Affordable Housing

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Emily Thornberry]

Personally, speaking as a Back Bencher, yes, I do. I want to see rent regulation. An individual should be able to enter a tenancy agreement with a landlord for a long period of time—three, four or five years—at a set rate, which should increase only in line with inflation. We should not be able to treat people as they are being treated.

I believe that the private sector has an important role to play in meeting our housing need; I am not one of those people who do not believe in the private rented sector. However, we now have an entire generation of youngsters—some of them are our own children and our researchers’ friends—who move into properties and are exploited. They are asked to pay ridiculous amounts of rent. They make a home, but after six months or a year, perhaps because they have complained about the fact that their windows are leaking, they will be chucked out and they have absolutely no rights. We have to strike the right balance, and we must not give tenants so many rights that landlords are frightened off, but we are talking about people who want to be able to make a home in a community. For them to be able to contribute properly, they need some form of security. We should not allow them to be pushed out of our cities and our metropolises because rents are continually being hiked up.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

The hon. Lady is talking about striking a balance. Does she agree that the acute problems that affect her constituents are of a different magnitude to the problems in the rest of the country? Affordable housing is a difficulty in the rest of the country, but not on the scale that she has outlined.

[Emily Thornberry]

I completely understand and agree. That is why when the Government talk about localism, I say, “Hooray! Let us come up with some local solutions to local problems.” However, when my local authority starts to introduce innovative schemes to try to address our problems, we are either trampled on by the Department for Communities and Local Government continually changing the rules and tightening up on section 106 agreements, which we are using as imaginatively and laterally as we can to build as much affordable housing as possible—in Islington, that has to be social rented housing if it is to be properly affordable—or we are trampled on by the Mayor.

The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk) talked about publicly owned land, and the Mount Pleasant site in my constituency is one such cause célèbre. It used to be a massive piece of publicly owned land, which was owned by Royal Mail. When Royal Mail was privatised, the large site at Mount Pleasant was deemed to be a “car park”, so it was sold for a song. The developers now say on behalf of Royal Mail that, because it is a development site, they should be able to get huge amounts of money back, so they cannot possibly afford to put affordable housing on the land. There is a battle royal going on in my constituency about the matter. My local authority and Camden local authority both say, “We are in desperate need of real affordable housing, and this is one of the largest development sites in the area. Please, please, let us build homes for local people. Please don’t stop us.” And what happened? The Mayor came in and said, “What we mean by ‘affordable housing’ is 80% of market rent.” Guess what? Nobody in Islington can afford that. This is nonsense.