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Affordable Housing

That will be a matter for the Conservative party’s ongoing policy review and we will look at it very closely. There is a need for more homes across a variety of sectors and Labour’s approach—that rising house prices will necessarily lead to a generation of more units of social housing for rent—is simplistic. We need a greater diversity of housing in constituencies such as mine. We need to speed up the planning system and make it more flexible. The planning gain supplement will almost certainly not be the solution; in general, taxing home building will not be the solution and previous attempts to capture the uplift in land prices for the Treasury generally have been a failure. The Labour policy that, as a hard and fast rule across London and perhaps across Great Britain, 50 per cent. of new stock is to be social housing for rent is misguided. It is strongly contested by some London Labour councils. The London borough of Newham has, I think, come to the conclusion that what it needs is more lower cost private sector home ownership of the sort that I describe, in order to create a better balance in that borough. Such councils argue that they want to increase home ownership and shared ownership. There are also genuine problems to do with stamp duty being too high and with the threshold for inheritance tax being too low, but that is probably a matter for a separate debate. There are people who are paying inheritance tax on former local authority right-to-buy properties on estates such as Sulivan court in my constituency. The original intention behind inheritance tax was not that people who bought their council flats under the right to buy in the 1980s and 1990s should later leave an inheritance tax bill to their children. What we need across Britain is a much more liberalised approach to land use, and especially urban land use. There has been a lot of over-classification. In my constituency, the previous Labour council has classified some areas as key local shopping areas. The Dawes road is full of unused shops—disused retail frontage—which could, with a little more imagination, be transformed into residential property.