Cost of Living: Energy and Housing

Neil Parish Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I hope that that was not directed personally. I am sure that it was not.

I want to concentrate on the supply of housing, or rather the lack of it, the regulation of the private rented sector and the impact of immigration on some of our poorer communities.

On housing supply, we ought to be building 250,000 homes a year to keep pace with household formation. We all know from the people who come to our surgeries weekly that we do not have homes that people can afford to buy, and that there are not homes in the social rented sector for which people are eligible—even, as in my constituency, for those who have been on the waiting list for 10 years. Many in the private rented sector are well housed but many others are not and they feel the pressure of rising rents.

We have a long-term failure in this country, as politicians, to build the homes that people need. I use those words carefully because it is a failure of the last Government as well as of this Government. It is just that the failure has got worse under this Government, as the number of homes being built has fallen.

Historically, compared with the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s the real fall-off has been in the building of homes to rent in the social rented sector.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

We could do with affordable homes in many of the villages and hamlets I represent. The problem is that whenever a site is identified, people come running to me to say, “We are all in favour of affordable homes, but this is the wrong place, Mr Parish”. That is where I think the problem lies—we need to persuade people that affordable homes are needed and must be situated somewhere. The problem is that everybody objects, wherever we want to build them.

[Mr Betts]

I entirely take the point that some people object. At a public meeting in my constituency three or four years ago, someone said to me, “We are not going to have homes for those sorts of people, are we?” Frankly, an elected representative has to stand up and face down that sort of prejudice, making it clear that everyone is entitled to a home. Many people who have lived in my constituency all their lives simply cannot afford to buy homes that their parents could have afforded to buy a few years ago. These people are entitled to live in that community; homes should be provided for them.

It is unfortunate that one of the biggest cuts in Government funding during this Parliament has been the 60% cut in funds for social housing. If we are to see house building rise in future, the private housing developers will play a part, but they are not going to build the quarter of a million homes we need. We are going to have to build more homes to rent. It is disappointing that the Government have not moved at least some way in that direction in the Queen’s Speech—failing, for example, to take the cap off local authority borrowing for house building, which they could have done. They could have provided 60,000 new homes immediately with no cost to central Government funds. They could have taken steps to alter the definition of the grant on housing association books and convert it into a genuine grant from the loan that it currently is. That would have freed up more borrowing for housing associations as well.

If we are honest about this in the long term—I say this to both Front-Bench teams—and if we are to build the homes that people need and build more social housing on the scale this country needs, we are going to have to put in more subsidy from the national public purse. That is the reality. We are not going to build the homes we need unless we spend more money on them. That is an uncomfortable fact and we tend not to want to discuss it before the general election, but it is, as I say, the reality of the situation. Whether it be housing associations or local authorities that do the building, they are going to need more assistance to make it work. We need to carry on arguing about that.