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Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Canning Town) (Lab): I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.
PETITIONS
Luncheon Clubs
5.59 pm
Mr. Tony Colman (Putney) (Lab): My constituents have suffered from cuts imposed by Wandsworth council to the funding of voluntary organisations, particularly luncheon clubs. Key within that is the work of Regenerate.com in Roehampton. I wish to present a petition signed by more than 4,000 residents, which reads:
To the House of Commons,
The petition of supporters of the Regenerate.com lunch club in Roehampton, London SW15
Declares that Wandsworth Borough Council has said that lunch clubs are "a low priority in that they provide activities which do not provide a significant contribution" and have "a limited role"; that the Regenerate.com lunch club at Roehampton Methodist Church is a lifeline to many of its users, both enabling people to share their lives and build community, and helping to combat isolation in older age; that the closing of all lunch clubs in the Wandsworth area would be catastrophic.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons ask the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to exert pressure on Wandsworth Borough Council not to withdraw funding and other support for lunch clubs in the area.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
To lie upon the Table.
Post Office Closures
6.1 pm
Bob Spink (Castle Point) (Con): I refer hon. Members to the comments that I made on this subject yesterday and in the main debate today. The petition, which I totally support, states:
To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament Assembled.
The Humble Petition of Councillor Enid Isaacs and Cllr Norman Ladzrie and others of like disposition sheweth
That there is great public concern caused by the proposal to close yet another local post office in Woodfield Road, Hadleigh which will damage our shopping areas and threatens the very fabric of our community, hurting vulnerable people the most and that this closure, coming after so many other Post Office closures, is insensitive.
Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your Honourable House shall urge the Government to change its policies on Post Office closures and the provision of banking services and payment of benefits and pensions so that Post Offices are able to remain open in our community.
And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.
To lie upon the Table.
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Maajid Nawaz
6.2 pm
Mr. David Amess (Southend, West) (Con): I have the honour to present a petition that has been signed by a large number of my constituents, including church leaders, in support of a plea for clemency to President Mubarak. The petition states:
The petition of Mrs. Abi Nawaz and others
Declares that Maajid Nawaz travelled to Egypt on a compulsory exchange course from his university and was subsequently detained along with two other British boys—on groundless charges—by the State Security Services; that he has been tried and sentenced; and that Amnesty International and other organisations are investigating practices undertaken by the Egyptian authorities which, it is alleged, violate human rights standards.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to do all in its power to secure the early release of Maajid and his friends.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
To lie upon the Table.
27 May 2004 : Column 1804
Housing Market Renewal
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Charlotte Atkins.]
6.3 pm
David Wright (Telford): I am pleased to be able to raise the important issue of housing market renewal. Before I begin, I should declare that I am a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing. As I have told the House on several occasions, I pay it money rather than receiving any financial benefit myself, but as I will be commenting on some of its work, I should place that on the record.
Before I develop the theme of the debate, I should like to mention that my good friend Councillor Jim Hicks is at this very moment being made mayor of Telford and Wrekin council. I wish him all the best for the coming year.
Councillor Hicks is interested in housing market renewal and he was pleased to know that I had secured an Adjournment debate.
Thankfully, the renewal of housing markets and the development of sustainable communities is moving up the political agenda. To put it simply, sustainable communities are the bedrock of a decent, tolerant and inclusive society and the stability of housing markets is central to that. I want to concentrate on five key themes: the complexity of housing markets; the importance of investment in neighbourhoods; the role of the housing market renewal pathfinders; the opportunities to learn from the new towns experience—that is especially important to me, given that I represent Telford; and the need for a national strategy for housing market restructuring and the subsequent creation in short order of a "midlands way."
Housing markets are complex and need a range of interventions by the public and private sectors and local residents to make them balanced and sustainable. Housing markets change because of several factors that affect the desirability of neighbourhoods. Market decline can occur in small pockets and/or in swathes of a town or city. It is not limited to large metropolitan areas; it can happen anywhere.
Areas where the housing market is generally dysfunctional exhibit several characteristics. There will be obsolete housing stock, which does not meet the needs of the local community. The design of the stock and the surrounding environment will be failing. The private rented sector will be in decline or badly managed and regulated. There will often be a mismatch between the supply and demand of house types—for example, too many high-rise flats or systems-built dwellings and not enough large family homes. Often, significant change will be taking place in the local economy. There will be poor quality mixed-tenure stock and, in many areas, a desire among residents to leave, with consequent problems of population churning and the associated impact on other services such as schools and social services.
