Decent Homes

Tom Brake Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Thank you very much, Mr Bone, for calling me to speak in this important debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who opened the debate. He is very knowledgeable on this subject, which he has spoken on for many years, and he is clearly a fount of substantial knowledge.

The hon. Gentleman rightly drew attention to a number of matters, such as the respective performance of ALMOS and housing associations. There is an issue for housing associations regarding their performance. Originally, the idea was that local authorities were not particularly responsive, because they were large and managed large numbers of properties. Therefore, people thought that housing associations should take on local authorities’ role as they would be more responsive. Many Members may now feel that many of the problems that were associated with local authorities are associated with housing associations, given their size and the geographic extent of the areas they cover. The hon. Gentleman was right to highlight that. He was also right to highlight the importance of tackling issues in the private sector, where the housing stock is often unacceptable.

Before I focus on what is happening in relation to Sutton and the Sutton Housing Partnership, I want to make one political point. Opposition Members need a reality check, and they should acknowledge that the situation the coalition Government are in is very similar to the one they would have been in had they been elected. It is not, therefore, good enough simply to say that the coalition Government’s proposals for reducing budgets are unacceptable; there must be an alternative proposal. The Labour party would have been in the same place and it would have had to work within the same boundaries—they would perhaps not have been exactly the same—as the coalition Government. It would have faced the same challenges, so simply bemoaning the fact that budget reductions have to happen is not good enough. In seeking to position themselves as a future Government, the Opposition owe it to everyone who reads the report of this debate to come forward with some solutions, rather than simply bemoaning the position we are in.

[Mr McFadden]

It is a matter not just of the total amount of spending, but of the profile of the spending that is being cut. My local ALMO, Wolverhampton Homes, fears that the cuts will be front-loaded and that it will be in the ludicrous position of having to lay off hundreds of people when it might be looking to hire more in a couple of years’ time. It will not be able to do things in a balanced way. That would not have happened under a Labour Government; we would have supported a programme that is providing important employment in my city, as well as improving the homes for tenants, who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) said, have been waiting far too long. Yes, this is a matter of public spending levels, but it is also a matter of the profile of the cuts, which is adding to the difficulties of ALMOs that are trying to carry out the decent homes programme.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but he has simply restated the Opposition’s stance that the profiling is different. That does not really help to define in what way his party would have tackled the issue if it had been in power. Simply saying that this is to do with profiles does not actually help residents in his area to have some clarity.

[The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that there is no profiling or front-loading in respect of the decent homes funding in this spending period?

[Tom Brake]

I thank the Minister for that intervention, and the right hon. Gentleman may want to consider that point.

I want now to focus on the position in the London borough of Sutton and to run briefly through some of the history. Sutton’s ALMO, the Sutton Housing Partnership, was one of the ALMOs that achieved two-star status only very late in the day under the previous Government. It had achieved one-star status and was on track to achieve two-star status when the previous Prime Minister announced that his Government were going to build 20,000 new homes. As Members may recall, it then emerged that that would be achieved by reallocating funds from ALMOs that were about to receive funding for the decent homes programme. When Sutton Housing Partnership achieved two-star status under the previous Government, it found that it would not get decent homes funding because of the previous Prime Minister’s announcement. Let us not say, therefore, that everything that is happening now is wrong, while everything that happened before was acceptable, because it was not. Under the previous Government, some ALMOs did not receive the funding that they had been offered.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

A number of London ALMOs were in the same situation as Sutton, including one I know in Redbridge. It is my understanding—I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman accepts this—that certain funds were forthcoming from the previous Government. They may not have been the amounts, or provided as quickly as, the hon. Gentleman would have liked, but funds nevertheless actually made their way to Sutton’s ALMO.

[Tom Brake]

Indeed. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and that was going to be my next sentence. I was going to say that £5 million—a limited amount of funding—was to be made available from April 2010 onwards. However, there was no guarantee about what would happen to the remainder of the £112 million that Sutton Housing Partnership was seeking under the decent homes programme. She is right that limited funding was made available after heavy lobbying, but that was all that was on offer to Sutton Housing Partnership.

