Housing Benefit
Debate between Rachel Reeves and Anne Main(11 years ago)
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Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House regrets the pernicious effect on vulnerable and in many cases disabled people of deductions being made from housing benefit paid to working age tenants in the social housing sector deemed to have an excess number of bedrooms in their homes; calls on the Government to end these deductions with immediate effect; furthermore calls for any cost of ending them to be covered by reversing tax cuts which will benefit the wealthiest and promote avoidance, and addressing the tax loss from disguised employment in construction; and further calls on the Government to use the funding set aside for discretionary housing payments to deal with under-occupation by funding local authorities so that they are better able to help people with the cost of moving to suitable accommodation.
This is an important debate, which is why it is so good to see so many Opposition Members on the Benches behind me and so disappointing to see so few Government Members on the Benches opposite. I am also sorry that we will not be joined today by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who apparently has more urgent and important business at an intergovernmental conference in Paris. Some might welcome the fact that one of Parliament’s more dedicated Eurosceptics has suddenly developed such a passion for discussing his problems with our European partners—perhaps he has had a second epiphany—but those affected by his policy will be disappointed that he has chosen not to be here today to answer for the distress and disruption his policy is causing up and down the country and to explain himself to his victims, the more than 400,000 disabled people, as well as their families and carers, as many as 375,000 children forced out of their homes or pushed deeper into poverty and debt, and the foster carers and families of those serving in our armed forces who have also been hit. Those people are at the sharp end of the Prime Minister’s cost of living crisis. They are already struggling to survive and to do their best for their loved ones, yet they have been treated with callous disregard by this out-of-touch Government.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Before the hon. Lady moves on from her remarks about the Secretary of State, is she really suggesting that he should not be discussing youth unemployment with other Heads of State? Is that what she will say the next time we discuss youth unemployment?
Rachel Reeves
Rather than going to a conference to discuss youth unemployment, he should be doing something about it in this country.
I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will have a chance to meet some of the people who have come to Parliament today, many of whom have travelled across the country, to tell their story and hear the debate. But even as they got off their trains and coaches in London this morning, the Secretary of State was already scuttling across the channel on the Eurostar.
Infrastructure
Debate between Rachel Reeves and Anne Main(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Rachel Reeves
That intervention says it all. It is all jam tomorrow from this Government.
The last set of GDP figures demonstrate the scale of the Government’s economic failure. The economy shrank by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of last year, demonstrating once again the desperate need for a strategy for growth. Since the Chancellor’s spending review two years ago, out of the G20 economies Britain has been 18th out of 20 when it comes to economic growth—worse than the USA, worse than Canada, worse than Germany, worse than France and worse than Turkey. So much for the Prime Minister’s global race.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
In the previous Parliament, I was fortunate to serve on the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. The Committee examined why houses were not being built under the previous Government, and 400,000 planning permissions not implemented. Surely the hon. Lady ought to be looking at what is stopping building. The permissions have not been stopping. The banks were not lending under the previous Government. This is a deeply entrenched position.
Rachel Reeves
House building was down 8% in 2012 and the think-tank Policy Exchange has warned that the Government could end up presiding over the lowest level of house building since the 1920s. That is the record of the hon. Lady’s Government—not one, I would imagine, that she is proud of.
The Prime Minister says that we are in a global race, but in reality we are hardly out of the starting blocks. The Chancellor has been told time and again—most recently by the International Monetary Fund—that if economic growth undershoots expectations, the Government should boost the economy with greater infrastructure spending. Well, growth has undershot and the economy is shrinking. Over two years, economic growth has been 15 times less than the Chancellor promised in 2010.
Rachel Reeves
PFI in my constituency built three new secondary schools and helped to rebuild primary schools, as well as building Sure Start centres. I would not have wanted any of those projects not to go ahead, so I do not share the hon. Gentleman’s criticism.
It is not just independent outsiders attempting to urge the Chancellor to change course and take action or saying that change is needed. Even the Deputy Prime Minister, in what he described as a “self-critical” mood, has stated:
“I think we’ve…realised that you actually need, in order to foster a recovery, to try and mobilise as much public and private capital into infrastructure as possible.”
