| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
7.33 pm
Ms Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden): Thank you for calling me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to make my maiden speech. I would like to congratulate all those hon. Members who have made their maiden speeches today. I hope that they will not contrast my contribution too unkindly with theirs. It is interesting that I should
speak after the hon. Member for Wokingham, or rather for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), because the last time we met was across a council chamber. In politics it seems that we move in a small circle, given that we have bumped into one another again.
I represent the constituency of Mitcham and Morden, which was formed in 1974. Until 1982 it was represented by Bruce Douglas-Mann. Some senior Members may recall that he was the only defector to the Social Democratic party who caused a by-election. Although he did not have luck on his side, because it was called just as the Falklands war commenced, he was an assiduous constituency Member whose memory is still held dear by a number of my older constituents. I understand that Bruce has fought a gallant fight against serious illness in the past few years. He has made a recovery, and I am sure that all hon. Members would wish him well in his continuing fight against illness.
For the past 15 years, the seat has been held by Dame Angela Rumbold, who had success at that by-election. She was my opponent in the elections of 1987, 1992 and more recently on 1 May. Hon. Members will gather from that that neither I nor my constituency are overnight successes.
It would be wrong for me to suggest that I had a great friendship with Dame Angela. In fact, I would be subject to retribution from someone of even higher standing than either you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, or anyone else in the House were I to do so. Nevertheless, I admired Dame Angela's single-minded determination to succeed, her work as a campaigner and her instincts for political survival, even if that meant bringing down her party as she attempted to do during the recent campaign.
Dame Angela's talents were recognised and she became a vice-chair of the Conservative party with particular responsibility for the selection of female candidates. Although I hold the hon. Member for Maidenhead in great esteem, she was the only new woman candidate selected for a safe Conservative seat. Dame Angela's other contribution was to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Conservative party's submission to the boundary commission. I am sure that a number of my hon. Friends are particularly grateful to her for that work.
I was born and brought up in my constituency, where I have always lived. It is the only seat for which I ever sought selection or which I would ever want to represent. Although it is a place that I hold in great affection, I would not attempt to suggest that it is the most beautiful or dynamic constituency in the country. Although the constituency is home to 474 acres of Mitcham common and the beautiful Morden park, which is well looked after by the National Trust, and while we can boast the oldest cricket green in the world, it also marks the end of the Northern line. I hope that that service will improve under the new Government.
Mine is a constituency of two halves--those who regard themselves as Londoners and those who think that they live in Surrey. It is a suburban seat to which people come to raise their families and where they generally enjoy living. On behalf of those people, in particular the one in five households who live in council accommodation, the 200 families in significant housing need each year who have no chance of being housed, and the many people who work in the building industry either in small firms or as self-employed, be they plasterers,
bricklayers or carpenters, I commend the Bill to the House. I also commend it on behalf of those young people in my constituency who desperately want a trade and who want the opportunity to make their future better.
I assure the House that the Bill is well supported by my constituents irrespective of whether they are owner-occupiers, tenants or leaseholders. It is with some incredulity that we have witnessed my council, which raised £56 million from the sale of council houses, being unable to afford to make the most basic improvements--the installation of central heating or new windows--available to the vast proportion of its tenants.
My tenants associations of Lavender, Glebe Court and Phipps Bridge wrote on numerous occasions to their previous Member asking her to support their attempts to persuade the then Government to use capital receipts to improve their homes.
My constituency consists of half of the London borough of Merton, which has amassed considerable amounts of money from the sale of council housing. The respective Labour and Conservative councils have always worked efficiently to sell what we had to benefit our voters in the best way. We appreciate that we will not have access to all the funds currently held by the council. We are happy with the two thirds:one third split proposed in the Bill, which suggests that the formula will be based on need and the amount of money that each council holds. Nevertheless, we believe that our one third will represent about £20 million over a five-year period.
We welcome the use of special credit approvals, which will not cause problems in the council's funding as a whole. We also welcome the revenue subsidy, which means that rents will not escalate. Our tenants will therefore not be forced into the benefit trap, whereby they consider it better to remain on benefit than in work because of those increased rents--increases made to make possible the improvements to their homes.
