---

Housing and the Credit Crunch

I listened with interest to the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe made and I have read the points that have been made in the report. I know that the Treasury is aware of those points too and I will ensure that he gets a more detailed response from the Treasury. However, I wanted to move on quickly to the issue of skills, because I think that the report is absolutely right to identify that it is essential that we do not repeat the mistakes that were made in the last recession, when skilled workers left the construction industry. They did not come back even when conditions improved, which left a real gap between the level of skills that the industry needed for the longer term and the skills that were available. It took about 15 years for the industry to recover. That is why we have taken significant action to help the construction industry to maintain skills and outputs. As part of that approach, we have brought forward significant amounts of Government spending to build new social housing, to repair and upgrade existing social housing and to ensure that even more privately-rented homes are of a decent standard. On top of that, through the Homes and Communities Agency we allocated £350 million last year to buy 9,600 unsold new homes from private developers for use as affordable housing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich is absolutely right to draw a distinction between that work and the housing market package in the early 1990s. I worked for a housing association at that time and although I had nothing to do with property acquisition I remember being sent out to drive round the estate agents of the west midlands, in what was really an arms race with other housing associations to buy up as many homes as possible. That package from the early 1990s can hardly be compared with the strategic and targeted approach that the Government are taking now. More recently, as part of the Budget package for housing we put in place the £400 million Kickstart Housing Delivery programme. That programme will help to restart stalled construction activity across the country by using equity, infrastructure, gap and affordable housing funding to leverage in private development finance. It has now been strengthened by the housing pledge to deliver approximately 22,000 homes, of which a good proportion will be affordable. We are also promoting apprenticeships on Government projects such as the 2012 Olympic games, with an apprenticeship matching scheme that is led by ConstructionSkills. We expect the Olympic games to create 250 construction apprenticeships. We are also working with the HCA to put targets for apprenticeships in place across the broad range of HCA projects. By maintaining the supply of homes, affordable or otherwise, all of that investment supports skills and capacity within the house building industry. Before I finish, I wanted to pick up on the point that the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield made about rough sleepers. I was planning to write to him in more detail on this issue, because I do not think that the situation is nearly as simple as he pretends that it is. The key point to make is that, whatever one thinks about the figures and however they are calculated, they demonstrate a trend of massive reduction, by about 75 per cent., since we embarked on our programme for rough sleepers. I think that anybody would concede that that is the case. The challenge for him and his party is to tell us if they will match the 2012 target, because that is another subject on which they have been entirely silent. Before I conclude, I must say that it is important that we do not lose sight of the bigger picture and continue our vital work to put in place the conditions to accelerate a sustainable recovery. That includes ensuring a sufficient supply of deliverable land, an efficient and proportionate planning system, co-ordinated infrastructure provision that is aligned with housing plans, a strong and diverse house building sector and regulations that help to facilitate more homes that are better designed and green. I am confident that our suite of sustained investment and support will enable us to meet our future challenges and to emerge with the homes and communities that we need for a stronger and fairer Britain.