George Howarth
Main Page: George Howarth (Labour - Knowsley)(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)
Order. I hope that I will not have to impose a time limit. If Members limit their speeches to around five or six minutes, we should be able to fit everyone in. However, if over the next 10 or 15 minutes it looks like we cannot achieve that by voluntary means, I will impose a time limit.
Ms Abbott
I was of course talking about the top end of the market to illustrate how the effect ripples out to the homeless in Hackney or homeless families in Greenwich. There is constant pressure driving up house values in London, and that is what is behind the spiralling cost of rent.
Colleagues have spoken about what is happening in the rental market—my hon. Friends the Members for Eltham (Clive Efford) and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) did so with particular vividness—and about spiralling rents which mean that families do not have security of tenure.
As for the social cost, London is increasingly becoming a city in which people have to be extremely wealthy or quite poor to live. That leads to a society that is inherently unstable. If we leave it to the market, to live in Islington or Hackney people either have to be able to afford a house that is worth upwards of £1 million, or be so poor that they are eligible for what social housing there is. That is an essentially unstable society and one in which it is extremely difficult to recruit public sector workers.
In Hackney, there is a generation of head teachers who originally bought at the end of the 1970s or beginning of the ’80s and who are now approaching retirement. Now, head teachers of that calibre, willing to stay for as long as they have stayed, will be hard to recruit, because no one can now buy a house in Hackney on a teacher’s salary. Young teachers who are very committed to Hackney and similar areas find themselves having to move outside the M25 in order to own a family house.
The housing problem is not only about bricks and mortar or destitution, but about what sort of society we want to see in London. How do we ensure that that society is stable? How do we recruit for the public sector in future, if increasingly people on an average public sector worker’s salary are scarcely able even to rent in the centre of London, let alone buy anything?
What is the answer to the problems that my colleagues and I have set out? We have to begin with what is happening in the private sector and at the high end of it. Something needs to be done about the non-domiciled overseas buyers—by looking at some sort of levy perhaps—and at the same time we need to make it easier for British buyers to buy off plan, although this is not the whole answer, of course. Let us remember that even flats in Dalston are being bought off plan by buyers in Hong Kong, but British buyers who wants to buy off plan two years ahead cannot get a mortgage. We need to look at the availability of mortgages to people here who are prepared to buy off plan one, two or three years in advance; otherwise, they will always be crowded out by foreign buyers who are able to get mortgage finance, which will continually drive prices up.
We need to have a financial levy on the non-domiciled buyers, but we also need to look at private sector landlords and how they are managed. It would be sad indeed if the boom in the right to buy was to turn into a new Rachmanism. Rachmanism gave private rented housing a bad name when I was a child in north Paddington. It would be extraordinary if, half a century later, through an unwillingness to exercise the right controls on the private sector, we went back to the bad old days of Rachman. I am not saying that we are there yet, but that is where the cycle is taking us. Furthermore, although the idea is unpopular, we also need to have rent controls. I do not care what we call them, but we have to bear down on spiralling rents.
My colleagues and I are saying that the crisis in London is a crisis not only for the homeless and for those who are having to rent for longer and later in life than they might otherwise have done, but for perfectly well housed people who are worrying about whether their children will ever be able to afford a house within the M25. Government could do a range of things, and Labour Members are shocked by the unwillingness of Government and of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to take effective action to fix for the well-being of ordinary Londoners a London housing market that is broken.
Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)
I will call Meg Hillier in a moment. Two more Members wish to speak and I will be calling the Front Benchers from 10.40 am, so if the hon. Lady does the maths she will know what it takes to get her colleague in.
Nick Boles
The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) was passionate, and I listened to her in silence. It would be great if she was not perhaps silent—I would hate it for her ever to be silent—but could just allow me to speak.
The reason why we introduced the permitted development right was because councils across the country were resisting the conversion of low-value, under-used offices to the houses that all of us agree are desperately needed. Since we introduced the permitted development right, it has been estimated that there were more than 2,000 conversions in less than a year of offices into homes that people are going to live in and enjoy, so that they feel that their housing need has been met. That immensely progressive reform is delivering vitally needed housing in the face of the opposition from local authorities that had no good reason to oppose it.
Nick Boles
May I make this clear? I am not giving way.
I want to address the subject of foreign buyers. Listening to Opposition Members’ speeches, one would think they wanted to prevent foreign buyers from buying London properties, which would be entirely logical given the shortage of properties. Then, listening to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East, one would think the Opposition were going to make it slightly more difficult to claim, by putting in a table or a chair, that a home was empty—