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Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) has a sense-of-humour failure. Each year the Government announce new housing figures and each year the housing crisis gets deeper. Each and every year the Government miss their own targets on house building. The Government are so out of touch with the housing market that their cure for failure is to increase the target even more. Goodness me! Is that not how Nikita Khrushchev ruined Soviet agriculture? Let us consider what we were told on Tuesday—that the Government are going to build 3 million new houses by 2020. The Government do not have the capacity to build 3 million houses, nor do local authorities. The Government can create conditions that encourage house building, and councils can help facilitate new communities. The reality is that the Government have not come anywhere close to meeting their own targets. The figures speak for themselves. The Government are building fewer houses than the previous Conservative Government. Under Labour, in England an average of just over 145,000 homes have been built each year since 1997. Across the whole of the Thatcher and the Major Governments, the average number of houses built each and every year was well over 173,000. So what is the Government's response to failing to provide enough new homes? The Prime Minister talks about meeting aspirations. What first-time buyers want are bricks and mortar. According to the Halifax, there were an estimated 315,000 first-time buyers in 2006, the lowest total for a quarter of a century. Home ownership is falling for the first time since records began. Mortgage repossessions are up. The Government, through higher taxation and a refusal to listen, have kicked the housing ladder away from thousands of first-time buyers. Homes are unaffordable for the vast majority of people.