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Housing and the Credit Crunch

For the sake of completeness on policies that the new Minister could adopt quickly, I shall discuss those policies in a moment. First, let me say that mobility is crucial and that I hope the Select Committee will get the chance to look into that issue. There is no doubt, according to research that we carried out the week before last, that one reason why there is such a great waiting list for housing is that nearly 250,000 people live alone in three and four-bedroomed homes. So, we have the wrong-shaped families in the wrong homes creating a waiting list, with other people waiting to get into those properties. Then there are the problems of sheer economics, particularly during the credit crunch—the subject of the report. The difficulty of moving between social houses creates an inability to move around which affects the running and flexibility of the economy. That is a key issue. We have already heard how the HOMES—Housing Mobility and Exchange Services—move programme collapsed post-1997 when the Labour Government privatised it and it went wrong, but there is now an online home-swapper programme, which moves more people around the country faster than any of the previous programmes. Will the Minister take a close look at how a proper national mobility programme and a set of measures that we have called the "right to move" could be put in place so that people who live in affordable, rented social housing can have the same mobility and flexibility to move as others? On the Homes and Communities Agency, it is a huge quango, but we have not said that we are going to have a bonfire of all quangos. I suppose that we have said that we are going to have a barbecue of quangos and that we will check carefully what each of them does and whether it is performing to task. I have to say to the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich that I am not impressed when I see an agency that has 20 offices and spends £4.5 million a month on salaries alone, but as I have said to its chief executive Sir Bob Kerslake on several occasions, we want to see how the agency performs and what its outputs, rather than inputs, are—or what its outputs are in return for the inputs. The agency has time between now and the election to prove that it can get the stalled housing and the stalled town centres, as in my constituency, and other projects that it has an interest in, working. If it can, and if it proves to be an effective delivery model, then it or something similar would, presumably, have a role. To expect the Opposition to give a blank cheque to an agency that has been in place for only a few months—it got started on 1 December—without having seen how it really performs is unrealistic. The same is the case for the Tenant Services Authority, which was set up by the same Act as the HCA. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman and I both sat on the Committee that considered that Bill. I am not terribly impressed that the authority has so far spent its time surveying 27,000 tenants to get responses and then writing a draft report about what it might do. I want to see action from those organisations; they are spending a lot of public money and we need to make sure that we get proper protection to protect our tenants in the most efficient way. That is a quick round-robin of where we stand.