Housebuilders

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, this is the first occasion that I have taken part in a debate on housing, which, with the NHS, is one of the two most serious social problems we face. They are both in deep crisis. First, I must declare an interest. One of my sons-in-law is the CEO of a company called Pocket—a private sector developer of intermediate, relatively cheap housing for sale in London, backed by both the Mayor of London and the HCA. It is not a major construction company, but, having won several awards, it is expanding fast.

The industry faces a demographic time bomb. Its workforce is ageing, with retirements greatly exceeding new recruits, who take some three years to be trained to the necessary quality. To meet government plans—building 1 million or more houses in a few years—the industry must expand by some 35%. Well, in the third quarter of last year it contracted by 0.5% and is still contracting. It has become heavily dependent on 200,000 EU immigrant workers, not only for the actual building of houses and factories, but for the pre-manufactured modules, use of which the Farmer review recommends. Some 92% of the workforce building the modular homes that Pocket specialises in are EU immigrants.

But now we face the prospect of Brexit. Many EU workers are going home, not only because of uncertainty about their longer-term future rights of residence, but because they no longer feel welcome. There are numerous reports of Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians, Bulgarians and their families who are being abused in public and told to go home if they speak in their own language. We are no longer a tolerant country.

What Brexit risks is what the industry tells us it needs: common recognition of EU standards and qualifications, common legal systems for contracts, and tariff-free flow of imports from the 27—in fact, frictionless trade with the EU. None of these will survive if we are not in the customs union and single market, yet the Government are adamant that we must leave both.

The implication of the excellent and very important House of Lords Committee report last December, Brexit: Deal or No Deal, is clear, even if not explicit: the only way to achieve the Government’s housing aims, and to promote prosperity of large sections of our industries, to preserve an open Irish border and, indeed, generally to avoid the impoverishment of the British people, is to reverse what almost everyone outside Britain regards as our extraordinary national act of self-harm—the decision to leave the EU. The people should have the final say now the facts of what Brexit means are becoming clear, to decide, if they wish, not to travel one more miserable inch along that path to national disaster—in fact, to stop Brexit.