Housing

Debate between Jack Dromey and Andrew Love

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it is a bitter irony that the public purse, through housing benefit, is picking up the consequences of the failure to build new homes on the one hand and subsidising landlords charging ever higher rents on the other.

There are other serious consequences of the growing housing crisis, from health to welfare. Bad housing harms health and costs the national health service £2.5 billion a year. It holds kids back at school, and the price tag for lost earnings of young people whose GCSE results have been affected by poor housing is £14.8 million. Unaffordable housing drives up the benefit bill. The Government’s supposed affordable rent programme alone will drive up housing benefit by £1.4 billion.

Despite the costs of the housing crisis and the Government’s long record of failure, Ministers continue to claim that they recognise the importance of house building, including to the economy. Since cutting the affordable housing budget by 60%, the Government have announced and reannounced countless schemes and initiatives that promised to get Britain building. May I summarise but some?

In November 2010, the Department for Communities and Local Government launched the new homes bonus, promising action

“to get the country building again”.

In March 2011, the Government launched “The Plan for Growth”. Remember that? It said:

“A successful construction industry is vital for sustainable growth. Building and maintaining homes…are activities that underpin the entire economy…it is critical that industry gets the support it requires to build houses on the scale the UK needs”.

It promised

“radical planning reform”

that would deliver

“the housing the country needs.”

At the time, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government welcomed the

“action to get the house building industry building again”.

Two months later, the Government launched Firstbuy, promising

“a much-needed boost to our house building industry, supporting thousands of jobs across the country.”

In November 2011, the Government were at it again, launching the housing strategy. Do Members recall that it was described as the housing revolution? The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister donned their wellies, hard hats and high-vis jackets for the TV cameras as they promised

“to restart the housing market and get Britain building again”

with schemes, they said, that could create 400,000 jobs. All that with £420 million, but a tenth of what was cut the previous year by the Chancellor.

Not four months later, in March this year, the Prime Minister and the former Minister for Housing hit the airwaves again, launching the NewBuy guarantee and promising a

“boost to the housing market…and thousands of jobs in the construction industry”,

and yes, you have guessed it,

“to get Britain building again.”

So much has been promised—hundreds of thousands of jobs in the construction industry, hundreds of thousands of new homes, hundreds of thousands of new home owners—but what has been delivered? A contracting construction industry and collapsing housing starts, a growing housing crisis, a double-dip recession, and an array of announcements followed by a litany of failure. Can there be any more fundamental an indictment of failure than the fact that, at a time of economic crisis, when the Government have promised over and over again to build Britain out of recession, building starts fall quarter after quarter after quarter, pushing Britain back into double-dip recession?

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

What does my hon. Friend make of the announcement that we are to have yet more planning legislation, increasing uncertainty and almost certainly blighting a possible housing revival?

[Jack Dromey]

I will cover that in greater detail later, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government blamed the failure to build homes on the planning system and so tore the system up by its roots. We warned them of the consequences: damaging uncertainty, chaos, confusion and hiatus. Sure enough, the figures bear that out. The ink is barely dry on the new national planning policy framework, planted only four and a half months ago, but they want to tear it up once again and say that it needs fundamental reform.