The scale of the problem can be as small as a collection of streets or encompass whole wards or larger areas in a town or city. We need to tackle those problems by talking to people about their neighbourhood and confronting the key characteristics that I outlined.
27 May 2004 : Column 1805
My second point is about investing in neighbourhoods, which is crucial if we are to create communities that are economically, socially and environmentally successful. Investment in housing and the urban forum will be central to that approach. Regenerating communities and providing housing market stability is also a route through which we can engage local people and, having listened to the previous debate, hopefully reconnect them to civic life and structures. Much of the casework that comes through my surgery is linked to housing market change, whether it is people who need housing or those who are coping with the environmental problems of neighbourhoods in decline.
We need to break the cycle of decline through comprehensive market renewal linked to wider regeneration programmes and restructuring local economies. There is undoubtedly a need to develop more quality homes for rent and sale in this country. The Barker review indicates that we need to build significant numbers of new dwellings each year to tackle change in the UK housing market—120,000 private sector homes per year and 21,000 social housing units per year for several years. That is not, as some have tried to portray, an issue between north and south. Poor housing needs to be cleared and estates redesigned across the country. Redevelopment is also needed, with high-quality new homes for rent and sale. The National Housing Federation, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Local Government Association have proposed a building programme of 140,000 extra homes by 2007–08, costing some £8.4 billion. I hope that that will be considered carefully as part of the spending review process. The proposal forms part of their submission.
Thirdly, the creation of the nine housing market renewal pathfinders was a major statement of intent by the Government that they take housing investment and policy development seriously. Tackling problems in these areas will need major, long-term engagement by the private sector, and local people will need to invest in their homes and communities. The £500 million allocated will significantly pump prime the process.
However, each area will need continuing investment in order to deliver, because they are at different stages of development and they need time to become self-sufficient. So we need to focus on those areas extremely carefully and to learn from their experience in delivering housing market renewal. We also need to integrate their approach into our wider policy understanding of housing.
My fourth point is that we have a lot to learn from the new town experience in regard to the development of sustainable communities. Telford had a massive programme of new building based on the neighbourhood unit theory formulated by US planners in the 1920s. The problem that we are confronting now is that the investment in the infrastructure of many of the areas that were built over a short period of time has not been sustained for some years. Several estates in south Telford, including Sutton Hill, Woodside, Brookside and Malinslee, were built using the 1920s model, in which the estate was surrounded by a circular
27 May 2004 : Column 1806
road network and local facilities were provided at the centre of the estate. That design layout has come to be known as a Radburn estate.
Those estates were excellent, and they provided superb accommodation for many people, including the large numbers moving out of the black country whom Telford was designed to take as overspill population. However, there was a lack of sustained investment in those estates throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Most of those housing areas are now between 30 and 40 years old and they are all falling into decline at the same time. I shall go on to talk about some of the positive things that we are doing to arrest that decline, and I hope that lessons can be learned for other areas.
The new town experience shows us that we need to take a comprehensive approach to infrastructure provision and to sustain investment in housing stock and public amenities over time. We are now starting to get that right in Telford through a partnership between the council, English Partnerships, the Housing Corporation, the private sector and, most importantly, local communities. This involves an understanding of local estates and their market dynamic, and we need to ensure that regeneration initiatives are comprehensive and that they incorporate investment in the social and economic infrastructure of communities.
In Woodside, for example, we are changing the structure of a large Radburn estate through a unique approach which I hope can be replicated elsewhere, and investing in a major new multi-use community facility in the centre of the estate funded via a partnership with Advantage West Midlands. That community centre will, I hope, bring a range of services—including NHS dentistry, about which we have heard a lot recently—into a new centre for residents of that community. Our approach also involves reconnecting the estate to the older centre of Madeley, and regenerating that town to ensure that it can provide shopping and community facilities for the wider south Telford area.
