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Sir Irvine Patnick indicated dissent.
Mr. Raynsford: Oh yes they do. We saw what happened to the 1993 leasehold reform measure. We saw that, and we saw the betrayal of leaseholders by the removal of the right to manage from the Housing Bill earlier this summer.
The Government have betrayed tenants, whether private, council or housing association, by forcing up rents, cutting investment, reducing tenancy rights and plunging an increasing number into benefit dependency and poverty traps.
The Government have betrayed the homeless, using the Housing Bill to remove the statutory safety net that has been there for 17 years, and which every informed organisation concerned with the homeless--every church, every housing association, every voluntary body involved with the homeless--says is a necessary and correct way to protect some of the most vulnerable people in the country, and provides proper cover and help.
The Minister for Local Government, Housing and Urban Regeneration (Mr. David Curry):
There is a difference between a Government or Opposition day, in which we engage in the normal polemics of this place, and the opportunity for a more reflective and discursive approach that a Select Committee report provides. I plan to choose the less exciting of those approaches, but it may be more appropriate.
The hon. Member for Greenwich (Mr. Raynsford) may have forgotten that the Housing Bill has almost completed its passage through Parliament--although we join for what may be our last passage of arms in that matter on Monday--because he made his familiar speech again. I could have written the peroration myself. I have heard it so often that I have come to know it almost by heart, but it deserved a slightly wider audience--of three rather than two.
The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Mr. Bennett) chairs the Select Committee, to which I gave evidence. I also had the pleasure of his company on the Housing Bill Standing Committee. After the first
sitting, he complained that too many documents and too much paper were being thrown at him. It reminds me--my right hon. Friend the Member for City of London and Westminster, South (Mr. Brooke) will recall this--of George III's response to Edward Gibbon's latest production: "Another damn volume, Mr. Gibbon."
The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish remarked on the structure of the Select Committee, but that is not for me to respond to. He intelligently summarised the issues raised by the Select Committee report and, broadly speaking, I intend to follow the structure of his remarks in responding to the points that have been made. He talked about the human circumstances of housing and homelessness, the economic cost of housing in individual and national terms, and the crucial issue of planning.
I understand the instincts of people who wish to protect the open countryside, the green areas between built-up zones, the woodlands and our traditional rural landscape. I should strike a small note of caution, however, because someone with a house overlooking the countryside may have a slightly different sense of priorities from someone whose aspirations for a home have not yet been met. One of our central dilemmas in dealing with housing is that building houses is not popular and meets enormous resistance.
It is easy for the housing lobbies and those of us in housing politics to say where we think people should live and where it is convenient for them to live--it may not be where we happen to live ourselves--and to forget the tremendous resistance to construction. Whenever plans are submitted, or housing allocations in the home counties or further afield are published, there is resistance because people genuinely feel that there is a cost to be paid in terms of land being taken. The answer must be to build on the so-called brown-field sites, but to say that every element of housing need can be satisfied in that way is not only extremely prescriptive but puts more housing on those sites than they can sustain.
We all agree that it is difficult to come up with a formula for the estimates that is not within a wide bracket because they are based on so many uncertainties and permutations. Tonight, we have discussed two sets of estimates: first, the household projection estimates and, secondly, the estimates of need. The household projection estimates are that there will be 4.4 million new households by 2016. The hon. Member for Greenwich was right to say that, historically, we have tended to underestimate rather than overestimate housing needs. They result from many factors: population growth, which is one of the major factors; changing age structures; changes in behaviour; and the number of single-person households, which is growing in every age group. That category includes not just single or unmarried mothers, but single people throughout the age range.
The hon. Members for Christchurch (Mrs. Maddock) and for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Mrs. Jackson) mentioned the problem of elderly people. Obviously, a better use of our towns and cities must be a priority. We have set a target of ensuring that 50 per cent. of all new build is on sites that have been used before. We have now attained 49 per cent., whereas in the 1980s we managed less than 40 per cent. We must constantly see how we can improve that percentage because, in some areas, building is part of regenerating and enhancing our cities. It is part of improving the environment, not what is regarded as a
constant erosion of it. It may not be a panacea, but we must look in that direction for a significant part of our new build.
