Social Housing

I beg to move,

That this House recognises that there is a housing crisis with too few genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy; further recognises that the number of new social rented homes built in recent years has been too low; notes that the Government has set a target to build 300,000 homes a year, which is unlikely to be achieved without building more social homes; further notes that Shelter’s recent report, A Vision for Social Housing, concluded that 3.1 million new social rented homes need to be built over the next 20 years; and calls on the Government to adopt a target of building 155,000 social rented homes, including at least 100,000 council homes, each year from 2022.

It is an honour to rise to discuss one of the most critical issues facing us, and I thank the Backbench Committee for affording me the opportunity to do this today. Sadly, looking round the Chamber, I see surprisingly few people here to share the debate. I thank those who are here, but I am surprised at how few there are, given the very real and pressing crisis that we face in this country. It is the foremost of all the crises that we face.

The housing market is fundamentally broken, and it is the social housing sector that has been the casualty. As a result, homelessness is up 50% and rough sleeping has risen 160% since 2010. Elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of people are living in homes that are not fit for human habitation, yet this is the fifth wealthiest country on the planet. Despite that apparent national wealth, we are impoverished by crushing personal debt, large mortgages, high private sector rents, student loans, significant unsecured debt as great as it was in 2007 and stagnant wages that have failed to keep up with the cost of living. It is no wonder that the UN rapporteur has observed us as a country in crisis where the social fabric is not just frayed at the edges but badly torn.

This week marks the second anniversary of the terrible tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire, and we are reminded of how recent and current policy on social housing has failed and continues to fail our society, so how is it that the market and the policies that govern that market are not delivering the much-needed housing? The social housing report commissioned by Shelter in January estimates that the UK needs to build 155,000 social homes a year for the next couple of decades. That is the scale of the crisis. If good housing is fundamental to the quality of our lives, why is it not the basis for everything in our society? Lord Porter put it succinctly when he said that, with a housing problem,

“you haven’t just got a housing problem, you’ve got an education problem, you’ve got a health problem, anti-social behaviour problem, whatever.”

It is clear that we need to reset the market and restore the principle that a decent home is a right owed to all, not a privilege for the few.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the market has failed in constituencies such as mine, where it is getting more and more expensive to either rent or buy, and that we therefore need to build council houses to provide security for people and their families, including accessible housing, given that more and more people with disabilities cannot find homes?

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point, and I will come on to it. I am particularly familiar with his constituency, and I know that many areas of our country have seen high house price inflation, which has priced out young people, a lot of whom would ordinarily want to stay in those communities. This needs to be urgently addressed through social housing.

Twelve months ago, I was fortunate enough to meet a former soldier at one of my Saturday surgeries. He was back in his home town of Warwick, having been discharged from the Army after 10 years’ service. A veteran of several tours, soldier Y found himself searching desperately for a job and a home, and he was not in a good place. He was really struggling. He had he been diagnosed with, and was clearly suffering from, post-traumatic stress disorder. Soldier Y was sofa-surfing. Until relatively recently, it would have been possible for him to access one of the hostels provided by Warwickshire County Council, but the cuts since 2013 have resulted in a huge drop in capacity and places such as Beauchamp House in Warwick are no longer available. I have mentioned soldier Y, but I could have spoken about any of the dozens of people I have met since my election in 2017, all of them desperate for help to resolve their own housing situations.

I would like to thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Drew). I agree with him wholeheartedly about the need for a major council house building programme. The issue I would like to raise is the need for much greater funding for local authorities to build council houses. In my area of Reading, there has been an ambitious programme to build council houses within the limited scope of the funding that is available, but more funding is clearly needed. We have an excess of brownfield land in Reading, a former light industrial town. We have enough brownfield land to build all the houses that are needed until 2036, and I understand from colleagues that many other boroughs, towns and cities around the country face a similar situation in which former industrial land is available but there is no funding to enable the local authorities to build. Does my hon. Friend agree that that should be a priority for this Government?

