Social Housing (Houghton and Sunderland South)

Pat Glass Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Stunell]

I thank the hon. Lady, who acknowledged the reality of what I said. As she correctly says, this is a matter of priority. I shall come to exactly what the Government’s priorities are, and why we took the decisions that we have announced.

We need to be clear that there is a significant gap between the supply and demand for new homes. For decades, the housing market failed to keep up with the needs of our growing population, which has led to problems with affordability, people coming on to the council house waiting list and people seeking to buy their first home. That, in turn, has led to social and economic problems, and the hon. Lady eloquently set out some of the problems affecting her own community.

The long-term demand for housing is strong and fed by rising population, increasing affluence—taking 10 or 20 years at a time—and people’s strong cultural preference for homes of their own. Under-supply has led to some serious consequences for us.

I want to make it clear to the hon. Lady that we, too, share her commitment to having more affordable housing, and we remain committed to the provision of social rented housing for those in need. We will promote shared ownership schemes and help social tenants and others to get on to the housing ladder, although that has to be done within the constraints of the financial position that the Government find themselves in.

If constituents came to hon. Members’ surgeries with a problem and explained that they were on £300 a week but were spending £400 a week and putting the extra £100 on their credit cards, which had £50,000 on them, we would, as responsible Members of Parliament, say, “You need to see whether you can increase your income and reduce your expenditure.” People would get such advice from any sensible debt counsellor or MP. We, as sensible MPs, and as a sensible coalition Government, have to say that our commitments and aspirations must be measured against the resources available and the constraints of the financial position that we are in.

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

We hear that mantra from the Government every time they open their mouth; it is their answer to every question. The Government are looking to wipe out the deficit in three to four years simply so that they can deliver tax cuts before an election. They are doing that at the expense of the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson).

[Andrew Stunell]

It would be nice to think that we could wipe out the deficit, but the Government’s financial plans say that we will have stopped adding to the overdraft. It is not that we will reduce the £50,000 credit card debt that I mentioned, but that we will stop increasing it. The hon. Lady needs to get a grip on reality.

To return to the subject of the debate, we are absolutely committed to wider home ownership and helping those who aspire to own their own home; the figure is estimated at some 1.4 million households. We want first-time buyers who cannot get into the housing market to do so, and we want social housing waiting lists to be reduced. We want to ensure that the affordable housing supply is increased.

That means building new homes, where they are sustainable, in places that are attractive to people and near to work. We know from the performance of the previous Government that top-down targets are not the right way to go about that. In fact, the higher the targets were raised by the Labour Government, the fewer houses were completed.

We intend to return decision making to democratically elected councils and to remove regional housing targets. We will reform the planning system to give neighbourhoods more say, provide incentives to local authorities to deliver sustainable development and create new land trusts that will make it simpler for communities to provide homes for local people. We will drive up housing supply by providing financial incentives to local authorities that build additional housing. I would have thought that that was helpful to the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South in respect of the debate.

Ours will be a bottom-up approach, allowing local communities to control the way villages, towns and cities develop through local plans and letting them derive direct benefits from the proceeds of growth in their areas. We need to remind ourselves again that the affordable housing supply was down by more than a third under the previous Government. We recognise that there is continued need for affordable housing for social rent and for low-cost home-ownership housing, and we remain committed to delivering on that.

Some Library figures on spending reductions being applied to the Homes and Communities Agency were mentioned. If the hon. Lady looks carefully at the expenditure plans that we have set before the House, she will see that the previous Government’s housing pledge committed £1.5 billion to the agency’s funding. We have now secured and authorised £1.25 billion. In other words, by struggling and kicking we have pushed forward a sum that is just £250 million short of the original pledge, which was based on wobbly finance. The Government are strongly committed to pushing that programme forward. We will make the radical changes needed to incentivise housing supply and ensure that local communities are empowered so that they can take advantage of that.

On Monday, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government attended an event in Liverpool, which was the first of a series of events to kick-start the big society. It was announced that four pilot local authorities would immediately be given the opportunity to take forward some of the ideas for devolving power and making things happen locally, to supersede top-down decision making from Whitehall and get things going on the ground. I hope that, soon, the hon. Lady will see those pilots delivering success and that she will strongly encourage Sunderland city council to join in.

The hon. Lady mentioned housing benefit, which I want to discuss. We—the Government and taxpayers—are paying more in housing benefit than we do for the police and universities combined. In real terms, the cost of housing benefit has risen from £14 billion to £21 billion in the past 10 years. I will give her the opportunity after the debate to score a few points at my expense. This is the second time that I have debated housing benefit in Westminster Hall with a Member representing Sunderland South. The previous time was on 12 January 2000, with her predecessor—she may want to look it up in Hansard—who said:

“The overriding objective of the housing benefit system is to enable those with no income of their own and those on low incomes to provide for their reasonable housing costs… housing benefit should not subsidise someone to live in a property that is unreasonably expensive. If it did, tenants would… have no incentive to look for more reasonably priced accommodation and landlords would have no incentive to seek more reasonable rents.”—[Official Report, 12 January 2000; Vol. 342, c. 108WH.]

At that time, her predecessor was a Minister with responsibility for communities and I was in the hon. Lady’s place, making bitter complaints about what was happening to housing benefit. Since then, housing benefit expenditure has risen by £7 billion.