Housing Benefit and Supported Housing

Debate between John Healey and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

It is down to the hon. Gentleman and his Front-Bench colleagues to demonstrate that case to those who are watching the debate, and especially to the people whose homes and lives are at risk.

As I said, every Member of the House has constituents who are threatened by the Chancellor’s crude housing benefit cut. In the Minister for Housing and Planning’s local authority area of Great Yarmouth, there are some 258 people in supported housing and at least 139 in sheltered housing. The numbers are even higher for Swindon and Tunbridge Wells. What do we say to these residents and their families? What do we say to the committed charities, churches, housing associations and other groups that provide such specialist housing and are so concerned?

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Surely the right hon. Gentleman concedes that this is not a back-of-a-fag-packet policy and that the Government are doing a sensible thing by collating all the information and demonstrable data as part of a proper scoping exercise on assisted housing, with an impact assessment. They have also put aside nearly £500 million for discretionary housing payments and the changes will not take effect until April 2018. Surely that is a sensible policy for the Government to pursue.

[John Healey]

We have not seen the information and we have not seen the evidence—we have not even seen the fag packet. Without the information and the evidence, why on earth did the Chancellor take this decision in the spending review before Christmas, thus pre-empting exactly what good policy and decision making should be based on?

Housing

Debate between John Healey and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. I will come on to starter homes and how Tory Ministers try to fiddle the figures by fiddling the definition, but this is not the first time they have redefined what constitutes “affordable”. The level of so-called affordable rented homes we are now seeing in many parts of London means that rents are more than £1,000 each month. That may be affordable in their book, but for many people—with ordinary jobs, on ordinary incomes—it is totally beyond their reach. More is required of this Government to help the people who are working hard and struggling most.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. He did not attend the Housing and Planning Public Bill Committee, for the reasons he has given us, but will he confirm that it was comprehensively demonstrated by all the witnesses during the evidence sessions that there was no evidence that starter homes would be unaffordable for anyone north of a line between the Bristol channel and the Wash—most of the north-west, the north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside, and the east and west midlands?

[John Healey]

I am not sure how much attention the hon. Gentleman was paying. He should have looked at the reports from Savills and from Shelter, and he should have listened to my hon. Friends who led for Labour so ably and so strongly throughout the many scrutiny sessions in Committee. I want to the return to the fact that we have seen such a serious failure during the past five years under Conservative Governments.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between John Healey and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

The hon. Gentleman is right, but perhaps he should address his remarks to the Secretary of State. In the previous Government the Tories built the smallest number of affordable homes in this country for more than two decades—10,920 affordable homes for social rent. That compares with three times that number in the last year of the last Labour Government, which, incidentally, was when I was Housing Minister.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Surely the right hon. Gentleman would concede that this time five years ago he was making the same arguments against the affordable homes regime, which has given more financial autonomy and authority to registered providers, and delivered 260,000 affordable homes.

[John Healey]

It is quite the contrary. I was a strong supporter of the affordable homes programme, and I negotiated with the rest of the Government an unprecedented switch of £1.5 billion from other Departments so that we could build more genuinely affordable rented homes to help bring the country through the recession. If the hon. Gentleman looks at his Government’s record, he will see that eight out of 10 of the affordable homes for social rent that they claim they have built were started and funded through decisions that I made as Labour’s last Housing Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Healey]

Eight out of 10 of the genuinely affordable rented homes that the Minister claims credit for were started under Labour—commissioned under us and paid for with a commitment of investment under us.

[Mr Jackson]

The shadow Minister is extremely kind to give way. May I put to him a straightforward and honest question? Without the direct intervention of the Secretary of State, how would he deal with the situation where 35% of local planning authorities have not taken their plans through the whole system, and one in five has no land supply plans for the future? That is a major supply-side issue. How would his party deal with that?