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Housing Corporation (Delegation) etc. Bill

With respect, the difficulty with section 106 agreements is that developers are having to come up with huge amounts of infrastructure, such as new primary schools and contributions to new secondary schools. They tend to go back to the local authority and say ““If any more burdens are placed on us, the development will become unviable.”” I invite the Minister, through the Government office for the south-east, to look at the Bankside/Bodicote example—a large new development with very little social housing coming through, using the planning system by way of benefit. Working families on low incomes are finding themselves in a catch-22. They are told by the housing authorities that if they go on to the housing waiting list, they will probably have to remain on it for a very long time. If they move into the private rented sector, they are told that they are adequately housed, so they drop off the social housing list. However, the reality is that they are in semi-permanent housing in assured shorthold tenancies. Those of us who are fortunate enough to own our own homes know that one benefit of home ownership—of the security of tenure that freehold gives—is that we can do things in our own gardens and houses that those in private rented sector accommodation cannot do. Under the Bill, the Housing Corporation has to cover England, Scotland and Wales, so by definition, it has to cover Oxfordshire. My worry is that at the moment, there is no sign of its covering Oxfordshire—it is invisible so far as Oxfordshire is concerned. Why is that so? I therefore hope that we will see shared equity policies that will enable working families in Oxfordshire, as elsewhere, to get the secured tenancy that social housing provides, rather than their having to live for ever in the private rented sector. Such temporary accommodation may well enable social mobility by allowing people to move, find a job and get settled, but many families want then to move into more permanent tenancy. At the moment, such tenancy is being denied them in areas such as mine.