I like to think that I am reasonably fair in these debates, and I do not want to give Opposition Members the impression that everything will now proceed apace under the coalition Government. Clearly, we face many of the same funding challenges as the previous Government. Sutton Housing Partnership has had to adjust its bid downwards to £84 million. As the hon. Member for Sheffield South East said, it is a two-star ALMO, and it worked hard with tenants, councillors and Members of Parliament to achieve two-star status. It made the necessary investment, thereby demonstrating that it has the capacity to deliver its programme. It is now bidding with ALMOs that do not have two-star status, and its tenants and I feel uncomfortable about that, given that it put so much effort in over so many years to achieve two-star status.

[Joan Ruddock]

Obviously, the hon. Gentleman’s ALMO and mine are in a similar position. Mine has just put in a bid for £128 million. However, is he aware that, although the national pot of money is £1.6 billion—the Minister may wish to confirm that—London alone needs £2.5 billion? What hope does the hon. Gentleman’s ALMO or mine have in the present situation? He is wrong to say that the Labour Government would have done the same thing. We said we wanted to halve the deficit in the period in which the coalition want to clear it.

[Tom Brake]

I know that the right hon. Lady’s Government would apparently have halved the deficit in the same time frame in which we are getting rid of it. That, of course, would have had interesting consequences in relation to the level of interest that the nation would continue to pay in the second Parliament, beyond 2015.

To return to the issue of Sutton Housing Partnership, I agree that our ALMOs are in the same position, which is a difficult one. I hope that the Minister will this afternoon deal with some of the issues that the ALMO faces. First, there is the question of getting everyone together, reforming the ALMO and getting the buy-in of tenants to achieve that two-star status, and then finding that they are competing with everyone else for the available funding. Also important in Sutton is negative subsidy. We have always argued—and I welcome the reform of the housing revenue account—that if Sutton’s tenants were allowed simply to have the money that they pay in rents reinvested in the housing stock, there would not be a need for Government funding. With the £10 million of tenants’ money that is exported to other parts of the country, if I may put it that way, resulting, as my ALMO would say, in a situation in which the nearly poor subsidise the really poor, and the money that could be borrowed against that revenue stream, the ALMO could address the issues about decent homes with its own resources, without falling back on Government funding. I hope that that will happen and that tenants will be able to benefit—and that they will not be penalised in a different way, by having to pick up a proportion of the debt, which would mean that even if they kept the revenue they would still not benefit from it.

Sutton Housing Partnership is looking to adjust its programme to try to maximise the chance of getting access to the funding. One specific issue that affects a large number of homes— something like 750—is the box bathrooms on the St. Helier estate. The estate was built in the 1930s and box bathrooms were subsequently built on to the back of the properties. Many are now completely inadequate. They contain asbestos and they are falling away from the properties, so that gaps are developing between the property and the box bathrooms. They are poorly insulated and need to be replaced. In many cases, given that the houses are terraced, they can be replaced only by using a large crane to move the old box bathrooms out over the properties and new ones to the back of them. Sutton Housing Partnership is trying to split off that matter so that it can get access to the decent homes funding for the other works and perhaps find a separate way to fund the box bathrooms.

We would all accept that our housing stock is in need of substantial investment. It is fair to say that all Governments have neglected that in recent decades. We need collectively to find a way to raise the required investment. In 2011 everyone should be able to live in a property of a decent standard. I should like to think that at the end of this Parliament, and the end of the first term of the coalition Government, that will be achievable for us.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank the Select Committee for the report and pay tribute to Dr Phyllis Starkey, who unfortunately is no longer a Member of the House, for the work she put into chairing the Select Committee in the last Parliament, the quality of the report and the information in it.

Hon. Members will have heard what I said about the way in which the decent homes standard was brought in under conditionality of local authorities. We need to think about that process a bit more for the future because it seems grossly unfair that those authorities, such as Camden, that did not agree to establishing an ALMO or to stop transfers were punished as a result, with the necessary resources coming in much later. I absolutely endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) has said about how Lewisham appears to have been punished because it essentially achieved the right stars on the wrong date. The process is as arbitrary as that. The issue of the date and so on does not make a blind bit of difference. The reality is that somebody living in Islington in a two-bedroom high-rise flat will have achieved decent homes standard, but somebody living in the equivalent in Lewisham probably will not have done. Why not? It is simply unfair. The Labour Government put the money in for both those tenants to achieve the necessary standard. We need to think about that.

