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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I start by agreeing with the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) on his opening remarks, in which he rightly praised my hon. Friend the Minister for introducing sensible amendments in response to debates in Committee. The hon. Gentleman's recognition of the Government's willingness to listen and respond positively was welcome and in rather marked contrast to the comments of the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), who was rather churlish in his approach to the issue. However, I disagree very profoundly with most of the other comments made by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and, indeed, those of most of the other contributors to the debate this afternoon. It strikes me that, when there appears to be consensus, as there appears to have been in the House today, it is often an occasion for ringing alarm bells. I want to ring a few alarm bells now. I have to tell hon. Members that the inheritance that the Government received when they came to office in 1997 was indicative of things that were in many ways fundamentally wrong with housing policy. Not only was there the huge legacy of substandard council housing that was in urgent need of improvement—the funding for that improvement has been quite rightly a fundamental part of Government policy in recent years, and we will return to the details of that in a moment—but there was the pernicious legacy of years in which tenure had been allowed to dominate the debate and politicians had argued the merits of tenure as master rather than the interests of the public for whom tenure should be the servant. So we had debates about the merits of owner-occupation, which obsessed the Conservatives at the time, in just the same way as we have heard rather an obsession about the merits of council housing as against social housing more widely. I believe that it is fundamental that we should think of tenure not as the master but as the servant and that we should try to provide a framework where people can opt for an appropriate tenure suitable to their needs and resources at different stages in their lives, without being trapped, as too many people have been in the past, in unsatisfactory and undesirable circumstances. The consequence of the obsession with tenure was that, for 50 years or more, we allowed all housing development in this country to be divided and polarised in a rigid and ultimately socially destructive way. We had estates that were almost exclusively owner-occupied on one side and estates that almost exclusively comprised social housing on the other, and ne'er the twain did meet. That led to all sorts of problems. A lot of the market housing provided for owner-occupation was built wholly unsustainably, with people gobbling up acres of green space, seeking detached houses in rural settings. Of course, that created the concept of concreting over the countryside, which has become a rather significant issue in the debate about how we meet housing need. A lot of the opposition to new housing is exactly the product of poor-quality, insensitive housing development, gobbling up the countryside, particularly in southern Britain, over many decades. The Government who were in power in the 1980s and early 1990s were fundamentally at fault for allowing that to proceed.