Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill
Debate between Frank Dobson and Jeremy Corbyn(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Jeremy Corbyn
Does my right hon. Friend think that this will lead to a whole cadre of virtually stateless people who will congregate together in one place, and that will be a problem for absolutely everybody rather than one state? Surely, as he rightly says, a state has a responsibility towards its own nationals.
Frank Dobson
I understand my hon. Friend’s point. The whole proposition of exclusion orders seems to be predicated on the idea, first, that these people are totally rational; and secondly, that their greatest desire is to come back to Britain. Neither of those things will necessarily be the case, because some very odd people are going to be involved.
Private Rented Sector
Debate between Frank Dobson and Jeremy Corbyn(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I am pleased that we are debating the private rented sector. I suspect there will be many more such debates between now and the general election, because the situation requires urgent intervention, and in many respects a change in the law.
Like some of my colleagues who have already spoken, I represent an inner-London constituency, and we are facing the most acute housing crisis that I can remember, both in my time as an MP and before that as a councillor in a neighbouring borough. When I hold a constituency advice surgery—as we all do—I am frequently there for five or six hours, and 90% of the cases are about housing. Such cases are desperately sad: it is frightening to hear about what people are going through and the trauma of families being upheaved and forced to move out of the borough from one private rented property to another and another and another, with all the disruption that causes to their children’s education, their health and family relationships, and the damage it does to the community as a whole.
The ward where I live has a population turnover of almost 30% per year, which makes any kind of community cohesion much more difficult and voluntary organisations less well populated, and affects all the social infrastructure that is so important in our societies. We must consider the desperate housing need, not just in inner-city areas but in the country overall.
Frank Dobson
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the biggest problems is that these constant moves often involve children? It is clear from the research that a child having to shift from one school to another—sometimes two or three schools in one year—is about as damaging to their educational opportunities as can be imagined.
Jeremy Corbyn
My right hon. Friend makes a strong point with which I absolutely concur and which I understand well. It works like this: a family is in receipt of local housing allowance, and the landlord puts the rent up way beyond what the allowance enables them to pay; they do not have enough other income—either from a low-paid job or from other benefits—to make up the difference, so they have to move. There is no possibility of their getting another private rented property in the same community, so the council is forced to do its best by hassling various agents all over the place to try to find somewhere for them to live—my council does that all the time, and Camden council does much the same thing. The family is perhaps found somewhere to live in Enfield, Barking or wherever. They are there for six months, they have the temerity to complain about the conditions, the tenancy ends, and they get moved again. The children either have to be uprooted from one school to another in another borough, or make a long journey to return to their original borough—such as Camden or Islington—and try to maintain themselves at the same school. What kind of life is it for a seven or eight-year-old child to be dragged on a bus or train for an hour every morning to get to primary school and having to change time and again? Ask the teachers how the kids suffer because of that.
My borough is doing its best to provide as much council housing as it can. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) kindly visited our borough last week, and she will have seen the excellent quality of our new build. Indeed, it is rather better quality than the current private sector new build: larger rooms, better accommodation, and more energy efficient—very good quality stuff. It is difficult to find land to build it on and expensive to do, but the social investment is enormous, as is the return for the whole community.
The message from the Government is that we should increase council rents to 80% of market value. That would be totally unaffordable for people who live in our existing council properties, and would mean that they could not accept them even if they were offered them. We must maintain the social rented model and address the problems of housing in this country, essentially by building a lot more council houses.
Some 200,000 or more new households are created every year, and the number of new properties being developed in the country is around 100,000 per year. We are all into the science of managing shortages. Councils are doing that, as is everybody else, and the only safety valve is the private rented sector. The only safety valve in that is ever-increasing rents and the huge profitability that exists within that sector. We therefore need to do two things; the first is to support local authorities to build council housing.
I do not support the sale of council houses or big discounts on their sale, particularly in areas with enormous housing shortages, not because it makes a lot of difference to residents, if they remain living in them, but because later the properties might be sold on or rented in the private rented sector. The highest rent I have come across so far—there might be more in the pipeline—for a former council flat is £660 per week. For the person living next door in an identical council flat—possibly even in better conditions, because the council tends to look after things quite well—the rent would be about £100 to £120 per week. How can anyone possibly justify that discrepancy?
