House of Commons Hansard Debates for 2 Jul 1991

Ms. Mildred Gordon (Bow and Poplar) : The mark of a civilised society is that it is one in which people can expect to be decently housed and clothed, to have enough to eat and to have access to health care and to education for their children. Our society fails many people in a number of these respects, but nowhere more so than in housing. Every Member of Parliament representing an inner-city area has thousands of cases of human misery, ill health and broken families--all caused by overcrowding and the impossibility of getting somewhere decent to live. Furthermore, it is a cause of racial conflict. The Government put the squeeze on local authorities and refuse to let them have money for council house building, and so communities turn against each other and fight for the meagre resources that are left. The worst part of it is the loss of hope and the depression that come from 10 years of being on the waiting list and seeing no chance of a solution.

Tower Hamlets is fairly typical of inner-city boroughs. It has over 1,000 families accepted as homeless. Many are in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. The money that goes on bed and breakfast represents millions of pounds down the drain because it provides no permanent solution. I have visited constituents in seedy bed-and-breakfast hotels in Paddington and Earl's Court. The conditions are appalling. In a room the size of a boxroom in an average semi-detached house, there are two beds, a mother and father and two children. There is no television or a fridge. There is a coffee table at which one person can eat while the others eat on their beds. The mother comes up a steep flight of stairs from a communal kitchen with one child in her arms and the other hanging off her skirts, carrying pots of boiling food. Not only are they in danger, but, as I know

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from my experience as a teacher, these children will have no chance of healthy development. A child needs a place to move, to run and to stretch so as to develop mentally and physically, and there is no room for them to do so. These families in bed-and-breakfast hotels are condemned to a nightmare.

According to the community charge office, Tower Hamlets has 4,000 empty and second homes, most in the private sector. In docklands 1, 500 units--the minimum admitted by the London Docklands development corporation--are luxury homes that people cannot afford to buy. We need radical solutions. The right-to-buy money must be released and used to repair empty homes so that they can be used. All unused land in public ownership must be released so that prefabs can be put on it ; then we could do something within months to accommodate the vast majority of homeless families. Privately owned homes that have been empty for years must be requisitioned and let by local authorities. The right to buy helped many people to purchase their own homes, but it has reduced the condition of public sector housing stock. In London, one fifth of the housing stock has been sold, three quarters of it houses with gardens, because they are what everybody wants to live in. That leaves only 15 per cent. of council tenants in houses with gardens. Therefore, the worst stock is that left in municipal control.

In docklands, we had a great opportunity to solve the housing problems because vast areas of land were left unused. When so much land is left empty, it must be zoned so that a fair proportion of it goes for affordable housing. Instead, million of square feet of office space was built, half of which is empty, and millions more are to come although they are surplus to requirements. That is not the answer that we need, in Tower Hamlets or any other city centre. Most people dream of owning their own homes, but for many that dream has turned sour and has become a nightmare in these days of unemployment and rising interest rates. People come to me in desperation. They have bought their homes, but they cannot pay service charges, or a big repair has to be carried out, and they do not have the money for it. Bow county court deals with more repossession cases than any other court in London. A single person needs an income of £21,000 and a family needs an income of £26,000 to be a first-time buyer. That is no answer in an area such as Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest in the country.

The sad evidence of the failure of the Government's policy of trying to put an end to council house building can be seen all round us in London--in the people living in the streets, in the crowded rooms of the seedy bed-and- breakfast hotels and in the queues of desperate people in the surgeries of every London Member of Parliament. As I have said many times, for my constituents and those in other urban areas, the only practical answer is more affordable housing built by municipal authorities. The Government can shake their head and proffer other methods, but that method took people out of the slums and gave them decent homes and it is the only one that will work in the future.

