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Housing

Mr. Speaker: I inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister and that there is a 15-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.

12.40 pm

Mrs. Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con): I beg to move,

That this House regrets the Government's failure effectively to address the worsening problems of housing affordability, homelessness, sustainable development and house price inflation; laments the failure to diagnose correctly the underlying causes of house price inflation, including the insecurity of savings under the present Government; notes the Council of Mortgage Lenders' survey which found that 81 per cent. of the population aspire to home ownership and believes that key workers should not be penalized by high property prices; further regrets the rising numbers of vulnerable people living in temporary accommodation; urges the Government to explore new options for accessing empty homes to meet demand for social housing, as well as enabling people to move from social housing to owning their own homes; further notes that there was no ministerial statement or debate in Government time in response to the Barker Review which itself fails to provide acceptable solutions to these acute problems and poses a serious threat to the nation's green fields, to sustainable communities and to robust local democracy by its recommendation that housing targets be set at a regional level.

When I entered the House in 1997, I made my maiden speech on saving the green belt known as the Meriden gap, which lies between Coventry and Birmingham, but never did I envisage the scale of the assault on that green lung. The Government's changes to planning have led to back gardens being ripped up for executive homes and to neighbour being set against neighbour, making housing almost the hottest issue in areas such as mine. Neither did I expect to stand here facing a Labour Government to lament a rise in homelessness and a decline in affordable housing.

Difficult as it must be, the Government should first and foremost admit that something has gone seriously wrong. The public will not accept that the blame lies elsewhere. Seven years is a long time to be without a proper home. No one can be in any doubt about the seriousness of the housing crisis in this country. Only last week a front-page newspaper headline referred to house price inflation of 19 per cent. Most of us will know someone, usually a young person, who is struggling to get a foot on the property ladder. As MPs, we see constituency cases involving more and more people living in temporary accommodation.

To their credit, the Government have conducted a review—the Barker review of housing, published on 17 March. I say that the Government have conducted a review, but it would be more accurate to say that the Treasury has conducted the review. I have to say that the Barker report bears all the hallmarks of Treasury-focused assessment rather than those of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister or of an environment-based body of work.

The Chancellor waxed enthusiastic on Budget day about the publication of the report, and we all know from his pre-Budget statement in November that he
 
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believes that the way to solve the housing crisis is simply to build more houses. There will always be house building, but using it as the key instrument for dealing with affordability is both misguided and na-ve. To believe that mass house building will solve the housing crisis is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. The pattern of misdiagnosing the nature of the problem and prescribing the wrong solution is common under this Government. It appears that their approach to housing is no exception.

There are currently two separate but related problems. It is true that, as a country, we need to increase our housing stock, but there is another problem—house price inflation. The reality is that house price inflation—an economic trend that is snatching the property ladder away from so many people—is in large part a consequence of the Government's own failings. I accept that housing shortages play a part in inflating prices, but even that gives rise to the question of what the Government have been doing for the past seven years to bring about such a decline in house building, bringing us to a position in which fewer new homes were built last year than at any time since 1924. That takes some doing.

Mr. Peter Pike (Burnley) (Lab): The hon. Lady came into the House in 1997. Between 1983 and 1997, 13 Conservative Ministers visited Burnley, where the problem is one of low demand—quite different from what she is describing. The previous Conservative Government never did anything to deal with the problem in Burnley, and it has become horrendous, with 4,500 empty houses in the area. Does she accept that we had to wait for a Labour Government and their housing renewal pathfinder project to begin to tackle the problem?

Mrs. Spelman: I fully understand the gravity of the problem in Burnley, and am deeply sympathetic to the needs of the hon. Gentleman's constituents. However, if he waits, he will see that later in my speech I shall come to the question of how to help in a constituency such as his. I think that the public will be more interested in what is going to happen in the future than in a retrospective analysis.

It has not proved safe to save under Labour. Following the Chancellor's raid on pension funds, more people are buying property as a form of security for the future. In the absence of a Government statement on the Barker report that would have told us what they think about it, we will have to take the report as a proxy for Government thinking on the subject. The Government must use some of their own time in the House to state otherwise.

