Housing

Debate between John Healey and Mike Hill

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

No.

It is good to see the Housing Minister speaking for the Government today. He not only told the House that housing was the Government’s chief domestic priority, but told an industry conference in February that

“once we get beyond Brexit, housing will be the Government’s priority.”

Given the mess that the Government have made of Brexit for more than two years, and given that the Prime Minister is in Europe today begging for an extension just so that we can move on to the next stage of the negotiations, that bodes badly for the Government’s future focus on housing. I have to say to the Minister that Brexit is a very feeble alibi for a totally non-Brexit Department with six Ministers and 2,000 civil servants.

I enjoyed the Minister’s speech, but the story that he tries to tell is so at odds with the experience of millions of people up and down the country that he and his colleagues risk sounding complacent. They risk sounding as if they just do not get it. They do not get the public’s anger and frustrated hopes of a housing market that they feel is rigged against them. They do not get the despair at being one in a million on council housing waiting lists when the number of new homes for social rent built last year was just 6,453. They do not get the lives blighted by bad housing—children growing up in temporary accommodation hostels, renters too scared to ask landlords to do repairs, young couples stripped of the hope of home ownership and prevented from starting a family or putting down roots—and they do not get the fact that a systematically broken housing market demands wholesale change and cannot be fixed without big action from Government.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Is the current situation not ridiculous? In Hartlepool, for instance, we have in-house poverty. There are people who have lived behind boarded-up windows for more than a year, just because they are scared of raising the issue with the local authority or their landlords.

[John Healey]

Unfortunately, although there are good landlords and many tenants are satisfied with the homes that they rent, my hon. Friend has described the experience that too many of the country’s now 11 million renters face from day to day. After nine years in office, the Government just cannot carry on talking about what they are going to do. What they are doing at the moment simply is not working.