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Andrew Selous (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con): In common with other hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, I want to draw on some of my constituency experience. I am enormously pleased that my district council of South Bedfordshire has plans to build some 7,000 houses over the next few years in order to meet the housing demands and needs of my constituents. Like others, I find that housing is the issue that people come to see me about most often. I am delighted that my council plans to build those houses to meet local need and go some way towards providing additional housing for the wider area.
My local housing authority—South Bedfordshire—is Conservative controlled. Only 5 per cent. of its housing stock is of a non-decent standard. It is a good housing authority, which manages its stock well. That may be why, when stock transfer came up a few years ago, tenants voted to stay with the local authority. They felt that it could trust it and did not want to leave it. I hope that the Government will continue the commitment to give local people the right to decide. It is important that the democratic element of stock transfer should remain in place.
Although I am positive about the local housing plans that are in place for my constituency, I share the widespread concern of my constituents. About 70,000 of them have backed me by signing a petition expressing concern about the Government's house-building plans, as contained in the communities plan, for my area. Frankly, we believe that the plan is inaptly named: it is not "sustainable", as the Government call it, for a number of reasons.
The principal reason is that 40 per cent. of people in Bedfordshire already commute out of the county to find work. There are nowhere near enough local jobs to provide for the 43,000 houses—as opposed to the 7,000 that we have sensibly planned for—that the Government propose to place in my constituency. There are also serious concerns, reflected in the Select Committee report, about water availability, and we are highly sceptical that we have sufficient infrastructure for 43,000 houses. We do not believe that the community facilities would be sufficient and we worry about large out-of-town housing estates being placed on the edge of small market towns. That is not the same as proper organic growth. We also believe that a serious lack of community spirit would result, as happened in the Easterhouse development on the edge of Glasgow.
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Above all, we object to having something foisted on us undemocratically from outside our area. My constituents are sensible people, who are quite capable of electing local councillors to reflect their needs and wants for decent and affordable local housing for themselves and their children. We have a good record locally and it is absolutely wrong of the Government to try to take away powers from the local level to the regional level and then again from the regional to the national level. The Minister for Housing and Planning, who has just come back into the Chamber, confirmed that the regional spatial strategy would be "the creature", to use his words, of the Secretary of State. It is a top-down, rather than a bottom-up, approach, which does not trust the people.
I wish to make a few comments about why we have the housing problems now facing the country. I commend wholeheartedly the remarks made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman). He showed with great clarity and conviction that the Government lack a proper national strategy for coping with housing demand. I am in favour of meeting the genuine housing needs of the south-east, but the Government seem set on aiding the continuous flow of people from the north to the south-east. Their plans do not include providing proper transport links or infrastructure development, and there is no prospect of some Government Departments moving to the north, as has been mentioned already in the debate. We need that to balance the economic development in the country as a whole. The economy is concentrated in the south-east, which is being over developed, as anyone who spends any time on the M25 knows.
Mr. Pike: The hon. Gentleman is making an important point. In Burnley, we are beginning to tackle the housing problem, but the fact that industry is increasingly based in the south, or even in Europe, means that there are fewer jobs in areas such as mine, especially jobs that will attract back people who have been away to university. Does he agree that that is a very serious problem in areas of low housing demand?
Andrew Selous: As always, the hon. Gentleman makes a sensible and powerful point: he wants local jobs to go with proper housing in his area. It will come as no surprise to him that I want exactly the same for my constituents. The Government's plans are wholly unbalanced. We need a proper relationship between housing and jobs. They should be close together, so that we can reduce the amount of unnecessary transport, and thereby pollution. In that way, we could achieve a proper and sustainable environmental solution. I am therefore absolutely at one with the hon. Gentleman on that point.
The second factor that has contributed to the problems that we face today is the sustained and heavy pressure that the savings and pensions market has come under in the past few years. We must accept that many people now buy houses purely as an investment. One reason for that is that the stock market has fallen in real terms since the Government came to power. The same has happened in Europe and the United States, so the problem is not unique to this country. Although people
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will rent houses that have been bought for investment, the practice has helped to push house prices up. Housing is therefore less affordable for the people about whom we are concerned this afternoon.
From the point of view of housing as well as of good community relations, it is important that we introduce a proper and systematic way of removing failed asylum seekers. I want to raise this matter in a sensible and measured way, but the information that I have suggests that there are about 250,000 failed asylum seekers in this country, mainly in London and the south-east. They have not been removed, even though the Government believe that they should be. It is important that we get a proper grip on that problem. That will help secure the good community relations that we all want, and relieve the extreme housing pressures that already exist in the south-east.
I want to be positive. Labour Members have criticised the Opposition for not having positive ideas, so I shall use the remainder of my speech to put forward some positive solutions of my own.
I understand that there are about 150,000 empty properties in London and the south-east. I want to make a specific proposal, which I have mentioned before and which I shall keep mentioning. It has to do with the empty flats over shops that can be found in every high street in the country. That phenomenon undermines the vitality of our town centres.
Those flats would make excellent starter homes for newcomers to an area, or for couples with one child who are just starting out. Such people might not want to remain all their lives in a flat over a shop, but a small financial inducement could be appropriate to facilitate the development of the properties.
Andrew Selous: I am thinking of some form of grant, or of a tax penalty if such properties were not developed. I favour a carrot-and-stick approach, although there is no time for me to go into the details—as the hon. Gentleman said in respect of some of his party's policies. However, some such inducement could easily be introduced, and we should explore the possibility.
The notion of extended financial families is somewhat new to me, although it received an airing in the national press last week. In this country, our concept of the family is nuclear, and that is hugely to our detriment. Several national newspapers last week carried stories about families who live their lives together. When we build new houses, why not consider building ones with two kitchens, for example? In that way, grandparents could live in one part of a house and younger people in another, but everyone could retain some privacy. All sorts of advantages in respect of child care and so on could flow from such an arrangement, which also represents an environmentally sensible solution. I urge a little more flexibility in our response to new building.
The debate has touched on demographic change, the euphemism for which is "household formation". I think that we should be more blunt: this country leads the way in Europe in the incidence of relationship breakdown, in all its manifestations. That is a significant driver of demand, and therefore of the housing crisis that we face. We should look much more seriously at relationship
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support work—a sector into which the Government put only tiny amounts of money. Only £5 million goes to the marriage and relationship support programme. An excellent project for couple mentoring proposed by the organisation Care for the Family was turned down only last week. We must look seriously at this area, as helping people to stay together will reduce housing demand. That is a sensible approach to take.
We should also extended the disabled facilities grants scheme. To pay for that, I would scrap much of the regional apparatus, and the result would be that many more disabled people would be helped to stay in their own homes.
Finally, we need to look seriously at how we can help people in large properties—particularly council tenants—to move to smaller ones. We could provide some sort of financial inducement in that respect, and thus free up the larger properties for families who need them.
3.27 pm
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