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Housing and the Credit Crunch

I have spent most of my time speaking about the schemes that are outlined in the Select Committee report. As I said, I do not think that the analysis is of sufficient detail to demonstrate that the outcomes of the schemes have met the intentions behind them. I do not believe that targets are of any benefit on a national level, although local authorities will know what they plan to achieve through their local development frameworks. Such aims are more realistic because they are at a local level. Incentives would make such things more likely to happen. Our measure will be much simpler than targets. It will be whether we have built more houses and housed more people, particularly from the social housing waiting list, which is at an all-time high. I can create policy only for after the election, not for today. We will have to assess the situation nearer the time. Eventually, the economy will come out of its current hole. I hope that we do not return to the days of housing boom and bust, which we were assured we had moved away from even as house prices doubled in a mere seven years. We will deal with that through more intelligent regulation of the financial markets, which is covered in the background to the reports. We had the Barker reviews of 2004 and 2006 and the policy of 3 million homes by 2020 because everybody bought the argument that there were too few homes. Everybody knew that because house prices were doubling in just seven years. Although it seems obvious now, everybody did not know that one reason for that was the over-supply of lax mortgages. The ease with which people could get mortgages and the competitiveness in lending caused house prices to shoot up even faster than would have been the case purely because of supply and demand in the housing stock. That was quite different from previous housing booms and busts. We must learn that lesson and change the regulatory framework right at the top. As we have said this week, that means putting the Bank of England back in charge of some of this regulation. The tripartite system that was put in place in 1997 has clearly failed and let us down, principally because nobody really know who was in control. There is a bigger macro picture that hon. Members would not thank me for going into in more detail. I will return to the report and to the proposals that the Minister could adopt right now. I have mentioned the rough sleeper count and the empty properties programme. Hon. Members have mentioned the problem of renters who find out that the buy-to-let property in which they live will be repossessed in a short period of time. The Government have done a little on that by extending the period of time during which the renter should be told that the property in which they live may be repossessed, but a series of other steps could be taken. I shall not go into them now, for the sake of brevity, but we have published them and I will happily send them to the Minister, as that set of proposals is another that he could adopt immediately. Finally, there is another area to discuss, which the reports do not address as much as they should and which has not been mentioned in the debate—the lack of mobility in affordable housing. That is at the crux of this matter when it comes to the recession, the credit crunch and the lack of social and affordable housing.