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Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Before making my remarks on housing, I want to pick up one or two issues raised in the debate. First, a couple of hon. Members have referred to education, including the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), who talked about the academies programme. I think I can confidently state that I am the only parent in Parliament who has a child in an academy school. Let me say that I, for one, go down on my knees in gratitude for the three new academy schools in my constituency. Together, they will account for about £100 million of new buildings when completed. Those buildings replace a dilapidated, ugly and brutal three-site failing school. We hear so much nonsense and mythology about the schools programme, but it is right that the schools that were in the greatest need and in trouble have been the priority for new buildings and management. New buildings alone are not going to transform children's educational experience. One of the worrying contexts that we are failing to address on both sides of the House is the extent to which schools have polarised in terms of their intake. New buildings or no new buildings, devolved management or no devolved management, it will be impossible to provide all our children, especially those from the most challenged backgrounds, with the quality of education that they need if we do not have a mixed intake. A voucher-type scheme is the worst possible option. In some ways we have a de facto voucher scheme now, because parents apply for the most popular schools—those in highest demand—and those schools choose their parents and children. It is not a case of parents and children choosing those schools. As a result, the schools that are less popular gradually ratchet downwards, to become schools of last resort. That has to be turned around. Many different polices will be needed, including the academies programme and resource allocation. We need to be far more rigorous and honest about what is happening in our schools because of their admissions policies, and what we need to do to ensure a balanced intake. The second issue that has arisen a couple of times is migration. I was grateful to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government for seeing some of us a few weeks ago to discuss the impact of new arrival communities on local services. We need to discuss the extent to which, while central Government benefit from migration and the contribution that migrants make to the economy, local communities have to deal with the service consequences of changing or growing populations. The problem is decades old; it is not new. We have to address it, but before we do, we must go further in ensuring that we have a reasonably accurate count of who is living in our local communities. Again, it is easy to go for glib soundbites. No open democratic society in the world knows with absolute certainty what its population is, or where it is at any given time. As a member of the Home Affairs Committee, I was fortunate enough to go to Washington a couple of weeks ago. The American Government believe that there are 20 million people in the country who are not documented and whose location they do not know. It is a global problem, but what we can do is improve our capacity to measure at local level. In 2001 I was a lone voice. It gives me no satisfaction—well, actually it does give me some satisfaction—to know that I was right. I was alone in saying that the local census count in my borough in central London would prove to be catastrophically wrong. I telephoned the censors and the Government during the weeks running up to the census to say there were whole estates to which forms had not been delivered, and which would therefore disappear from the count. We knew very well at an early stage that the count would be inaccurate. Incidentally, my local council took no interest in the possibility of an inaccurate population count until 18 months later, when the census was returned and it found that it had lost 24,000 people. Then it suddenly became a matter of great interest. The Office for National Statistics had been wrong, and refused to admit it. Only now are we beginning to elicit from the ONS some recognition that its methods alone cannot cope with what is happening in our urban communities. It is not just to do with migration, although migration is part of it; it is also to do with churn, an issue that is hugely under-recognised by government at all levels. A population in which 30 per cent. of households move every year has massive implications for the delivery of services such as schools, social services and benefits, because it is very hard to count. When diverse communities exist along with communities with large numbers of properties in multiple occupation and a high level of mobility, a dry statistical measurement will simply not be enough. It is the services at the sharp end that will be affected, and it is the people who depend most on those services—often the most vulnerable—who will not be counted and will therefore not be provided with services. The Government need to recognise that the Local Government Association has a point. It may have its own political axe to grind, but it has a point about numbers. They also need to recognise that we must vastly improve the partnership approach to the measurement of population. That involves not just the ONS, national insurance numbers and GP registrations, but a great deal of permanent outreach-based contact with populations and the matching of numerous data sources. Housing is a long-standing concern of mine, and I welcome the new priority for house building that we have established in recent months. Mechanisms in the housing Bill will enable us to deliver the homes that are needed. I especially welcome the emphasis on social housing. As the sub-prime crisis across the Atlantic and its ripple effect have demonstrated, we have a genuine problem not just with those who cannot get a foot on the ladder—important though that is—but with those cannot sustain home ownership. There are a growing number of such people, and sadly that number is likely to continue to grow. We must ensure that we not only provide homes for them, but do something critically important, by de-stigmatising affordable housing for rent. Home ownership is a legitimate aspiration. It is a lovely aspiration. It is an aspiration that I am sure almost every hon. Member has fulfilled. It is not, however, a moral right. It does not confer a higher status on home owners, and it does not imply that those who cannot afford to buy their own homes are in some way inferior and as a consequence—for this is the practical manifestation—should not have the rights to choice, mobility and decency that the rest of us take for granted. Of course the problem is partly due to a long-term failure to build new homes on the necessary scale, but it is also the result of the right to buy. That was a fantastic policy, and a windfall, for those who benefited from it directly, but it was a social catastrophe none the less. It left us in a position equivalent to running the bath taps with the plug out: building new homes while haemorrhaging social housing at the other end of the process. We must address that problem. Although building new social homes is crucial, it is not enough. I welcome the fact that the Government are also seeking to implement some of the recommendations of John Hills' review of social housing. He has this year produced what is probably the most rigorous and thorough analysis of the social housing sector in generations. He has put forward some excellent proposals, mostly based on incentives and rightly rejecting the call we have heard from some quarters for an end to permanent tenancies for social tenants. That would be another inhumane and brutal social catastrophe. The incentives address issues such as downsizing and mobility. He also looked at the issue of worklessness among social tenants. That is not a problem to do with housing benefit, as has been suggested from the Opposition Benches. It is a problem to do with rent: those who aspire to get into work at the lower end of the salary scale will be unable to clear their rent. If people are to be able to hold on to their homes, rather than be at risk of arrears and losing their homes, we must look more imaginatively at the relationship between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Communities and Local Government in terms of the treatment of housing costs. It is criminal that families are trapped in poverty and worklessness because of the way in which rent and housing benefit currently interact. I will push hard for the housing legislation to include the long promised and long overdue updating of overcrowding measures. In my constituency, we have families not of six people in two-bed flats, but of six people in one-bed flats. It is time we recognised the inhumanity of that level of overcrowding. We need a modern legislative response to give such families the hope that they will achieve what they rightly aspire to.