He did not quite get round to saying sorry for a second time, but at least he has finally stumbled upon the problem. We said that cutting infrastructure spending too far and too fast would stifle the recovery, but the Deputy Prime Minister’s brief lapse of regret came two and a half years too late. That moment of self-realisation will not help the construction worker who has already lost his job, the children waiting for their new school or the new business waiting for improved roads. We do not need mea culpas; we need the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister to change course.
Rachel Reeves
The economic and political system in China is a bit different from that of the UK, but what we must learn from other countries is that we need a proper industrial strategy if we are going to create the jobs and growth that we need, and if we are going to excel and win the global race that the Prime Minister has talked about.
Two weeks ago, at Treasury questions, the Chancellor said that I was being “creative” with the facts when I said that he was spending less than Labour planned to on infrastructure investment. He said that I was being misleading on his record on investment. He had to withdraw that slur. Channel 4’s “FactCheck” has looked into his claims. The verdict is in, and I quote from its conclusion:
“Latest figures from the ONS show that Mr Osborne’s claim to have spent more on infrastructure than what Labour had planned is wrong.”
The Chancellor has refused to come to the House to put the record straight, so let us do that now. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility—which the Government set up—the Government are spending £12.8 billion less in capital investment compared with the plans they inherited from the last Labour Government. They are cutting too far and too fast. I am happy to take an intervention on that point.
Rachel Reeves
Yes, I would like to hear why the Government are spending £12.8 billion less.
Mrs Main
The Labour Administration had a target for rail freight interchanges, and the Howbury Park project was given the go-ahead in 2007. However, no work has yet been done. Should not the Labour Government have insisted on proper investment being put into the project, which would have benefited the local area?
Rachel Reeves
I have generously let the hon. Lady have another chance at intervening, but she did not explain why, in the first year of this Parliament, her Government spent £3.2 billion less than the last Labour Government planned to spend, or why, in their second year, her Government spent £2.9 billion less than the amount in the plans they inherited. Nor did she explain why, in the third year of this Parliament, they spent £6.7 billion less than we had planned. When the Chancellor says that he has matched the plans of the last Labour Government, he is just plain wrong.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
I profoundly disagree with the motion, particularly what it says about “dithering” and “delay”. I am all for a bit of dithering and delay, but I would call it caution and sensible planning. I am speaking up for the environment because I want us to take a considered approach to planning as well as kick-starting our economy. Carpenters have the old adage, “Measure twice and cut once.” We should be very careful that we get our infrastructure right rather than just dashing forward and building on any old place.
The motion stresses the need to get Britain building, but we need to have a cohesive approach, not a mad dash for growth without considering local communities or what is actually needed. I am concerned that we are intrinsically entwining planning and the Treasury. I want to make sure that we are giving these matters due consideration and are not trampling over communities, historic landscapes, and, importantly, the green belt, but getting our infrastructure right and getting it in the right place.
I want the infrastructure debate to be associated with economic benefit, local regeneration and jobs, but never to lose sight of the environment. The two are intrinsically linked. Local communities need to ensure that plans are not granted in a hasty fashion just to join the ranks of unimplemented or badly located permissions. The absence of a joined-up approach to getting our infrastructure right and ensuring that there are full appraisals of alternative sites for large, private-funded proposals, such as those for rail freight interchanges, is likely to result in a developer-led scramble to see who can get their project through first, and it will often not end up on the best site for the local area or for national economic growth. That can also affect investment in other sites that may be more suitable, but which are starved of potential investment as investors hold fire in case another rival site gets permission through the planning system.
I want to make sure that we ask where we need to deliver such infrastructure in Britain. It is obvious that large infrastructure projects can create jobs and they should, if possible, be based in those areas where there is a need for those jobs, while at the same time doing minimum harm to the environment. That would be a win-win situation for everyone.
There has been a “minded to grant” decision on a rail freight terminal in my constituency. According to the developer of the site, it will create more than 3,000 jobs, the vast majority of which will be blue collar. Such a development could—I agree with the Labour party on this—provide a considerable boost for a struggling local area if it had the work force. It would be a shot in the arm for an area that needed those jobs. In St Albans, however, we are fortunate to have an unemployment rate of just 2.5% and the vast majority of those 1,155 people are white-collar workers. In fact, we have a deficit of blue-collar workers. Beyond that, neither my constituents—some of whom would be situated 100 metres from the development—nor Hertfordshire county council want the site, we are not a regeneration area, and the site will depress our local house prices, concrete over 10% of our green belt and compromise commuter routes into London.
