Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)

Debate between Kris Hopkins and Nia Griffith

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kris Hopkins]

No, I will not. I want to make progress on the point I was making earlier.

We wanted to transfer our housing stock into a not-for-profit trust. We renovated 30,000 of those decrepit houses into decent quality houses. We put forward a £1 billion package to transform them into quality houses and put in a 30-year maintenance scheme to sustain them through that stand-alone trust. It is successful. Our Labour councillors, local Labour leaders and trade unions voted against that package, however, and actively campaigned against it. [Interruption.] I hear the scorn coming from the Opposition, but Labour does not want to take real action. Labour councillors and representatives were prepared to allow people to live in slums, rather than intervene.

[Nia Griffith]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that some local councils, such as Carmarthenshire county council, kept their whole housing stock in-house and have done an excellent job in renovating section after section of it? He should not be saying that the deciding factor is whether a council decides to keep provision in-house or to give it to another authority to look after. What matters is what is done with that stock.

[Kris Hopkins]

I do not know where the taxpayers of Bradford were to find £1 billion over 30 years to renovate those houses. That was the reality and the reason why the housing was put into a trust, which is delivering. The people of Bradford living in social housing were betrayed by the Labour party.

I want quality homes and I shall work to make sure we get them, but the fact is that the housing benefit budget has doubled in 10 years, on the back of the previous Government’s economic failure and mismanagement. We have to spend within our means. The public rightly expect us to get a grip on the benefits regime—a regime the Labour Government allowed to get out of control. Labour failed to build social housing, failed to manage the economy and therefore clearly failed those who are living in social housing and those who need access to it.