Housing and Social Security

Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

We need to do both, of course. The major flaw with Help to Buy is that nearly a fifth of the people being helped to buy through the scheme are not even first-time buyers. Nearly 4,000 being helped by Help to Buy are on incomes of more than £100,000. It is not well targeted and it is not good use of public money. It could be spent much better, especially on helping younger people on ordinary incomes to get their first foot on the housing ladder.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman says that a £100,000 income should be too high to qualify for Help to Buy. What level would he set it at?

[John Healey]

We would be happy to consult on that. My main argument is with Ministers. They are making the wrong judgments and they are not putting in place the help that young people need in particular. That is why—the hon. Gentleman may know this—the number of homeowners under 45 has fallen by 900,000 since 2010. Young people’s hopes and dreams of ever owning their own home are being completely dashed, and the Government have no plan in this Queen’s Speech or in their manifesto to fix that.

In truth, the Prime Minister is locked in place by her party only until its members judge that they can dump her without facing the British people again in a fresh election. It was Margaret Thatcher who said:

“Minority Governments can only struggle on from day to day with a series of short-term measures. They can’t and don’t tackle the longer-term questions that affect the future of our nation and the wellbeing of all of us.”

The question for the Queen’s Speech is whether the “short-term” will be days, weeks or months. On 8 June, the Prime Minister asked the people for their judgment on seven years of Conservative Government, and they gave it. Real wages have fallen, Government debt has risen, investment in new transport and housing has been slashed, the NHS is in crisis, schools are cutting teachers and last year, more than a million people used a food bank. At the same time, there have been big income tax cuts for the top earners, with more tax cuts to come for the richest on wealth that they do not even earn. We have had seven years of failure and a party with no answers to people’s problems, no hope for the future, and no plan to change the country for the better or to make government work in the interests of all.

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[John Healey]

Good. It is a small number, and it has a zero in it—and nothing else.

Let me return to the serious points that I wish to make. Secondly, let me say to the Secretary of State that all markets, organisations and consumers need regulation to guarantee safety, ensure fair practices, safeguard standards and stop abuse; yet that is not the mindset of current Conservative Ministers. Never again can a Minister who is challenged on fire safety measures say, “It is not the Government’s responsibility,” and justify it by citing the Government’s “one in, two out” rule on regulations. That must change.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The right hon. Gentleman must accept that it was this Government who introduced improved regulations insisting on the installation of smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors in homes in the private rented sector, and, for the first time, required electrical safety checks and checks on appliances from this autumn.

[John Healey]

But my goodness, didn’t people—including us—have to argue hard for those basic regulations? Why did the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues, when the Bill that became the Housing and Planning Act 2016 was going through the House, reject intervention and regulation to ensure that all private landlords at least made their homes fit for human habitation before letting them? This is a Government whose mindset can see regulation only as red tape, and who do not see what the Prime Minister described as the important role played by good regulation in the public interest.

[John Healey]

This is precisely about politics. This is precisely what the House should do, and, in fact, it is precisely about what the Prime Minister said this morning. Indeed, my third point follows on from the point that she made when she talked about the fundamental issues that underpin the detail of what we have also been discussing.

Sections of our people feel marginalised and ignored, and that is what happened to the tenants at Grenfell Tower. It is no good the hon. Gentleman huffing and puffing; the Prime Minister said that this morning. She recognised it. However, this is a Government whose housing regulator has now dropped any real requirement for the voice and views of tenants and residents on governing boards to be heard, and who, in 2010, abolished the National Tenant Voice, which we had set up. Its establishment resulted from a report called “Citizens of equal worth”. Many Grenfell Tower residents, and other social housing tenants, will feel that that rings hollow in this day and age.

Let me now deal with the specific failures on housing. Two thirds of people now believe that the country is experiencing a housing crisis. Everyone knows someone who is affected—people who are unable to obtain a home that they need or aspire to. Many of the housing decisions made by Ministers since 2010—decisions that the Secretary of State boasts about—have made the problems worse. Because Ministers have done too little for first-time buyers on ordinary incomes, home ownership has fallen to a 30-year low. They have given private landlords a freer hand and rejected legislation requiring properties to be fit for human habitation, so 11 million private renters have fewer consumer rights than they have when they buy a fridge-freezer. They have stripped away protections for people who need help with housing, so the number of people sleeping rough on our streets has more than doubled. They have cut investment and outsourced responsibility for building new homes to big developers, so, on average, fewer new homes have been built since 2010 than under any peacetime Government since the 1920s. That is the track record of the Secretary of State and his colleagues.

After seven years of failure, it is clear that the Conservatives have no plan to fix the country’s housing crisis. Some of what the Secretary of State has said this afternoon, and has said before, about house building and tenants’ fees is welcome, but there is nothing in the manifesto or in the Queen’s Speech to tackle the wider causes of the housing crisis.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Healey]

I have given way twice to the hon. Gentleman, and I want to finish my speech so that others can speak.

There is nothing to change the scandal of rising rough-sleeping homelessness. There is nothing to deal with the lowest level of new affordable house building in 24 years, nothing to reverse the rapidly falling level of home ownership among young people, nothing to secure supported and sheltered housing for the future, and nothing to scrap the hated bedroom tax.

