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Mr. Raymond S. Robertson: I have asked the House to approve a housing support grant order of over£19 million. If the hon. Gentleman were in my position, what would be the housing support grant level that he would be asking the House to approve?
Mr. McAllion: We are dealing with what the Minister is proposing. If he wants to find out how much the order would be under a Labour Government, let him and his hon. Friends call a general election now, and they will find out in a short time.
Mr. Gallie: The hon. Gentleman suggested that it would take a general election to find out what a Labour Government would do. The Labour party has said that it will not increase taxation or take more out of the pockets of the taxpayer. So a Labour Government could not increase housing support.
Mr. McAllion: There was a rumour about two weeks ago--I was contacted by the press--that the Secretary of State was thinking of inviting me and my hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton (Mr. Robertson) to look at all the books to see what resources are available. The Secretary of State has never made good that offer. They know that if we were allowed to see where all the money is tucked away for the tax cuts that the Government hope to use to get re-elected, the cat would be out of the bag. If we could see where the money was, we could perhaps say what we would do with it.
The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Michael Forsyth): The phrase "a look at the books" is absurd. The
Scottish Office block is published and is available to the hon. Gentleman. It sets out where the expenditure will come from. Surely it is fair to ask the hon. Gentleman whether, if he were in government, he would increase the level of support provided for council tenants and from where the money would come. Why can he not answer?
Mr. McAllion: The Secretary of State knows very well that the size of the Scottish Office budget is determined by Cabinet decisions on public spending generally. The Cabinet, of which the Secretary of State is a member, has found £1.5 billion to waste on rail privatisation and billions of pounds over the past few years to waste on council tax and other schemes. Where did that money come from? It came from Government decisions taken by the Secretary of State and his right hon. and hon. Friends. If they cannot stand up and take responsibility for those decisions, they should not be there, and most of Scotland agrees with me that it is time that they were not there.
The Minister said that there need not be rent increases in Scotland next year, but we know for a fact that, across Scotland, in Renfrew, Dundee, Edinburgh and Highland, rents will increase significantly as a result of the Government's policies. As always, the Minister blames the councils, and, as always, he is wrong, because the blame lies fairly and squarely with him and his Government, who, over the past 15 years, have waged ideological warfare against the council sector. It was not the councils but the Government who slashed capital allocations to councils in Scotland. It was not the councils but the Government who abolished general fund contributions. It was not the councils but the Government who all but abolished housing support grant and forced councils to put rents up year on year, thereby forcing council tenants to rely on housing benefit and forcing them into a poverty trap, from which thousands of ordinary Scots can no longer escape.
This is the Government who rail against the social chapter and the national minimum wage, who are evangelical about workers pricing themselves into low-paid jobs, who force rent increases on hundreds of thousands of low-paid Scots who cannot possibly afford to pay. Yet the Minister has the effrontery to boast this evening about £650 million of housing benefit being allocated to Scottish tenants. He is creating a poverty trap from which low-paid Scots cannot escape. He is making council tenants in Scotland dependent on handouts, because he is forcing on them rent levels that are well beyond the means of ordinary people to pay.
We should not be surprised by any of that, because the Minister has already made clear his intention to finish with council housing for good in the longer term. It is now official that the final solution has been fixed by the Government, and that, in a Tory future, there will be no more council housing. All the signs are there, because as well as the slow strangulation of housing support grant in the order, we now have the ruling on capital receipts. Next year, 25 per cent. is to be used to redeem debt that councils have accumulated on their housing revenue account. The following year, 50 per cent. is to be used for the same purpose.
In those two years, some £300 million will be cut from investment in council housing in Scotland. All of that will happen at the same time as Scottish Homes, the Government's national agency, begins its second national house condition survey. God knows, the first one painted
a bleak enough picture for Scottish housing: 95,000 houses in Scotland were below the tolerable standard; 267,000 houses were affected by dampness; 580,000 required urgent repairs; and an outstanding repairs bill of £3.7 billion.
Most decent observers would have expected that a Government who commissioned such a survey and received such a devastating analysis of the crisis facing Scottish housing would have made housing one of their top political priorities--not this Government. They did exactly the opposite. They launched a holy war against housing in Scotland, particularly public sector housing. In all the talk of Government priorities recently, not one Scottish Office Minister can be found who will say that housing is a priority for the Government, because even these Ministers balk at something so blatantly untrue. So they cut the housing budget. They cut the budget for Scottish Homes. They steal the capital receipts from councils' investment programmes. They force rent rises on council tenants. They make the people pay. All of that at a time of crisis in Scottish housing.
Most hon. Members present will have received a briefing from Shelter, which says:
than that introduced by the Minister. In cash terms, it is a cut of 17 per cent. this year. In real terms, it is a cut of 19 per cent. The figure that Shelter uses is £148 million, which, by happy coincidence, is the figure that the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Kincardine and Deeside (Mr. Kynoch), quoted in our first debate as the increase for council spending in Scotland. I hope that those figures are not linked.
Mr. Allan Stewart (Eastwood):
It is always a great pleasure to listen to the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Mr. McAllion), who has the merit of being an honest socialist--a fairly unusual position for a Member on the Opposition Benches these days. What was most interesting about his speech was that he completely failed to answer the perfectly reasonable questions that were put to him by my hon. Friend the Minister, by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and by my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr (Mr. Gallie).
Of course, nobody suggests that an Opposition are able to put precise figures on their policies to the last million pounds, but, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State
told the hon. Gentleman, the Scottish block figures are perfectly well known. They are published. The hon. Gentleman refused to deny that a Labour Government would abolish all support to council housing in Scotland.
Mr. McAllion:
Nobody asked me to.
Mr. Stewart:
I am asking the hon. Gentleman now. What is the figure?
Mr. McAllion:
I cannot understand how the hon. Gentleman can think that I refused to answer that question when it was never asked of me in the first place. I can tell him that a Labour Government will ensure that all tenures in Scotland are treated fairly and that the resources are distributed fairly across all tenures. It is for people, not Governments, to choose the tenure that they want. Labour will go back to the old system, which was far preferable to the way in which the zealots on the Government Front Bench operate.
Mr. Stewart:
I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman. Perhaps he will give me the figure within £50 million.
Mr. McAllion:
If the Secretary of State for Scotland were to invite me into the Scottish Office and to the Cabinet Office to see all the Government's books, I would be glad to give the hon. Gentleman the exact figure.
"Few can remember a more damaging round of cuts"
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