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Rented Housing

Realistically, we cannot sell one property and then build another. The maths do not work out. The Homes and Communities Agency has an £8.4 billion budget over three years. That money is supposed to be spent on affordable housing. Will the Minister tell us how much of that money has been allocated and how much of it has been spent? Perhaps we can find out at the same time when the three-year period for that £8.4 billion started and at what point it will end. I have been in conversation with the chair and the chief executive of the new Homes and Communities Agency, and it is clear that they do not understand the budgets and cannot get their heads around the figures. I have requested detailed financials from the agency—a body that will spend some £15.5 billion in public money a year, £8.4 billion of which will go towards affordable housing over three years—and it does not know how the numbers are made up. Will the Minister be kind enough, either to tell me today or to send me a note in future—I understand that this is unexpected—to explain how the budgets will be separated? To answer the intervention accurately, of course public money must go into it. I had a similar intervention from the hon. Member for Islington, North. When we were in power, we built 60,000 affordable homes in 1992, a year of recession. Even the Government's targets mention only 45,000 or 50,000, variously; it is hard to know which. The reason why we built more was pointed out earlier. It is because we put more public subsidy into it, and because the system that delivered housing was not top-down but bottom-up. It did not rely on Ministers thinking that they knew best and directing regional assemblies to plonk down housing in localities; it worked with local communities to deliver housing. We know that there is a better way to do things; we have seen it in operation. I invite the Minister to share, as the Government have tended to do in the past year, in some of the Conservatives' better ideas on housing. Perhaps we can work together to create the affordable housing and better rented sector that we need in this country. I want to ensure that I give the Minister adequate time to answer this flurry of questions, so I will end by asking her just a couple of questions. Last year, the Conservative Homelessness Foundation produced a report showing that 130,000 children in this country are now homeless. That is twice as many as 10 years ago. Does she think that there is anything in the review of the rented housing sector that would be of help and comfort to those 130,000 homeless children? Is there a measure or some response that I have not picked out that would reassure them that the Government are on the problem? Finally, as has been mentioned, there is dramatically less housing overall than in the period preceding this Government. Will the Minister do what neither of her predecessors seem prepared to do and admit once and for all that the problem with housing is that too little has been built in the past 10 years? With the admission of that problem comes the resolution to the problem of the private rented sector and much else besides.