amendment of the law

Fiona O'Donnell Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn]

If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I wish to make a little more progress.

I will now turn to the Budget. I have some questions to put to the Secretary of State. We know that the Government have a soft spot for people who earn a lot of money, but why is he proposing that his new deposit and mortgage scheme should be made available to anyone earning any amount, including millionaires, so that they can buy a house worth up to £600,000? Why is he changing the rules in that way, given that Firstbuy is currently only for those with family incomes below £60,000, and given that the Treasury document published last Wednesday states that the scheme is meant to help

“households struggling to save for the high mortgage deposits required by lenders”?

How many struggling top rate taxpayers does he expect to take advantage of the new scheme? No doubt they will be very grateful to him for his generosity.

In respect of the mortgage guarantee element of the help-to-buy scheme, can the Secretary of State clarify once and for all whether people who already own a property will be able to use it to buy a second home? He did not quite answer that earlier—[Interruption.] No, he did not. On Thursday, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills could not answer the question. When asked, he simply said:

“The scheme has not yet been designed in detail.”—[Official Report, 21 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 1102.]

At the same time, the Minister for Housing told “World at One” that second-home purchases would not be allowed. The BBC then reported that No. 10 had had to clarify the position. It seemed that the Housing Minister had been referring to another part of the help-to-buy scheme relating to equity loans. So yesterday we all turned on “The Andrew Marr Show” to watch the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and far from ruling it out categorically, he said, in a formulation that the Secretary of State has repeated today:

“Our intention is not to help people to buy second homes”.

If the Government do not want it to happen, why do Ministers not simply make it clear that it is not going to happen? Otherwise, reminiscent of last year’s Budget, we will have fanfare followed by farce.

In the event that these schemes are over-subscribed, what criteria will be used to determine which applicants are going to get assistance? I listened very carefully to the Secretary of State when he said that foreign nationals would not be eligible for assistance from the scheme, but where in the Government’s scheme description does it say that foreign nationals will not be eligible? I have looked at the mortgage eligibility criteria, and they do not say that. Has he taken any advice on whether EU nationals who are resident in the UK will be barred by law from taking part in the scheme?

What estimate has the Secretary of State made of the impact that “help to buy” will have on the housing market, given that we know that it is the lack of supply that has led to high house prices? The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has warned that the Government must be careful not to create “another housing bubble”. It seems that the scheme is not even a done deal with the lenders, because the Council of Mortgage Lenders has set out certain conditions that it wants to be met, or else, it warns, the scheme could be made “uneconomical”. How many additional homes, in total, does the Secretary of State think will be built as a result of the scheme?

[Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend also seek clarity on whether, in the event of a family break-up and a parent wishing to buy a home, that parent will be restricted in the number of bedrooms they can have in that home, or is aspiration only for some and not for others?

[Hilary Benn]

That is a very good question that has already been asked. I am very happy to give way to the Secretary of State if he wishes to answer it. Does he wish to answer? No, he does not.

We need a lot of new affordable homes because of the decision taken by the Government nearly three years ago to slash the affordable housing budget, when £4 billion was taken away. We are then asked to be grateful to the Secretary of State when we hear in the Budget announcements that an additional £225 million will be made available, although it seems that only £125 million of it will be spent before 2015. That figure is dwarfed by the original £4 billion cut. We are told that this is a time for tough choices. A quarter of a billion pounds was identified by the Secretary of State to try to persuade councils to collect the bins in the way that he thinks is correct. It was such a failure that only one council took him up on his offer. A quarter of a billion pounds and one council: think how many affordable homes that money could have been used to build! If the Government want to be taken seriously on affordable housing, they have to will the means. That is why we called for the 4G auction proceeds and the bankers’ bonus tax repetition to be used to build 125,000 new affordable homes to get the economy moving.

The Secretary of State referred to councils. We know that he is presiding over cuts to the local authority sector that are bigger than in any other part of the public sector and that the cuts are being unfairly applied. Councils need as much money as they can find to help, in part, to build homes. When the Secretary of State was asked about these cuts earlier this year in front of the departmental Select Committee, he said that in his view the cuts were “modest”. In private, however, it seems that his views are rather different. When it was reported last month that the Chancellor was looking for further cuts from certain Departments, including CLG, The Times said that

“sources close to Mr Pickles”—

[Interruption.] It certainly was not me. The Times said that

“sources close to Mr Pickles made clear that he was not accepting the latest reductions, arguing that council services had already been cut to the bone.”

