British House Building Industry

Debate between Richard Bacon and Siobhain McDonagh

Thursday 5th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Actually, the shareholders are doing quite well as well, because they are getting quite a lot of money on the back of Help to Buy. That could be the subject of another debate.

I have no doubt that those four men work hard and have a grasp and understanding of their industry that few others could provide, but surely high pay is supposed to be about high productivity and high quality of product. It seems to me that the more substandard the properties they build and the lower their rate of productivity, the more they get paid. There seems to be no consequence for poor performance. We are in a housing crisis—is it really appropriate to provide such preposterous pay packets, considering the house building record I have described?

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

I agree with almost everything that the hon. Lady has said, but I ought to point out—I declare an interest, because as part of an Industry and Parliament Trust fellowship I spent a day at Berkeley—that the main shareholder of Berkeley is Tony Pidgley, who started that business himself. He left school at 15, unable to read and write, and he has employed thousands of people, created a great deal of wealth for this country and paid a huge amount of tax. Moreover, he would deny—and he would be right to do so, unlike some of the others the hon. Lady rightly mentioned—that Berkeley produces poor quality. It does not; it produces extremely good quality. Berkeley refuses to be a member of the Home Builders Federation because it does not consider itself a volume house builder.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman in part. I have had the honour of meeting Mr Pidgley and I give him credit for his career and his actions. His profits do not come from Help to Buy, but, even so, it does seem like a very unequal company. I have no problem with people earning well at the top, but the people at the bottom should not earn badly.

Housing and Homes

Debate between Richard Bacon and Siobhain McDonagh

Tuesday 15th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

It is a delight to follow the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who had many very good ideas, but we have to talk about the green belt in London. There is enough land to build a million homes that are 10 minutes from tube and train stations and an hour’s journey away.

What is the green belt? What is the land that I am talking about? Is it nice, pleasant and green—somewhere we would wish to spend the day with our families? No. I spent my bank holiday going around and looking at some of these sites. I started over in Hillingdon, where I saw an illegal waste tip and stood on 20 feet of rubble that could be land on which we could build 3,500 new homes. I went along the A40 to Ealing, where I saw, close to a mosque, two schools and a train station, a site covered with building rubble and surrounded by chain-link fencing. I then went to the pièce de résistance: a tyre-changing shop and car-valeting service at Tottenham Hale, where a housing association had had its application for housing turned down because it was green belt.

At some point, we have to stop being frightened of the title and inspect what land makes up this designation. I do not want to build on a park that children use, or on rolling green fields that people enjoy on their bank holidays, but I do want to build on scrappy bits of land that nobody in their right mind would choose to regard as green belt.

[Mr Bacon]

Well said. Carry on.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

I would love to, but I do not want to stop anyone from speaking.

I ask hon. Members from all parties to support my early-day motion on this issue and to support the contribution that we have made to the consultation on the national planning policy framework, which has Members from both sides of this House, academics, housing associations and businesses saying, “Yes, stop it. Please look at the green belt.” We cannot keep talking about building more homes unless we have the means and the land to provide them, and we do, if only we all got a backbone and started looking at what we call the green belt.