Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Grant Shapps and Chris Williamson
Grant Shapps
Just to clarify one point, sub-prime lending happened when people who could not afford to pay a mortgage back were lent money, sometimes as much as 120% of the value of the property. That is nothing to do with today’s NewBuy scheme. I know that the hon. Gentleman takes a keen interest in the private rented sector in particular. He makes a lot of very good and serious points about it and I can inform him that this Friday I intend to come and see him in his constituency to see the problems for myself.
Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)
I wonder what will shake the Housing Minister out of his complacency. Surveys show that 90% of private sector tenants would prefer to be living under another form of tenure, but his policies are trapping more and more people in private rented accommodation, paying ever-increasing rents. Despite his rhetoric, the Housing Minister is failing those tenants and failing to achieve his claims that this Government would build more homes than Labour achieved. When will he get a grip on this housing crisis and stop making empty announcements that fail to live up to expectations?
Grant Shapps
I have certainly been shaken out of any sense of complacency by that question, given that it came from a member of a party under whose government we saw house building crash to its lowest level since the 1920s. I can report to the House this afternoon that in the past year alone house building starts in England went up by 25% compared with those in 2009.
Decent Homes
Debate between Grant Shapps and Chris Williamson(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
We could knock these figures back and forth, but I reject the idea that the cut is about 50%. I accept, however, that more money needs to be spent on decent homes.
Grant Shapps
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not mind my making a little progress. Others have spoken for a lot longer than I will get to respond to the many points that have been raised.
We are putting in £2.1 billion, but I would estimate that we need about £3.5 billion to truly finish the programme. I expect that, by April, about 210,000 homes will still be in need of decent homes funding, and the programme throughout this Parliament may cover about 150,000 of them.
The Chair of the Select Committee also asked for greater flexibility for local authorities to, for example, put in a boiler but charge 0.5% more rent. That is a very sensible suggestion and it requires no intervention from me. Local authorities are absolutely within their rights to do that. The guideline rents that we currently provide mean that they already have flexibility, and the direction of policy in the Localism Bill, which is at Committee stage, is to do precisely what he says. It is an excellent idea and one of the very good suggestions that have been made.
My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) raised the issue—perhaps he did this inadvertently, but it also came up in a later exchange—of the value of ALMOs versus housing associations versus local authorities. I do not particularly want to enter into this debate, other than to say that, from a Government perspective, I have a completely neutral view on whether an ALMO is better than a local authority or a housing association. Indeed, there have been some very interesting exchanges throughout the afternoon, and they have all been argued from the individual perspectives of constituency MPs. We know that, at certain times, an ALMO can be very good or very bad, and the same can be said about a local authority or a housing association.
There are even arguments about the size of housing associations, from vast conglomerates—I have a great deal of sympathy with some of the comments about the distances sometimes involved—to some small ones. In my experience, having travelled around the country a lot, looking at different types of housing, there is no single prescription for the right size or shape of organisation to run housing.
The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) made a number of interesting points. I was impressed in particular by her comments on the quality of the environment and on how important design is to the way people feel, which was picked up again by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), when he talked about walking into a block of flats and how the entranceway can make all the difference.
The hon. Member for Stockport also made the point about walking into the home of someone who has had the decent homes work done—the delighted tenant—and sharing in that delight. I am sure that, as constituency MPs, we have all been in that position. I put it on record that, in the previous Parliament, I was the Conservative Opposition Member who represented the most council tenants in the country—I have not checked for this Parliament. On many occasions, however, I have walked into a kitchen or bathroom and been greeted by the delighted tenant. It is an absolute pleasure.
I also put it on record that I believe in the decent homes programme. It was an achievement of the previous Government. I accept the comments of the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and others, including the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson), that it probably started four years too late, but it did a lot of good work. I also accept the arguments of the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and others, that it sometimes carries on doing work where it is not quite required to do so, or doing it in a uniform or almost machine-like fashion, at times unnecessarily ripping out perfectly good accommodation or facilities, as mentioned by other Members.
My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) talked about the importance of apprenticeships. I absolutely agree with what I thought was a thoughtful contribution from him. We have a great opportunity, with today’s economic backdrop, to ensure that local skills are being used or upgraded to provide improvements for people’s homes. It is the perfect mix and combination, given the opportunity of the £2 billion-plus to ensure that it happens in the future.
The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) made a number of interesting points about estates still requiring regeneration. I offer to engage with the hon. Lady to listen to the problems and to be of as much assistance as possible. It is not easy, the money does not exist and we have had to make difficult decisions, as she and everyone else appreciates.
However, I wanted to correct one point in the hon. Lady’s speech, when she seemed to suggest she believed that the local authority would have to contribute 10% towards the costs of decent homes. That is not what the Government said. I said that if more than 10% of repairs were needed in order to reach decent homes standard—if there were more than 10% non-decent stock, in other words, which I believe would be the case in Lewisham—authorities can apply for decent homes funding. It is not that they are then expected to pitch in 10%, although in fact it might be a good idea for them to do so. I just wanted to ensure that that got on the record.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Grant Shapps and Chris Williamson(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
It is very important to get out to all local authorities across the country the message that the most vulnerable people should be protected in this spending settlement. That is an important point, because one of the principal ways in which vulnerable people are protected is through the Supporting People programme. Its budget has been pretty much kept intact. I will send out the message from the Dispatch Box now that the reduction in Supporting People is just 2.7% per annum, so there is no reason for local authorities to use that as an excuse to cut services to vulnerable people.
Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)
The Minister must accept that, far from supporting local authorities, the unprecedented cuts that his Government are inflicting will lead to diminished services, massive job losses and lower economic growth in the private sector. Will he at least concede that in the context of these massive cuts and the abolition of area-based grants, the £650 million that he is offering to freeze council tax is nothing more than a gimmick? Can he tell the House how he justifies sacrificing the country’s most deprived communities to indulge the Secretary of State’s penchant for attention-grabbing publicity stunts?
Grant Shapps
That was an interesting pre-written question, which seems to have ignored what we have established from the Dispatch Box today: that £650 million will lead to a 0% council tax rise in virtually every authority in the country. Although the hon. Gentleman says that that is of no consequence at all, I can tell him that for the pensioners in my constituency, his constituency and in those of my hon. Friends it will matter a great deal.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Grant Shapps and Chris Williamson
The Minister for Housing (Grant Shapps)
The current legislative framework delivers the right balance of rights and responsibilities between landlords and tenants, so, as I announced to the House on 10 June, we have no plans to add to it, whether through a national register for landlords or the regulation of managing and letting agents.
Chris Williamson
Why is the Minister so indifferent to the rights of private tenants? Is not he worried that weakening local authorities’ powers will give a green light to rogue landlords and lead to a surge in the number of houses in multiple occupation? I ask him in all sincerity to think again about ditching the plans to give private tenants greater protection—or is he happy to usher in a new era of Rachmanism?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman may not have been here when I last addressed this subject, but I am keen to protect tenants’ rights and to ensure that sufficient landlords can operate in the market and are not regulated out of it, thereby making rents more expensive for the very people who want to go into the private rented sector. I looked long and hard for and asked in the Department about the supposed landlords register that the previous Government announced. I could not find a scrap of paper about it, leading me to conclude that it was more a case of a press release than a policy on a landlords register.