Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Roberta Blackman-Woods and Bob Blackman
Bob Blackman
No. This is where there might be differences between London and the south-east, and other parts of the country. The vast majority of London council house tenants, and even housing association tenants, are on the maximum housing benefit, so the public sector is picking up the cost of their rent. I am saying that if someone is earning more—if they are above the threshold—they should contribute more to the cost of their rent. When we examine the figures, we can see that tenants actually pay very little in rent in most parts of London at the moment because housing benefit picks up the cost of their rent. I am saying that if people are employed in reasonable occupations with reasonable incomes, it is right that they should contribute to the cost of public sector housing, and that principle is set out in the Bill. It is the right approach and one we should thoroughly endorse tonight. It is important to put it on record that this is not an attempt to force people out of social rented accommodation; it is a matter of fairness and of people paying their way reasonably.
Transport for London has 5,700 acres of land in London, and while not all of it is developable, a lot of it is. That is one public authority in London that has an opportunity to provide land that could be used for the development of housing for rent or for sale. I piloted the Bill that will enable TfL to provide the homes that are required, and it was interesting that the only opposition to it came from London Labour Members, who opposed the opportunity for more than 50,000 homes to be built in London for the very people they represent. I suggest that we should reject all the Lords amendments that are a deliberate attempt to wreck the scope of the Bill, which contributes to the creation of more housing and more affordable housing, to the opportunity for people to own their own homes, and to local authorities working in partnership with the Government to deliver the homes that people want.
Dr Blackman-Woods
The hon. Gentleman has had much to say about pay to stay, but has he looked at the Government’s own consultation on the policy, which showed that 75% of people disagreed with the thresholds that the Government are setting? In fact, a huge majority disagreed with the voluntary policy that is already in place with a threshold of £60,000. I am not sure where the hon. Gentleman gets the idea that this policy is readily accepted by everyone; it simply is not, and not at the current thresholds.
Bob Blackman
If individuals are not contributing additional rent towards the social rent they are being charged at the moment, I can understand people saying, “I don’t want to pay any more.” Who would want to pay more? That is a foolish view to put forward. We must ask what is fair and reasonable to ensure that we can change the situation in this country by creating more housing and encouraging the development of more housing, while making sure that people pay a reasonable rent so that they are not subsidised by other taxpayers on lower incomes who are struggling either in private rented accommodation or to buy their own homes. Such a view is not fair or reasonable, and it must change.
I end, as I began, by saying that I commend the Bill and the Government amendments to the Lords amendments. I trust that we will reject all the Lords amendments that the Government oppose and that we will support the Government amendments.
Regeneration
Debate between Roberta Blackman-Woods and Bob BlackmanWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Bob Blackman
That is a key point in the whole regeneration debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) mentioned the evidence that we received from the London borough of Newham, where investment has been made in regeneration schemes for 30 years. When we forcefully asked the mayor of Newham whether that should continue and when we should stop public sector investment, he said, “We’d all dearly love to see it end, but just not now.” The view seemed to be that we will still invest in Newham for another 30 years and nothing will change. The housing will be nice, but the indices of deprivation will hardly have shifted.
My view is that if there are limited resources, they should be applied where the maximum gain can be achieved. We have to be honest about the situation and say that certain areas will not get funding because we will not get the most gain from them in terms of growth and opportunities. We have to concentrate the resources, as opposed to saying, “We’ll spread it thinly for everyone,” because by doing that nothing is achieved.
Roberta Blackman-Woods
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the consequence of the policy direction that he is outlining is that some areas will be abandoned altogether or, indeed, will go backwards if no resources are given to them by the private or public sectors?
Bob Blackman
The potential consequence is that, yes, areas could be told, “We can’t invest anything in you because we’re not going to get any leverage from the private sector.”
I want briefly to describe three regeneration schemes. I was chairman of the Harlesden city challenge company that was bidding successfully for Government money. We in that regeneration scheme were in direct competition with everyone else. We brought together the private and the voluntary sector. Uniquely, that city challenge project was about promoting economic growth; creating 2,000 new jobs in the west London area on the Park Royal estate; improving the housing stock on the Stonebridge estate, which was a dramatically bad estate at the time; and improving Harlesden town centre. It was a wholesale regeneration project. Some £37.5 million of Government funding produced £200 million of private sector investment. It was a brilliant and highly successful project that was supported by both parties in Brent.
At the end of that project, we evaluated it and asked whether we had succeeded. Against every single criterion that we had agreed with the Government, we had succeeded. However, when we evaluated the project properly, we said, “Well, in this case, has the unemployment rate changed at all? No, not a bit of it.” We evaluated why and found that, as soon as someone got a job, they moved out of the area to somewhere better to be replaced by someone who had not got a job. In many ways, yes, the project had been successful, because it had created jobs and safeguarded existing jobs in the area, but it had not ended the deprivation. I have repeatedly said both here and in the main Chamber that investing money in the areas of greatest deprivation does not solve the problem. We have not yet resolved that key issue.
The second regeneration scheme that I want to mention is one that my right hon. Friend the Minister will remember well: the Chalkhill estate in Wembley, which was a similar type of council estate to the one that we saw in Hulme. High-rise blocks built in the 1960s replaced some lovely family houses and were built as a village in the sky, where no one would need a car and everyone would live in peace and harmony. People had to compete to get into that estate, but it was not long before people were trying to escape. I remember the previous director of housing describing Chalkhill people coming together to form the escape committee to get out of that dreadful estate.
The replacement of all that awful housing—no one in their right mind would want to live in such an area because of its security issues and run-down nature—was funded by selling off a large part of the land to Asda. We used the capital generated to replace the housing in partnership with a private sector developer. We made sure that the housing was replaced in the way that the community wanted. Instead of having architects and planners doing things to people, the project was based on what people wanted. In our visit to Hulme, we saw a very similar type of exercise.
I should like to allude to the situation in the London borough of Harrow, which relates to a much more recent development. The redevelopment of Harrow town centre was going to be promoted by Harrow college moving there.