We now need to use the experiences developed in Woodside and to transfer them to other estates in Telford, and other estates across the UK, from which we can also learn, but we need resources from the regional housing board and a recognition that pockets of deprivation that do not show up on larger deprivation indices also need investment. Telford will be central to the development of a regional housing market renewal strategy. We are delivering more than 6,000 new mixed-tenure units through the work of English Partnerships and the local authority, along with clearance and estate remodelling in older housing areas. This is allied to proposals comprehensively to remodel Telford town centre so that it can build on its reputation as a regional shopping centre. We hope to make it a focal point for cultural activity and evening entertainment with new living environments of the highest quality. It is in towns such as Telford that we will meet the housing targets for the west midlands. We are about to embark on the second phase of the comprehensive renewal and redevelopment of Telford. At 40 years old, Telford is middle aged, but I hope that it is fighting fit.
My final point is that the nine pathfinders are very important because, as I have said, they provide a route through which we can mainstream market renewal. They do not, however, constitute a comprehensive national strategy for housing market restructuring that
27 May 2004 : Column 1807
would enable the Government to meet their own policy targets by providing a funding and policy framework in mixed-tenure areas, promoting community cohesion, sustainability and regeneration in areas of privately owned and rented homes, and ensuring that links are made with wider regeneration initiatives.
There are many areas not covered by the pathfinders, which are now being identified by the regional housing boards. The communities plan acknowledged that the nine pathfinders cover half the dwellings identified as at risk of market dysfunction and community abandonment. The remaining dwellings are not covered by any specific national strategy or funding mechanism, which clearly needs to be addressed. The problems are at their worst in the midlands and the north, but there are dysfunctional markets across the whole country. As one goes around London, one sees pockets of housing market dysfunction next to areas of very high-cost housing. It is not a north-south issue; there are dysfunctional housing markets across the board, although the pressure is most significant in the midlands and the north.
In advance of this work, a national strategy perspective has been developed by the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing, with support from the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, and a number of case study areas, including Telford and the black country, Tees valley, West Yorkshire and Furness and west Cumbria. The NHF and CIH envisage that a national strategy would be built on the following main principles: to create sustainable communities in areas of actual or potential market collapse; to manage planned interventions over a number of years; to lever in as much private funding as possible; to maximise housing money by matched funding from other related pots; to create and/or support effective and efficient delivery vehicles and mechanisms; to enable public sector programmes to be delivered in areas of housing market stability; and to link housing activity with complementary physical and social regeneration initiatives.
We need to produce a national strategy for housing market restructuring that is led by the regional housing boards. I am not suggesting that we need a top-down approach. We need national leadership, but we need regional housing boards to identify areas where housing markets are dysfunctional and to put forward proposals and co-ordinate activity to make significant change. They will marshal the resources from the public and private sector. Delivery on the ground needs to be via a range of partnership vehicles that fit the needs of individual areas. There will be no one-size-fits-all approach in relation to this debate; it will depend on what local people want, and what can be delivered in local areas.
The NHF, the CIH and the Local Government Association suggest a £350 million pot of public resources over the lifetime of the spending review period, as an addition to, and a ring-fenced element of, the single housing pot. That approach recognises the regional perspective in understanding complex housing markets. I welcome the proposals to merge regional planning and housing boards, which emanate from the debate around the Barker review. That is a major step forward in terms of our housing and planning policy. It always seemed nonsensical that a series of housing
27 May 2004 : Column 1808
professionals were meeting separately from their planning colleagues, discussing an approach to regenerating communities and dealing with dysfunctional housing markets, so I welcome the Minister's recent comments in that regard. Each region needs to develop its own approach to delivering national objectives, and we may need to create building blocks across the regions. I should like to see the development of a midlands way, to mirror the excellent northern way proposals produced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
I look forward to the Minister's response. I know that she is extremely interested in and committed to this area, and that she wants to deliver change for communities. Her own area suffers from some of the problems that I have been talking about, and we need a comprehensive national strategy to tackle market instability and the dysfunctional nature of many housing markets. There is a real prize, however, if we get it right. Not only can we regenerate communities and invest heavily in them, but we can reconnect those communities with the wider civic process and wider civic life. Nothing engages communities more than talking about their neighbourhood, the streets in which they live, and how they interact with their neighbours. This is a much wider agenda than just investing in infrastructure and fabric; it is a mechanism through which we can also make communities more sustainable, and reinvigorate the political process that takes place within communities.
6.29 pm
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