However, there is an alternative, as we showed in our Labour manifesto. It is possible to fix the failings in the housing market and in housing policy. I am not just talking about a fully-fledged new Department for Housing to reflect the seriousness of the crisis, to spearhead our new deal on housing and to tackle the crisis. I am talking about a new deal for first-time buyers, with no stamp duty, guaranteed “first dibs” on new homes built in their local areas, and 100,000 new FirstBuy homes at a discount price linked to local average incomes. I am talking about a new deal for homeowners to stop leaseholders being ripped off, and a new homeowner guarantee to help people to pay the mortgage if they lose their jobs. I am talking about a new deal on house building, with at least a million new homes built over the current Parliament, and a new target for 250,000 new homes a year to be built by 2022, a level that should then be sustained each year for the five years of the next Parliament.

I am talking about a new deal on affordable homes. I am talking about building at least 100,000 genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy a year, with the biggest council house-building programme in more than 30 years. I am talking about a new deal for private renters to establish new consumer rights, with legal minimum standards, as well as making three-year tenancies the norm, with an inflation cap on rent rises. Finally, I am talking about a new deal on homelessness, involving a new national mission and plan to end rough sleeping—not some time in the future, as the Secretary of State says, but during the next Parliament.

Ministers have no domestic programme in the Queen’s Speech, and no majority in the House of Commons. I offer them our new deal on housing: a deal between the people of this country and the Government, and a bold, long-term plan to start to fix our country’s housing crisis and meet people’s housing needs and aspirations. If they too are willing to offer people that hope, I offer them Labour’s support as they put it into practice; but if they are not, they will have to make way for a party that can change the country for the better, and can make government work for the many and not the few.

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[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow such excellent maiden speeches from Members on both sides of the House. I was here to listen to the tremendous contribution made by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke)—the first, I am sure, of many in this House.

I must draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have been involved in the property market for 25 years and am still involved. I am deeply passionate about it, and I am very pleased by the Government’s clear and ambitious plans to increase house building by 1 million homes between 2015 and 2020, and by 500,000 more by 2022. Those are very ambitious plans.

I am delighted to see that the shadow Secretary of State is back with us in the Chamber. I tried to intervene on him earlier to question one or two of the facts that Opposition Members keep repeating. They keep saying that since 2010 house building has fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s, but the House of Commons Library shows that some 100,000 houses were built in 2009-10, and 153,000 in 2016. Where do these figures come from? The claim is that affordable housing building is at a 24-year-low—the shadow Secretary of State can intervene on me on this point—but we know that in the past six years we have built 304,900 affordable homes, and in the last six years of the Labour Government, 294,000 affordable homes were built. Members can choose their own opinions, but they cannot choose their own facts.

[Ms Buck]

Is the hon. Gentleman querying the Department for Communities and Local Government’s own statistics, on its website, which show that there has been a 97% drop in the number of social housing completions since 2010? Those figures are there on the website now to be inspected.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Lady raises a valid point. There is a different definition. Social housing is part of the overall definition of affordable housing—that is true. The shadow Secretary of State will tell the hon. Lady that that is true. It is also true that we are building more affordable homes than the Labour Government were in their final six years in office.

Building more homes has to be our objective and Members on both sides of the House will agree that we must reform the planning process to deliver more homes and release more land, whether that is brownfield or greenfield. That must take up some of the slack to deliver the amount of housing we need.

We need not just to deliver more land but to reinvigorate some of the sectors of house building on which we have come to rely. Some of that is about our local authorities, and the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government reported on that just before Dissolution. We believe that local authorities should be given the opportunity and more levers to increase house building to previous levels—they were building about 100,000 homes a year back in the 1970s—but only if those houses are properly designed and communities are designed properly around those developments.

The key element of reforming planning to deliver more homes is the role of small and medium-sized enterprises in house building. In 2008, SMEs built 44% of new homes delivered in this country. Today, they deliver 26% of homes. It is not just about land; it is also about capacity. The difficulty for small house builders is that they cannot find the land. That is the primary difficulty: finding access to the land and to the finance.

A White Paper from the Department has accepted that we need to deliver more housing for more small sites, and proposes that in the future, instead of local authorities simply allocating a huge site that is ideal for a huge house build and drawing a big red ring around it, which is probably easier for those local authorities, a certain number of sites in that local plan must be allocated for smaller sites and for small and medium-sized enterprises. It recommends that 10% of those sites should be half a hectare or less. That is good progress, but we need to go further if we really want to get small builders back into the business of building houses. It is critical that they do that.

The other principal problem is finding finance. It is almost impossible for an SME house builder to get finance for their developments. The Government have recognised this with their £3 billion home building fund, but we need to go further. We need to ensure that the mainstream high street banks lend to those SMEs. Those banks are their first port of call, but that is a difficult conversation at the moment. In Germany, the state-backed bank, KfW, sits behind the loans to SME house builders, meaning that builders can keep building. Through that, Germany has been far more successful in ensuring that there is a mixed delivery of house building.

For the next couple of minutes, I will focus on something else of huge significance to the industry: the tenant fees ban. I am still involved in the business and I am told by my finance director that the ban will cost us around £800,000 a year, so hon. Members might think that I am against the legislation, but I support the fee ban. I recognise that there is a problem. It cannot be right that when a tenant finds a property they want, they are susceptible to charges of which they were not aware and which can vary wildly between different letting agents.

All legislation that we bring forward in this place cannot just be about the measures. Delivery—the oversight and enforcement—is also needed. My concern is whether the measure will be delivered with that proper oversight and enforcement. The team that currently manages that within the sector is the National Trading Standards Estate Agency Team near Bangor. That team does not have the capacity to deliver the necessary oversight. We need to ensure that if this legislation is brought forward, it drives out the cowboy operators, who will try to find a way around the rules, which cannot be right. If the legislation is well thought through, it can include new measures about rental property standards. We need to ensure that the rented property sector delivers an appropriate standard of rented accommodation.