Housing and Homes

Debate between John Healey and Mark Prisk

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. The number of families—now nearly 80,000—living in temporary accommodation because there are no homes available, let alone homes in their own area, is a scandal that shames us all. I am interested to hear what the Secretary of State has to say. It is not just in Newham; he has been in government since 2010, since when his own council has seen a fivefold increase in the number of families without a home living in temporary accommodation.

The Secretary of State said that we are now investing more in affordable homes, and he cited £9 billion, which of course is the figure for the rest of this Parliament. Even if that money is spent, spending will still be half the level it was in Labour’s last year. To give people a measure of it: in Labour’s last year, spending on building new, badly needed affordable homes was £4 billion; and last year, under this Government, whatever they say, it was less than half a billion pounds. No wonder we saw 40,000 new social rented homes started in 2009, in that last Labour year, and last year we saw fewer than 1,000.

The £28 million for the Housing First pilots is welcome, but let me gently say to the Housing Secretary that that is a small drop when compared with the £996 million the National Audit Office says is the annual cut in the Supporting People programme since 2010—a programme to help the homeless. Finally, the right hon. Gentleman makes the welcome argument that we need more social rented homes, but what does he say to the residents in his own area, where 6,022 are on the council waiting list and the number of new social homes rented homes built last year was zero? He has a lot to pick up on and a lot to learn.

We have seen eight years of failure on all fronts since 2010, and it is no wonder that the Prime Minister admitted that housing was a big part of why her party did badly at last year’s general election. As the Secretary of State has said, as the Prime Minister has said and as I have argued, the housing market is broken, and housing policy is failing to fix it.

I say to Conservative Members that at the heart of Tory policy is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Ministers talk big about total house building targets, but what new homes we build and who they are for is just as important as how many we build. Simply building more market-priced homes will not help many of those who face a cost-of-housing crisis, because that can influence prices only in the very long term. We have to build more affordable homes if we want to make homes more affordable, and the public know that. It is why eight out of 10 people now say the Government should be doing more to get new affordable homes built.

The public expect much more of Ministers—more urgency, more responsibility, more investment and more action to fix this broken housing market. That is why Labour has set out a bold, long-term plan for housing. It is what people need from their Government. We have made the commitment, with the plan to back it, that under a Labour Government we would see 1 million new genuinely affordable homes built over 10 years: the largest council house building programme for more than 30 years, building those new affordable homes at a rate we have not seen in this country since the 1970s. The very term “affordable” has been so misused by Ministers that it is mistrusted by the public, so Ministers should drop it and replace it with a new Labour definition linked to local incomes, not pegged to market prices.

We must build for those who need it, including the most vulnerable and the poorest, with a big boost to new social homes built as part of the programme, but we should also build Labour’s new affordable homes, both to rent and to buy, for those in work and on ordinary incomes, who are priced out of the housing market and being failed by current housing policy. These people are the just-coping class in Britain. They are the people doing the jobs we all depend on—IT workers, delivery drivers, call centre workers, teaching assistants, electricians and nurses. They are the backbone of our economy and the heart of our public services. This is the same Labour aspiration that led Aneurin Bevan to talk of the “living tapestry” of mixed communities as he led the big house building programme after the second world war.

[Mr Mark Prisk (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman’s leader is a keen fan of rent control to cap the total level of rents. Although that may superficially sound attractive, the right hon. Gentleman will understand the impact it will have on the prospects for that market; we may see people leave that market, so there will be fewer homes. Is he too a keen advocate of rent capping?

[John Healey]

I am surprised if the hon. Gentleman has not already done so, but he should read the housing manifesto that I launched with the Labour leader during the election campaign last year. It pledged longer tenancies, with a cap on the rent increases during that period. I shall come to the Labour plans for private renters in a minute. This debate is about differing views and very different visions of the housing problems that people face and the solutions that the country requires.

Our determination to get built the new genuinely affordable homes that are needed in this country was redoubled after the terrible Grenfell Tower fire. When the Grenfell survivors who contributed to our review say that

“tenants were victims before the fire”

and

“we’re treated as second class citizens in social housing”,

it is clear that radical, root-and-branch reform is required, so we will build more and we will build better, as the public sector has always done in housing. We will have leading-edge standards on energy efficiency and smart-tech design, so that Labour’s new affordable homes will be people’s best choice, not their last resort.

A huge majority of us in Britain aspire to buy our own home, yet the dream is currently denied to millions, especially young people facing a lifetime locked out of the housing market. We set out in our Green Paper a plan for Labour’s living rent homes, which would have rents set at no more than a third of average local household incomes and would be aimed at ordinary working families, young people and key workers—those who need to be able to save a bit for a deposit or who need a bit more to spend on the other things they need.

Labour’s low-cost home ownership home would be a new type of low-cost home, called first-buy homes. Again, they would be discounted, so that mortgage payments would be no more than a third of average local incomes. Crucially, the discount on those homes would be locked in so that it could potentially benefit not just the first first-time buyer, but future first-time buyers.