Housing Supply

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Kris Hopkins]

What is of key importance is for local authorities and housing associations to understand their stock, and to redesign, restructure and, where necessary, rebuild it to reflect local demand. [Interruption.] That is the answer.

So far, receipts from right-to-buy sales have ensured that some £420 million is available for the building of houses. We want councils to build them more quickly, and we are pushing them to do so, but I think that the Government should be extremely proud of the fact that 3,000 new homes have already been delivered as a result of the extra growth that generated those 10,000 sales.

In the Budget, the Chancellor announced that £300 million in HRA funding would be provided so that more council houses could be built. The prospectus has gone out, and we have received some responses. We will keep pushing councils to deliver those houses. Whatever the tenure, whether we are talking about private, affordable or social housing, this Government want to support the housing industry that is delivering it.

One of the tragedies that came out of the 2008 housing crash and the resulting recession, the deepest since the 1920s, was the loss of jobs. Some 250,000 people—a quarter of a million—lost their livelihoods: their wage packets disappeared. Many thousands of small and medium-sized building and construction firms were lost as a consequence of the dying days of the last Labour Administration, and the loss of that capacity—a direct result of the crash—is still being felt today. That is why the Government want to attract more young apprentices to the sector to secure the future of the housing and construction industry. Thousands of the 1.8 million apprentices whom the Government have supported so far—some 14,000 of them in the building and construction industry alone—are now the plumbers, chippies and brickies who are required to build the houses.

We have put together a builders fund worth a quarter of a billion pounds to support those small and medium-sized businesses, and we are ensuring that they can gain access to it so that they can build on smaller sites. A bidding process is about to end, and we look forward to making announcements in the future. We need to increase capacity, and to do that we need skills—the skills that were lost.

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend recalls a visit that he made on 24 January to Claughton Manor Brickworks in my constituency. It was forced to close in 2009 because there was no demand for bricks, and 35 jobs were lost. It reopened in 2013, and is now at full capacity, employing 38 people and producing bricks for tens of thousands of new houses.

[Kris Hopkins]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Not only were skills lost, not only were small and medium-sized businesses lost, but the companies that made the products that built the houses were lost as well. I remember visiting that site and talking to the foreman, who had been in a hut protecting the site for the best part of four years. I saw him on television the other day. The company is thriving. I said earlier that the industry was becoming stronger, and it is. At every level, whether we are talking about attracting young people to the sector or about encouraging investors to invest in the manufacturing of materials for house building, the industry is growing, and we should celebrate that boost to our economy.

We are extending the life of the Help to Buy scheme, thus giving some stability to the industry. One of the main points that have been made to me by its representatives is that they do not want a cycle of boom and bust; what they want is some consistency. They want to see products that will give a long life to house building, and if those products are there, they will invest. Some 1,200 businesses have signed up to the Help to Buy equity scheme, and more than 90% of them are small and medium-sized businesses.