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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

We could probably have read ““War and Peace”” in this debate. Hon. Members will remember that there used to be a target to build 3 million homes by 2020. Then it ceased to be a target and became an ambition. What happens to a target that becomes an ambition? It becomes an aspiration. Now I read from the new Minister for Housing that the ambition has become a challenge. What it comes to is this: a target that becomes an ambition, which then becomes an aspiration, which then becomes a challenge, turns out to be a pipe dream and a confidence trick on the British people. The Government have dropped another target, on eco-towns, to which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) referred. That target, too, is now an ambition and will become an aspiration and then a challenge, so at least the Government are consistent in the methodology and the words that they use. That is a skill that they have acquired at any rate, and we should be grateful for that. Finally, there is the social homeBuy scheme, which relates to a matter of real concern. People who are struggling to keep their homes are subject to acute pressure, but what did we get to address that? We got a particularly cruel situation. Hopes were raised by a scheme that it was said would assist some 10,000 families over two years, but how many families have in fact been helped? At this time of particular need, 235 families have been helped. That is a shameful and abject failure by the Government in the very years when one would have thought that they would have more to do. Ministers must understand that the failure of the social homeBuy scheme naturally makes the public hugely sceptical about the latest initiative to assist people with mortgage arrears. Once again, that latest initiative is an interesting scheme. We were first told by the Prime Minister with his usual hyperbole that all the major lenders had signed up, only to find that just two had gone into any detail about the assistance to be offered. As everyone said, it is only by seeing the devil in the detail that we can understand the concerns about the scheme. What is sad is the real lack of initiative and the real lack of joined-up government. As Members have said, we are facing a recession that will test our economic resilience to the utmost. That is why the skills agenda is so important and why focus and determination are so important. The recession will test our social fabric to the utmost and nowhere is that more apparent than in housing. The Government's lack of imagination and their willingness to fall back on soundbites are things that the British people will not forget. Housing is one of the greatest concerns of the British people. They work hard, they hope for and have an aspiration to have a decent home: it is the most basic of natural instincts. When the Government offer up ideas that they then casually abandon in a serial manner, it is no wonder that people lose confidence in what they can do and achieve. This is not the only instance where we have seen that problem, as we also saw it in the past. Once again, the Government are behaving in a way that causes the British people to lose faith—not in the Government themselves, although they certainly will in time, but sadly in the institutions of democracy. That is a serious failure of the Government in respect of the trust that people have placed in them. There is still time, if they could only get their act together, to do something constructive. On current form, however, what we are going to get is yet more spin, yet more soundbites and complete inaction on a key area of policy.