Mortgage and Rental Costs

Debate between Peter Dowd and Paulette Hamilton

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

In advance of today’s debate, I read the contents of yesterday’s statement by the Chancellor on the mortgage charter. The answers he gave went from bad to worse, and beyond. Besides not answering many of the questions put to him, those he did answer—I use the word “answer” loosely—were answered nonchalantly. Then, when he agreed with the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) that it was all the fault of a lack of productivity, above all in the public sector—that nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, border staff, local government staff and the other 5.8 million people who work in the public sector are causing misery and problems for themselves—I realised that the nonchalance was simply a cover for incompetence at best, or ineptitude at slightly better.

[Mrs Hamilton]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Peter Dowd]

I will not, because I do not want to take up too much time at this stage.

Clearly, the Chancellor has lost the plot. What about the productivity of the Government—the most unproductive Government in my lifetime? There was no mention of that in his statement. In that exchange, the issue of supply-side responses was also referenced. If either the Chancellor or the right hon. Member for Wokingham had read page 12 of the Library’s briefing yesterday, that would have confirmed to them that supply-side pressures and bottlenecks are easing and the cost of shipping has come down to pre-pandemic levels, but of course, that is a fact that the Government do not want to listen to.

My initial assessment proved to be correct as the debate wore on. In response to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) about the reasons why many people in Europe are paying significantly less in mortgage payments than in this country, the Chancellor defaulted to the answer he gave to the previous question from my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins). He went from turgid to orotund and then back to turgid, with a little bit of circumvention in the middle. I thought I was listening to the Radio 4 programme “Just a Minute”, but without the humour.

The fact is that having a roundtable with the banks is all very well and good—a bit of finger wagging, a wink and a nod here, knowing looks there—but while the Chancellor looks for a solution or tells the banks in no uncertain terms that it is an issue that needs to be resolved, he is doing little to ease the pressure on millions of our constituents who have a mortgage, and there are millions of them. He said it needs a solution, and of course it does—I think we can all agree, without any contradiction, with that pearl of wisdom from the Chancellor. My cat Gilly knows there needs to be a solution. The only problem is that the Chancellor did not present us with one—unless, of course, that part of his statement was left out of Hansard.

I will not go into too much detail about how the current mortgage crisis sits alongside the cost of living crisis, the mental health crisis, the health crisis, the housing crisis and the many other crises inflicted on the country by the Conservative party—they have been covered on other occasions, including yesterday and today—but there are many thousands in my constituency, and millions across the country, who will be paying thousands of pounds more in mortgage payments as those fixed-term deals come to an end. What about the thousands of mortgage prisoners, many in my constituency, who have been hit even harder without Government intervention?

I want to bring to the attention of the Minister, and vicariously to the attention of the Chancellor, an article in the Financial Times today by Helen Thomas—I hope she will forgive me if she feels I am cherry-picking from the article, which I am not. She makes excellent points, and these are issues that have to be addressed by the Chancellor sooner rather than later. She says:

“This crisis should prompt longer-term questions about the peculiarities of the UK market”—

meaning the mortgage market—and that

“with little lending at above five years fixed and essentially none above 10 years, the UK looks an outlier even in Europe”.

In her final paragraph, Ms Thomas says:

“This interest rate shock will prove uncomfortable for many. But it should also prompt fresh debate on what might create a less dysfunctional mortgage market in the future.”

The question for the Chancellor is whether he is up to the challenge in effect laid out in that analysis. Were any of those points raised in his roundtable with the banks on Friday, and what commitments did he get from the banks in relation to easing the pressures on my constituents? Crises are years in the making, and the longer this Government stay in power, the longer this crisis will continue, so it is time for the Tories to go.