Housing: Spending Review

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who always makes thoughtful and well informed speeches, enhanced on occasion by an Ulster flavour. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, on having secured the debate and on her predictably expert speech. In an act of political chivalry, I congratulate her, too, on her timing in inserting the speech into the parliamentary diary before the forthcoming White Paper. Clearly, her speech will deserve close study.

My late noble kinsman was for four years in the late 1950s Minister for Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs. I do not think that it was because he took the trouble to learn the Welsh national anthem in Welsh that Nye Bevan, in the Attlee Government, asked him, although he was a political opponent, to chair departmental working parties on aspects of housing policy. I do not know as much as 1 per cent of what my late noble kinsman knew about housing; but I do know that, while the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, has chosen her moment well, it would be wrong for my noble friend the Minister to be left naked of Conservative support behind her today, even though our coalition colleagues have turned out in force and, although it is a Labour debate, exceed in number the Labour speakers.

I am grateful for the comprehensive briefing afforded to speakers in this debate by the National Housing Federation. I shall tick off the relevant questions that it believes need asking as opposition speaker follows opposition speaker, so I shall not spend my six minutes asking them myself. Nor shall I spend my time hypothesising about what a Labour Government might have done in the present circumstances. “What if” questions are fun as a social game—for example, asking, at this moment in American history, what would have happened if Wolfe had not taken Quebec—but they are not a good use of time when the Labour Government are no longer in power, for reasons associated with their recent policies, and when another Government are proposing a massively important welfare programme that embraces housing but goes far beyond it. I shall rest on a paragraph from Labour’s 2010 manifesto, which was drafted by the present leader of the party and which states:

“Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state. Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford”.

I could not put it better myself.

The programme that the coalition Government are pursuing is a wholesale reform of 21st-century welfare from the foundations that Beveridge laid two-thirds of a century ago when Nye Bevan was Minister of Health. It is not a policy that the Opposition would have adopted, for they drove my noble friend Lord Freud—as he then was not—from their ranks when he sought to persuade them to adopt it. Of course, I realise that they believed that tax credits would resolve the dilemma, in an era when they also believed that they had banished boom and bust from economic history. The difference today is that the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister, Mr Brown, is by instinct a complicator, whereas my noble friend Lord Freud is a simplifier. I am pretty sure that DWP and HMRC, despite their loyalty to any Government, would prefer the latter instinct to the former.

I have personal experience of the complexity of tax credits. A member of my family was given, no doubt in good faith, appalling tax advice by the HMRC hotline. My relative brought it to me and I brought it first to my own tax accountant and later to a relevant Lords Minister, who, coincidentally, will speak for the Government later in the debate. The Minister very generously and kindly researched it with the Treasury. Both the latter consultees agreed that the hotline advice was wholly ill founded. However, think of what effect, in all senses, the advice of the hotline would have had on many other inquirers. I say that because of the complexity of the matter.

It is worth saying a word about housing provision. The words appear on the Order Paper, although I appreciate that they are in their context ambiguous. Housing costs are a function of the amount of provision, and I will not go into why the previous Government failed to reach their own targets. However, I will remark that twice in Grand Committee in the second half of the last Parliament—once on a planning Bill and once on a housing Bill—I asked why the Government believed, as an underlying premise for their legislation, that the economy would go on behaving as it had in the preceding 10 years. On the second occasion, I quoted the then very recent first comment by the Governor of the Bank of England that the possibility of a recession could not be ruled out. On both occasions, the Minister expressed confidence in the economy, noting that there was not a recession in progress. I also remark that the growth in housing targets over the period 1996 to 2006, with the interim projections of 2002 and the final Kate Barker report of 2004, was most recently not in the south-east—a key arena for the issue that we are debating—but in the north-west, Yorkshire and Humberside, and the west and east Midlands.

Much of my own housing experience comes from representing for a quarter of a century an inner-city seat with considerable street homelessness. I do not associate myself with the emotive language of the Mayor of London, whom I generally and genuinely admire, but I am conscious that I was representing what was not only in part a rich seat, although not as rich a seat as the EU statistics imply, but also in significant part a poor seat. When I left the other place, it was the 48th poorest seat in the country by British statistical criteria. That remarkable social balance is necessary to the way that London works. There has to be low-income housing at the centre to serve the practical needs of a great city, and I shall watch the outcome with what is currently confidence that for pragmatic reasons that balance will remain.