I support the Opposition Front-Bench team’s proposal for the regulation of letting agents and for the enforcement of much better conditions and much longer tenancies. In areas of very high housing demand—in London and other cities such as Oxford and York and in the centres of other cities—rent rises are huge. I have no idea where the Residential Landlords Association gets its figures from, but it claims that in the 12 months to March 2014, the rent increase in London was 1.4%. I tried this figure out on people in my community, but I only got as far as “1.4” before they started laughing. They said, “That must have been last week’s increase.” I have no idea where these figures come from, but these things are very important.
We seem to be presiding over a cowboy mentality among some, although not all, letting agents who think it okay to stick some scruffy piece of paper in a window saying, “No DSS allowed here”—they are a bit out of date: the Department of Social Security was abolished a long time ago and is now the Department for Work and Pensions; perhaps they should be educated about that. However, should anyone be allowed to say, “If you’re on benefits, you’re a second-class citizen and you cannot even apply”? Also, the “Panorama” programme has exposed the racial profiling that goes on, presumably under pressure from landlords saying they do not want any Muslims, blacks, Jews—or any other group they care to identify. To his credit, the Minister correctly agreed with me that this is criminal activity, completely wrong and has to be outlawed. I hope there will be serious prosecutions where it can be proved, as a lesson to others that we will not accept race discrimination in the housing market.
I hope that the House will support the motion. I do not know whether the Government will support it—I seriously doubt it—but I hope we can have not just the regulations outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East but even longer tenancies. I also think there is a case for rent controls, particularly in areas of very high housing demand such as London. If we do not manage the private rented sector, control rents and build more housing in London, it will become a totally divided city: a city divided between those lucky enough to get social housing through councils or housing associations, those rich enough to buy and become owner-occupiers, and the rest, who will be spending all their earnings and savings on excessive rents. It will lead to labour shortages and economic decline in our big cities. We need regulation and a determination that we, as a nation, will solve the housing crisis and give all our kids somewhere decent and safe to live.
Private Rented Sector
Debate between Frank Dobson and Jeremy Corbyn
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I commend the speech by my new hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane), who represents the great city of Manchester. He is one of the few people who could survive a headline saying “New MP for Sale” without being investigated by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I congratulate him on the wit and intellect that he used in his maiden speech, and on the tributes that he paid to his predecessors. One characteristic of both Alf Morris and Paul Goggins was that they commanded rather a lot of respect and affection on both sides of the House. That is a trick that most of us have not pulled off over the years, I have to say, and I hope he manages it. I pay tribute to some of the work that got him here, including his work on promoting a living wage and on trying to undermine and replace the loan sharks who batten on a lot of poorer people. I am sure that he is very welcome in the House.
I welcome the report by the Select Committee and commend the hard work that it has put in, but I am afraid that I do not think it goes anything like far enough in dealing with the problems of the private rented sector in London. Londoners are being priced out of London, and young Londoners are suffering most. Whether they are seeking to buy or to rent somewhere to live, all the options are being taken out of the reach of ordinary people. Over the years, housing policy in London has been a failure, and there is now a housing crisis the like of which I cannot remember in all the time that I have been involved in local politics.
When I first became an MP, I knew that a nurse at Great Ormond Street or University College hospital would not be able to afford to live in the area. Over the years I realised that, increasingly, junior doctors would not be able to afford to live in the area surrounding those two great hospitals. It has now reached the stage where a new specialist consultant can no longer afford to live in the area, which is a ludicrous and damaging situation.
Younger people who are starting careers and who want to start a family and to find a place to live are being pushed out by house prices and rents that have been rising out of hand. The badly off have been hammered and the situation in London is such that—these are official figures—the average weekly rent now exceeds 50% of the average weekly pay. It is not just the badly off who are being driven out; it is people on middling incomes and young professionals who are hoping to start a career. They certainly cannot afford to buy and increasingly they cannot afford to rent.
In the past few years, private rents have gone utterly mad. It is not just me who is saying that. A recent headline in the Evening Standard stated: “Half Londoners fear they’ll be forced to leave neighbourhood: Housing costs in London ‘driving us out’”. A few days later the paper had a similar headline: “Rents rise 8 times faster than wages”. These are unsustainable increases.
The fact is that the private rental market is failing. It receives a £9 billion subsidy from the taxpayer—£9 billion of housing benefit goes to the private sector. It does not reside in the pockets and handbags of the tenants; it goes to the landlords.
