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Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. I shall not follow him all the way to Iraq, although I do share some of the concerns that he raised on the issue of immigration. However, I wish to speak mainly about housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) pointed out, after 10 years of this Government, we all sense a general improvement in the quality of the health service, hospitals and transport in our constituencies, but housing is one of the weaker areas in that general improvement, and that is why I wish to concentrate on it. I welcome the commitment to an expanding housing drive in the Queen's Speech, which will be pushed through by the new Minister for Housing. My right hon. Friend is not in her place at present, but she carries all our good will and will bring a new intelligence and dynamism to the housing issue. Having made that sycophantic point, I wish to raise certain problems in housing. We have tried to drive forward on housing while carrying an excessive burden from the past of failed policies, which will make it more difficult to make progress. It is a huge problem, because the building record has been poor. The supply and demand equation has featured in the escalation in house prices. More importantly, under the Tories there was a long period of disinvestment in council and social housing that produced horrendous problems on housing estates. I draw the House's attention to the research done by Leon Feinstein, of the university of London's institute of education, entitled ““The Public Value of Social Housing””. It analyses the relationship between housing and life chances and shows that the housing estates were very mixed communities in the 1950s. Very often, they were a springboard for success and social advance. By the turn of the century, however, thanks to disinvestment and the fact that the scarcity of public rented housing meant that they had become dumping grounds, the estates had become a drag on performance. They were associated with high unemployment and a comparative failure in life chances. It is a shocking report, and the ground has to be made up. The problem is huge, and the Government must shed some of the burdens of failed policies in the past. They should take the money used on those policies and put it into the housing construction and refurbishment drives, as otherwise success will not be achieved—especially given the short time scale that now remains. I have various criticisms to make, therefore, although I shall not make them in the spirit of a performance at the Bolling working men's club, which was what the Opposition spokesman gave us earlier. I want to offer more sensible criticisms of some of our policies that are not working as they should. First, I turn to the pathfinder programme. Some time ago on the ““Tonight”” programme, Trevor McDonald revealed that, under the pathfinder programme, viable terraced housing that could be reconditioned very cheaply was being pulled down and replaced with far more expensive housing that people did not want. That has been a feature of the pathfinder programme's performance. In addition, the National Audit Office has released a report on housing market renewal through the pathfinder programme, and I shall be able to tell the House about it at one minute past 12 noon tomorrow. However, I can say today that it is very critical and that it states that the programme does not provide good value for money. The pathfinder programme is disappointing, and the money spent on it could be used elsewhere. Secondly, I emphasise that there can be no successful housing drive without councils' full and enthusiastic co-operation. Yet the Government continue to pressure councils, keeping them short of the money that they need to do the job in respect of housing because they prefer them to privatise their housing stocks. Councils are still being bullied, bamboozled and bribed into going for privatisation, even though it is an expensive programme in itself. Enormous gap funding is required for the new housing associations, there is a big debt write-off and the NAO has estimated that the costs per property of the whole transfer programme at about £700. That money could go to housing, but in fact it is being spent on estate agents, lawyers, consultants and accountants all over the country. It is wrong for the Government to maintain the pressure to privatise housing. That pressure should be suspended until we put local authorities on a favourable financial footing so that they can play on a level playing field against the registered social landlords. At present, the playing field is not level, especially when it comes to RSLs' ability to borrow and the debt write-off that they enjoy. The Government are alienating local authorities instead of co-operating with them, but 3 million council properties remain in council control, often through arm's length management organisations. More than 100 authorities have rejected transfer or decided not to go for it, and the Minister for Housing has said that 95 per cent. of them can meet the decent homes target by the dates to which we committed in our manifesto. However, many are forced to get money for repairs and refurbishment by selling off council housing and the sites to private developers. It cannot make sense to try and increase the stock of public rented housing by selling it off and pulling it down. Yet that is what is happening in places such as Sheffield—where my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) and I were due to speak against the policy at a meeting tonight—Birmingham and Camden. The Minister of Housing has said that the amount pulled down will be less than the amount of new build, but that cannot be true in Camden, where very little land, if any, is available for council housing.