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Housing and the Credit Crunch

I congratulate the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), the Chairman of the Committee, on two excellent reports, particularly the first report. The second report is a very good update—it is bang up to date—on the situation and includes information about the Government's most recent "Building Britain's Future" announcements. They provide a good basis for the debate. I welcome the new junior Housing Minister to his place. This is the first full debate that we have had as opposing Front-Benchers. Previous Housing Ministers have not had the longest tenure. I have worked out that the four Housing Ministers whom I have faced across the Dispatch Box were in place for an average of 211 days. It is slightly better news for the Minister: he is only the second junior Housing Minister whom I have faced. Junior Housing Ministers usually last slightly longer than Housing Ministers on average, but with an impending general election, time will tell. Given the Minister's short period in office, he will still be struggling—excellent though he will turn out to be—to get his head around some of the key housing figures, and of course it can take a long time to comprehend the housing lexicon, so I thought of a few basic facts to lay out some of the background to these excellent reports. Not all those facts are referred to in the reports, so perhaps there have been one or two omissions. The first key figure for the Minister is that far too few homes have been built in the past 12 years—that is the underlying cause of everything that is written about in the reports. How many too few? The answer is about 24,000 a year—missing homes that were never built under this Government, by contrast to the trend of the previous couple of decades. That has left a huge hole in housing in this country. Simple maths tells us that that is one reason why we are in the current mess. However, that is not the only problem. Most of the debate has focused on affordable housing for rent, purchase or part-purchase. The bad news of the overall house-building statistics gets even worse when it comes to affordable housing numbers. Less affordable housing has been built in every single year of this Government than in any of the years under the Governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. That is a rather damning indictment of a Government who I am sure would like to be thought of as being on people's sides and assisting with things such as housing for those most in need. This year, it is likely that 70,000 to 90,000 houses will be built in total, which is fewer than half the Government target of 200,000, which is supposed to increase rapidly to 240,000. We are in a mess. The single greatest lesson that the new junior Housing Minister could learn from the two reports and the current housing situation is that those top-down targets simply do not work. In fact, not only do they not work; they probably make the situation slightly worse. Regrettably, he will not find that conclusion in the reports. I am afraid that the Committee has in many ways fallen for the Government's warm words on housing, which they deliver all the time. The Government have always been very polite about housing. They never told anybody that they were going to get fewer homes of all types built in this country, including affordable housing—it has just happened over a number of years. It is almost as though, as long as the Government come out with new and supposedly ambitious or challenging targets—as they are variously described—everyone, including, I am afraid, members of the Committee, will buy the argument and congratulate them on having so much aspiration. The truth is that aspirations, targets and challenges do not build homes, and nor do headlines. All too often, the problem with the Government's housing policy has been that they chase headlines. There were supposed to be 10 eco-towns—five by 2016 and the other five by 2020—yet today, it was announced that there will be only four and they will probably take till 2020. By the way, the houses will not be as environmentally friendly as the zero-carbon homes that we will be building by 2016. The houses in the eco-towns, which is a sham name, will only be at sustainability level 4—I am sure the Minister has already discovered that level 6 is the zero-carbon level. We have an incredible situation in which the rhetoric is so far distant from the reality that even Labour Back Benchers and those who are most experienced in housing dare not challenge the raw facts of a failed, top-down housing policy. I do not believe that the Government want this situation or that they lack the compassion to change things, and it is not for the lack of warm words about new headline-grabbing schemes and initiatives that we are in this situation. It is worth reflecting on some of the schemes mentioned in the reports, even if there is not the forensic detail that one would like. To be fair to the Committee, such detail would be impossible to provide, simply because the numbers change daily, although not by much.