Pat Glass
Main Page: Pat Glass (Labour - North West Durham)
Kris Hopkins
Rather than just reading reports, I have been listening to lots of councils. During the local settlement agreement, I spoke to more than 100 councils, and not one of them said that they could not set a budget. Yes, these are difficult times, but they are difficult because of the failure of the last Government to manage the economy. We have now created the largest growing economy in the G20, with more people employed and more apprentices out there. More people are getting a job. That is the route that we need to follow, and we will deliver more spending in the public sector by having a strong economy.
Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
4. How many people owned their own home in England in (a) May 2010 and (b) the latest date for which figures are available.
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
9. How many people owned their own home in England in (a) May 2010 and (b) the latest date for which figures are available.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Stephen Williams)
The number of households in home ownership has remained relatively steady since May 2010. There were 14.45 million in the year 2010-11 and 14.32 million in 2013-14, according to the latest available data from the English housing survey.
Pat Glass
Despite that response, the number has not remained steady. It has actually fallen by almost 4% in four years, and we now have 11 million people, including 1.5 million children, living in private rented accommodation. What are this Government going to do to support those families, and to support generation rent more generally?
Stephen Williams
The figures I gave did show a fall, so we are not disagreeing on that. The fact is that home ownership peaked in 2005 and fell dramatically in the five years of the last Labour Government. The private rental sector is an attractive part of the housing mix for a large number of people, and in the past 12 months this Government have put in place a huge number of reforms to regulate the sector. They include the regulation of letting agencies to ensure that they all belong to an ombudsman scheme, that they are completely transparent about their fees and that they publish a how-to-rent guide and a model tenancy agreement. That is a vast improvement on what we had before.