Emma Reynolds
Main Page: Emma Reynolds (Labour - Wycombe)(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Prisk
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend’s point, which is that we need everyone, in both the public and the private sectors, to engage and that will mean that we need to consider greater flexibility for local authorities. I will come on to that later if I can.
With regard to housing associations, now that we have the long-term framework, we need to hold them to their commitment. Many are performing well, but some are not. I hope that I may encourage the Minister to challenge those housing associations that could and should be building many more homes. I will also encourage the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), should she cross the Chamber and take office in May—heaven forfend, from my point of point—not to tinker and meddle with that long-term rental programme, because the result of that would be inconsistency in policy. It would take everyone’s eye away from delivering actual homes for our constituents. As politicians, we have a habit of wanting to tinker and meddle, but consistency is important.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman support the suggested new policy of the Conservative party to open up the right to buy to housing association tenants?
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.”
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) on securing this important debate, because there is a huge affordable housing problem. Whether in the social rented sector or the private rented sector, people are struggling. She and the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) are right that the problem is not new; there has been a problem for a long time. The previous Government did not build enough houses, which leaves us where we are now, and the current Government have not fixed the problem, either.
My constituency of Cambridge has an acute problem, partly because we are a success story. We have a booming local economy and very low unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, but we have not had the housing or infrastructure that are needed to keep up. In fact, in previous decades, there was a deliberate policy of not building houses in Cambridge but only building in the surrounding villages, which increased the cost of housing and worsened traffic congestion. That has now changed, but it takes a long time to catch up, so private sector prices are getting ever higher, whatever the category. Rent for a one-bedroom flat in Cambridge is the highest in the entire east of England. The average house costs 11 times the median salary, which prices many people whom we desperately need—researchers, teachers and nurses—out of the housing market.
We have a shortage of social and council housing. As of September 2014, 2,500 people were on the housing needs register. Many people are waiting two years or longer to find a place. There is huge demand. In November, there were 90 bids for a one-bedroom flat, and there were 152 bids for another property in December. We have a shortage, which is not a new thing. The previous Government managed to reduce the number of social and council houses by 421,000 across the country, which is a big problem—a huge indictment.
What hit us perhaps even worse in Cambridge was the ridiculous negative subsidy scheme, in which council tenants’ money was taken from Cambridge to be spent elsewhere. In Cambridge, £1,300 had been taken from every tenant by the time we got rid of the scheme. Over the 13 years of the Labour Government, the sum taken from Cambridge city council was £120 million. In our surrounding district, South Cambridgeshire district council lost £118 million to the scheme. The money was taken directly from council tenants.
Just think what we could have done with that money if we were allowed to keep it. We could have spent £5,000 doing up every council house and still have had enough money to build about 1,000 more. I am delighted to say that the Government have scrapped the scheme, so the city council has been able to build and improve council housing. When we ran the council, we started a programme to invest £286 million, partly from those savings, to build 2,000 council homes over the next decades. Free from negative subsidy, we can make that a reality: we built 146 council homes before the elections last year.
We got through an ambitious local plan, now being inspected, calling for 14,000 new homes by 2031, 40% of which would be affordable, and the Greater Cambridge city deal with a total of £1 billion of investment in affordable housing and transport. I want to go further and faster. Although we lost control of the city council last May, just last week at the budget meeting we pressed the new Labour administration to invest the council’s own money in housing, rather that speculate on commercial property as it wanted, because we think that people in Cambridge need those houses. We therefore argued for £12 million to be put into 100 affordable homes, but sadly Labour decided to stick with its rather more risky approach. That housing was needed locally and would have generated revenues for the council as well.
We will keep pressing, but we also need to do that nationally. My party has the most ambitious plan among the three parties: to build 300,000 homes a year, because the calculations show that replacement needs 225,000 homes as there are more households. If we do anything less than 300,000, we will not be keeping pace and the pressure will continue, albeit perhaps at a slower rate.
Emma Reynolds
Given that the Liberal Democrats are part of a Government who have presided over the lowest level of house building in peacetime since the 1920s, what is the hon. Gentleman’s party’s plan for those 300,000 homes a year?
Dr Huppert
I am sure that the hon. Lady has heard the discussions. Garden cities would be a large part of that plan, because they are a sustainable way to go ahead. It is no secret that we have wanted to see much more of this, but coalition government is not the same as a single-party, Liberal Democrat Government—I look forward to seeing that at some point.
The other thing we would like to do that we have set out in plans is to give local authorities the ability to suspend the right to buy and the right to acquire. They have played a useful role in many places, but they are incredibly damaging in other areas. They are depleting social housing in places such as Cambridge. A localist agenda would allow councils to decide what is best and ensure that all proceeds are used to build more social housing.
Since we have the Minister here, I would like to pick up another issue quickly.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) on securing this important debate.
As a country, we face a severe housing crisis. We are not even building half the number of homes that we need to keep up with demand. As the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), the former Housing Minister, said, certainly for more than 25 or 30 years, we simply have not been building anywhere near the number of homes that we need. It is regrettable that, under this Government, we have seen the lowest level of house building in peacetime since the 1920s.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South has spelt out, people are being priced out of home ownership, and millions are on the waiting list for a social home. Home ownership is at its lowest for 30 years, and a record number of young people in their 20s and 30s, many of whom are living at home with their parents, are suffering most from this. We had the lowest number of homes in 20 years built for social rent last year. As my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Sir Hugh Bayley) pointed out, there has been an increase of 55% in those sleeping rough since 2010, and an increase of 26% in those who are statutorily homeless. As he also said, different people from public and private sector organisations are being priced out of home ownership. They may be cleaners, childminders, office workers, bus drivers or shop workers in some areas. In other areas, they could be teachers, police officers, or university lecturers. The list goes on.
The lack of affordable housing is not only bad for those who cannot afford to live in their communities. It is also bad, as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), for taxpayers and the wider economy. Worryingly, there has been an increase in the benefits bill because of people who are in work receiving housing benefit: an increase of two thirds since the Government came to power. It is a threat to our economic growth and competitiveness, with businesses in high-demand areas such as London—but not only London—worrying about where their staff will be able to afford to live. So it is clear that we need many more affordable homes, including council homes. I grew up in a council house, where I spent the early part of my childhood, so this is not just an abstract notion for me.
It is regrettable that the Government have taken every opportunity to undermine the building of genuinely affordable homes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South pointed out, it was an early signal of intent that, within weeks of taking office, the Government cut the affordable homes programme by an eye-watering 60%. They have redefined what affordable means. They changed what was meant by an affordable home when they introduced the 80% affordable rent model. As my hon. Friends the Members for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and for Hackney South and Shoreditch pointed out, the truth is that homes at 80% of market rent are very often unaffordable in high-demand areas. According to research carried out by Inside Housing, for a home to be affordable for those in Kensington and Chelsea, a combined income of £80,000 is needed, and for many other London boroughs people need an income of £40,000. That is not affordable for many of the key workers we need to live in our cities.
As though redefining “affordable” was not enough, the Government have watered down the requirement to provide affordable housing and removed the requirement for affordable housing contributions on sites of fewer than 10 units. As my hon. Friend the Member for York Central pointed out, this is having a particularly devastating impact in rural areas. The Government have introduced what they call a vacant building credit, which is basically an excuse for developers not to fulfil their affordable housing requirement, and even the developers themselves think that that goes too far. The Westminster Property Association, which includes British Land, Land Securities, Berkeley Homes and the Grosvenor Group, said that the policy was deeply flawed and would lead to a further erosion of the ability of people from a wide range of backgrounds to live in the heart of the capital.
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.
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%.