Having said that, the Government should think carefully about the long-term implications of the comprehensive spending review, the cuts that have been imposed and the problems that that will build up for future. I was a councillor in Haringey before I became a Member of Parliament. During the 1980s, we started the process of a post-1948 programme and improved properties considerably in both Haringey and Islington, where I became the MP. Gradually, central Government money dried up, and the repairs and capital improvements budgets were cut back and back. We reached a situation where the only repairs being done were in cases where the tenant threatened legal action or took the council to court to require repairs to be done. It was essentially a solicitor’s process. If someone could convince a court or a solicitor somewhere that their case was strong enough, the repairs would be done. It was a ludicrous way of doing things. By the mid-1990s, the repair backlog was absolutely massive, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) pointed out in introducing the report.

The decent homes standard is, by and large, a very big success story in that it has meant that millions of people have now got decent kitchens and bathrooms, roofs that do not leak, new windows that are energy efficient and often new heating systems and many other things. Again, on the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East made, the specific inclusion of communal areas and common parts in the decent homes standard programme has meant that whole estates have improved a great deal. The Andover estate in my constituency was not terribly well designed in the first place—as, indeed, many estates all around the country were not—but with intelligence and sympathetic ideas and investment in the common areas, that estate is now far better than it ever was. It has a decent open square area in the middle, better play facilities and good quality security. In return, levels of vandalism and socially divisive issues are much reduced. Investment does pay off.

If a huge backlog of repairs will be building up during the next five years or so, I dread to think what that will do to the self-perception of people living in those areas or, indeed, to the condition of the flats they are living in. Cutting housing repairs and housing capital improvement budgets is a self-defeating prospect. At the lowest level, if one does not clean out the gutters, eventually the roof gets rotten, starts to leak and so it goes on. Money spent on maintenance and repairs is money well spent.

I obviously represent an inner urban area. The make-up of my constituency is the mirror opposite to that of most of the rest of the country—the same would apply to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East—in that about 40% of the stock is council or housing association, about 30% is private rented and about 30% is owner-occupied. The fastest fall is in owner occupations and the fastest rise is in private rented. Within the private rented sector, there are the most incredible levels of demand.

There are also issues with leaseholders, from both housing associations and local authorities—I take the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) was making—who sometimes feel quite justified in their grievance that the amount of money spent on capital works on a block seems wholly disproportionate to the benefit achieved from it. I never expected to become such an expert on the cost of renting cherry pickers, scaffolding and skips, and on the cost of sink units, windows and all that kind of thing. I do not mind that I am; I am quite happy to develop a knowledge and expertise in that area, but an awful lot of leaseholders have an incredibly close knowledge of such matters and they feel that they are being ripped off. There are all kinds of appeal procedures that cost everyone a great deal of money. Sometimes there needs to be much tighter monitoring of these contracts to ensure that everyone is getting value for money—both the tenants who will not necessarily be intimately aware of the intricate costs and the leaseholders who clearly are aware of the costs because they have a direct interest in them.

[Tom Brake]

I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the fact that there are many organisations that contract in that way and that should be put under a degree of scrutiny. For example, the Peabody Trust is in a protracted argument with the residents of BedZED, which it manages. The residents, who are a mix of owners, social tenants and part-rent, part-buy tenants and key workers, have obtained a quote for redecorating the residential block that is a fraction of the amount that Peabody is proposing to pay its contractors, which it will of course pass on to its residents.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

That sounds like a depressingly familiar story. Indeed I have had similar relationships with a number of housing associations, including the Peabody Trust, in my own area. There needs to be a Select Committee investigation into the governance, accountability and democracy of housing associations. That would be a very good area to discuss. Having said that, I pay tribute to Islington council for setting up a well-run ALMO and for its attempts to co-ordinate the work of housing associations, the council, building programmes and the community to ensure that we get family-sized housing, which is in the greatest demand.

We also need to consider the standards of management and, where possible, amalgamate the management of housing associations and the council in particular areas. There can be six or eight housing associations operating on one estate, which is not a sensible way in which to run things. Tenants will have six or eight caretakers, six or eight managers and six or eight cleaning contracts. How about just having one? Clearly, there is a need for us to investigate that area as well.

I also want to thank the people who work in housing in my own borough—the caretakers, the cleaners, the repair people and so on. They are not often thanked; they are usually criticised and blamed. The majority of people who work in the public sector do so because they want to. They want to do a good job and to co-ordinate well with the tenants and the local communities. I want to praise them for what they do and the way in which they try to respond to people’s needs.

