Affordable Housing

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Emma Reynolds

Wednesday 4th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Emily Thornberry]

No, I will not go back to that. I will carry on talking about Mount Pleasant for a minute, because it is a disgrace. The more we talk about it, the more we expose the difference in values between the Conservative party and local people and why the Mayor is trampling on local people’s wishes. The Mayor is the Tory party’s London representative, and he aspires to high places within the party. People should be warned about his agenda.

Some 681 new homes will be built on the Mount Pleasant site, and 163 of those homes will be affordable, at 80% of market rent, but the rest will carry the most ridiculous prices in which only people cashing in their gold bars in China could invest to be able to live there. We have 19,000 families on the housing waiting list in Islington who want to stay in Islington. If we could build 1,500 affordable social rented homes on that site, on the Canaletto site or on another such site, we could unplug our housing waiting list. People would then have a fighting chance of getting themselves a social rented home.

I will illustrate the sort of people on my housing waiting list. I never try to exaggerate. Whenever I make a speech, and I have made this speech many times over the past 10 years, I always talk about the very last person I met. In this case, the last person I met was a woman with three children. She has lived in so-called temporary accommodation for five years. She had polio, so her legs are in the most terrible state. She has 28 steps up to her front door, and she has fallen down twice and broken her leg. She now has to have a knee replacement. She has a child with special needs, and she is stuck in this accommodation. And guess what? She has also been hit by the benefits cap. She is in temporary accommodation, which costs £400 of the £500 a week that is available to her. She and her three children are living on £100 a week in entirely inappropriate accommodation. My local authority is doing its utmost to find alternative accommodation.

Frankly, if someone moves their car in Islington, we have built a flat there by the time they come back in the evening. We are building as much social rented accommodation as possible in the area, despite the Government having cut back the subsidy to local authorities and despite the Government making it so difficult for my local authority to stand up to developers and say, “We need social rented accommodation. That is what our local people say. We are the local representatives. Who are you? What is localism? Let us have our say.”

[Emma Reynolds]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the potential role of a progressive Labour Mayor would be to drive up the number of affordable homes on these big sites, rather than taking every opportunity to drive down the number of affordable homes, as the current Tory Mayor is doing?

[Emily Thornberry]

Absolutely, and I will give another example. Clerkenwell fire station is on the other side of the road from the notorious Royal Mail site, which was sold off for a song and out of which a huge profit is now being made. My local authority is attempting to constrain the Clerkenwell fire station site by saying that it must be used for affordable housing. We believe that best value does not just mean that a public body should squeeze as much money as possible out of a site by building as many luxury flats as possible. Best value for the community—this is a public asset in the middle of the community—ought to be what the public want and what will give best value to that community. Providing homes to my local community in Islington is best value as far as we are concerned, which we hope a Labour Mayor would understand. I will always give Boris Johnson the benefit of the doubt, and I will be completely converted if he comes back with this, but I want him to say, “Emily, I understand that ‘best value’ means affordable homes on that site, which means a large proportion of social rented accommodation.” I hope against hope, but I am always an optimist. You never know, Mr Gray; you never know.

I appreciate that I have taken a bit of time, so I will wind up, although there is much more that I want to say, as I am sure people can tell. The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford said that there is no silver bullet, but there is. The reason we do not have affordable housing, whether in Northern Ireland, in his constituency or in London, is that we do not have enough homes. We have not been building enough homes, and we did not build enough when we were in government. We did a great deal of good, and we did up all the country’s social housing. We made all social housing conform to the decent homes standard, which was a fantastic achievement that we do not shout about enough, but we did not build enough new homes. We needed to build more.

It is all very well for the hon. Gentleman to carp about that, but, frankly, his party should look at the plank in its own eye. How much has his party built during its five years in government? Very little indeed. That is why we are in this crisis, and one thing on which we can all agree is that we must build more homes. We need to be brave and allow local communities to decide on the sorts of places that they need. The solutions that are appropriate for my constituency might not be appropriate for Nottingham or York. Nevertheless, we must drive local authorities and local people, so that we are able to give our younger generation a chance. My youngsters might not be able to live in Islington, and Nottingham youngsters might not be able to live in Nottingham, because they cannot afford to move into the sort of accommodation in which their parents lived. This is all about intergenerational justice, and we, the older generation, either have secure social rented homes or are buying our own places, but our youngsters have no chance unless we grasp the nettle and say, “Yes, we owe it to the youngsters in this country to start building more homes.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Reynolds]

If I cross the Floor of the House, as the hon. Gentleman suggested earlier, we will obviously inherit the current affordable homes programme, but we will make our plans for the future clearer in the weeks to come.

Even Westminster city council’s deputy leader, Robert Davis, has said that the policy

“threatens our capability to deliver much-needed housing in central London.”

