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Affordable Housing

I am not giving way, as we have already had exchanges on the subject. I disagree with the argument that the problem is not particularly associated with this Government. As I said in my opening comments, problems with social housing have—unbelievably—been worse under the Labour Government over the last 10 years than they were even under the Conservative Administration, who already had a pretty bad record. I have highlighted problems with the level of private rents and the price of housing on the private market, but the human cost—for the 30 per cent. of the population who do not own their own homes and often have no hope of doing so—is so much more. My hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) mentioned constituency surgeries, and tomorrow I shall conduct my usual Friday surgery. Almost inevitably, I will hear the same stories every Friday from pensioners living in council flats or council family homes. They may have lived there for 30 or 40 years, seen their children grow up and leave, and they may have lost their partners. The house is too big, the garden cannot be maintained, yet they cannot move out. They would love to live in an old age pensioner’s bungalow, but the council is not allowed to build or provide them. The next person to come along to my surgery may have a young family and live in a council flat or private accommodation that is overcrowded with children. The family wants to but cannot move into a council house and certainly cannot afford to go to the private sector. As I say, the human cost is enormous. I have repeatedly asked over the past five or six years: what is it about this Government, that they have such a dogmatic new Labour ideology that they oppose the principle of social housing in the form of council housing? First, in 1997, they effectively stopped council house building, and then tried to force every council in the country to privatise its council stock. More than 100 councils, including Chesterfield, have not done so, because their tenants chose democratically to stay with the council rather than privatise, but the Government are now vindictively penalising them for taking the ““wrong”” democratic choice. I have raised that matter twice at Prime Minister’s questions, only to be told that I should celebrate choice. I do. If tenants choose to move away from the council because it is so badly run—I have certainly seen badly run councils—that is their choice. However, if tenants choose to stay with the council, as they did in Chesterfield and more than 100 other councils, their choice should be recognised and supported by a Government who claim that they support choice. Both Conservative and Labour Members raised the question of where the money for more social housing comes from. Let me stay with the particular example of Chesterfield, one of the 70 per cent. of councils that retain stock and are judged by the Government to be in surplus financially in respect of council houses. That is strange in itself. On the one hand, the Government and the Minister tell Chesterfield that it has too much money from its council rents, so some of it will be taken away to spend elsewhere. On the other hand, as we heard in respect of Birmingham earlier, the Government office for the east midlands comes along with a jackboot every two or three months, complaining that there is not enough money to bring all an area’s houses up to the decent homes standard within the requisite time scale, so it has to privatise. Surely we cannot have both. Either there is too much money in the council house budget from rents, with the Government taking it away to spend elsewhere—including on Olympic infrastructure in London under the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister—or we do not have enough money and they want to force us to privatise. It cannot be both; that is totally impossible. It has to be one or the other.