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The Minister for Local Government, Housing and Urban Regeneration (Mr. David Curry): I agree with what the hon. Gentleman has said about ownership. One important factor is the way in which the estate is designed--its physical shape. It is much easier for someone who lives in a more conventional street with neighbours, in a classical setting, to feel a sense of ownership than it is for someone living in a high-rise block, which is part of a series of blocks with wasteland between each one. That is why one of the key factors of the estate action and estate renewal programmes has been to consider the overall design and to accept elements of demolition; in that way, we can create a physical environment that gives people a greater sense of ownership.
Mr. Bennett: I accept what the Minister says--there is considerable evidence to support that view. If estates are redesigned and properties taken out, the available stock is reduced. The redesign may make the stock better, but if there are to be more demolitions--in order to achieve what the Minister has just suggested, more demolitions may be necessary--we may need to build more houses or build between blocks. We should house people in dwellings that are people-friendly, not people-unfriendly. The Minister should do a little more work on weighing up the consequences of repair as opposed to rebuild. I am worried that there are some tower blocks and deck access schemes where it might be better value for money in the long run to start again rather than to try to make the existing dwellings people-friendly.
Another aspect of existing stock that concerned the Committee was that of red lining. I do not want to become involved in arguments across the Chamber about whether it was a great idea in the 1980s to encourage many people, particularly council tenants in high-rise blocks of flats, to buy their property. It has happened and, having happened, I am worried about the number of people who are finding it difficult to resell their property. There is nothing worse on a council estate than to have many houses that are well looked after and two or three houses or flats that are neglected or empty and look a mess. It is particularly upsetting if those properties are owned by individuals who have simply walked away from them.
In the 1980s, the building societies were keen to let people have mortgages on some of the properties; now, the building societies have lost their enthusiasm for lending money. The building societies have let this country down on too many occasions. In the 1960s and early 1970s, they were reluctant to lend money on old, Victorian properties, some of which were good value for money. On that occasion, the local authorities acted as the lender of last resort and made it possible to borrow on those properties. Interestingly, more recently, the building societies have taken over responsibility for many of those mortgages from local councils. Having shown enthusiasm for providing mortgages for residents in big blocks of flats, it is unfair of the building societies to withdraw that support, and doing so causes a great deal of hardship. One crucial factor when considering housing need is the analysis of existing stock, of which we must make as good a use as possible.
Have the Government made a correct estimate of total housing need? Points that I have made about housing stock suggest that I believe that the Government's estimate is too low. One of the Committee's most difficult tasks was to come up with the right estimate. We fudged it and said that we thought that, on the whole, the Government's estimate should be at the top of the range rather than towards the bottom.
In response to the Select Committee's report, the Government attempted to justify their figures. They said that if we continued to build at the rate of about 60,000 social houses per year, that would be perfectly all right. The Government achieve their own target, but that target is low. The Government's excuse is that we do not need as many social houses provided by the public sector, because the private rented sector is doing better than we thought.
I am worried about the private rented sector--I am not against it in principle, but I am worried about some of it. The evidence in my constituency shows that some of the private rented sector consists of poor-quality housing. If it was cheap, poor-quality housing, we might be able to say that the Government had found a good bargain. But I am worried because much of it is poor-quality housing--people have to live in inadequate housing--but it is dear and it is paid for out of housing benefit. The tenant gets a poor deal; the Government get a poor deal because housing benefit amounts to a big bill.
The private rented sector has also grown, but only temporarily, as a result of the number of people who have found it difficult to sell their property, so have rented it out. I do not think that all those cases should be dealt with as if they provided social housing. If someone rents out a house in one part of the country and cannot sell it, when he moves to another part of the country, he has to rent rather than buy. That process does not contribute to social housing. I accept that, sometimes, when property is difficult to sell, people move into it as social housing and receive high housing benefit to pay for it. We need more information about the private rented sector before the Government can justify their low estimates.
Mr. Michael Stephen (Shoreham):
The hon. Gentleman has rightly drawn attention to the problem of the high prices being paid by the public, through housing benefit, for sub-standard housing in the private sector. How does he propose to tackle the problem? Would he suggest limiting housing benefit to a certain amount according to the property's condition? What other method would he suggest?
Mr. Bennett:
I do not want to return to the time when we subsidised housing as opposed to people, but we may have gone a little too far in the direction of subsidising the individual, which has produced the poverty trap. In this debate, I simply want to illustrate that that was one of the areas that concerned the Select Committee. We are worried about the estimates. We understand the Government's argument about the private rented sector, but at this stage, we need more information.
What I am coming to--this is not strongly recommended by the Select Committee--is that if we are to try to push up the number of social houses that we are
building, we must consider a pretty fundamental question: where will the money come from? I would certainly argue very strongly that, although the Government are looking for tax cuts in the autumn, if they have any spare money, an awful lot more ought to be going into housing.
I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich, on the Front Bench, that, although he has a scheme for building more houses from capital receipts in the first one or two years of a Labour Government--if he is a little inefficient, it might go into a third year--we must consider firmly where the money will come from after that. We might be able to reduce the amount that is being spent on housing benefit by getting people back to work. The minimum wage may throw some people off housing benefit.
I would argue, although I shall not expand on it tonight, that we should weigh up the Treasury rules and the fact that there has been too much pussyfooting around about where the money comes from. If a country is investing in housing that will be of long-term benefit, such expenditure should not be treated in quite the same way as borrowing money to pay social security bills or other expenditure. That is not in the Select Committee's report; it is very much my view. One of the advantages of the Government publishing figures and of this debate is that we can argue in other areas of public expenditure that housing need must be met.
One issue that came out strongly in evidence to the Select Committee was special housing need. It is very obvious that the elderly and other groups of people need special housing. One of the most interesting things that the Committee found concerned lifetime homes. We were invited up to York by the Joseph Rowntree trust to look at some of the houses that it was developing, which were designed so that people with disabilities of one sort or another could adapt them at a very small extra cost. I am not saying that such houses are the whole solution. The Government have been considering building regulations and how far houses should be designed to be friendly to adaptation by people who live in them for short or lifelong periods. I hope that those regulations will come out fairly soon.
Where will the houses go? There was much technical argument in Committee on how far it is possible to measure housing need looking downwards from a national perspective and how far it can be considered from the bottom up. One of my disappointments is that it is not possible to get the two figures to meet to see what is happening. There was much evidence that those two approaches should be merged and that there should not be such a top-down approach.
One of the crucial questions is how many new houses we need. Paragraph 16 of the Government's response says that there will be a discussion document. The Secretary of State for the Environment has been going around the country saying that 4.4 million new homes need to be built. Where should they go? I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us when that discussion document will be published, so that we can have a proper debate on it. I suggest that the method for planning housing in London ought to be considered for other areas. The London housing capacity survey is quite important.
It is important that much of the new housing is built on brown-field sites. I congratulate the Government on the fact that almost 50 per cent. of new housing is being built on such sites, but I suggest that they should work the figure up even higher. I have some reservations about what a brown-field site is. I am not quite sure whether Stonehenge counts or not. There is a little evidence that some of the sites that are classified as brown-field sites do not have quite the grime of the gasworks with which we would associate the term brown-field site.
As the first paragraph of the Select Committee report says,
"The Government's declared aim is 'a decent home . . . within reach of every family'".
That ought to be the nation's aim, but our report makes it quite clear that we have a very long way to go to meet it.
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