---

Housing and Regeneration Bill

I think that the Minister recognises that overcrowding is the result of a lack of sufficient housing. That links in with the earlier debate on priority groups. The reason you have to have priority groups is that you do not have enough housing for everyone, so you have to prioritise. It gets down to the same issue. Although the £8 billion is obviously welcome, and we have talked about this before, it is going to solve only a small part of the problem. There are nearly 2 million applications for social housing, but £8 billion will build about 100,000 homes over the next three years, which is barely sufficient. It all links in to the point about the lack of sufficient affordable housing. Quite what the Government are going to do about that, I do not know; it is their problem. There are better ways of spending the £8 billion—for instance, getting empty homes back into service. The Minister slightly slipped up on one point, in my view. When we talked earlier in Committee, I mentioned that I had been to the dentist, where a receptionist had been talking to another patient about how their children had broken up their marriages and were having to live in their houses. One was saying that their son had to live in a box cupboard with a bed in it, while the other had a daughter with two children who were living on the sofa downstairs. If they were in private housing, how would the Minister's department get to find out that there was overcrowding there as well? I asked them if they were on the social housing list. They said, ““No, there's absolutely no point in going there because we need our housing now. We need a roof over our head tonight, not in five or 10 years' time””. There are a lot of people out there who just have not tried to get on to the housing list because they think, ““What's the point? We're just going to be a gun number at the end. The priority people are going to get the housing, and we will be left in the queue for years””. That may get worse as people get married and cannot afford a house. Last year, first-time buyers accounted for only 300,000 homebuyers, which I think was the lowest figure for many years; before, it was 450,000 or 500,000. Where are they going to go in the next year or two? They are going to need affordable housing, or they will be cramming up with one of their parents. This is a major issue.