We still have had no statement on the Barker review. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) for securing a debate on the subject in Westminster Hall last week. The Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), said that work on the Barker report was getting under way, including consultation, so why do not the Government try to consult colleagues in Parliament? There have been calls from both sides of the House for a debate in Government time on housing.
 
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After all, the Government allowed the report to be published almost two months ago. It is not unreasonable that their silence might be construed as acceptance, at least of the report's main thrust. That would be a mistake, as I shall explain.

The report is premised on a series of false assumptions. First, and quite fundamentally, I do not understand why the 2001 census findings were ignored as the basis for projecting demand. Not only is that information more recent than that used by Professor Barker, but the Government claimed that the 2001 census was a good deal more accurate than its predecessor. Crucially, it shows that there appear to be almost 1 million fewer inhabitants in this country than was previously thought. That may mean that the scale of the housing shortage is smaller than we thought.

In addition, the report assumes that important demographic trends—such as immigration levels, the birth rate and the level of single home ownership—will remain the same. Given the social changes of the past few decades, that simply cannot be realistic.

Professor Barker's key recommendation is for a huge increase in house building, but that is a very blunt instrument when it comes to tackling the underlying problem. For a start, it takes time to deliver house building on the scale envisaged in the Barker review, so it is not a solution that would deliver short-term relief. Furthermore, such a scramble to put up houses may well compromise standards and suppress efforts to find more eco-friendly building methods.

New build accounts for only 1 per cent. of UK housing stock. Most people buy or rent existing properties, so surely the most immediate solution to housing shortages is to make more of the existing housing stock available. There are still 718,000 empty homes in this country, and my party is looking at what could be done to bring more of them into use.

Another fundamental problem is that plenty of houses are available, but in the wrong places. The flight from our cities to the countryside is not sustainable, in any sense. In my view, it is a symptom of the Government's policies across the board on transport, crime and education.

When I go to my constituency, the Meriden gap is a strip of green belt five miles wide that holds the cities of Birmingham and Coventry apart, lest they coalesce into an even greater conurbation in the west midlands. Yet if one catches the train into Birmingham from my constituency, one travels across great swathes of derelict land that are ripe for regeneration and, potentially, housing. Commuters have to make that journey at varying degrees of rapidity, polluting the atmosphere and adding to their working day. Surely that cannot be the most sensible planning model for the future.

There are similar tracts of land throughout the country, and we should be reclaiming them. Instead, the Government have offered us their sustainable communities plan. How could they ignore the environmental imperative, which is immediately apparent to all, that if there is one region in the country least well equipped to cope with a huge additional burden of houses it is the south-east? The south-east currently has 30 per cent. less water reserves than it had a decade ago, and the rate of decline is increasing. That is in addition to transport and other infrastructure
 
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requirements, which together make a persuasive case that further house building in the south-east is unsustainable.

Milton Keynes is another example. The hospital there was originally built to serve a population of 15,000, but we have seen the town expand almost exponentially. Now, a sustainable communities plan would add even more housing to put pressure on basic infrastructure, such as the hospital that has to serve that catchment area. How can that be called a sustainable community? Or consider the Thames gateway project, where land assigned for house building is at risk of flooding, in a region expected to see a 31 cm rise in sea levels by 2050. How can that be sustainable?

Last week, I visited the proposed site of a new building programme near Ashford, in Kent. Kent is the garden of England, but it is at risk of becoming a patio under the Government's house building plans. Why do the Government have a fixation with building in the south-east? It is extraordinary that a Labour Government should turn their back on what they like to term their heartlands in the north. The Government have completely overlooked the potential that the north offers for addressing the nation's housing needs. The Government provide a framework in which individuals must make choices about where to work and live. Demand for housing will change. For example, Oracle has moved its business from the M4 corridor, where it had exhausted the skilled labour supply, to my constituency to tap into the pool of labour available in the midlands and the better infrastructure.

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