Affordable Homes Bill

Debate between Tony Baldry and Nick Raynsford

Friday 5th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Tony Baldry]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I suspect other hon. Members will enlarge upon the fact that, under Governments of both parties, new social housing has tended to be a planning windfall gain from new house building. Under the Labour Government, very little new housing was built. In Banbury and Bicester and throughout my constituency, more new housing is going up—as a consequence, new social housing is going up—than for a very long time. He is correct that that leads to new social tenancies.

[Mr Raynsford]

The right hon. Gentleman should bear in mind the fact that the average number of homes built per year during the lifetime of the Labour Government was 145,000. The lowest number in any one year was 124,000. The current Government have not completed 124,000 homes in any single year they have been in office, so it is simply not true that more housing is being built than was built under the previous Government.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The right hon. Gentleman is a little selective in his use of figures. The previous Government were in office for 13 years, and had they not built houses in all those years, we would have been in serious difficulty. As a consequence of the economic mess they got the country into, during their final years in office and during the early part of the recession—the hangover of the recession overlapped with our being elected—the construction industry was in dire straits. I am glad to say that, wherever I go in my patch, I see signs saying “Bricklayers wanted” outside building sites. The construction industry tells me that it finds it very difficult to get the people with the skills it needs because the building boom, with new housing going up, is running apace, thanks largely to the policies pursued by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer in turning the economy around.

I should get back to the central point to which I wish to draw the House’s attention. The experience of the pathfinder areas of the local housing allowance led to the previous Government legislating for a national roll-out from 7 April 2008. The local housing allowance measure was contained in the Welfare Reform Act 2007 and associated regulations.