotten and dangerous proposals. It is part of a package that is billed as reform, but it is not reform. It is vandalism, it is broken promises, and it is a tawdry way in which to run a Government.