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Housing and Regeneration Bill

The fact that I wish to address my comments to new clauses 1 and 8 will come as no surprise, given that almost everyone who has spoken has done the same. Those new clauses have dominated the debate. This group contains more than 21 new clauses and amendments, and those two alone have taken up well over 90 per cent. of the discussion. That shows just how strongly people feel about this matter. The right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) discussed dogma about tenure and whether people should be buying houses or living in council houses, saying that that was not the key issue. One of the key issues is that the 11 years of dogma from this Government, saying that council housing is bad and that it must be forced into privatisation or stock transfer, has caused huge harm. I shall return to that in a moment. New clause 8 concentrates on effectively establishing the fourth option—or a level playing field for councils alongside housing associations—and has two parts to it. The first is about equal access to resources to maintain existing housing stock. The second is about equal access to funding and borrowing and being allowed to build new houses. Like new clause 1, new clause 8 stands in the name of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell), who does an excellent job as chair of the all-party group on council housing. The second name listed is mine, as I am vice-chair of that group. Given the excellent speeches that we heard from the hon. Members for Poole (Mr. Syms) and for Carmarthen, East and Dinefwr (Adam Price), I look forward to having two new vice-chairs for the group so that we can turn it into a fully fledged all-party group. I have no doubt that at the end of the debate we will hear from the Minister that all these issues are being considered and are under review. There is a review of the housing subsidy system, to which I shall return shortly. We have heard that from Ministers and the Government before. Members of the Labour party have heard it at conference. They heard it in the run-up to the 2005 election. They heard it last summer, in the run-up to the general election that never was. They heard promises that the Government were looking at the problem and would sort it out, and that they would allow councils to have a level playing field and to build. As many hon. Members have pointed out, that is nonsense, and that has been the case for the past 11 years. The dogmatic thrust of Government policy is to bring an end to council housing. Those council tenants who vote against Government policy—that is, more than half the social housing tenants in the country—are penalised and punished. It is no good the Minister saying that he is looking into the matter, that there is a review and that the Government will come up with some answers next year, the year after that or maybe the year after that. We have heard it all before and it has not happened. The crisis is now. We all know what is happening in the private housing sector: repossessions are soaring and have almost reached the levels they were in 1990 during the last big negative equity crisis. People who bought in the sub-prime market or who are on three-year fixed interest mortgages and will come off them on to a much higher interest rate will begin to hit problems. The crisis will be much worse than the one in 1990 to 1992. After that crisis, the Conservative Government altered the regulations so that the benefit system no longer paid the interest on a mortgage for the first six months of unemployment. More people will be pushed straight into repossession, homelessness and seeking help from councils. Councils will not be able to provide that help because of the lack of council house building over the past 11 years. For the 50 years following world war two, the average number of council houses built was 150,000 a year, as we have heard. Last year, fewer than 300 were built, the lowest number since before world war one. Councils are not in a position to meet the high demand, which will grow over the next year or two because of the problems that are hitting the private housing market. As we have heard, waiting lists have soared over the past 11 years. Homelessness is up from 40,000 to 80,000. Waiting lists for council housing are up from 1 million to 1.6 million. In Sheffield and Chesterfield, waiting lists have trebled since this Government came to office. When the all-party group held its second evidence session a couple of weeks ago, a Labour councillor from Bolsover told us that someone who applies for council housing in Bolsover has to wait an average of 10 years before they can get any sort of quality accommodation. The old lady rattling about in a family house, whose husband is dead and whose children have grown up and left home—that is the normal pattern that I see in my surgery most Friday afternoons—cannot cope with the house, the stairs or the garden and wants to move out to a bungalow, but no bungalows are available because councils are not allowed to build any more. They cannot provide that replacement accommodation. Every Friday at my surgeries I see young families who live in poor private accommodation and are being exploited, who are sleeping on relatives' sofas or who live in upstairs flats that are council property. They say that they have one or two children and ask when they can move into a house with a garden. The answer in Bolsover would be that they have to wait 10 years. The situation is much the same in Sheffield, Chesterfield and hundreds of other local authorities. The crisis is here now. It is bad, but it will get much worse as we encounter further problems with the private housing market. In 1990, councils still had some capability to respond to such situations, but now they will not be able to respond to the growing problem. That is why the Government must do something today. They should accept the new clauses, rather than tell us that the subject is under review and make promises for the future. We have heard that for 11 years but nothing ever happens. The housing associations, to which the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich referred in such glowing terms, have not filled the bill. They were supposed to be the alternative and to meet the shortfall in what councils provided before. Over the past 11 years, housing associations have built 22,000 social housing units a year. The Government's reports have said that at least 46,000 are needed a year simply to allow the situation to stand still. That would not improve the 1.6 million waiting lists, but would simply keep up with right-to-buy losses, for example. The housing associations, which were supposed to be the great answer to all our problems, have managed to provide a pathetic 22,000 social houses a year, which does not even keep up with the right-to-buy losses.