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Mr. Stewart: The hon. Gentleman is wriggling now. All the Scottish Office block figures are published. They are on the record. The hon. Gentleman's problem is that he is subject to the Dunfermline doctrine: that Labour Front-Bench spokesmen are entitled to say anything that they want but must never quote a figure. That means that there is never a real commitment to anything at all.
Mr. Nigel Griffiths: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
The speech of the hon. Member for Dundee, East was completely meaningless, unless he can say, within a margin, how the Labour party would back its objectives with taxpayers' money. That is what every council tenant in Scotland should learn from the hon. Gentleman's speech tonight.
My hon. Friend the Minister talked about the variation order, which is, of course, a technical matter, and about the hostel element in housing support grant. The House would accept the justification for general taxpayer support to local authority expenditure on hostels, because people move across boundaries. I thought that my hon. Friend made an extremely good case for voting against the order, because he said that it is a random and indiscriminate subsidy, which it is. He said that money out of the general portion is received by Aberdeenshire, Shetland, Western Isles and Highland. Why should I vote for a transfer of resources from the good people of Eastwood to those authorities? I cannot think of any good reason for doing so. I hope that the Labour party will divide the House. If they win the vote, the grant will be abolished. So much the better.
Government policies on housing should be developed by moving faster from using taxpayers' money forcurrent expenditure--that is what the grant does--to concentrating on capital expenditure. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister not to be dismayed if the Labour party divides the House and he loses the vote, thus abolishing the Scottish housing support grant. He will then have a lot of money in hand, which he will be able to spend on capital projects.
Mrs. Fyfe:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Stewart:
I am about to finish, and I know that other hon. Members want to join in the debate.
Mr. Jimmy Wray (Glasgow, Provan):
It is some time since we started our debates today, and I have been in the Chamber since we discussed the revenue account. I am sorry that I was not called in that debate, because a lot of political chicanery concerning facts and figures was going on. It was also hard to understand all the positions that various Ministers took up in the newspapers beforehand.
However, in this debate I can speak with some authority, because I was brought up in the Gorbals. There were 10 in our family, and several of them died from tuberculosis at early ages--at four, at 20 and at 33. Other people in the family died early because of the later effects of such conditions. So we know all about bad housing.
I can answer the question that the hon. Member for Eastwood (Mr. Stewart) asked, because I am not a member of new Labour. I am still old Labour. I am red-blooded and I fight for the people when I see an injustice. I spent 30 years dealing with housing complaints every Saturday, and I have probably found houses for more people than has anyone on the Government Benches. People used to say that they had prayed toSt. Anthony and he had got them a house--but actually it was me.
I understand why my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, East (Mr. McAllion) would not give a figure, because obviously he does not know the figure. I can give the Government a figure. I can tell them that if we wiped out the Scottish housing debt, that would improve things.
One of the reasons why we introduced the housing support grant was to clear out bad housing in Scotland. My hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, East is right about the money, because 15 years ago we had£228 million, plus £100 million from the general fund contribution, whereas in 1996 all we have is£19.4 million, including the general fund contribution. Every year, the Minister says that any local authority in Scotland can apply if it is finding difficulty, but several have done so and every one was rejected. The Government should wind up the GFC, because they are not really interested in it.
The only way in which the people of Scotland will get any justice is by getting rid of that lot. They are the last of the Mohicans; they have drained the boxes of every
penny that they could find and they all, to a man and to a woman, obey the Secretary of State for Scotland. But he will be off the card when the general election comes, along with the rest of the Scottish Ministers. Possibly the only one to survive will be Lord James himself--
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes):
Order. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will remember the tradition here that we address other Members by using their constituencies.
Mr. Wray:
I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I must remind the Government that 25 years ago we were clearing out the slums of Glasgow--the worst slums in Europe, where people were living 600 and 700 to the acre, in rat-infested houses owned by private landlords. Tuberculosis was rampant, and people were dying of poverty. Past Tory Governments acknowledged that poverty but allowed it to continue, because their support came from the private landlords who were charging the poor people in Glasgow, in the rest of Scotland and throughout Britain extortionate rents.
Today we are in the same position. We have a golden opportunity to look after the people of Glasgow and the rest of Scotland. In Glasgow, there are 23,297 dwellings below a tolerable standard, and 7,000 houses lying empty. In 1992, Glasgow city council received 5,673 applications from homeless people; in 1993-94, the figure rose to 13,200. That shows the extent of the problem and the Government's failure to tackle it.