The situation now is such that rents are going up, but the supply is going down. Another headline from the Evening Standard read: “‘Generation Rent’”—that is how young professional people are being referred to —“suffers in overheated market as housing supply slumps.” The idea that high, unregulated rents are bringing resources into the private sector is simply not true. Some argue that some sort of regulation or control might harm the supply, but it could not harm it any more than the free market is managing to do at the moment.
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank my right hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour for giving way and I agree with everything he has said. Does he accept that what is happening in our constituencies is, in effect, a form of social cleansing of those on housing benefit, who cannot afford to pay the gap between the benefit level and their rent and are thus forced to leave, which is damaging to all our communities, families and schools and to everything about London life?
Frank Dobson
I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. I think I invented the phrase “social cleansing” and sometimes I refer to it as the lowland clearances, which might be of interest to our colleagues in Scotland.
A headline in The Sunday Times stated: “Buy-to-let returns top 10 % a year: Investors piling into the market as yields soar”. The supply is not soaring, but the yields are and it is time we shifted the balance in favour of the tenants, with greater security, and longer tenancies. I believe that we cannot afford to avoid introducing rent controls. In fact, I would go further and say that there should be a progressive reduction in the level of some of the rents and that, in future, rent increases should be tied to wage levels.
We of course have the problem of the massive increase in house prices, which is a major factor in the rise in rents. One of the biggest factors is foreign buyers. Some of them buy property in London to live in, but they are a small minority, because most of them now buy residential property simply as an investment that they leave empty. To read another Evening Standard headline, “Super-rich from overseas flock to buy homes in London”. They do not intend to use them as homes; they are simply an investment that is better than putting their money in gold. They cause double damage to people in London: they drive up prices; and they take a lot of housing out of supply, because the places that they buy and do not occupy could be occupied by other people.
We cannot stop EU citizens buying residential property in this country, but we can stop other people doing so. The Government have established a precedent, because they have said that a private landlord must not let to a tenant who is not lawfully in the United Kingdom. I believe that we should change the law so that people cannot sell residential property to somebody who is not entitled to be in the United Kingdom. That would have a dampening effect on these massive rises in house prices.
As the Government are now scrambling around in contemplating sanctions against Russia, may I suggest that, as a pilot scheme, we quickly pass a law to prevent Russian oligarchs from buying houses and flats in this country unless they are entitled to live here, because all that happens is that landlords, estate agents and property companies are making money? They have contributed little or nothing to making London a better place to live. In the southern tip of my constituency, which includes Covent Garden, people—with their children or their parents—battled for years in the 1970s to prevent the wholesale destruction of Covent Garden and to preserve it as the great success that it has become, but they can no longer find anywhere in Covent Garden to live, because properties are bought up by other people, whether British bankers or foreign owners.
We also have the problem of Crossrail, which has cost £16 billion, most of which has come from the taxpayer. With a fanfare of trumpets, the people now running Crossrail have announced that some firm of valuers is predicting, again to quote the Evening Standard, that “Crossrail ‘will boost property prices by up to 25 per cent’”. It has cost billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, but someone else will benefit from the increase in property values.
In all I have said, I have been very careful to avoid mentioning any socialists, and I will now mention a very unsocialist person. He said:
“Do you think it would be very unfair if the owners of all this automatically created land value due to the…enterprise of the community…had been made to pay a proportion…of the unearned increment which they secured, back to…the community?”
That was Winston Churchill at the great Free Trade hall in the great city of Manchester in 1909. He was right then, and he is right now. My view is that if there is to be a massive increase in property values as a result of Crossrail—I have always supported Crossrail—the public should get some of it back.
I will quote somebody else:
“Both ground rents, and the ordinary rent…are a species of revenue, which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry.”
He went on to suggest that rents are
“the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.”
That is what Adam Smith said in the “The Wealth of Nations”. If the Tories claim to be Churchillites or say that they support the Adam Smith Institute, it is about time that they adjusted some of their policies in line with what those distinguished people advocated.
It seems to me that there will be no prospect of ordinary folk continuing to afford somewhere decent to live in London until we introduce rent controls and reductions, introduce a tax on gratuitous increases in values accruing to landlords, and do something to stop the stinking rich foreigners buying up residential property in this country. When people talk about immigration, they say that there will be all sorts of burdens on the infrastructure. The suggestion seems to be that there will be such a burden only when poor people come here. The fact is that the people who are recruited by the City from abroad also want somewhere to live. They impose as great a burden on our housing stock as anyone else. I therefore think that we need a much more radical approach. That no doubt betrays me, yet again, as being not old Labour, but heritage Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn
I was expressing concern about my Friend’s reading list—Adam Smith and Winston Churchill —but he assured me, and he is quite right, that there was a radical tinge to Churchill who also introduced wages boards. There was also a radical tinge to Adam Smith, although he was grossly misrepresented by the far right of the Conservative party many decades later. We will not debate that.
