Housing

Mims Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

And there was I thinking the right hon. Gentleman was going to congratulate my hon. Friend the Mayor of London on his excellent work. It is important that he considers the whole ambit of the Housing and Planning Bill and our policies elsewhere, which are providing a wide offer across all tenures and types of housing and, with those £1,400 deposits to help people into those homes, making sure that, in areas such as his, shared ownership is a real possibility.

For too many people, the aspiration and the reality of home ownership are drifting apart. The decline in home ownership is not just an economic problem but a social failure. We risk creating a generation of young people exiled from home ownership. The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne might not consider the decline in home ownership since 2005 to be such a bad thing, but we disagree. He might not care, but we do. We care about young people worse off than their parents, compelled to leave the communities they love and grew up in or to decline good job opportunities because local housing is too expensive. That is why we must build more homes. Everyone in the House has a duty to make that case and, along with local authorities, to show good leadership. We have a duty not just to say that we need to build more homes somewhere else, but to build—and to make the case for building—more homes in all our communities. This will be a defining challenge of our generation.

[Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)]

During the election, I received phone calls from people who had been in their homes for some time and were delighted to get the opportunity to buy them. On local plans and Labour’s top-down approach, is it not perfectly possible to build good-quality homes with a good local plan?

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is important that we show good local leadership and deliver good local plans setting out where homes can be built in communities and outlining the aspiration for good-quality homes and good-quality design. That is what local authorities and we in the House have a duty to do and what my hon. Friend has championed in the House over the last few months. This will be a defining challenge for our generation, yet the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne, who spoke for more than 32 minutes, gave not an iota of a start of a Labour policy to tackle this problem. Instead, he fell back on outdated politics. I am afraid it was the Soviet version of “Back to the Future” after all. There is the lazy assumption that there is a contradiction between supporting the dreams of home buyers and ensuring that more affordable homes are built. Nowhere is this clearer seen than in the right hon. Gentleman’s opposition to our extension of right to buy for housing association tenants.

In the last Parliament, we dramatically improved the right to buy for council tenants, with 47,000 tenants seizing this opportunity and over 80% of the sales occurring under the reinvigorated scheme, yet 1.3 million social tenants in housing association properties continue to get little or no assistance. That cannot be right. We promised the electorate that we would end this unfairness.