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Mr. Mark Francois (Rayleigh) (Con): I thank the Minister for her courtesy in giving way. I have been listening to what she is saying, but the missing word is "infrastructure". In my constituency, all the secondary schools are effectively full, it is difficult to register with a general practitioner, and it is practically impossible to find an NHS dentist. The Government cannot keep forcing more houses into the south-east of England, including my own county of Essex, unless they are prepared to provide the infrastructure to go with them. If they are not going to do so, they should stop trying to cover us in concrete.
Yvette Cooper:
Of course infrastructure is important in growth areas. That is exactly why we are putting hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into the growth areas. Conservative Members expressed their concerns about the housing market, but all that they could say about their own policy was that they were conducting a review. The predecessor of the hon. Member for Meriden said that he was doing a review
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and he asked the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) to lead it. I have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire, but I remember that he was the Minister who described the homeless as the people one stepped over as one came out of the opera. So we will wait with bated breath for that review and the conclusions that it reaches.
The Conservatives argue that we do not need to increase the housing stock. They do not like the Barker report. I see that those on the Conservative Front Bench have decided to offer their own analysis in place of Kate Barker's, and I am sure that the House will want to weigh in the balance the economic expertise of Kate Barker, a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, and the economic expertise of those on the Conservative Front Bench today. They are, after all, the team whose leader argued strongly against giving the Bank of England independence and said that it should not have increased interest rates in 1997–98. Given that those interest rates were so important in preventing the boom-bust cycle and in preventing a crash in the housing market like the one that we saw in the early '90s, I think economic history has demonstrated that we are lucky to be dependent on the judgment of the Monetary Policy Committee in this area, rather than on that of the Conservative Front-Bench team.
The Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think they can ignore the problems of house price inflation and pretend that there is no case for more houses to be built. Demand is increasing and supply has not kept up. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) argues that we should not concentrate on addressing housing supply because it takes a long time to build houses. I must point out to him that if he had started to take a long-term view 10 or 20 years ago, and if his party had done the same, we might have a rather healthier housing market today.
The Conservatives keep pretending that we do not need more houses. Tell that to the nurse who cannot afford to buy a flat within an hour of the London hospital in which she works. They say they care about key workers and they want to support first-time buyers, yet the logic of their analysis is to price more and more of them out of the housing market altogether, and that is not fair.
The hon. Member for Meriden claimed that we were patio-ing over the countryside. I should point out to the Opposition that the green belt has increased since 1997 by 25,000 hectares, with a further 12,000-hectare increase under consultation. What happened to the green belt between 1987 and 1997? It was cut. The Government have increased brownfield development above 60 per cent., which the Tories continually failed to do.
Mr. Hayes:
The Minister says the Government have increased the green belt, as I predicted she would, but 22,630 hectatres—94 per cent. of the total—is in Blyth Valley, Tynedale, Bolsover and Blackburn, which are not the areas that are under most pressure to develop. It
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is unsurprising that the House of Commons Library describes her policy and her answers on the subject as evasive. Are they evasive or is the Library wrong?
Yvette Cooper: We have made clear throughout our commitment to sustaining the green belt in every region. That is exactly what we are doing, unlike the policies of the Conservatives when they were in government, when they cut the green belt over a long period.
It is important that we address the problems faced in parts of the north, where some areas face low demand and where we have set out a £500 million programme to tackle low demand, as well as regional growth strategies such as "the northern way", whereas the Conservatives ignored the problems for so long. The hon. Member for Meriden said that she cared about regeneration, and again, I believe her, but she urged us not to cut regeneration funding. Has she talked to the shadow Chancellor recently? Does she know that he wants to cut 5 per cent. in real terms from every budget except health and education?
Mrs. Spelman indicated dissent.
Yvette Cooper: The hon. Lady denies it, but the shadow Chancellor said on the record that he wants to freeze spending and make a 5 per cent. real terms cut in regeneration programmes, which would mean cuts to the new deal, Sure Start and neighbourhood renewal programmes. She might want to focus her passion within her own party; this party is committed to keeping up investment in regeneration programmes because they tackle unjust inequalities across the country. We need more, better quality affordable housing.
Sarah Teather (Brent, East) (LD): Is the Minister aware that house prices in my area rose by 11 per cent. last year, which is the greatest increase in any London borough, and that 18,000 people are on the Brent waiting list to be transferred to council housing, 4,238 of whom are in temporary accommodation? Is she also aware that the incidence of empty homes is much higher in Brent than elsewhere in London—5.4 per cent. of properties in Brent are empty, compared with the London average of 3.2 per cent.? Does she think that more could be done to address that problem?
Yvette Cooper: The hon. Lady makes an important point, and I agree that more could be done about empty homes. We are working closely with the Empty Homes Agency because we want to act on the issue, which is why we held a consultation. The hon. Lady referred to the difficulties that some of her constituents face, and she knows that both affordable housing and overall housing supply in London and the south-east are important issues. We must increase the supply of affordable housing and tackle the issue of quality, which is why we are addressing the £19 billion backlog in repairs and maintenance. In 1997, we inherited a situation in which 2.1 million families were living in cold, damp or draughty accommodation, which included homes with leaky windows and inadequate heating that did not meet modern standards and expectations.
Mr. Clifton-Brown: The Government amendment states that the Government have taken the trouble
"to support the creation of 230,000 affordable homes since 1997".
Given that a parliamentary answer on 27 April stated that 14,601 affordable homes are currently being built, and that seven times 14,601 is way short of the 230,000 total, will she undertake to put in the Library which regions those 230,000 houses were built in?
Yvette Cooper: I am happy to provide the hon. Gentleman with more information about affordable housing, which is an issue that we must address across the country. The Conservatives also need to reflect carefully on their claims about building social housing. In the early 1990s, the public sector could build affordable homes at those levels because the housing market had collapsed, the property and construction markets were in crisis, the Tories had pushed the country into a devastating recession and interest rates had hit 15 per cent. Some 1.5 million families suffered negative equity because of the stupid economic policies pursued by the Conservative Government at that time. Do Conservative Members really want to hold up the early '90s as a great example of housing policy? We know that they want to turn the clock back, but it would be foolish to turn it back to a policy of boom and bust.
Look at the Tories' other polices for tackling affordable housing. They want to force housing associations to adopt the right to buy, which would cut housing stock in the long term. Their most ludicrous policy is to cut investment in housing. The shadow Chancellor has made it abundantly clear that he wants £18 billion of cuts in two years, which means at least £400 million of cuts in housing. I must point out to the Tories that houses cost money, and do not grow on trees or fall from the sky, street by street. Affordable houses cost money, and I do not know how they can increase affordable housing by cutting the housing budget.
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