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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I should like to remind the House of the report by the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, ““Affordability and the Supply of Housing””, which was published before the summer recess and supported by all parties on the Committee. The Committee welcomed the Government's then objective to raise the number of net additional homes by 200,000, but said that that was probably not enough, which has since proved to be the case. Indeed, I am not convinced that even the new target is sufficient to meet housing need. I want to re-focus this debate on what my constituents would want it to be about. I am disappointed by the speech that the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) made, because that sort of cheap debating style is exactly what puts ordinary people off this place. In particular, it puts women off big time. This debate is about two issues that are of enormous concern to my constituents and, I would have thought, to those of almost all hon. Members. The first issue is the fact that young people are increasingly priced out of the housing market, as prices rise beyond their reach. I commend to hon. Members a series of booklets by the National Housing Federation called ““Home Truths””, which show the level to which housing inaffordability has risen in every part of the country. For example, even in Milton Keynes, a growth area with lots of houses, people need a household income of more than £50,000—two and a half times the average income in Milton Keynes—to pay the average mortgage. In the rest of Buckinghamshire, where incomes and house prices are higher, people need a household income of £85,469 to pay the average mortgage, which is 3.8 times the average income. Our constituents know that such statistics mean that young people who in former times might have reasonably expected to buy a house now have no hope at all of doing so unless their parents can give them substantial sums to help them into the housing market. That is a huge concern to me, and I would have thought that it would be to every other Member, but we did not get a flavour of that from the hon. Gentleman's speech.