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6.27 pm

Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton) : I listened with interest to what the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Ms. Gordon) said about housing conditions in her constituency and other inner cities. I remind her of what a former Labour council leader said about his council, Liverpool. Mr. Keva Coombes said :

"Tenants get an appalling service, and they know that. I think probably the fundamental cause is, frankly, we've put the interests of the providers of the service, the workforce, above the interests of the tenants."

How true that is of so many services provided in Liverpool. I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Minister was not able to develop his thoughts on reviving the private rented sector. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will recall that he told me, in a written answer :

"It is too early to assess the overall impact of the Act on private renting."--[ Official Report, 14 February 1991 ; Vol. 185, c. 541. ]

He was referring there to the Housing Act 1988. He pointed to some hopeful signs, but we still have a long way to go before we have a revived private rented sector. In contrast, in West Germany nearly half all homes are privately rented. In this country, there are some 600,000 empty private sector homes, many of which could be used to house the homeless. Unfortunately, previous restrictions have deterred such use.

There are hopeful signs--for example, reports in the London borough of Islington published in October 1990 show that private landlords are renting up to 30 per cent. more homes than they were two years ago. But in my constituency and in other parts of the south-west, there is no substantial scope for reviving the private rented sector. We must look to local authorities, or more particularly housing associations, as my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary knows. I note that my hon. Friend the Minister said earlier that the Government have reallocated capital away from areas with receipts to areas without receipts. I hope that the Government will constantly take into account local authorities' practice of keeping homes empty, not collecting the rent and not facilitating the sale of council homes. Hon. Members will recall that I have made those points before. For example, in most of the districts of the south-west, between 25 and 30 per cent. of council accommodation has been sold, whereas in parts of London less than 10 per cent. of a much larger council estate has been sold. I hope that the Government will not lean over backwards too far to help inner cities in that respect.

An unpublished study of the housing situation and the consequences of council sales in my constituency said :

"Family houses are more attractive to potential buyers than flats This has clear implications for the housing section of Taunton Deane, as it displays a clear lack of available family accommodation which will either have to be met through an increased building programme, or through private rented sector property and reveals a problem which has arisen not solely, but perhaps largely as a result of the depletion of the housing stock through the promotion of the Right To Buy."

I therefore welcome the suggestion made in a letter dated 24 April from my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State about the capital finance system. He said :

"We shall keep the workings of this system under review and I do not rule out changes at some time".

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I reiterate that some flexibility in the administration of the system would be welcome not only to me but to a number of my hon. Friends who represent local authorities which have handled their assets well.

Finally, I wish to relate housing provision and home improvements to our present economic situation and to the needs in the coming year or so to try to revive that sector of our economy. The Building Employers Confederation, in which I declare an interest as an adviser-- [Interruption.] As the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) will recall, I advocated these views before I became involved with the organisation and I should continue to advocate them were I not involved. It makes this point :

"Housing output will have to be expanded in both the private and the public sectors, to meet market demand".

It also says :

"Capital receipts are an available source of funding for the Housing Corporation if Ministers do not wish local authorities to build. Now is a good time to get housing associations to increase output, because land and building prices are low and they can maximise bang for the buck' "--

as builders call it--

"at present. Rules preventing local authorities using their own land to pay for more building work should be relaxed."

I note that when the economy was recovering from recession between 1981 and 1984 there was a significant increase in the amount of spending on home improvement grants. In the financial year 1981-82, £197 million was spent on home improvement grants. In 1983-84, when the economy was reviving, £911 million, nearly £1 billion, was spent on home improvement grants--a considerable increase at that time. I commend that to my hon. Friend the Minister. I know that he has recognised in correspondence with me the teething troubles in the system that was introduced last year and I hope that this opportunity will be taken to try to float that sector off the rocks on which it is at present.

