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Affordable Housing

I take on board your earlier comments about trying to be brief, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I represent a rural constituency. As most hon. Members appreciate, concerns about affordability are not restricted to urban areas. In our sparsely populated rural area we experience many problems similar to those in urban areas. The main difference is lack of delivery in rural areas. House building has focused in and around urban areas, and funding from the Government to support affordable housing has followed. That was brought home to those of us who serve on the Public Accounts Committee—it is good to see other members of it here—earlier this week when we considered the National Audit Office report, ““A Foot on the Ladder: Low Cost Home Ownership Assistance””, which forcefully made the point that house prices are rising fast and incomes are relatively static, especially in rural areas, and the problem is getting worse. The NAO identified £112 million of efficiency savings that could be made from the implementation of the Government’s policies on supporting affordable housing. Redeployment in the way that the NAO suggests would help more than 4,000 people into affordable housing. I hope that the Department will take note of that and try to implement some of the recommendations. I have recently been lobbied by the Midlands United group of housing associations, which has made a submission to the Chancellor for the comprehensive spending review, pointing out some of the impact of the lack of priority afforded to the midlands, especially rural areas, in recent years. The east and west midlands have almost one fifth of the country’s housing stock but receive less than 15 per cent. of public funding for housing. Last year, just under 30,000 new homes were built in the midlands, but only just over 3,200 were affordable homes. That is not good enough. The needs of the area are acute. One reason for the lack of priority is that no funding has been provided through the Government funding mechanisms for key workers who live outside London, the east and the south-east. That means that, of the £470 million that the Government spent last year on their affordable housing schemes, £221 million was spent on key workers, but not a single pound was spent outside those areas. None of that was spent in the midlands or in the north. One reason for that is that we are labouring under an excessively centralised housing allocation. The new regional spatial strategies grant unelected regional assemblies the ability to allocate houses according to their priorities. Not surprisingly, that tends to focus house building and growth on the larger population centres. For example, in the west midlands, of housing is being allocated to the urban areas, leaving the rural areas to pick up the scraps. I agree with the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) that we should consider local determination based on local priorities, and provide much more flexibility for local authorities to decide how many houses they should build and where they should build them.