In the six weeks since my election, I have heard great speeches on great things about which I know little. Politicians of all parties in every area of public life are motivated by the people they meet and the problems they experience. As someone who has spent the past 16 years working in public housing, five of them as chair of my local housing committee, I know what the Bill will mean to all those elderly tenants on the St. Helier estate in Morden, who have worked all their lives and fought in a world war, but whose council cannot provide them with the central heating they need during the winter.
Mr. Peter Bradley (The Wrekin):
In embarking on my maiden speech, I congratulate those for whom the ordeal is recently over, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Ms McDonagh). It is a far, far better thing that she has done than I might achieve in the next few minutes.
The traditions of this House are daunting--not so much the shuffling and sneezing in the Lobbies as the fact that this is the mother of parliaments. Fox, Pitt, Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and others of their stature have sat, stood and spoken in the places that we now occupy. I should also mention the three hon. Members who in the last Parliament represented the communities that now make up the constituency of The Wrekin, which I am proud to represent.
For many years, John Biffen, now Lord Biffen, was held in great esteem by his colleagues on the Conservative Benches and by the then Opposition Members; he was also held in great affection by his constituents. As befits a man of his record, he has now gone, if not to a better place, at least to another place. The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) represented for some years part of my constituency--the villages of Shifnal and Albrighton. He is a great advocate for Shropshire, even if he would like the county better if it could be further detached from Europe. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Mr. Grocott) is a true champion of his constituents. He is respected on both sides of the House and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made an inspired choice in appointing him his parliamentary private secretary.
This is a crucial debate. Everyone recognises that we are living through a housing crisis of monumental proportions, although one would not get the impression, listening to Conservative Members, that they had presided over that crisis for almost two decades. It is ironic, albeit interesting, that they pray in aid Shelter--an organisation which vigorously campaigned against the policies of the Conservative Government for 17 or 18 years. As this is my maiden speech and I am therefore obliged to be charitable, or at least uncontroversial, I have to concede that it is refreshing to hear them now admitting the existence of a housing problem, even if they are quibbling about the solution.
There is a housing crisis. It damages the lives of individuals, families and entire communities throughout the country. Taxpayers spend millions of pounds on the costs of homelessness--on temporary accommodation and the associated benefits and social services that people in poor housing receive. Hundreds of thousands of construction workers are kept unemployed and on the dole when they could and should be at work, building or restoring homes for those who need them. The crisis is a testament to the record of the Conservative Government over the past 18 years. The record of the new Labour Government will depend to a large extent on what we do now, which is one of the reasons why the Bill is so welcome.
The Bill will be as welcome in the semi-rural constituency I now represent as in the inner-city ward that I represented for more than a decade. That ward is no more than a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster--Millbank ward, in which Millbank tower is situated, which is where our great election victory was planned. In the 10 years that I was a member of Westminster city council--it is important to my reputation to stress that I was a Labour member of that council--I saw what the Conservative local authority that out-conservatived all local authorities could do through housing and other policies to decent, honest, ordinary people. I saw the community I represented decimated by
the dogma of Tory housing policy and I know how important it is to my constituents--then and now--that this Bill and future measures be enacted.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey) was somewhat extravagant in claiming that her constituency was a microcosm of the universe. I make a more modest claim for The Wrekin: the whole nation is contained in my constituency, from the factories at Hadley where GKN builds Warrior armoured vehicles for the British Army and all the British Telecom telephones on our streets, to the fields where Shropshire farmers produce some of the best beef and sugar beet in England. I have to admit that I am not sure how one judges one bit of sugar beet against another, but no doubt I shall discover the finer points of sugar beet production during the life of this Parliament. My constituency contains market towns such as Shifnal and Albrighton, Newport and Wellington; old mining communities, many of which originated in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr. Radice); the Army base at Donnington and the RAF base at Cosford; and hi-tech industries in new business parks all over the constituency.
We in The Wrekin enjoy all the nation's strengths, but also many of its weaknesses. Recently, the Henley centre reported that our district is sixth out of 459 local authority areas in terms of economic dynamism, but 296th in the poverty stakes. That is because The Wrekin is the nation's low pay capital: unemployment is low, if we trust unemployment statistics, but the price that too many people have to pay for a job is low-paid, part-time or temporary employment when full-time and decent, secure employment is what is needed. Employment rights are inadequate and business also pays a price because low pay goes with low skills. Not long ago, I met a business man who benefited from the incentives to locate and expand his business in The Wrekin, but who is now transporting it, lock, stock and barrel, to south Wales because he found that when he wanted sophisticated and improved production he could not find the necessary skills in the local economy.
