Amendment of the Law

George Freeman Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint]

People throughout the country benefited from the decent homes programme and other housing initiatives that helped them to get on to the property ladder and to ensure that they had choices. In the first six months of 2010, before the election, the number of new homes built went up by more than 20%, but in the last six months of 2010, after the election, the number of new homes started fell by nearly 20%. If the Secretary of State wants that debate, I am always happy to have it with him—or with any of his colleagues.

The country wants to know what the Secretary of State and his Government will do to help to build the homes for which communities up and down the country are crying out. Whatever he pretends, the reality is that the Budget brings very little good news. It promises help for first-time buyers. The Opposition welcome the Government’s U-turn—their decision to bring back Labour’s homebuy scheme, which they insist on calling “Firstbuy”—but less than a year ago, the Minister for Housing and Local Government described that policy as an “expensive flop”. That was not what thousands of first-time buyers thought about it or what the housing industry made of it. The Home Builders Federation said that it

“was judged a major success by the industry”.

Only a matter of months later, with his customary humility, the Minister has been forced to admit that he called it wrong. We have wasted 10 months in which we could have ensured that people had a better opportunity to own their own homes. He has done too little, too late, and the measure does not go far enough, because while more than 3 million hopeful first-time buyers try to get a foot on the property ladder, the measure helps only 10,000 of them.

No one is convinced that the new homes bonus is the panacea to the housing crisis that the Government believe it to be, least of all the 21 Tory council leaders from the south-east who wrote to them earlier this year warning that they were not convinced that the plan provides enough of an incentive to communities for them to welcome development. The Budget was crying out for measures to support housing, but they did not happen. All it comes up with is the idea of allowing commercial properties to be turned into homes without requiring planning permission. When the Government get around to establishing exactly which sort of commercial properties will be allowed to turn into residential properties and under what conditions, we will look at their proposals carefully, but if the Secretary of State really believes that the answer to the country’s housing crisis is turning some empty offices into luxury penthouses, or asking people to live in disused out-of-town business parks or derelict industrial estates, he had better think again.

The biggest disappointment is the failure to address the deeper problems of housing supply and the lack of available mortgages. In their submission on the Budget, the Home Builders Federation is absolutely clear that mortgage availability

“is the biggest immediate constraint on demand and house building.”

Figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders published as recently as 18 March show that mortgage lending has stalled. It says that lending is

“weaker than a year ago”

and that the housing market is “stuck in a rut”, but on that, the Budget is silent.

Before we move on from housing, let us remind ourselves of another matter on which the Government have not lived up to their promises. Just a few weeks ago, the Minister for Housing and Local Government told the Zero Carbon Hub annual conference:

“The commitment to Zero Carbon remains in place—there’s no ambiguity about that”,

but when reading the small print of the Budget, we discover that that is just another broken promise, because from 2016, new homes will no longer have to source all their energy from carbon-neutral sources, which goes back on a commitment that the Conservatives made in opposition and repeated in government. Those standards were about not only protecting our environment, but driving innovation and creating new jobs in the green economy. The Government’s failure on that undermines not only their green credentials, but the ability of our economy to compete for new jobs, new investment and new industries.

Let me deal with the underlying economic nonsense at the heart of Government policy. They hope that the UK economy will be saved by an export-led recovery, which I call Osborne’s see-saw, because the Chancellor views the public and private sectors as opposite ends of a see-saw. He thinks that the harder, deeper and faster he cuts the public sector, the sooner the private sector grows to fill the space and suck up the unemployment. One does not have to be an economist to know that there is no reason why cutting home helps, police officers and council cleaners will lead to the UK selling more electrical equipment, cars or IT services abroad. However, I do know that if we cut public investment in roads, regeneration and house building, and shred the school building programme, the private sector takes a huge hit. The construction industry nose-dives and hundreds of thousands of skilled workers and those who manufacture and supply to them lose their jobs.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Has the right hon. Lady noticed the International Monetary Fund’s recent figures showing that Britain is running interest rates 3% lower than those in countries with similar deficits to us? Is that not a fundamental result of our programme for the deficit?

[Caroline Flint]

I notice that the economies of the USA, France and Germany grew in the last quarter of 2010, but that of Britain shrank by 0.6%, and that the German and US economies are forecast to grow more strongly.

This is the first ever Budget for growth to downgrade its own growth forecast, yet the Government’s answer is not to continue Labour’s plan to manage the deficit reduction, but to go faster and further and hammer public spending harder. Then they blame everyone but themselves when growth forecasts fall and when Government borrowing rises. Hundreds of thousands of people tried to tell the Government on Saturday that it is hurting but not working, and they are just not listening. For this Government, giving a tax cut to the banks was more important than supporting the construction industry, keeping people in work or building new homes.

The Budget shows above all else how out of touch the Government are. With more people out of work, inflation rising and people facing the biggest squeeze on their living standards in a generation, we hear the Secretary of State make much of this year’s council tax freeze, which every Labour council has implemented, despite receiving much steeper cuts than Tory and Liberal Democrat councils in far wealthier parts of the country. However, with the Deputy Prime Minister busily coming up with a thousand and one new taxes and the Business Secretary desperately trying to resurrect the idea of his mansions tax, it remains to be seen whether the Secretary of State will be able to say the same next year.

A council tax freeze helps only so much. It is a £72 saving versus a VAT increase that will cost a family £450 extra this year, and it is coming at a time when families are losing tax credits and facing a freeze in their child benefit, when pensioners are seeing winter fuel payments cut, and when the Government’s cuts are undermining our recovery and costing people their livelihoods. They give with one hand but take with many more from the communities that we represent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

A very interesting thing happened in my city in 2009. For the first time since the 1960s, the number of affordable rented homes built exceeded the number of private homes—55% of all new build was affordable rented homes, subsidised by public spending. That subsidy helped the private builders who otherwise would have had to shut up shop for a while—as many have had to do—and meant that some at least could stay in work, and that gave work to the skilled work force who would otherwise be sitting at home watching daytime television because there was no work. When those people are at work they are contributing to our economy and paying taxes—[Interruption.] I do not know why that is so funny for people who want to reduce the deficit, because if people are paying taxes in, that is far better than their simply taking benefits out.

That was a good thing. It showed the weakness of the private sector, however, that it was affordable rented homes that had to be built in the numbers to keep some people in work. I look out from my constituency office at a regeneration scheme that has stalled because the private sector is not leaping in to build new homes and to bring offices or any other kind of business into the area. I look out on land. There is no shortage of land, but there is a shortage of investment to make all this development happen. We ought to invest in housing and build a real shared equity scheme, rather than providing a meagre amount of money that will be available for only one year, as we learn if we read the detail. The scheme is not sustainable: for one year there will be £250 million.

Shared equity has certainly helped to keep the house market going in my city—it is very important—but it needs subsidy. What is wrong is the constant juxtaposition of the private and public sector as though they are at war. In fact, the two are constantly interrelated.

[George Freeman]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Sheila Gilmore]

No, I will not.

The private and public sectors are constantly interrelated, because public sector stimulus has kept the economy going since the recession began.

History has been rewritten, and I find it deeply perplexing and upsetting that the Liberals have been prepared to be complicit in that. I am not surprised that the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) took us along the byways of Colchester becoming a city, because it was a diversionary tactic. He did not want to talk about his party’s real economic policy. It reminded me of when I was working from home—suddenly, cleaning the kitchen became quite attractive because I could not settle down to do the work that required a bit more effort. That is what is happening with a party that went into the election telling people that it would be downright dangerous to cut public spending too quickly. That is not just some sort of Labour notion, as the Conservatives seem to think. It was the policy of two of the parties that went into the election and that, together, won a majority of public support. It is not true that the public supported the financial disaster that the Conservatives are now wishing on us.

I said in a previous finance debate that the proof would be in the outcomes and that if the Conservative party was right and economic growth was driven by their policies, I would concede that, but so far we are seeing nothing of the sort. Our position would not be too far, too fast—