His director of planning went even further and called it insane. The Housing Minister claimed that the reforms would not have a significantly adverse effect on the affordable housing programme, even though his own Department admitted that it had not done a formal assessment of the policy’s impact.

[Emily Thornberry]

There has been a side debate about what is affordable. In relation to house prices in Islington, may I add that social rented accommodation in Islington is set at 40% of market rent?

[Emma Reynolds]

The City of London has estimated that this policy will reduce its housing budget by a massive £8 million. It is clear that the Tory Mayor, as hon. Members have already suggested, is keen on driving down the number of affordable homes, particularly on big developments. My hon. Friend mentioned the Mount Pleasant development, which used to be public land. It has not been used to provide the number of affordable homes that we need, precisely because Boris Johnson has taken it upon himself to call in that application and force down—not up—the number of affordable homes on that site.

The Government have failed to live up to their promise of replacing homes sold through right to buy one for one. Since 2012, for every 21 council houses sold under right to buy, only one has been built. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South underlined in her contribution, the Government’s bedroom tax is not only a complete failure of a policy that hits the most vulnerable the hardest, but it has led to a rise in rent arrears and, in some cases, homes being left empty.

One or two such changes would have been bad enough, but the cumulative impact of the changes that the Government have introduced has meant that people across the country are struggling to find a home to rent or buy. Tragically, the lack of affordable housing is having a real impact at the sharp end. I have already mentioned homelessness and rough sleeping, but it is worth mentioning again that the lack of affordable housing is, unfortunately and tragically, driving the numbers up.

Housing will be a day one priority for the next Labour Government. It is true that the market has not been delivering for quite some time. There is a huge and pressing need to increase the overall supply of new homes. We have made it clear that, under a Labour Government, housing will be a priority for capital investment. We will reverse the watering down of section 106 and ensure that tougher rules are in place to assess viability, so that developers cannot dodge the rules. We will scrap the Government’s affordable homes avoidance scheme. We will make sure that we use public land to drive the development of affordable housing, and we want to see councils return to their historic role of building council homes. Wolverhampton city council is building the first new council homes in our city in more than 30 years. I am proud that Labour councils are building twice as many affordable homes as Tory local authorities.

There is a crucial role for housing associations. I am always grateful for the wise advice of the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford. He suggests that I make sure that they have great stability going forward. I say to him that some of the biggest changes to the way in which housing associations operate have occurred under his Government. There has been a huge cut in funding, and the welfare chaos that we have seen has provided unstable and uncertain conditions for them to operate in. Unfortunately, the story of this Parliament has been an ever-rising need for affordable homes, but we have had a Government seemingly determined to do everything that they can to undermine the building of new, affordable homes.

I know that the Minister will get up and aggregate the numbers over a five-year period, but if the Government are so serious about building affordable homes, why did they cut the affordable homes budget by 60%? Why did they water down the definition of affordable? Why have they watered down the requirements on developers? Why have they changed the way in which viability is assessed? All those measures have led to the number of affordable homes, particularly those for social rent, going down. Only a Labour Government would have a comprehensive plan to tackle the long-term housing crisis by making the market more competitive and making sure that councils have the powers and flexibilities to build and provide the housing that we need.

Housing (London)

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Emma Reynolds

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Emma Reynolds]

My hon. Friend pre-empts the next section of my speech. The problem is not just about numbers but about affordability. All of my hon. Friends have talked about the distorted notion of affordability that the Government have introduced. The idea that 80% of market rent in London is affordable is plainly ludicrous. It is plain stupid—it just is not the case.

I will give the Minister some figures. In Westminster, to be able to pay 80% of market rent for a three-bedroom home tenants would have to earn an annual income of £109,000. In Southwark, renting a two-bed flat at 80% of market rent would require an income of £44,000. The severe shortage of affordable housing is accelerating what many of my hon. Friends have been talking about, which is social segregation here in the capital and, if we are not careful, a hollowing out not only of central London but of London more generally. My hon. Friends have talked about midwives, nurses, teachers, policemen and firefighters not being able to afford to live in the communities where they work. That was not the case 10 or 20 years ago.

[Emily Thornberry]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent and passionate speech. Does she agree that we have yet to have an answer from the Mayor or from the Conservative party as to how it can be that affordable rents can be 80% of market rent, yet, for example, in Islington the local housing allowance, which is the amount someone is allowed to get in housing benefit, is a maximum of £370, and the market rent for a three-bedroom flat might be £600? Should the two not be aligned if we really mean to have affordable rents?

[Emma Reynolds]

The truth is that the housing benefit bill is going up. The Government should try to shift Government subsidy away from benefits to bricks, but when we take into account the bedroom tax and the cap, in London in particular, on the amount of money that families can receive in housing benefit, we see that things are being pushed in the wrong direction and that the housing benefit bill is going up, not coming down.