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Rented Housing

As the hon. Lady knows from sitting opposite me for hours in Committees, we want to see more homes built. In fact, we have a very proud record of building more homes. We do not think that the way to do that is to set a top-down, centrally driven, Whitehall-dictated target to build homes. She has heard me say this before: if I were to ask the appropriate Minister what the tractor building target was by 2016 or 2020, the Minister would look at me as if I was mad. Governments do not have those types of targets. They do not have targets for car production, for example, but, for some reason, they have a target—which now turns out to be merely an ambition—for house building, which makes no sense. If one wants to know why it makes no sense, one has only to look at the situation in the year since the target was set. The simple fact is that it will not be reached and it turns out in fact not to be a viable approach to house building. In retrospect with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the housing shortage was being promoted not only by the severe lack of house building, especially in the past 10 years and, I concede, previously—I will return to that in a moment—but by the excess credit that was allowed to build up. That enabled people to take out mortgages and do all sorts of things related to private rented sector, such as take out buy-to-let mortgages at 125 per cent. and four, five or six times salaries. The Treasury and the man who is now Prime Minister failed to call time on those banks and took the ability to do so away from the Bank of England. It is not only a question of total housing targets, but of demand that was built at an expanded, bubbled price.