The site has had three refusals, but on the Friday before Christmas, there was a volte-face and the “minded to grant” decision was made. Residents were stunned, because, if we compare and contrast the situation with that of a nearby site in Upper Sundon, just a few miles north of St Albans, we will see—this may be coincidental —that it has all the supposed national benefits that I believe we should be looking for and none of the drawbacks, or very few of them. The site is located in an old quarry—it is not on the green belt—and a ready, accessible work force, who would not need to travel in an unsustainable fashion, want it. It is also on the M1, which I am pleased to say is being upgraded, as we have heard from the Government today.
The site is in the central Bedfordshire development plan and has the support of the council, which would make the planning process simple and, I hope, amicable. Luton airport is also nearby, which is also looking to expand. The site will have easy accessibility to roads and road freight. From the economic point of view, the site is located near Luton, where the most recent figures show that 5.6% of the population are unemployed, most of them blue-collar workers.
I want to marry up those two happy coincidences, but I am concerned that the prevailing mood—driven by the Opposition in particular—is that, in the name of economic necessity, we must give permission to build at whatever cost. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) would not let me intervene when I wanted to ask her whether she agreed—
Rachel Reeves
Of course infrastructure investment should be in the right place, but there is no risk of any infrastructure under this Government. That is the problem that we have been trying to highlight today, and the hon. Lady seems to welcome that lack of investment.
Mrs Main
I point out to the hon. Lady that in 2007, under her Government, the Infrastructure Planning Commission granted the decision to build Howbery park, against much opposition from local residents, on the green belt, on the basis that the Strategic Rail Authority said that it should be situated just about there. However, not a shovel has been turned on that development —the previous Government did nothing about it. I do not see why we should not have a strict rule that infrastructure must be placed exactly where it is needed, not where a developer happens to want it, which may lead to a situation such as that in Alconbury, which ended up with the Trojan horse of a business development park because it never got the rail links it was promised. That is not what we should be doing with our infrastructure. It should be in the right place and linked to the right work force.
If we are going to allow the development of much-needed housing, we should also look at why we have 142,000 unimplemented planning permissions that have already been granted. Across England, the figure is up to 400,000. Our priority should be to look at what has already been granted and ask why it was not built in the first place or why it was not built according to the planning permission that was granted to it, as in the case of Alconbury. If we do not make sure that infrastructure is correctly located, future generations will judge whether we had proper stewardship of our countryside.
We should examine historical permissions, both for large-scale infrastructure developments and large housing developments, that have not come to fruition. We must not just speed up the planning process and churn out more permissions that can be banked for five years, because that does not help the economy by ensuring that development happens where there is economic need and where there are people who can take up the job opportunities that are created.
A clear-sighted strategic decision-making process that was more “steady as she goes” would give investors confidence that they would not end up with permissions granted but never see the developments delivered properly in the way that was envisaged. If people want to get involved in strategic rail, there are many spin-offs such as people working on the site and promises of additional infrastructure upgrades to support the development. However, all those things fail if the developer never puts a spade in the ground and does not deliver the site as it was envisaged. All the potential jobs that are linked to such planning permissions never actually happen.
That has happened under previous Governments, and not only the last Government. However, the Opposition are now arguing that we should rush through more planning permissions and accuse this Government of dithering. I ask the Treasury to please be a bit more cautious and not to do what the previous Government did in allowing loads of permissions to be granted that never delivered what they should have delivered. We should consider applications slowly, cautiously and carefully to ensure that instead of a developer pushing the area where he would like to build, developments are built where we want them to be built and where communities want them to be built. That would be in the best interests of this country as a whole.
To return to the site in St Albans, it will not benefit my constituency one jot to have a rail freight interchange. It would probably benefit Sundon quarry and the surrounding area because of the jobs that it would create, but it would not benefit my constituency if it happened in Radlett. I hope sincerely that the “minded to grant” decision is suddenly reversed to match the original three refusals, because those refusals were sensible. Two of them came under the previous Government, so I hope that Labour Members would approve of them as well. The harm that will be done by that development certainly does not justify its going ahead, especially where an authority slightly further up the road would like to have such development, very much as the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) said his area would.
We should encourage development to go where communities would welcome it, and where it fits in with our with our bigger, broader strategic plan for the economy of this country.