There is also the problem in my constituency, and I think in others, too, of owner-occupied homes which are in some difficulty because of non- traditional build. In Taunton--in the Galmington area--there are Woolaway houses which were built just after the war. They are not facing significant problems in terms of repair, but they are facing problems with regard to resale. As my constituent Mrs. Keitch says : "On the last sale the purchaser had an extensive structural survey carried out on the house which proved positive in confirming that it was well-constructed and well maintained, but the purchaser withdrew because of unfounded rumours and worries about resale problems." I have corresponded with my hon. Friend the Minister about that and I hope that he will continue to attach importance to the problem which is causing blight in parts of my constituency and no doubt other constituencies, too. Widows or elderly people occupying such homes and wanting to move to smaller, more manageable properties would release substantial three and four-bedroom houses for families in my constituency and elsewhere who are in urgent need of such accommodation.

I commend my hon. Friend's policies and I commend these points of concern to his attention.

6.35 pm

Mr. Terry Rooney (Bradford, North) : It is important when discussing housing to get away from the rhetoric of simply slagging off any Labour- controlled authority and blaming everything on municipalisation. We should

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remember that many Tory-controlled councils are public-sector landlords to many people. I also despair at Tory Members- -one of whom I am glad to see returning to the Chamber, the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Mr. Howarth)--who spend their time here whingeing about their Labour-controlled authorities and then write to them asking for special treatment for people whom they see at their surgeries. That is despicable.

It is important to remember that HIP allocations apply not simply to public sector schemes, but to new build, the modernisation of existing stock, the estate action programme allocation, statutory improvement grants, mortgages for council house buyers and support to housing associations.

My authority in Bradford, which is a pleasant mix of inner-city and rural areas, has seen a 75 per cent. reduction during the past 10 years in its HIP allocation. In 1990-91 we saw an increse in expenditure on bed and breakfast from £20,00 to £200,000. For the first time, Bradford had a long-term bed-and-breakfast accomodation problem on its hands. Last year, 2,300 people were assessed as priority homeless. Because of the loss of housing stock during the past 12 years we were able to house only 975 of them and 1,200 people were left in bed-and-breakfast accommmodation. In addition, more than 4,000 families are trapped in flats waiting for houses that they cannot have because the majority of houses have been sold. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Poplar (Ms. Gordon) said, bad housing affects education. We all know that substantial research has been done which shows that one of the major influences on children's educational achievement is their environment. Stress caused by poor accommodation leads to family break-up which in turn means that two units of accommodation are needed, adding to the problem. Such stress in turn makes demands on the health service. For far too long, the indirect consequences of the Government's housing strategy and the costs associated with it in other areas have never been brought together.

Because of the ludicrous housing subsidy rules, we now have the poor subsidising the poor. In 1990, £8 million in housing subsidy was lost from the housing revenue account. This year that figure has risen to £10 million. That has produced a rent increase of £6.20 which means that housing benefit must be increased--a rising spiral in subsidy.

In Bradford we have seen the rise of disreputable second mortgage companies which will advance money at extortionate rates of interest. At the first failure to pay they will go to the county court for a possession order.

Last week, one of my constituents came to see me. She may have been foolish, but never mind that. She had taken out a second mortgage to the value of £19,000 and--having, perhaps, taken less than the best legal advice--had signed a document that would lead to her losing her home three years later. Meanwhile, her debt stands at £31,000. That is the legacy of the 1990s, when the present Government created the myth that it was possible to extract the equity from a property and thus dispense with all worries. Now all the chickens are coming home to roost.

I will say little about the building societies. By and large, they are well intentioned ; they have been led up the garden path by the new powers that they have been given, and now want to turn themselves into banks. We all know what that means.

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What, then, is the solution ? Both the Minister and Opposition Members have talked about housing strategy. I only wish that there were a housing strategy. We need a strategy that recognises all tenures and all agencies, and makes no excuse for bad management by local authorities, building societies or private landlords. We need a strategy that reflects market forces. Nine thousand people are on the waiting list in my local authority area, because they want low-cost public- sector housing. The market is there ; when will supply match demand ?

