Housing

Debate between Karen Buck and Jack Dromey

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey]

I want to make a little more progress.

The sad reality of the gulf between supply and demand means that this week and every week, 2,500 fewer homes are built than are needed. The Minister will be aware that although his predecessor said two years ago:

“Building more homes is the gold standard upon which we shall be judged”,

housing starts under his tenure were lower in every quarter since Labour left power. The Minister will also know from his considerable experience in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills that the collapse in the house building industry has had a catastrophic impact on the construction industry. The Office for National Statistics has confirmed that the total volume of construction output in the second quarter of this year fell by 9.5% from the total in the same quarter of last year. The ONS confirms that that was driven by a fall in work on new private housing of 6.7% and a catastrophic 25% fall in the public housing sector.

Two years ago, we warned the Government that by recklessly raising taxes and cutting spending too far and too fast, they risked putting the economic recovery at risk. We warned them that if they cut the housing budget by 60%, it would be a devastating blow not only to house building and the construction industry but to the wider economy and the millions of families desperately in need of a home at a price they can afford. The Government, having failed to listen to those warnings, cannot now escape their failure or duck their responsibilities for its victims.

Perhaps most devastating is the rise in homelessness and rough sleeping, the very issues that the previous Housing Minister said brought him into politics in the first place. Statutory homelessness has risen for five consecutive quarters, up 14% in the past year alone. I do not know what brought the new Housing Minister into politics, but, with the new homelessness figures out tomorrow, will he tell us whether he expects to see a fall or an increase for the sixth quarter in a row?

Most heartbreaking of all—we see it all over the country—there was a 23% rise in rough sleeping last year. It is a visible, visceral epidemic that harks back to the 1980s, when Tory policies led to cardboard cities under bridges and annual reports of deaths in cold English winters.

It is not just those without a roof over their head who are suffering. The Minister’s predecessor and the Prime Minister have claimed on the Floor of the House that private sector rents are falling, so perhaps the Minister can explain why the very company used by both the Prime Minister and yesterday’s Housing Minister to justify their claims, LSL Property Services, reported only two weeks ago that rents hit a record high over the summer? As a consequence, we have the rise of “generation rent” with 1 million young people predicted to be locked out of home ownership by 2020 as they face a squeeze on their wages, increasingly unaffordable rents and difficulties saving for a deposit, as evidenced by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

While my hon. Friend is on the subject of private sector rents, which the Government categorically promised us would fall, not least because of the reductions in housing benefit, does he accept that since the election 93% of the additional housing benefit claimants have been working people? It is therefore working people on low incomes who are being hit by the total failure of the Government to fulfil their promise.

[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?

Homelessness

Debate between Karen Buck and Jack Dromey

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Jack Dromey]

We have—as the Government have not—put housing at the heart of our economic recovery plan to kick-start the economy and get it moving.

[Ms Buck]

We might reflect on the fact that, in a full-day Opposition debate, we discussed the impact of the housing benefit cuts on housing, in the context of the collapse in housing supply. We warned of the interaction of the policies bringing about exactly the conditions that we have been debating today.

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend is right, and I would compare our record with that of this Government at any time, including on what kind of action should be taken now. When there was global collapse in 2008, did we stand back? No, we did not. We acted on the one hand to keep people in their homes, avoiding the tide of repossessions to which my hon. Friend referred earlier, and on the other hand by way of the kick-start programme, which saw 110,000 homes built and 70,000 jobs and 3,000 apprenticeships created. To this day, the benefits of that programme are feeding through.

What do we see now? We see the reverse. We see a Government who have done scarcely anything, as a consequence of which we see today the depressing statistic that there has been a 68% fall in affordable house building. That is why we want the Minister to listen to our case for a repeat of the bank bonus tax, enabling us to start with 25,000 badly needed affordable homes, the creation of jobs for 100,000 young people and a cut in VAT on home improvements, which will both upgrade housing stock and create jobs in the economy. If we were in government, our argument is that we would do what this Government are refusing to do, which is to act: to raise standards in the rapidly growing private rented sector, protecting tenants and good landlords alike, to create a more stable, secure and affordable sector and to encourage investment in major new build in that sector. The Housing Minister has gone in exactly the opposite direction; for example, repealing crucial protections that Labour put in place when in government, dismissing them as red tape. Much needed protection for tenants, many of whom are suffering in the private rented sector, is not red tape.

In conclusion, what strikes me as the most shocking thing about homelessness is not that it exists in a rich nation such as ours but that we know how to solve it. Therefore, I hope that the Minister has not completely forgotten what brought him into politics and that, instead, he listens to the voice of those concerned, such as the verdict on homelessness in the second edition of the powerful “Housing Report” produced by the National Housing Federation, Shelter and the Chartered Institute of Housing, whose annual conference he and I will be addressing later this week. I hope that the Minister hears the report’s assessment:

“The large increase in homeless acceptances and rough sleepers is deeply troubling. Ministers need to respond urgently to this growing problem, which could be exacerbated by further cuts to Housing Benefit in 2013.”

It is true that there was once a noble tradition in the Conservative party that took housing obligations seriously. It was the tradition of Harold Macmillan. Sadly, that tradition now appears to be all but extinct in the modern Conservative party.