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Housing and the Credit Crunch

I certainly understand the point that the hon. Lady makes, and I know that the evidence gathered by the Select Committee will have been considered thoughtfully. As we are debating the reports and the Government's response to the first one, let me give my criticism. Why was the Select Committee not slightly more forensic in its questioning about the outcomes and success of the schemes? Although the hon. Lady may well be right to suggest that not all 6,000 people would ever be helped, it is still certainly the case that a Minister stood at the Dispatch Box—I remember it well; it happened in January—to announce the scheme in a headline-grabbing manner that made the 10 o'clock news and sounded as though thousands of people were about to get great help from the Government. As the reality six months later is that only six families have been helped, it does no Government—and no newly appointed Minister—any harm to step up to the Dispatch Box and admit the reality: perhaps the scheme, along with the others that I have outlined, is not functioning as it was initially designed to. If we are not happy with how the mortgage rescue scheme is operating, what about the home owner mortgage support scheme? It was first announced by the Prime Minister on the same day as the Queen's Speech and is designed to allow home owners to defer their mortgage interest for up to two years. When the Prime Minister usurped the Queen's Speech to make that surprising announcement in the debate immediately afterwards, he suggested that it would cover some 70 per cent. of the mortgage market. The scheme was not launched in the spring; it was April before it came into operation, at which point, depending how one calculates—by volume, money or number of mortgage lenders—only 25 to 55 per cent. of the marketplace was covered. Before today's debate, I looked the issue up. As I understand it, a vast number of household-name lenders are not within the Government's home owner mortgage support scheme: HSBC, Barclays, Abbey, Alliance and Leicester and Nationwide. None of them are included. The Government promised, "Don't worry. Others will come down the line." They said that another six were at the tipping point and about to sign up. I checked again today, and only two have come on board since. I do not have time to go into the further schemes intended both to assist people into housing and to help them once they are there, but many of them have been nowhere near successful or are abject failures. It is about time that somebody from the Government stood up and explained why they think that the schemes have gone wrong and whether they were motivated by the prospect of catching great headlines on the day, in the hope that no one would notice when hard-pressed families were not helped in the long term. Interventions in this debate have focused on what Her Majesty's Opposition would do if we were in government, so I will reflect on one or two ideas that should be in the report but do not seem to be covered. The biggest is simply to stop thinking in terms of top-down targets and telling people what to do, where and how many, and to focus instead on a system of incentives that would allow communities to make some of their own decisions in return for money. Under a policy launched by us, that money would be provided through council tax. Specifically, every local area could keep 100 per cent. of council tax—in fact, they would get 100 per cent. on top of that—for a period of six years. Let us say that an eco-town, such as the one in north-west Bicester, got the go-ahead and was locally approved and all the rest of it. Over a period of six years, based on the likely outcome of the average council tax, the town would get £45 million to £50 million for the local area. That would be a huge incentive for local communities to develop and get something in return. We would also ensure that more affordable housing would be built—a subject that is of interest to many Members here today—by ensuring that local areas got 125 per cent. of council tax to keep, a larger proportion than is being paid by residents, for every home built. That would create an inbuilt incentive to build more affordable housing without the need for top-down targets, which—let us face it—have failed, whatever one thinks of them. Other hon. Members have mentioned community land trusts, which were not covered in great detail in the report but are agreed by all parties to be an exceptional idea. They were added to the Housing and Regeneration Bill in 2008 after much pushing, having been voted down by the Government several times and eventually agreed on at the last moment. They provide a framework for communities to get together and build long-term sustainable housing, as the land is locked in perpetuity for the use of local people. It is a tremendous idea. I invite the Minister to take on board local housing trusts, an idea from our recent housing Green Paper; he can rename them whatever he likes. They take the concept of the community land trust, which many of us like so much, and provide communities with the ability to grant themselves planning permission to go ahead with building, without having to go through any rigmarole at all, apart from holding a referendum of local people to ensure that that is overwhelmingly desired. Incentives, community land trusts and local housing trusts are all things that the Minister could take on board. He could also pick up and use our empty property rescue scheme. Nearly 1 million properties in this country are empty and could be used rapidly. We have described how, with a bit of flexibility in some of the rules and regulations, they could be used to house people today. It is simply not good enough that, after 12 years, the number of people languishing on the housing waiting list has gone up not by just a little, but by 80 per cent.—from 1 million to 1.8 million. It is not acceptable to sit by while families are living in temporary accommodation because they cannot move into empty properties on the flimsy excuse that they do not meet up to a particular code. Some people are not in accommodation at all. Last night, I met a man who was begging through the carriages of the train I was on. He said to everybody, "Excuse me, I am sorry to bother you, but I have fallen on hard times." The woman across from me gave him some money. I gave him the number for Thames Reach, because hostel places are generally available if people want them. The Government have put a great deal of emphasis on their homelessness strategy. Unfortunately, that strategy has not been as honest as it should be. Bizarrely and incredibly, the homelessness count claims that just 483 people sleep on the streets in this country. That is not true; everyone knows that it is not true; and everyone recognises that there is a problem with the way in which the figures are counted. One big problem is that the returns from local authorities are bracketed down when they have been estimated. The Minister's predecessor promised to address that issue and carried out a consultation on it. Unfortunately, rather than solve the problem, the consultation said that authorities that did not carry out street counts should not be asked to return figures at all. Therefore, for a local authority that estimated that there were five rough sleepers in its return and had that bracketed down to zero by the Department, the figure will still be zero because such authorities will not be asked to return any numbers. Will the Minister address this issue again? I understand that by keeping the rough sleeper count the same, there will be a baseline to indicate what is happening. However, with the attempt to get to zero rough sleepers by 2012, it is surely important to count the numbers accurately, so that we can understand the situation and focus resources. If he does not do that before we come to power, we have a pledge to do so.