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Housing and Regeneration Bill

The Bill initially contained more than 300 clauses, and on Second Reading I mentioned its size; little did I know that down the line in Committee there would be another 242-odd Government new clauses, and that today a further 137 amendments would be tabled at the last minute, with no time to debate them properly. Today's debate demonstrated just how ineffective the House has been made to be. There was limited time to consider literally hundreds of amendments and new clauses to the Bill. It is completely unsatisfactory. It is not that the Bill is inherently evil, or that the Minister and the Government are intent on destroying homes and creating bureaucracies that will prevent people from being able to live in affordable housing; they just fundamentally misunderstood the best way of delivering their objectives. They know that they have a lamentable record on housing delivery over the past 10 years. We know that the average number of homes built every year during our time in office was 176,000, and that the figure is only 146,000 under this Government. Social housing, which was mentioned today and many times in Committee, is being built at a very limited rate. We were building more homes on average in each of our 18 years in office than Labour built in any of their 10 years—a situation that has greatly frustrated Labour Back Benchers, as the Minister knows. In addition, homelessness among children has risen dramatically under this Government. There are twice as many homeless children as there were 10 years ago. The figure has doubled to 130,000. We know that there are all sorts of problems in the supply and provision of housing, but the Bill does very little to resolve them. It seeks to resolve them through more top-down management—exactly the kind of problem that got the Government into a low-level house building programme in the first place. The Bill is Whitehall driven, centralised and bureaucratic, and it gives powers to a new quango. We do not know how that quango will behave in future. The Minister mentioned earlier that Sir Bob Kerslake, the new chief executive of the Homes and Communities Agency, said that the agency would be able to act on local vision and work in a local way with local partners. That may well be true, but that is not what it says in the Bill. The problem is that despite the fact that one chief executive thinks that he can act in that way under the terms of the Bill, what matters is what is actually in the Bill and the way in which it is written. It has been written to dictate centralised targets from above to people down below. However one cuts it—however one reads the Bill—one realises that it is about creating targets and the Government trying to drive through their famous target of 3 million homes by 2020. Never mind the fact that the Government are already missing the target that enables them to reach that 2020 target, or the fact that they have missed their targets for the past 11 years, as I described; misguidedly, they still think that the solution is to put a top-down weight on local people. What came out most clearly both in Committee and—to a limited extent, because of the brevity of this debate—today is the idea that there is a better way of doing things. We could work with, trust and rely on local communities by incentivising them to build the housing that we need. For some reason, the Government feel that that is a dogma that they could not possibly adopt. The idea of working with, rather than against, local people—the idea that people should not have to create campaigns to try to protect their local area—is anathema to the Government. It does not need to be like that. We can encourage local communities to create the homes that are needed by incentivising them. We can do that by ensuring that infrastructure follows housing, and by ensuring that local communities are financially benefited as and when housing comes to an area. There must also be joined-up thinking, so that when the people in an area agree to build more housing, there is something in it for local people. When we ask ourselves honestly what incentive the Bill provides for local people to agree to or even encourage the building of housing in their areas, the answer is ““Absolutely none.”” The truth is that it will invariably destroy the quality of life rather than enhancing it. We do not believe that things need to be like that: housing and development should not have a bad name. It is the policies that have been followed for the past 10 years, gold-plated by the Bill, that have got us into this mess. What has happened in this instance is a bit like what has happened to the word ““consultation””. Under the present Government, no one believes that a consultation is genuine. The very meaning of the word—its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary—has been degraded by the sham ““consultations”” of the past few years. The same muddied cloud now hangs over the word ““development””, and the Bill does nothing to address that. It could all be so different. Local areas could vie with each other to build sustainable housing in which everyone would want to live. Existing communities could benefit, enjoying the extra services and improving their areas by backing developments. However, the Bill does nothing to favour that approach. Instead, it looks to the heavy hand of top-down government from Whitehall. When local people object to development proposals, do you know what? The Homes and Communities Agency will have the power to override their objections. There is very little to commend the Bill to the House. We had a great opportunity to provide the amount of housing that we know we need in order to accommodate a nation, but that opportunity has been missed. The Minister claimed today that the purpose of all those amendments had been to take account of the will of the Committee and the House, but he was unable to answer a simple question about the number of Opposition amendments that he had accepted. in fact, the reason there were so many amendments is not that this is a tremendous Bill, but that the Minister has dithered a great deal.