The Select Committee report says quite a lot about the private rented sector. The history of that sector in this country is a particularly chequered one. The Labour Governments of the ’60s and ’70s sought registration, rent control and a degree of national standards in the private rented sector. The tenor of the Conservative Government of 1979 was against any kind of intervention in anything. The results included a property boom, privatisation, the sale of a lot of council properties and landlords’ freedom to charge whatever they wished. Now, in order to adhere to national law on housing homeless families, local authorities have absolutely no choice but to place those families in the private rented sector. They have a legal obligation to house people. No London council still puts people in bed and breakfasts—as far as I know, anyway. Instead, they put them in the private rented sector, which is expensive, often inadequate and sometimes nowhere near the community from which those families come. The bill is usually paid by housing benefit.

The Government’s solution is to cap housing benefit, which will mean in turn the removal of large numbers of people from central London. That is not a solution. The solution must be to support housing benefit, but it must also involve considering the impact and costs of the private rented sector on our society. Paragraph 162 of the report points out how many private rented properties the UK had in 2007. The number has increased a great deal since then, and I observe that it is increasing even faster at present.

Paragraph 173 is interesting. The Committee took evidence from Professor Tony Crook, professor of housing studies at the university of Sheffield, who discussed the influx of small-scale landlords, the number of buy-to-let mortgages that were granted and the resulting boom in the private rented sector. Shelter wants good-quality conditions in the private sector and is chary of introducing rent controls, as it thinks that that might reduce the number of places available.

I can see Shelter’s point, but it seems to me that we in this country have built in an enormous problem for ourselves. People in my constituency who live in the private rented sector, unless they receive housing benefit, spend the highest proportion of their disposable income on housing—far more than any mortgage payer or social tenant—for the worst conditions and, generally speaking, the worst services and repair levels. The issue is not going to go away, and if my constituency is anything to go by, private tenants will increasingly start to come together and be much more vocal about it.

I support close examination and inspection and the use of building control and legal proceedings to ensure decent homes, decent repairs and decent quality, but we cannot escape considering rent levels in the private sector. It is done to some extent in the United States and to a great extent in Germany and many European countries. I do not see why we should not start considering a similar process in this country. With the best will in the world, even if a Labour Government were spending billions of pounds of capital investment on new housing at present, there would still be a housing problem in five or 10 years’ time, particularly in London. It is an issue whose time has more than come, and a serious examination of it is needed. I hope that the Select Committee is prepared to undertake it.

The Shelter document that I obtained in advance of today’s debate made this point:

“More than £4 billion of taxpayers’ money is spent annually on housing benefit for private renters and this is set to rise to nearly £6.7 billion by 2010/11.”

We do not yet know what the effect of the cap will be, but that is what we are paying at present. It goes on to make a good point:

“The sector doesn’t function well enough. Too many tenants live in terrible conditions…Too many responsible landlords and professional property managers are undercut in the market by slum landlords”.

I understand that point. There are good landlords out there who try to manage things properly, charge reasonable rents and be reasonable people, but then a cut-throat arrives next door and undercuts them or gets rid of them by other means. It is not a nice business in some areas. Shelter says:

“Too many landlords are confused about, or are unaware of, what their obligations are.”

Taxpayers lose a great deal of money every year as a result, so tackling rogue landlords is very important and another issue to which I hope that the Government and the Select Committee will pay attention.

In areas such as mine, housing is the absolute, No. 1, top-of-the-list, key issue. If someone is a council tenant, they have security of tenure—unless the Government’s new proposals under the Localism Bill come in and that security of tenure is under threat.

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[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Bone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) on his excellent opening speech, which set the scene for today’s excellent debate.

The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) referred to ALMOs, almost as a default position, as being better than local authorities. That is slightly unfair—probably very unfair—on the many local authorities that do an excellent job.

[Tom Brake]

For the record, I made a comparison between ALMOs and housing associations, and not between ALMOs and local authorities.

[Chris Williamson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarification, which I welcome, and I apologise for misunderstanding him. I was making the point that many local authorities do an excellent job and do not necessarily need an ALMO to improve the housing stock for which they are responsible.

