Affordable Homes Bill

Joan Walley Excerpts

Friday 5th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because it gives me the opportunity to say that the discretionary housing payment allowance to local authorities is helpful, and it is clearly important given the way in which the Government introduced these regulations. However, the rules attached to it make it extremely difficult to apply it willy-nilly for anyone who says, “I don’t like this tax—could you please just cover it for me?” It does not apply in that way, and it is wrong to imply that it does.

Some Conservative Members are saying that they really care about this sector, so let us look back at the DNA of the Conservative party and the last time we had the opportunity to look at the state’s relationship to under-occupation of property. My hon. Friend will understand this from a Cornish perspective. She will remember that the last time the Conservatives held power on their own, they introduced a 50% council tax rate for second homes. That represented the state spending hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money every year to enable the wealthy to own second homes, when thousands of families in constituencies such as mine could not afford their first. There was not just under-occupation but un-occupation of properties that were essential to local communities. I hope that the Conservatives have moved on from that policy and, as a result of their association with the Liberal Democrats, have been prepared to moderate their line in relation to the application of public money and under-occupation.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on introducing a Bill that I hope will be the first step in getting rid of this pernicious tax. May I take him back to the Minister’s intervention on sharing the information about the so-called £1 billion cost of these proposals? If the hon. Gentleman is able to have discussions with his colleagues in the Government on the costs, will he make sure that he brings the National Audit Office and the Office for National Statistics into that debate, because we have to talk about the unintended costs in social, health and economic terms of what this tax has created? Those are the issues that we should be costing—not just the straightforward black-and-white costs, which I think the Minister is completely wrong about.