In the past 10 years, the number of housing starts in West Yorkshire has fallen from 20,000 a year--both public and private--to 8, 000. An indirect consequence of that pattern, which has been repeated across the country, is the fact that some 250,000 construction workers are now on the dole.

We need that new strategy soon and we need similar strategies to deal with associated problems in, for instance, education and health.

The Minister said that far too many people lived in estates that had been designed by people who did not live in them, and would not want to. Let me tell him that far too many local authorities' housing policies are being determined by civil servants who live in London, and are acquainted only with London problems. They have no conception of life outside the metropolis, because they venture further afield only on overseas trips.

6.42 pm

Mr. Clive Soley (Hammersmith) : Nothing in the debate has suggested that the Government appreciate the seriousness of the housing problem. Indeed, everything that we have heard suggests that they are as complacent as ever. If nothing that my hon. Friends have said has had the desired effect, I should perhaps remind the Government that housing investment in this country has collapsed from 6 or 7 per cent. of gross domestic product to about 2 per cent.--far lower than the proportion spent in any comparable European or western country. We see the evidence on our streets, and also in the many reports that reveal the current decay in our housing stock.

No one listening to the debate would gain the impression that the Government, or their supporters, were even aware of the reports by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Public Accounts Committee or the Select Committee on the Environment--or, indeed, of the report by the Association of District Councils, which seems to have had no impact on the Government, although the ADC is composed of their friends and supporters.

Listening to the hon. Member for Gloucester (Mr. French), no one would think that there was a housing problem in his constituency ; yet Conservative councillors from that borough have asked me to try to persuade the Government to allow them to use capital receipts to replace housing costs in rural areas. I have received similar representations from other parts of the country. The Government are clearly prepared to ignore not only the Opposition but outside bodies. When will they start to listen to their supporters, who have also spelt out the problems?

Mr. Gregory : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

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Mr. Soley : I would love to give way, but, if I did, I would be taking time away from the Minister. I have eight minutes and he has 10.

The Minister implied that the Labour party had killed off the private rented sector. In 1979, when the Conservative Government were elected on the basis of their promise to revive that sector, it represented 14 per cent. of the rented market ; now it represents 7 per cent.

Mr. Summerson rose --

Mr. Soley : I shall not give way, unless I do so at the Minister's expense.

That market share is now declining further, except at the upper end of the market--and it is rising at that end only because house prices are currently frozen, and landlords are letting on a short-term basis. When the housing market starts to pick up again, those short lets will come to an end, and the housing problem will recur. As the Duke of Edinburgh's report has pointed out--and as I have pointed out for many years--the private rented sector has declined because of our system of housing finance. Only at the margins is that decline connected with the Rent Acts--as evidence from Northern Ireland and, indeed, elsewhere will show anyone who cares to examine the details.

The Government have fallen back on another example--empty properties. As Labour has said for some time, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney) has said tonight, when there is evidence that a landlord has not acted properly--whether that landlord is Labour or Tory, council or public housing association, or, indeed, private--we shall take steps to ensure that the property in question is transferred to a manager who can manage it, in the private sector if necessary.

Let me remind the Government, however, that 16 per cent. of their houses-- 35,000 properties--are empty. If they have read the reports of the Public Accounts Committee and the Select Committee on the Environment, they will know that only 2.5 per cent. of local authority houses are empty. Even authorities with larger housing stocks usually have special reasons. Where that does not apply, I would suggest transfer.

I shall issue a challenge to the Minister, which he may wish to meet when he replies to the debate. In the Government sector, 35,000 properties are empty--and I emphasise that most are not needed for defence purposes. One in five London police houses are empty ; prison officers' houses have been left empty for up to 10 years. In Archway, Department of Transport properties are even now being auctioned off, while many Ministry of Defence houses are being kept empty for sale by auction. I challenge the Government to transfer those properties, here and now, to housing associations or local authorities. It is a question of, "Do it now--don't talk."

