Budget Resolutions

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

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

The hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) might have Downton Abbey in his constituency, but at the heart of mine, Mitcham and Morden, is one of the biggest working industrial estates in south London. It is home to dozens of businesses—from scaffolders to skip yards, and from builders to brick yards. Among the lorries, vans, skips and fumes is a converted warehouse housing 84 families and hundreds of children. Four local authorities —Sutton, Croydon, Bromley and Merton—have been housing residents in Connect House because the Government have left them unable to borrow and unable to build so that those families can have a true place to call home. The residents of Connect House are just 84 of the 78,180 families in temporary accommodation throughout the country for whom a new Budget offered some hope of a way out and a place to call home.

The impact of temporary accommodation on the education and wellbeing of the 120,170 children without a permanent home has never been calculated, but I fear that it will continue to be felt in the decades to come. On the morning of the Budget, I received a letter from Mrs Sheridan, the headteacher at Malmesbury Primary School in my constituency, regarding a pupil who lives in Connect House. Since he has moved there, the pupil has been classified as a “persistent absentee,” meaning that his attendance is at such a low level that it will, should it not improve quickly, have a significant impact on his attainment.

Like Mrs Sheridan, I listened attentively to the Budget statement to hear what hope it would offer to her pupil and his friends and neighbours who just want a place to call home. The answer in the Budget was as follows:

“Local authorities will be invited to bid for increases in their caps from 2019-20, up to a total of £1 billion by the end of 2021-22.”

The Government estimate that up to 300,000 new homes will be needed each year to combat the backlog and prevent rising unaffordability, so it is crucial to establish how many homes that £1 billion could build. The answer is just 15,000.

The last time 300,000 homes were built in one year in England was almost half a century ago, in 1969, back when councils and housing associations were building new homes. Since 1939, in fact, the delivery of more than 200,000 homes per year in England has happened only when there have been major public sector house building programmes. Let us consider what happened last year. Of the 147,930 permanent dwellings completed in 2016-17, 82% were in the private sector. Some 25,000, or 17%, were built by housing associations, while 1,840 were built by local authorities.

To meet the target for new homes we need two RTBs: not only the right to buy but the right to build—the right for local authorities to build at affordable prices. Affordable rents do not match the Government’s definition of 80% of market value, because that is not affordable to anyone. We can go on talking about this issue, but we are putting more salt into the wounds of those who do not have a home if we simply refuse to liberate the land and the money to make building possible.