Meg Hillier
Main Page: Meg Hillier (Labour (Co-op) - Hackney South and Shoreditch)
Kris Hopkins
The key thing for me is that we trust local authorities to devise a five-year plan, to know their community, to know their place, and to have that dialogue with the community. With respect to incentives, every new house will bring money into the local authority to support those communities through the new homes bonus. We recognise that we need to grow small and medium-sized businesses, which is reflected in the fact that the Chancellor announced a £500 million package to support them. That is about jobs and apprenticeships. Those are the incentives that a local community can gain as a consequence of building homes.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Hackney council is one of the two largest builders of council housing in the country, yet week in, week out at my surgeries, I see people in desperate situations, unable to access that council housing or to afford the very high rent levels that we now see in my constituency. Is the Secretary of State getting some serious work done to look at how housing benefit can be recycled to make sure that it provides capital for housing, rather than the ongoing revenue support for those very expensive rents?
Kris Hopkins
First, we have to recognise that the Labour Administration failed to deliver sufficient numbers of council houses. In four years of this Government we have delivered nearly twice as many council houses as they did in 13 years. In addition, an affordable homes programme has delivered 200,000 houses already and in the next three years will deliver another 165,000 houses. Some £300 million has been made available for housing revenue account borrowing to deliver another 10,000 council houses. This Government recognise the role of social housing and are delivering where the previous Government clearly failed.