I congratulate my Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) on his election and membership of this House, and on an absolutely superb opening speech. I have never heard anybody start with Aristotle. I hope he carries on in that philosophical mode. It was absolutely brilliant.
I will be brief, you will be pleased to hear, Mr Speaker, because those on the Front Benches wish to wind up the debate. Like my Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras, who has the neighbouring constituency, I represent inner London where the housing crisis is acute beyond belief. I hold regular advice bureaux, as all Members do, and my walk-in advice bureau on the third Friday of the month frequently lasts for anything from six to eight hours. The vast majority of the people who come have housing issues, and they are devastated by the situation they are in. They are often people who have been placed in the private rented sector by the local authority, which must house them because they are in desperate housing need and the family is in danger of homelessness, or has medical needs and so on. I do not blame the local authority for that. People’s rent goes up, their housing benefit is capped, they cannot afford to meet the gap, and the only alternative for them is to be moved out of the area to a distant place. At the moment, my borough does not place people outside London, but I suspect it is only a matter of time before all London boroughs decant people outside London because they simply cannot find the private rented accommodation to house them. Schools are disrupted when families are moved out and the community is weakened. The flats are then rented to somebody at an even higher rent.
I am pleased that the Communities and Local Government Committee has decided to concentrate on the private rented sector. I agree with much in the report, including the regulation of letting agents, better conditions in the private rented sector, the guaranteed return of deposits, and the protection of tenants against unfair eviction because they have the temerity to complain to local environmental health services.
I would like those measures to be introduced, but we must address the elephant in the room—the rent levels in the private rented sector. In answer to a question from me yesterday, the Minister asserted that private rented sector rents in London are going up by 1.4% per year. I tested that out on a few people last night in my constituency. The answers ranged from, “Which planet is he living on?” to “Did he mean 1.4% per week?” There is a total disconnect between the figures the Department works on and the reality of life for people in the private rented sector.
Government Members say, “We cannot interfere with the market,” but we are already doing so. As my Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras has pointed out, the public are putting £9 billion a year into the hands of private landlords. That is market interference. I support housing benefit, but it has an effect. No rent regulation is associated with housing benefit, and there is no control on rent levels. That must be addressed. I recognise that, in most of the UK, private rents are not excessively high. In many parts of the country, they are lower than council rents. When I talk to colleagues about supporting my ideas on the regulation of private rents, they say, “It’s not an issue in my area.” I fully understand that, but in London and on the fringes of London, and in one or two other cities, it is a massive issue. A third of my constituents live in the private rented sector. They ask me, “How much longer can I afford to stay in your constituency?” Some of those people are not poor—their salaries are quite good. They are young professionals who want to live in an inner-city area of London but can no longer afford to do so.
There is a knock-on effect on the London labour market. I have been to the Royal Mail sorting offices in my constituency, the local hospital—on many occasions—the fire station, the police station, social services, the council departments and other places, and have asked people where they live. If they are under 40, the chances are that they live at home with their parents. They do not want to—the parents often do not want them there either—but are stuck in that situation. If they have managed to buy a place, it is a very long way away from London, and they spend an awful lot of time and money on commuting, which has an environmental effect. A few years down the line, where will the nurses, the teachers and the firefighters come from if we do not address housing for people who need houses and places in London?
To my local authority’s great credit, it is building council houses. It hopes to complete about 2,000 with the housing associations on affordable or social rent models. That is making a good difference to a lot of people’s lives. It is a great pleasure meeting families who have lived in grossly overcrowded, poor-quality accommodation when they get a decent, permanent, reliable and secure council flat. That has changed their lives, and has changed the attitudes of the young people involved. However, we are not doing enough of it; instead, we are letting the market rip, and allowing all the problems that go with that to arise.
I have introduced a Bill under the ten-minute rule procedure, the Regulation of the Private Rented Sector Bill. I think that the majority of Members would find most of it unexceptionable. It deals with the need to regulate letting agents. We could start with Criminal Records Bureau checks—in some cases, that would be quite helpful—and then move on to full regulation of the way in which agents charge, the extent of their transparency, and so on. Not all letting agents are bad, just as not all private landlords are bad, but there are some pretty seriously rogue elements.
