Oral Answers to Questions

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

There are a suite of options for first-time buyers. They can purchase a home using the Help to Buy scheme. They can take advantage of our shared ownership scheme, whereby, under the new proposals, failings and defects will be fixed by the developer for the first 10 years. As I said, the mortgage guarantee scheme that we announced today allows first-time buyers and others to purchase homes with as little as 5% deposit.

We are determined to ensure that first-time buyers are able to achieve their dream and get on to the property ladder. That is a world away from the campaign that the hon. Lady chairs—the campaign of Sadiq Khan, who promised to build 116,000 homes in London but has thus far managed to deliver only 28,000. I wonder whether that is why the housing pledge, which was at the top of his campaign in 2016, is now second from bottom in 2021. I think that that says a lot about Labour and its priority for housing.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

That was quite staggering. I do not know whether the Minister was listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck). He avoided answering her, and he previously avoided answering my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), so I will give him another go. Will the Minister please tell us what on earth the justification is for allowing new buildings to be built with dangerous cladding and other fire safety defects? What will he do to ensure that the number of first-time buyers moving into homes with dangerous cladding is zero?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving me a second go. I point out that she has no policies of her own. We are quite prepared to let her borrow some of ours, because we have a lot of them. We are determined to make sure, through the building safety regime that we will introduce, that we have a world-class building safety programme. We have consulted on the challenge of combustible products, which is a very complicated one, and we will make our announcements on those in due course. But make no mistake, Mr Speaker: we are determined to support buyers, we are determined to get more people on to the property ladder and we are determined to build better-quality homes—things that the Labour party talks about, we are doing.