Housing
Debate between Meg Hillier and Stephen Pound
Stephen Pound
Sorry, it’s Colin’s brother.
We are speaking today on an incredibly important subject. Last Friday morning, I went to the extreme east end of the District line, where a family from my constituency have been housed in temporary accommodation at the other end of London. The children have to get up at 7am to carry on attending their primary school in Northolt in my constituency. It takes an hour and a half to get there, before the day has even started. This is the reality of the housing crisis in the nation as a whole, but particularly in London. The housing that that family could once have aspired to has been sold. It is one of the cruellest ironies that some 42% of temporary accommodation that we provide under the private sector leasing scheme in Ealing is former council housing.
What are the Government proposing? Are they talking about a sensible house building programme? Are they talking about fiscal incentives and mechanisms to assist people in buying properties? No. They are proposing one of the most cruel, stupid and brutal pieces of legislation I have heard of in my life. Harold Macmillan was mentioned earlier, a man who spoke for a time when we thought that housing was something that should be built, not sold off, and something that is not a bribe but an entitlement and a right.
I have great respect for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. He is a good man, but he has fallen among asset strippers here today. Harold Macmillan talked about selling off the family silver. Well, we are talking about selling off the family shelter. The idea is that the Government can go to a charitable housing association and say, “We are going to nationalise you and then we’re going to liquidate you and sequester your assets.” How on earth can anything think for a moment that that is a logical or sane way to go forward?
I wish to do the Conservative party a favour. I wish to save them from themselves. I know there is no chance whatsoever of this proposed legislation actually seeing the light of day and becoming an Act. It simply cannot work. There will be legal challenges. As soon as we start to drill down into the minutiae, it will be realised that the Government simply cannot take a private asset and sell it off as a possible bribe to the future. If they want to take the logic of this forward, why not go to every single private landlord—including the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies), who confessed to being a landlord—and say to them in an attempt to expand the property-owning democracy that made this nation great, “We’re going to take your property. You are a private landlord, just as a housing association is a private landlord”? Where is the logical difference?
Stephen Pound
I wish I could, but I cannot.
I believe in the fairly basic precept that no person should have a second home as long as there is one person who has no home. Will the proposed legislation—I address specifically the issue of extending the right to buy, the sequestration of housing associations—make any difference whatsoever? It will. It will make matters a great deal worse. Housing associations will lose their collateral base. They will lose their ability to borrow. There will not be some great freeing up of assets spreading across the nation. Rather, there will be the same slithering, slimy people scurrying around the remnants of our housing estates trying to persuade people to buy their property, to realise their assets and to free up the money in their property. These poodle-faking spivs have had the time of their lives under Conservative Governments. We do not want to see it reach an efflorescence again under this ludicrous Bill.
In case after case in our surgeries, every one of us surely hears heartbreaking stories arising from the housing crisis. If someone is ill, they can go home until they feel better. If they lose their job, they can go home and apply for other jobs. If they lose their home, they are on a slippery slope to perdition. Homelessness means not just not having a home; it means being on the street and losing one’s health and one’s future. I spoke earlier about a primary school child making a one-and-a-half-hour journey in the morning and afternoon. What will be the corrosive effect of that on future generations? It will destroy their hopes, their dreams and their ability to learn and become good citizens.
The Bill will not help. Let us save the Conservative party and say, “Get away from this nonsense of trying to bribe the future with their own property”, and let us look at building new housing. That is what it is all about. That is the important thing. Let us do that and get rid of this insanity of trying to sell something that does not belong to the Government in the first place.