In Shropshire, 13,000 people earn less than £3 an hour; and 3,500 earn less than £2 an hour. It is hardly surprising that 2,500 families in Telford are living on family credit, which tops up low wages and is paid for by taxpayers. Others have mentioned the real lives of the real people we represent, but I want to tell the House about one of them--a man I met in Arleston in the Wellington area during the election campaign. He is a young man with a young wife and family, who starts work at 5 am and returns home at 6 pm, six days a week. He works a 78-hour week for £150 take-home pay. He has to do that to keep his family and to pay his mortgage, because he does not want to be one of the 800 people a month who lose their homes after having fallen into mortgage arrears. He, and thousands of people like him throughout the country, will look forward to the introduction of a statutory minimum wage.
Then there is the young single parent whom I met in Newport, who desperately wants to work to keep her child but cannot afford to when the only child care available to her costs £3 an hour. She earns £3.60 an hour. She will benefit from the Government's commitment to helping people off welfare and into work.
Then there is the pensioner from Albrighton who was left in pain when his routine operation was cancelled three times because the local hospital could not provide him
with a bed. I am glad to say that I received a letter from him this morning telling me that, although his recuperation was painful, at least he has now had the operation. He can look forward to a national health service being restored by a Government who understand the value as well as the cost of public services.
Next there are the 1,250 children between the ages of five and seven--38 per cent. of the children in The Wrekin, which is well above the national average--who are learning, or trying to learn, in overcrowded classrooms. At last, they will get the opportunity to learn, to grow and to prosper. The one in three people who have been victims of crime in the past two years will feel safer on their streets and in their neighbourhoods because the Labour Government will not just talk tough on crime, but act tough.
As for business in The Wrekin, it awaits with hope and a great deal of anticipation the private-public sector partnership for improving public transport infrastructure which will at last restore the InterCity link to Shropshire. That link was severed in the softening up process leading to privatisation of the railways, which in turn has cost our local economy a great deal in lost inward investment.
Our farmers, too, and the 800 people whose jobs were jeopardised in the past year by the BSE crisis look forward to the new Government's actions with anticipation. They also look forward to the lifting of the beef ban and a resolution, at last, of the BSE crisis. Their neighbours in the countryside are looking forward to the Government arresting rural decline. That will begin with the private sector restoring the lost bus services; rural post offices must be protected, too; and GPs must be encouraged back into rural communities.
Much that has happened in the first month of the new Labour Government has given us great encouragement and hope for the future--not least the ministerial announcement on 19 May, in an Adjournment debate, that minerals planning guidance note 3 will be urgently reviewed. It relates to opencast mining, and the review is probably more eagerly awaited in my constituency than anywhere else in the country. Once in place, it will provide relief to the communities of Muxton, Lilleshall and New Works Village, where lives and properties have been blighted for so long by the threat of opencast mining. I hope that the review will be swift and conclusive.
I also urge Ministers to take a look at planning policy guidance note 3 on social housing, because the planning system, besides housing policies, can deliver social housing of the type that our communities desperately need. Planning can be a great engine of social progress--a fact which I am sure my hon. Friend the Minister has not overlooked.
In my district, 2,553 households are in housing need, and the wait for housing allocation is an average two miserable years. Fifteen million pounds is needed this year for repairs alone, and over the next 10 years about £45 million in further investment is needed to restore our housing stock.
The problem is as great in rural areas as it is in urban areas. It is just as widespread in market towns as in the more densely occupied parts of the constituency. Communities cannot renew themselves unless they provide homes for the next generation: they wither and die. Just as the community that I used to represent in
Millbank has struggled long and hard, and with some success, against Tory housing policies, so rural communities have had their challenges to face.
It is time for the Government to act on housing. Council coffers are said to contain £6 billion; 100,000 families are in housing need; there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers on the dole. It does not take an Einstein to solve the equation and realise that those unemployed workers should be put back into employment, with money in their pockets to spend in the high street, making a contribution to the local economy and broadening the tax base.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |