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Affordable Housing

Access to housing, especially affordable housing, is a key issue for all our constituents and it is becoming ever more urgent. I am sure that we all know from our constituency case loads about the effect of the shortage of housing on individuals. It reduces the ability of young people to buy their own home and puts enormous pressure on social housing, especially social rented housing, and families are trapped in overcrowded and sometimes substandard housing. That was the reason why the Communities and Local Government Committee—although, at the time, it was the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister—decided to devote its first large investigation to the subject of the affordability and supply of housing. I am sure that that is also the reason why there are many hon. Members in the Chamber. I know that a great many of them wish to speak, so I will try to keep my remarks fairly short. Over the past 15 years, it is indisputable that the annual rate of house building has fallen while the rate of household growth has increased. There was an upturn in the number of houses built in 2005—there were 160,000 built, which was the highest number since 1994-95—but there is clearly still a need for further increases. Although there is a slight excess of houses over households nationally—the figure was 1.7 per cent. in 2003—that figure is falling and there is enormous regional variation. The Committee endorsed the Government’s view that the rate of house building must be increased if problems of house shortages are not themselves to increase. However, given that the latest estimates of household growth are even higher than before, at 209,000 households a year, the Committee questioned whether the Government’s target of an extra 200,000 houses a year by 2016 was actually enough. We urged that the target should be regularly revisited and reviewed. The Committee also thought that national figures were not especially informative, given that there was such huge regional variation. Some 60 per cent. of household growth is occurring in London, the east, the south-east and the south-west. There are already 3.5 per cent. more households than homes in London. The National Housing Federation, in an excellent leaflet that I commend to hon. Members as a source of statistics, highlights the scale of the ““affordability chasm”” in the south-east, such is the extent of the problem. Of course, the Committee accepted that there are housing hot spots in many other parts of the country and that affordability problems are both increasing and occurring in parts of the country in which they previously did not. The Committee felt that it was absolutely crucial that regional and local house building targets reflected regional needs. We thought that they should not be just dictated by the market, but that equal weight should be given to the needs of local economies and environmental and social issues. In the regional and local context, this is not just a question of housing numbers. Additional housing should match local demand through both a mix of tenure and a range of housing sizes and types.