Let me tell the Minister what really happened about housing action trusts. I understand why he does not know : historically, housing Ministers in the present Government have lasted for an average of six months. The present Minister was not involved at the time ; I give him full credit for that. If he had been, he would not have said what he did say.

In the Committee stage of the Housing Bill 1988, we argued against housing action trusts. We said that tenants would not be forced out of the council sector ; we also saw problems involving rent-setting mechanisms and so forth.

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Every one of the seven housing action trust areas identified by the Government voted them down. As a result of that pressure, and as a result of my taking groups of Members of Parliament to see the then Minister--the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Mr. Trippier)--the Government began to shift their position. Now they are saying that tenants can go back to the council sector.

Given that the tenants who voted the system down in the seven areas identified by the Government were not offered the special and favourable deals that are now being offered to Hull and Walthamstow, which I welcome, will the Minister now make the same offer to those tenants? They knew that they would be transferred. Furthermore, is he prepared to change the law, which, as it stands, is not commensurate with his offer?

Let me say to the Minister what I have said to the Hull authority--I said it some time ago, and it is in writing. Those tenants will have the right to go back to either the local authority or another landlord of their own choosing ; they need not go back to the local authority.

Then there is the question of housing authorities. It is wonderful, is it not? Various hon. Members are falling in love with the housing association movement : terrific. I wish that it had been so throughout the 1980s, when the housing associations grant was cut time and again. Now they are only just getting back to where they were in the 1970s. What a damning indictment of the Government's policy.

What else are the Government doing? One Minister--he is now Secretary of State for Health--promised to revive the co-ops. This year, the co-ops have had the lowest-ever allocation from the Housing Corporation--just 300 housing units. What a disastrous, incompetent measure.

Let me make two points about ending transfers--and I address this to the hon. Member for Gloucester as well as to the Government. Can we have a guarantee that, whenever tenants are transferred, they will be given the money to take independent advice about the desirability of the deal? Some tenants have bought a pig in a poke. An example of that--it was not badly intentioned--is the Greater London council seaside homes where tenants ended up paying more than they were told that they would have to pay. It was the fault of the housing association in that it got its sums wrong, but that was not surprising in view of the circumstances of the deal. Those involved were not offered independent advice which might have warned them off. No one should be transferred without independent advice.

I could make a success of a transfer if I were told that I could buy each unit for under £10,000, which is the maximum price for any house or flat in any total stock transfer that has taken place in Britain. Any fool could make a success of that. If one writes off all the debt, things can be improved. If it is such a good thing, why not do it for local authorities? The Minister says that we cannot have the capital receipts. He wants to do the equivalent of going home at night, finding that the roof is leaking and telling his family, "I am sorry, the roof needs to be repaired but we should pay off the mortgage." It is lunacy to use the money from capital receipts to pay off debts when there are so many homeless. It is also wicked. Therefore, the Government cannot use that excuse either.

There is a campaign for rough sleepers. Homelessness is not just a London problem and it is nowhere near being solved. I welcome the units that the Government have

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made available, but more homeless people will come to use them. They will come from Gloucester, Taunton, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. People will come from all over the place and the homelessness problem will continue to increase because, as the Duke of Edinburgh said, we have lost 1.9 million properties from the rented sector. The aggressive begging comes from the Government, begging for an excuse for policies that have failed the nation. 6.51 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Tim Yeo) : This has been an instructive debate on an important subject, and I welcome some of the contributions, including the eloquent plea of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Summerson) for a housing action trust there. I hope that the tenants will take careful note of what he said. I was interested in the suggestions of my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. French) for encouraging voluntary transfer. I shall draw the attention of the Department of Social Security to his remarks on housing benefit. I should like him to clarify his concerns about the Housing Corporation's attitude to circular 7/91. Perhaps he will do so in a letter.

