Housing: Affordability

Lord Horam Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, we are all very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, for introducing this debate on what is clearly a very important public subject. I am by no means an expert on housing, but I have a long-standing interest to the extent that, in the 1970s, I was the first chairman of the Circle 33 housing association, which is now part of Circle Anglia. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Best, from those days.

I strongly support what the Minister and her colleagues are doing in government, first in her own department, the Department for Communities and Local Government, where Nick Boles, for example, is doing a great deal to remove some of the distressingly difficult obstacles in the planning area and where my right honourable friend Eric Pickles has been talking about new towns, which I think are part of the solution. The Chancellor, in his help to buy measures, has got building going again. There is no doubt that it is on the up, from all that I hear from around the country, both in London and in the regions. All that is very good and I congratulate my noble friend on what the Government are doing.

I said that I had a long-standing interest in housing. It goes back a very long way. Some people my age and perhaps younger will remember when Harold Macmillan was Minister for Housing. The noble Baroness, Lady Ford, quoted some statistics from before then. The House will recall that Winston Churchill set Harold Macmillan the task of building 300,000 houses a year to cope with the housing crisis in the 1950s, and he achieved that target within three years. Even Emanuel Shinwell, one of the original red Clydesiders, who was then sitting for Easington, had to admit, “This Government does get things done”. In the following election, the Conservatives won 50% of the vote—I do not think that they have achieved that since then—and Harold Macmillan went on to become Prime Minister. I am not suggesting that that exact approach could be replicated today. Things have clearly altered a great deal. Council housing is a fraction of what it was then and housing associations did not exist in the 1970s in the way they do now. It is all very different. But the sort of priority that that Government had in the 1950s, when there was a similar sort of crisis, though different in prices and so forth, should be given to housing today. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, that if we get that sort of priority and the long-term thinking implied in that —and, if possible, with cross-party support, so that whatever Government are in power, that level of building is carried on—we have the makings of a solution. Unless you have something like that, we will just patch and mend as best we can from Government to Government and we will have the situation that we have today.

Finally, at local level there is a wonderful opportunity to build more flats and houses in our high streets, many of which are run down as a result of the increase in online shopping. In Orpington, which I represented for many years in the other place, Tesco built a new store in the high street, with many flats above. Where I live now in Fulham, Sainsbury is doing the same thing, both above a superstore and a local store. All that will contribute to the revitalisation of our high streets, as well as providing good, cheap social housing. That is one way forward, along with the long-term measures that the noble Baroness suggested.