It seems, therefore, that the Secretary of State’s private views are rather different from his public views. We are used to hearing Liberal Democrats say one thing to one audience and another thing to another, but I am surprised that the Secretary of State is also doing so.

This is a familiar record. The Secretary of State, as the statistics show, is not very good at getting things done. It is not just me who thinks that; the Chancellor does, too. Apparently the Chancellor was in a fiery mood at the Cabinet meeting following the loss of the triple A credit rating and challenged Ministers about the poor rate of growth. The Daily Telegraph reported:

“Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, was given a ‘dressing down’ for failings in the Government’s flagship enterprise zone programme, according to sources.

With less than a month until he unveils his Budget, the Chancellor criticised Mr Pickles over figures that show that one in three enterprise zones is failing to attract enough businesses. Mr Pickles is then said to have attempted to deflect the blame on to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, by accusing him of failing to convince foreign businesses to invest in the schemes.”

It is a very familiar story: Cabinet members are so busy fighting and blaming each other that it is no wonder that they cannot sort out the problems facing the country.

The reforms to the national planning policy framework were supposed to streamline the planning system, but it seems that they have left councils less able to decide applications quickly. The national rate of decisions taken on major applications within 13 weeks has fallen from 62% in 2011 to 57% in 2012, and the same is true of minor applications determined within eight weeks, which are down from 72% to 69%, and the transition period is about to finish.

The planning Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford, said recently that he wants further relaxation of the planning laws. We would be very interested to hear what he has in mind.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), who is now, we hear, a self-declared fan of a balanced Budget. No doubt his disappointment in his own Government has kept him out of the Chamber for the vast majority of today’s debate.

I do not know if you noticed, Mr Deputy Speaker, but on the day of the Budget this Chamber was colder than I have ever felt it before. It was as though a cold, chilly winter breeze was rolling through the Chamber as an ailing, failing, flailing Chancellor came to the Dispatch Box—but it was all too little, too late. I am so pleased to see the Business Secretary in his seat, because he will agree with me—or I will agree with him, most humbly—that the mistake that this Government made was to choke off the recovery. Just as the snow across this country is choking off the green shoots of spring, so this Government, by cutting too quickly and too deeply, have choked off the recovery.

What really chilled me to the bone was when the Chancellor spoke about an aspirational Britain, because I am old enough to remember aspirational Britain the first time around. It was aspiration for some, but not for others.

This Government are out of touch. I apologise for being late for today’s opening speech, Mr Deputy Speaker, but as a trustee of my local food bank my time was being taken up by people who are aspiring to put food on their table, aspiring to heat their homes and aspiring to stay in their homes.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fiona O'Donnell]

No, thank you.

When people look back on this Government, they will see five wasted years. The two greatest evils that they have committed are the bedroom tax and the cut for millionaires. They still have time to make more mistakes, but this country will never forgive them for those measures because they go to the heart of this Government.

I want to make some pleas on behalf of my constituency.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fiona O'Donnell]

No, thank you.

I want a more joined-up approach to government. Iberdrola is currently investing £10 billion in this country, but it is sitting on £3 billion because of the mess that is this Government’s energy policy. The coal-powered power station at Cockenzie in my constituency has closed and Iberdrola is not willing to invest until it gets some clarity from the Government. Some 1,000 construction jobs are on hold in my constituency, as are apprenticeships in a year when youth unemployment has risen by more than 7%. Will the Treasury team get together with the Department of Energy and Climate Change and get this in order, so that Iberdrola can invest in my constituency and the UK?

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) for the work that her Public Accounts Committee has done to let some sunshine on the disgraceful practice of tax avoidance in this country. I also praise the Government for meeting their commitment to spend 0.7% of our gross national income on development aid. I welcome that, but I want them to go further in the Finance Bill. There was outrage in this House and across the country at the practices of some companies headquartered overseas, and people in developing countries have the same right to be outraged if British companies do not pay their fair share of tax there. Will the Government take the opportunity provided by the Finance Bill to ensure clarity and transparency and that developing countries have the right to money that has been earned at the expense of their natural resources—the labour of their people—to be invested in their countries so that they can make their own choices? I hope that such a commitment will eventually be made.

The judgment on this Government has been set not by hon. Members, but by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the 200,000 children who will be in poverty at the end of this Government’s time in office who were not in poverty before, and the people who will be worse off in 2015 than they were in 2010. I urge the Government’s Front-Bench team to listen to the Opposition and to the people of this country, and to get their act together.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—