Agencies discriminate blatantly not only on grounds of ethnicity and race—as “Panorama” discovered—but against people on benefits. They say “We will not allow anyone who collects benefit to rent a flat through this agency.” Why do they do that? It is an interesting question, because someone who pays part or all of his or her rent by means of housing benefit will actually be a very reliable tenant. The answer can only be that the agencies do not want the attention of HMRC to be focused on the levels of income they are receiving.
We need regulation to deal with that, we need transparency in regard to how deposit schemes work and how tenants get their deposits back, and we need serious attention to be paid to the longevity of tenancies. Six months for assured shorthold tenancies is far too short; at least five years strikes me as a reasonable basis, although obviously there should be an appropriate form of get-out clause for people who, for instance, get a job in another part of the country. That can be worked out.
Other countries manage to regulate rents. Germany has a very regulated and a much bigger private rented sector, and, in general, private rented properties are owned by much larger landlords—co-operatives, insurance companies or others. When the Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), told me that regulation of the private rented sector would bring about the economic ruin of Britain, I asked him whether that was a parallel with the economic ruin that Germany was facing as a result of its regulation of the sector. I am still awaiting his answer; I do not know when he will be able to give it to me.
My Bill proposes that local authorities should play a key role, because they understand the communities they represent. Newham council, Oxford city council and a number of other authorities have introduced registration schemes, and have sought to introduce some degree of regulation of the private rented sector. Of course, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Select Committee, pointed out, the problem is that it is the good landlords who tend to register voluntarily, and it is the rogues whom we want to be registered. Nevertheless, that is a good initiative and a good step forward. Moreover, if local authorities introduced their own private letting offices, they could use them for their own purposes when they have to house families in the private sector because they do not have enough council houses to deal with the demand.
The Bill also proposes that a combination of the Mayor and London boroughs should be given the opportunity to introduce a rent registration and rent regulation regime across London, which would have some bearing on the affordability of properties. That would give access to housing to a range of people who are currently excluded from it, and would thus create more stable, more harmonious communities.
I welcome the work that the Select Committee has done, and I welcome the fact that we are beginning to have a serious debate about the private rented sector. It should be remembered that more than a third of the communities in many parts of London are already living in the sector, and that, according to all the predictions, it will grow a great deal. I very much hope that this will become a big issue at the next election. I hope that parties including my own will understand the need for regulation and the need to limit the excessive rents that have been charged, so that we can bring about some sense of harmony and decency in this sector of the housing market throughout the country.
Social Housing in London
Debate between Frank Dobson and Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman is referring to George Peabody and the Peabody Trust, which has a very large number of properties in his constituency, that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) and many others. The Peabody buildings were of very good standard—very high quality—and they have stood the test of time. It pains me to the quick when I see the Peabody Trust and others being forced, because of their financial situation, to rent at commercial rents or sell off properties that were built for people in desperate housing need. That is not what George Peabody or others wanted to do, and we should look at that.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
In my constituency there is a block called Parnell house, which was built in 1848, before George Peabody. The Peabody Trust took it over some years ago and has run it fairly well, but recently has started selling into the open market flats that have been social housing since 1848. That does not really help people in desperate housing need.
Jeremy Corbyn
It seems a sad reflection on the great revolutions of 1848 that we should expunge them on the altar of the housing market in 2011. I shall return to council housing in a moment.
There were consistent campaigns and demands for security of tenure for people beyond council housing. Council housing has traditionally provided the most secure form of affordable tenancy and has provided for effective, stable communities. I commend those councils—I choose Camden because my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras was leader of the council—which did a high level of building when they were able to. They also adopted a planning policy that has ensured that there are stable, mixed communities stretching right into the Camden part of central London—working-class communities alongside the business areas of central London. We should be proud of that record in this city, and I would like to see it reflected in all parts of London. The same does not apply in the case of Kensington and Chelsea and—I hesitate to say it with the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) present—in Westminster where the policies have been different. I think one should commend boroughs such as Camden.
Jeremy Corbyn
I can only agree. If the problem were limited to housing benefit in the private rented sector, that would be bad enough. However, in parallel with the cut in housing benefit payments, the Government have refused to introduce rent controls or even countenance the idea of controlling private sector rents. I hope that we will deal with that when we return to government in 2015 as a new Labour Government—not “new Labour”, but a newly elected Labour Government; I do not want anyone to think that I have changed my ways.