The hon. Gentleman also pointed out that successive Governments have neglected council housing. That was probably true of the previous Administration during their first four years, but the biggest problems built up over the 18 years of the previous Conservative Administration, and the decent homes programme went a long way towards addressing the backlog of dilapidation that was created by the under-investment from 1979 to 1997. He was hopeful that all the homes that are not currently decent will be brought up to standard by the end of this Parliament. I share his hope, but it is unlikely to be fulfilled.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) stressed the importance of good housing management. From my own experience of representing Derby North and as a councillor on Derby city council, I know that that is key to ensuring that people enjoy a good quality of life on their housing estate. Poor housing management can lead to a whole range of problems, and I am sure that there is cross-party agreement on that issue. My hon. Friend’s concern that the shortage of housing should be a key priority, if not the top priority, is again one that I share. However, the decision made by the Government to remove housing targets by getting rid of the regional spatial strategies will make it a more significant problem in years to come. Forcing people into the private sector is not a good way of proceeding, as my hon. Friend pointed out.

The hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) referred to apprenticeships and to how it is a good thing to use the decent homes programme to build up jobs by offering training and opportunities through apprenticeships for people to take advantage of the investment in construction. That is another important angle, but to some extent it will be undermined by the cuts made to the decent homes programme.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) said that too many people still live in substandard accommodation. She spoke eloquently about the impact that that has on people’s lives, and she referred to the embarrassment and shame that people feel, because they live in substandard accommodation. It is not their fault, and we have an obligation to people to ensure that they can enjoy their home. Nobody should be forced to endure that feeling of embarrassment and shame, because of inadequate investment by their local authority and central Government. I share her belief that, in certain circumstances, demolition is the only option. In numerous examples around the country, we have seen that selective demolition has had a significant impact and improved the overall standard of the housing estate, where it has taken place. She concluded by discussing the uncertainty about whether Lewisham will be able to deliver its decent homes standard.

The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) referred to authorities having to have a two-star rating. In a letter to the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, the Minister said:

“To improve fairness in allocating local authority decent homes funding, we will no longer require ALMOs to have passed a housing inspection with a 2* rating”.

Hopefully the Minister will confirm that that is the case and that consequently Lewisham will be able to access the funding that it needs and deserves.

My hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) made a number of important points and referred to the cuts building up problems for the future. I share my hon. Friend’s concern that it is short-sighted to make deep cuts now, because, in the long term, everyone pays a bigger price, both in human and financial terms. My hon. Friend also congratulated—I want to share in offering those congratulations—people such as caretakers, street cleaners and other public sector workers on doing an excellent job. They are all too often castigated, and they are not celebrated enough. I welcome his comments in that regard.

My hon. Friend also made an important point about high rents in the private sector, people being forced into the private sector and the problems associated with the quality of private-rented accommodation, because of inadequate regulation. The decision of the Government to impose restrictions on housing benefit is a blunt instrument, which penalises people who have, through no fault of their own, been forced to live in the private-rented sector. A better route may have been to restrict the level of rents that landlords can charge, as well as looking at restricting housing benefit. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that. It is wrong to penalise people because they are poor. This impacts not only on poorer people, but on people on middle incomes as well. He rightly pointed out the impact that poor quality housing has on health, education and general quality of life. He referred to the need for greater protection, regulation and security for people living in the rented sector.

The hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) referred to the danger—she repeated the point that other hon. Members have made—of the housing stock deteriorating if we do not invest appropriately. She is right to worry, and she is right to be more worried by the cuts being pushed through, ironically enough, by her own Government. Interestingly, she made the point about the need for adaptations as well. That is another area for disabled people that is extremely important. More people are living longer now, and there is a greater need for disabled facilities grants. It is another area where local authorities will struggle to meet the demand. They are already struggling, but the problem will become even more acute, because of the cuts that are being pushed through.

My hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) referred to the first four years of the Labour Government—I have already touched on this point—where housing was not given sufficient priority. She said that housing is the most important issue in her constituency, and she also repeated the impact of poor housing on health. She also stressed the importance of insuring that in any investment programme we secure value for money. She said that if we are not careful, there is a danger of cartels being created and the public sector not getting good value for money. We could actually get more bang for our buck, as it were, if we were to bear down more severely on that. My hon. Friend also made a good point about the use of empty homes and being more flexible, and she referred to the GLC. That is a good example to cite, and I am interested in the Minister’s remarks about it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) referred to the withdrawal of a huge PFI scheme that would have dealt with the problems in the Meadows estate. I know that area well, given that it is close to my constituency. Indeed, I had a job with Henry Boot plc as a bricklayer on the Meadows estate when it was being built, but I must say that I am not responsible for it, as I took a job on another building site.

My hon. Friend eloquently outlined the impact of the decent homes programme on her constituents. She discussed not only bricks and mortar, important though they are, but how such matters impact on the lives of ordinary people and improve the quality of their life. Indeed, she said that 80 apprenticeships have been created, and as a result of the cuts to the programme in Nottingham, fewer apprenticeships will be taken on now than would have otherwise been the case.

The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said that the largest proportion of council tenants is located in his constituency. He also had the good grace to refer to the legacy of previous, progressive Labour councils going back as far as the 1920s. Those councils set an excellent standard. I share his view about ALMOs being down to a local decision. When that is appropriate and tenants want it, that is fine, but it should not be forced on them. He, too, made the point about the private rented sector and the fact that most of the overall housing stock in the country that is not up to a decent standard is in the private rented sector. Only 56% of privately rented accommodation comes up to the decent homes threshold. That matter needs urgent attention, and I hope that the Minister will deal with it in his concluding remarks.

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[Grant Shapps]

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not mind my making a little progress. Others have spoken for a lot longer than I will get to respond to the many points that have been raised.

We are putting in £2.1 billion, but I would estimate that we need about £3.5 billion to truly finish the programme. I expect that, by April, about 210,000 homes will still be in need of decent homes funding, and the programme throughout this Parliament may cover about 150,000 of them.

The Chair of the Select Committee also asked for greater flexibility for local authorities to, for example, put in a boiler but charge 0.5% more rent. That is a very sensible suggestion and it requires no intervention from me. Local authorities are absolutely within their rights to do that. The guideline rents that we currently provide mean that they already have flexibility, and the direction of policy in the Localism Bill, which is at Committee stage, is to do precisely what he says. It is an excellent idea and one of the very good suggestions that have been made.

My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) raised the issue—perhaps he did this inadvertently, but it also came up in a later exchange—of the value of ALMOs versus housing associations versus local authorities. I do not particularly want to enter into this debate, other than to say that, from a Government perspective, I have a completely neutral view on whether an ALMO is better than a local authority or a housing association. Indeed, there have been some very interesting exchanges throughout the afternoon, and they have all been argued from the individual perspectives of constituency MPs. We know that, at certain times, an ALMO can be very good or very bad, and the same can be said about a local authority or a housing association.

There are even arguments about the size of housing associations, from vast conglomerates—I have a great deal of sympathy with some of the comments about the distances sometimes involved—to some small ones. In my experience, having travelled around the country a lot, looking at different types of housing, there is no single prescription for the right size or shape of organisation to run housing.

The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) made a number of interesting points. I was impressed in particular by her comments on the quality of the environment and on how important design is to the way people feel, which was picked up again by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), when he talked about walking into a block of flats and how the entranceway can make all the difference.

The hon. Member for Stockport also made the point about walking into the home of someone who has had the decent homes work done—the delighted tenant—and sharing in that delight. I am sure that, as constituency MPs, we have all been in that position. I put it on record that, in the previous Parliament, I was the Conservative Opposition Member who represented the most council tenants in the country—I have not checked for this Parliament. On many occasions, however, I have walked into a kitchen or bathroom and been greeted by the delighted tenant. It is an absolute pleasure.

I also put it on record that I believe in the decent homes programme. It was an achievement of the previous Government. I accept the comments of the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and others, including the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson), that it probably started four years too late, but it did a lot of good work. I also accept the arguments of the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and others, that it sometimes carries on doing work where it is not quite required to do so, or doing it in a uniform or almost machine-like fashion, at times unnecessarily ripping out perfectly good accommodation or facilities, as mentioned by other Members.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) talked about the importance of apprenticeships. I absolutely agree with what I thought was a thoughtful contribution from him. We have a great opportunity, with today’s economic backdrop, to ensure that local skills are being used or upgraded to provide improvements for people’s homes. It is the perfect mix and combination, given the opportunity of the £2 billion-plus to ensure that it happens in the future.

The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) made a number of interesting points about estates still requiring regeneration. I offer to engage with the hon. Lady to listen to the problems and to be of as much assistance as possible. It is not easy, the money does not exist and we have had to make difficult decisions, as she and everyone else appreciates.

However, I wanted to correct one point in the hon. Lady’s speech, when she seemed to suggest she believed that the local authority would have to contribute 10% towards the costs of decent homes. That is not what the Government said. I said that if more than 10% of repairs were needed in order to reach decent homes standard—if there were more than 10% non-decent stock, in other words, which I believe would be the case in Lewisham—authorities can apply for decent homes funding. It is not that they are then expected to pitch in 10%, although in fact it might be a good idea for them to do so. I just wanted to ensure that that got on the record.

[Tom Brake]

The Minister mentioned estates that still need renovation. Can he confirm that it would be strange if ALMOs with two stars, which put a programme to Government that demonstrated their capacity to deliver and carry out that estate renovation, were not given some priority in the bids?

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend is right to point out that what should count is the quality of the organisation, its ability to deliver and the need on the ground. I feel strongly that it is wrong to penalise tenants for whom it is almost impossible to do anything about the lousy management of their property, because they happen to have a useless landlord, and then penalise them again for that very fact.

My hon. Friend’s wish will come through in the work that will be done by the Homes and Communities Agency in assessing those bids, which will be taken further next month. It seems natural that those organisations that are well run and have a good plan will be more successful within the limited resources. If they are good, they are good. I do not think that two stars necessarily means that an organisation is good; it can all too often mean that it is good at ticking the right boxes, and employing too many consultants on too high a salary to jump through hoops, which is irrelevant to the lives of people on the ground. I am sure, however, that there will be a correlation.

In response to the hon. Member for Lewisham East, and to the many Members who raised this issue, the revenue account will be a vital part of the reform package. We have established that in our view the country does not have the money to completely finish the decent homes programmes—to make significant further progress during this Parliament—but we can carry out housing revenue account reform, and we are legislating for that right now in the Localism Bill, building on the work undertaken in the consultation by my predecessor, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne. One upshot of that will be an ability to plan for the renovation, repair and renewal of local authority stock for the next 30 years. I am very keen, as the hon. Member for Lewisham East pointed out, to get that provision through, and I look forward to support from right across the House in securing the progress of that part of the Bill. I do say to the hon. Lady that Lewisham’s chief executive could perhaps make a personal contribution by reducing his £192,000 salary. Times are tough, and I would have thought, as other Members have pointed out, that that would be a very good place to start.

The hon. Member for Islington North raised the point about two-star ALMOs. I have talked about how the system was unfair, and I am pleased to sweep it aside. In addition, I really do not mind if local authorities want to continue to manage their stock for ever. That is entirely their business, and this Government will cease the tricks of pushing local authority stocks into different forms of management. I sense from this debate that there is cross-party agreement on that matter, on the part of many MPs. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the subject of ending lifetime tenure, and affordable rent, which he and I have discussed previously. The most important thing that we can do is to provide more homes and upgrade the homes that we have.

I have judged that, given that the previous Government put £17 billion into building more homes, after 13 years they ended up with a net loss of 45,000 homes. Yes, there was the right to buy and yes, pathfinder knocked down homes, but if we tried to use that maths again, we would discover that we needed £50 billion to £100 billion from the Treasury simply to build more homes in that way. In other words, something was not working, and we needed to find a different solution. Affordable rent is my version of that solution. We can now use the additional money, in the way that the Chairman of the Select Committee suggested we do for renovation, for building more homes, and that will be a sensible step forward.

My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) made a number of important points, about the additional amounts of money sometimes required for homes built in different types of fabric—I know that the Homes and Communities Agency will take that issue on board—and, in common with several other Members, about round 6 bidding. Round 6 was never approved, so no one on the ground should have ever thought it was definitely going ahead. I will be meeting the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), and I make the same offer to my hon. Friend and to Members across the House, to meet to talk about the issues and the possible ways forward.

I thought that one of the best speeches of the afternoon was made by the hon. Member for Vauxhall, who rightly pointed out so many of the common-sense realities of housing, and whose speech was devoid of any political back and forth. Many of the same issues were raised by other Members, but I thought that hers was a great contribution.

In response to the hon. Member for Nottingham South, I can say that I have visited Nottingham City Homes and have even had its chief executive, Chris Langstaff, to my office here in Parliament. I know the great work that the organisation does, and I know that that work will be able to continue. With the flexibility that we are now providing through localism, with money going locally rather than through larger regional organisations, and through the housing revenue account reform, organisations such as Nottingham City Homes will be able to continue to upgrade homes, albeit at perhaps a slightly different pace.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark made a great contribution. He and I have discussed housing on many occasions.