The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish is right to say that we should make better use of our existing stock. There are 800,000 empty properties in England, 700,000 of which are in the private sector. That is why we are doing our best to encourage the use of those properties. Housing associations have an important role to play in buying and restoring derelict buildings.
No one can come up with precise figures on the calculation of housing demand--many extrapolations are built into the formulas--but I agree that we must keep the figures under review and develop our methods of assessing need. We are looking ahead, and we have asked the department of applied economics at Cambridge to develop an economic model that will enable us to establish the possible future need for social housing under a range of different scenarios. I do not think that there will be a definitive answer to the question.
My right hon. Friend the Member for City of London and Westminster, South raised some important issues about the unfortunate people who do not have homes. He made an important point about the difficulty of coexistence between homeless people and residents. For example, we have to seek planning permission for our winter shelters. In addition, people have difficulty finding a conventional shelter.
People also look for wet shelters, for detoxification units and for shelters where people with mental health problems can go, which are more difficult to find. Hon. Members must have experienced resistance in their constituencies when approval has been sought to provide an establishment for people who have behavioural problems. No matter what reassurances are given, people usually think that there is a good reason to place the shelter somewhere else.
A homeless person in a hostel is better than a homeless person in the street--for the person concerned and for the residents. There is too much facile discussion about homelessness and too many assumptions that if a homeless person is plonked in a home they will be all right--they may have been homeless for many years, and they may have a multiplicity of disadvantages.
A month or so ago, I visited a Salvation Army shelter in Whitechapel, and talked to a young person in his accommodation. He said that it is terrifying to be given a key, because that is responsibility. He said, "I have to take control of my own life now." He admitted that that was a difficult thing for him to do and that occasionally he was tempted to walk out of the shelter and back on to the street. The framework of care is crucial in helping people who have these difficulties.
Mrs. Maddock:
I am interested in what the Minister is saying about the element of care. I hope that he will say these things during the review on benefits as fervently as he is saying them here. I have made representations to the Minister on this issue. Many people are concerned that the packages will not add up if we do not have that care element in benefit.
Mr. Curry:
I understand the hon. Lady's concern in this regard. My right hon. Friend the Member for City of London and Westminster, South talked about the foyer
Today, I opened a different sort of project, called off the street and into work, which attempts to place homeless people in skilled employment. They will not be employed because they are homeless; they will be employed because they have the skills. The fact that they are homeless will be irrelevant. If they have a job, they will be able to acquire a home--which is important when they try to get a job--and they will be able to have a more "conventional" and self-sustaining life style. The scheme has a wide range of business support as well as London local authority support. Voluntary organisations are familiar with the rough sleepers initiative. It is a market-oriented way of helping homeless people. I was privileged to open the initiative this morning and to see how effective it is.
The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish is correct: the record of local authorities in turning over property for collecting rents is improving. Some authorities have a long way to go, but the overall record is improving, which is good.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the problem of houses in the wrong places. He said that we should take the jobs to the people rather than force the people to migrate to find jobs. I believe that both circumstances will always prevail. I offer the example of the efforts of development corporations, the jobs that Nissan has created in the north-east of England, and the jobs that have followed the Korean investment and the Siemens relocation.
We have tried to create new opportunities to allow people to remain in their areas because we know that they are attached to the concept of locality and neighbourhood, but we want people to migrate elsewhere if that is how they seek to improve themselves.
The hon. Gentleman referred also to the wrong type of house. That is an important issue: needs change. We must deal with the problem of under-occupation, as it is known in the jargon. More than half a million local authority and housing association tenants have two or more spare bedrooms. We do not propose to say, "We must decant you because we need the space for someone else." People may want to be able to have family members to stay or, what is more, they may have been brought up in those properties.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Sir I. Patnick) referred, in a fascinating historical account, to that crucial sense of belonging and identity. Over the years, we have learnt from programmes such as slum clearance--which, as far as I was concerned, was first highlighted in the book "The Life and Death of a Great American City"--the effect of uprooting people from their neighbourhoods and the resulting social problems. We aim for a better match, but that policy is necessarily inefficient in economic terms. We cannot avoid that: we put up with the inefficiency because the social considerations are more important.
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