We hear a lot about what is happening in Scotland, but those things are certainly not happening in Glasgow. In some of the constituencies with the worst housing, people suffer from high infant mortality rates, rat infestation and decaying housing unfit for human habitation.
The Secretary of State had a golden opportunity to increase the housing support grant and give Glasgow a chance to do something about poverty. Yet what figures has the Scottish Office produced? Since 1991, £22 million has been cut from the housing support grant, which represents a cut of 95 per cent. By 1995-96, there will have been a total cut of 99 per cent.
The Scottish Office works on a national figure calculated on the basis of rents 10 per cent. higher than rents really are. That means a direct cut for local authorities in Scotland. Rents are deemed to be £38.48, although the average is only £28.68. That is a damned disgrace, a fraud and a lie to the Scottish people, and it should not be tolerated.
The Secretary of State said that he was expecting rent increases of more than 5 per cent. Why would he expect that when increases are really running at only 3 per cent? When the Secretary of State put the cap on and Glasgow council asked for its inflation rate of 3 per cent., according to the right hon. Gentleman the gross domestic product deflator showed an increase of 2.75 per cent., yet he allowed it only a 1 per cent. increase. Now he wonders why the council is in its present state. He will draw upon himself the wrath of the Glasgow people with that increase, and the wrath of the people of Dundee will be turned on him too. Those are the two councils that will suffer the most.
I thought that housing support grant was intended to get rid of bad housing in Glasgow and to keep rents down, but Government policy is to ring-fence housing so that it is
funded by the people who pay the rent. Housing usually represents the largest single expenditure for individuals and families on low incomes. Earlier this century, Governments realised that, and adopted policies to provide decent housing for everyone, regardless of their income.
Those policies were successful, and, in 1977, the National Consumer Council found that people on low incomes often received better value for money than others, mostly because of good-quality subsidised housing run by councils. People in private rented accommodation suffered to some extent because Rachman-type landlords were exploiting tenants and not spending any money on their houses. As councillors, we were running about trying to get the sanitary inspectors to issue disrepair notices against them.
Now we come to the sad story of when the Government took over in 1979. The election of the Tories changed the situation completely. Their policies totally altered the role of public sector rented housing. The changes involved minimising public involvement and, as in other sectors, giving way to market forces.
The main thrust of the Government's proposals was as follows. Ownership was to be extended and Government expenditure reduced and targeted more effectively. Local authority responsibility was to be decreased by increasing private ownership and transferring homes to housing associations, such as Scottish Homes, with the support of a majority of the tenants. The Government were taking housing out of local authority control, even though local authorities could probably have done something about the problem of slum dwellings.
As well as those United Kingdom-wide plans, specific legislation for Scotland was introduced. Scotland, with its history of low ownership and a large number of council houses, was seen as having plenty of potential. Legislation included the Housing Act 1980 and the Housing and Planning Act 1986. Those Acts were supposed to benefit the poor. They introduced the right-to-buy scheme. We all know about negative equity and that thousands of houses have been repossessed after the Government's Thatcherite policy failed and exploited the poor. With interest rates of 6 per cent. they bought houses with possibly 70 per cent. discounts and ended up two years later paying 18 per cent. interest charges.
That is the sort of Government that we have. They do not care about what happens and then they run around telling us what they are doing for the people. Every Labour Member knows the problems because every Saturday we see such people coming into our surgery, poverty-stricken and in ill health because the Government do not care. Compassion comes only from Labour Members.
Those Acts were supposed to benefit the poor. They introduced the right-to-buy scheme, which allowed tenants to buy their houses at market value minus a discount, based on the length of occupancy. They moved subsidies from buildings to households to help people most in need and to shield the poor. The decline in council housing and the increase in private sector dwellings and housing associations was meant to increase the choice of accommodation available.
What happened? The policy of increasing home ownership has been a success in terms of numbers, with an increase of 450,000 in new owners, but the prospect of
home ownership has been unrealistic for people on low incomes; even with discounts of up to 70 per cent. on the market value, the prices were beyond their means.
The Government then committed the cardinal sin--this bright Cabinet introduced deregulation. In 1989, the Tories deregulated private rents. Since then, housing benefits for private tenants have increased from £1 billion to £5.5 billion--an increase of 300 per cent. The planned total in 1997-98 is £7.4 billion. That shows exactly what the Government are about, how they have changed the policy around, how they are putting the burden on the taxpayer, how they are getting at the poor and how housing benefits are clearing up debts. That is the only way in which they are working. The increase in such housing benefits is due mostly to massively increased rents--public money going straight into private landlords' pockets.
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