Right to Buy
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Brandon LewisUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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Brandon Lewis
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Yes, it absolutely is part of a wider package of work we have been doing and will continue to do to drive up home building as well as homeownership throughout different parts of the sector and with different types of tenure, while always remembering that 86% of our population want to own their own home and doing everything we can to support them in that aim.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
May I pick up the point that has just been raised? I was very concerned that money raised from the right to buy in areas such as mine will leave the borough and possibly leave London altogether. The Minister has not really answered this point. It is vital that any money raised through right to buy is reinvested in the nearby area. We should therefore look at all schemes to include as much genuinely affordable housing as possible. For example, 900 homes are being built at 250 City Road in my constituency. The cheapest one-bed flat there is £865,000 so starter homes are simply not affordable there. Does the Minister agree that the only genuinely affordable homes at the 250 City Road scheme are likely to be those for social rent?
Brandon Lewis
This is a pretty simple question of supply and demand. To get more affordable prices, we need to build more homes, and I hope that the hon. Lady will support this process, which is about getting more homes built in London and in the rest of the country.
Affordable Housing
Debate between Emily Thornberry and Brandon Lewis(9 years, 9 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. My hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk) made some good points, as he always does, on how we built the foundations for the success we are seeing with house building. He should be proud. One point he touched on, which showed the Government’s ambition, was the public sector land that has been released, which is enough to build 100,000 houses. A few Members made that point, and I am pleased to announce that we have surpassed that target. When Members leave the Chamber, they will see that we have gone past 100,000 and set ourselves a higher target of 150,000 in the next Parliament.
I am disappointed that the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) seems to lack real ambition. The Labour party generally seems to lack ambition compared with us on what can be achieved. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) made a fair point on the ambition of what we should be delivering. I have often commented that setting targets can lead to unintended consequences and fictitious outcomes. We should be driving for the right outcome, which is homes that people can afford. The Labour party’s lack of ambition in wanting to hit 200,000 homes by 2020 is clear and evidenced by the fact that this Government’s programme, as we outlined this week, will hit 200,000 homes by 2017.
I hope to work with Jane Hunt in a Conservative Government. I visited her in Nottingham South, where she is fighting hard to ensure that we get even stronger Conservative representation in this place. She wants to be part of a Conservative Government who would build 200,000 homes for first-time buyers. Not only will we offer first-time buyers a chance to benefit from Help to Buy, which has allowed tens of thousands of families to get on to the housing ladder with a reduced deposit following the economic farce and crash that we inherited, but we will go further by giving them a 20% discount, making the achievement of buying a first home more open to more people.
Emily Thornberry
Has the money for those 300,000 homes been explained to us, or does it come from the same pot at the end of the rainbow as the £7 billion of tax cuts that the Conservatives have promised the public?
Brandon Lewis
The hon. Members for Nottingham South and for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and I have spent many times at the Dispatch Box in the past few months in full agreement, so it is probably a healthy return to normal that we disagree today, but I suggest they go away and read some of the documentation before they come to this place and make comments that are absolutely inaccurate. For example, it is worth having a read of the Hansard transcript of the Communities and Local Government Committee sitting last week, where we made it clear that the right to buy programme is delivering on the replacement of homes in the way it was designed. There is an interesting contrast, because the replacement rate was 1:170 under Labour. Opposition Members should be very aware of that. It is important to understand that with the starter homes—it is clear in the documentation that the Government have put out—we are looking at making available land that has not been viable before. We are doing that without section 106 agreements and we are reducing regulation for developers so that they can offer those homes at a minimum discount of 20%.