My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. Nicholson) made some powerful remarks about the revival of the private sector, the use of capital receipts and defective housing in his constituency. Almost all the other speeches were pleas for more money to be spent on council housing. Opposition Members ignored entirely the enormous resources that the Government are putting into the housing association movement. The hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr. Bradley) is a former employee of Manchester city council. Before he asks the Government to put more taxpayers' money into that city, he should do something about collecting the £15 million of rent arrears which were outstanding at the end of 1990. The hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Ms. Gordon) should ask why Tower Hamlets council had 1, 758 empty council properties at 1 April 1990. Those were council properties built for council tenants. They were not built for policemen or hospital workers or for soldiers returning from abroad. They were meant for tenants and should be for tenants. They would be used by tenants if the Labour-controlled local authority did something about it.

The debate has reminded the House how the Government's policies over the past 12 years have given Britain more and better housing than at any time in history. The policies have been based on expanding home ownership, which is the preferred choice of the vast majority of families and individuals. Home ownership is now at record levels and is expanding still further with the promotion of shared ownership schemes and other intiatives designed to bring owner-occupation within the reach of those for whom it was previously impossible.

The Government's policies are also designed to improve choice and opportunity for tenants. They give all tenants more say in their own affairs. They target more resources where they are most needed and encourage the private landlord to play a bigger role in housing the homeless. The private landlord will have listened with interest to the reply of the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire). The hon. Member for Dagenham refused to say that the Labour party would

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abandon its crazy policy of giving private tenants the right to buy. If ever there was a sure way of ensuring that the private rented sector remained largely dormant, it was that threat of confiscation. The debate has also provided an opportunity for my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning to mention the hugely increased resources that we are putting into housing associations via the Housing Corporation and by making it possible for housing associations to tap private finance for the benefit of tenants. All those positive steps have been resisted in one way or another by the Labour party's dogged determination to continue living in the past. For example, the rents-to- mortgages experiment is now successfully under way in Basildon and Milton Keynes. That initiative manages to promote home ownership and extend the rights of tenants. It is sad but not surprising that no Labour Member today had a word to say in favour of that scheme. As it took so many years of proven Conservative success and overwhelming tenant enthusiasm before the Labour party replaced its obstinate hostility to the right to buy with its present grudging acceptance, it will be many more years before it gives the rents-to-mortgages scheme an unqualified endorsement.

The debate also reminded the House of what the Labour party would inflict on tenants and landlords if it ever got the chance. We have had the usual hostility to the private landlord, thinly disguised inside the Labour party's so-called new agenda for the private rented sector. That agenda has been drawn up carefully to prevent private landlords from providing for poorer tenants. The initiative of my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning, the pilot scheme under which housing associations are invited to bid for an opportunity to manage private property on behalf of landlords and to act as an intermediary between them and homeless families, is worth while. It would have done the Labour party some good if it had thought to give that a favourable mention.

The trouble is that at the core of the Labour party's policy is a deep- seated desire to meet every housing need by throwing huge sums of money at local authorities. The Government utterly reject that approach. Never again should tenants face the dreary monopoly of no alternative to a local council landlord. It was the excessive dependence on local authorities as the monopoly provider of subsidised housing which led directly to the dreadful conditions still found on many council estates today. That policy was utterly rejected by the Government but is still supported by the Opposition. It has given us more than 5,000 empty houses in Labour- controlled Manchester--more than one property in 20 of the total council stock. That same policy left more than £26 million of uncollected rent from tenants in Labour-controlled Southwark, almost one third of the annual rent roll.

Labour councils cannot be bothered to collect the rents that would pay for the improvements and maintenance that we want tenants to receive, but the Labour leadership is certainly not slow in promising to spend huge sums of taxpayers' money. Exactly how much it would spend remains shrouded in some obscurity. The promises that fall glibly from the lips of the hon. Member for Dagenham may not have been approved by the hon. Member for Derby, South (Mrs. Beckett). When she was confronted with the ghastly reality that Labour's spending

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commitments would require a basic rate of tax of 40p in the pound, the hon. Member for Derby, South back-pedalled furiously. The hon. Member for Dagenham told the House last year that a Labour Government would immediately set in train a scheme costing £1.85 billion as a solution to the homelessness problem. Was that commitment cleared with the hon. Member for Derby, South?