Jeremy Corbyn
Possibly, yes. I would like that Government to bite the bullet, just as Harold Wilson’s Government bit the bullet in the 1960s and 1970s, and were prepared to introduce rent controls and security of tenure in the private rented sector. That policy area needs to be developed.
Another important issue is the increase in the notional rent levels for local authorities and housing associations to 80% of market rates. That has had absolutely devastating effects on the affordability, or otherwise, of council properties in areas where councils choose to charge 80%. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) intervened on me, I shall cite the case of his borough. The average income in Redbridge of non-housing benefit tenants is £381 a week, and the average weekly rent is £102 a week. The median market rent of 80% of 2010 levels is £160 a week, so tenants in Redbridge are looking at a £60 a week rent increase, which is pretty bad, and I question the affordability of paying £160 a week on an average income of £381 a week.
Other boroughs are in a far worse situation. In Kensington and Chelsea, average income for non-housing benefit tenants is £370 a week, and current average rent is £113 a week, with 80% of market levels at £440 a week—in other words £110 a week more than such a tenant earns, so totally unaffordable. The borough with the lowest average income in London is Barking and Dagenham, where income levels in 2010 for non-HB tenants were £329 a week. Current average rent is £91 a week, and 80% of market rates is £148 a week. Even in Barking and Dagenham, which is regarded as “the most affordable place in London”, we are looking at 50% of pay going on rent alone in the public sector, never mind the private sector. The figures are available for every borough, and they make very grim reading indeed. The discretionary payments to London authorities to try to ameliorate the change to housing benefit should be much greater and more permanent, and the Government and the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government should look at rent controls and security of tenure in the private rented sector.
Frank Dobson
I would rather not. I will just get on, because other people want to speak.
There is no chance now of a tube driver, an ambulance driver, an ordinary police constable, a nurse, a midwife or, in some cases, a junior doctor meeting anything like the going rate for a private sector home. They are out of that market altogether. If we want such vital people to contribute to making living in London tolerable, we have to go much further than we have in the past, under Governments of all persuasions, because otherwise the place will be torn apart. I know that the leader—at least for the time being—of the Liberal Democrats, the Deputy Prime Minister, objects to the term “social cleansing” in relation to driving up rents and removing security of tenure, but as the inventor of the phrase, I make no apologies for it, because that is what will happen. If people’s security of tenure is removed, and if rents are driven up and subsidies for them are also removed, they will be driven out.
People say that we are spending far too much on housing benefit—and indeed, one could not make a more truthful statement. I think the figure is £22 billion, and it is that high because the rents are too high. If we want to cut the amount of money going into housing benefit, the best thing would be to cut the rents. Rather than trying to cut housing benefit, we should cut the entitlement by ensuring that we reduce the rents.
Jeremy Corbyn
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Government’s claim is that when the housing benefit allowance is cut, the tenant can negotiate with the landlord, who will understand the situation and therefore reduce the rent? The Minister himself told me that in his office. I expressed some astonishment and decided to check up with Islington council, which has tried to negotiate rent reductions with landlords. The council tells me that, sadly, it is very difficult to do that, if not well nigh impossible, even for the most well-meaning and determined people. Surely the answer is not only controls, but investing £10 billion in housing, rather than £22 billion in housing benefit. That way we would all be a lot better off.
Frank Dobson
I entirely agree. Even if we transferred the money from the housing benefit account into the account of, at least, the public sector landlords who are charging high rents, that would bring rents down and be to everyone’s benefit.
My final point is this. Large numbers of places have been sold under the right to buy—certainly in my area—that have then been sold on by those who bought them or their children, following which the buy-to-let people have moved in. Therefore, somebody will have bought the flat with a massive subsidy from the taxpayer, then someone else will have bought it with a tax incentive and now they will be charging a rent that is two, three, four or five times higher than it would have been had the property never been transferred from the council’s ownership in the first place. So when people talk about public subsidy for housing, they should remember that the biggest imaginable public subsidy involves those who own or are buying a buy-to-let property that was formerly a council flat. That is the sort of thing that we need to stop, rather than rabbiting on about taking away security of tenure from all sorts of other people.
I hope that the Government will eventually take this matter seriously. One of the biggest housing programmes in my constituency was carried out by Neville Chamberlain when he was Minister of Health. Indeed, one of the buildings is called Chamberlain house. Tories should not be ashamed of their distant past record on social housing; all they need to do is revert to type and stop being mad marketeers.