Later in the year the hon. Member for Dagenham was at it again. He told the Chartered Builder magazine that over £8 billion was promised for construction, repair and maintenance. I doubt whether that was cleared with the hon. Member for Derby, South. Perhaps she is not such an avid reader of that magazine as I am. When we talk of £1.85 billion here and £3 billion there, we are talking about real money. Those spending pledges are either a hollow and cynical sham designed to buy votes from every pressure group that presents itself on Labour's door, or they represent a clear and unambiguous threat to every taxpayer in the country--an attempt to cripple taxpayers and wreck the economy.

Liverpool is a supreme example of what Labour rule can do to a once proud and prosperous city. Of all the disasters caused by Labour's administration in Liverpool, its housing is supremely disgraceful. There are over 5,000 empty council properties--one in every 12 owned by the council. That is the worst record of any local authority in the country. There is £16 million of uncollected rent--more than a quarter of the total rent roll.

However, hope exists for Liverpool's beleaguered tenants in the form of a housing action trust. Last week the city council voted to start negotiations. I warmly welcome that change of heart, but does the Labour party? Is it still firmly opposed to housing action trusts? Will it threaten Liverpool council as it threatened Hull council with the winding up of a housing action trust before it has even had a chance to get under way?

On this crucial issue of housing action trusts, the Labour party leadership in Parliament is opposed to its whizzo new moderate Liverpool city council. So deep and rigid is the attachment of the Labour Front Bench to out-of- date dogma that it cannot utter a word in support of its councillors in Liverpool, who are belatedly attempting to redress some of the wrongs that were inflicted on them in the early 1980s.

A year ago tomorrow, the House debated a Labour motion on housing. In that year, Labour has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The same touchstones have been uncovered--a slavish and unquestioning enthusiasm for the local authority monopoly landlord, the same profound hostility to extensions of tenants' rights, the same resolute determination to stop the growth in the private sector. Those were the solutions of the 1960s. They were mistakes then ; they are irrelevant now. The House should reject the motion.

Question put , That the original words stand part of the Question :--

The House divided : Ayes 194, Noes 276.

Division No. 197] [ 7.00 pm

AYES

Abbott, Ms Diane

Adams, Mrs Irene (Paisley, N.)

Allen, Graham

Alton, David

Archer, Rt Hon Peter

Ashdown, Rt Hon Paddy

Ashley, Rt Hon Jack

Ashton, Joe

Banks, Tony (Newham NW)

Barnes, Harry (Derbyshire NE)

Barnes, Mrs Rosie (Greenwich)

Battle, John

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Beckett, Margaret

Beith, A. J.

Bellotti, David

Bennett, A. F. (D'nt'n & R'dish)

Bermingham, Gerald

Blair, Tony

Blunkett, David

Boateng, Paul

Boyes, Roland

Bradley, Keith

Brown, Gordon (D'mline E)

Brown, Nicholas (Newcastle E)

Brown, Ron (Edinburgh Leith)

Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)

Buckley, George J.

Callaghan, Jim

Campbell, Menzies (Fife NE)

Campbell, Ron (Blyth Valley)

Campbell-Savours, D. N.

Canavan, Dennis

Carr, Michael

Cartwright, John

Clarke, Tom (Monklands W)

Clwyd, Mrs Ann

Cohen, Harry

Cook, Frank (Stockton N)

Cook, Robin (Livingston)

Corbett, Robin

Corbyn, Jeremy

Cousins, Jim

Crowther, Stan

Cryer, Bob

Cummings, John

Cunliffe, Lawrence

Cunningham, Dr John

Dalyell, Tam

Darling, Alistair

Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)

Davis, Terry (B'ham Hodge H'l)

Dewar, Donald

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