My hon. Friend makes another important point. This is absolutely about the cost of providing housing and land and about how authorities are facilitated to do that. This is the most pressing issue of our time, as I have said, and Government policy should be to help our local authorities. Indeed, at one of the meetings of the parliamentary campaign for council housing, which I co-chair with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud, Lord Porter made it clear that, in his view,

“all the bad things in our society stem from bad housing, and the best way to fix any of those problems is to make sure as a fundamental that everybody’s got safe, secure, decent housing.”

I could not agree with him more.

We only have to walk down streets such as the Parade in Leamington Spa—and, I am sure, any of the high streets across the country—to see some of the casualties of this crisis: rough sleepers curled up in our doorways or sitting at street corners crying out for help, asking for loose change, desperately trying to create personal order out of social disorder. Inevitably, there will be an ex-forces person among them, but no matter—they are all one community now. Surely civvy street was not meant to be this uncivilised or, for an ex-soldier, this ungrateful.

To understand how we got here and where we need to go, it is worth briefly considering the past and how times have changed. Had soldier Y been lucky enough to have been returning from the first world war rather than from Afghanistan 100 years on, he would have been greeted by the then Prime Minister’s promise of “homes fit for heroes”. Lloyd George recognised the importance of social provision and knew that because house building would be difficult it was only through subsidies that local authorities would be able to afford to deliver them. His progressive social and local authority approach kick-started the sector and resulted not just in a growth of housing supply but in improved standards in all new homes. It was actually following world war two that the council house really arrived. Enlightened administrators strove to deliver them, and none more so than the Attlee Government, which, despite the ravages of war and the shortage of materials, managed to build more than 1 million new homes to replace many of those that had been destroyed.

On that point, statistics show that the construction of social housing has fallen 90% since 2010? Under the right-to-buy scheme, houses are not replaced on a one-for-one basis, which has led to a drastic fall in provision. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to look at how we can tackle these issues?

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. We have seen an absolute crash in the supply of social homes, and I understand that only one is being built for every five we are losing. Those are the tragic numbers that underline this, and they explain why we are seeing so many social crises in our communities.

I should like to congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this really important debate. Although there are not many colleagues on the Conservative Benches this afternoon, there is huge support for social housing on this side of the House. He made a point about numbers. Cornwall is not led by a Conservative council, so I am not making a party political point here. When I came to the House in 2010, Cornwall was delivering around 700 social homes each year, but in this past year, according to the Library, the number was 1,437. That is a doubling of the number of social homes available to people in Cornwall, which has a very challenging housing market because it is such a popular place for people to have second homes. Where communities and local authorities work together and innovate, it is possible to use the Government’s policies to meet local housing need.

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and I hope that she will make a speech later. Her point is valid and I am sure there are huge pressures in her community and other parts of Cornwall. I have discussed this very issue with many of her colleagues on the Government Benches, and I know that the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and Members from Somerset reflect similar views. There is a lot of hardship in our rural communities related to access to and requirement for social housing. What is being done in her constituency is admirable, but it comes down to the ability to borrow and what can be done. She may be referring to provision by housing associations, but I am particularly keen that we should see a rapid ramp up in council housing provision if we are ever to achieve the 300,000-plus figures that everyone mentions.

As I was saying, the achievements of the post-war period were extraordinary, and under the Attlee Government an astonishing 80% of houses built were council houses. Materials were in short supply, but they achieved it. The boom continued under the incoming Conservative Government. In response to Churchill’s challenge, Macmillan who had been appointed Minister for Housing, delivered more than 750,000 council homes in just one year: things had never been so good.

The giddy heights of those years and new social housing developments ended abruptly at the end of the 1970s with the radical policy changes of the incoming Conservative Government, and one of their first moves was to cut public expenditure for housing. Giving council tenants the opportunity to buy the homes they were living in, at a generous discount, was one of the defining policies of the Thatcher era and more than 2 million council tenants took advantage of it.

Does my hon. Friend acknowledge that one of the first acts of the incoming Conservative Government was to shift housing subsidy away from bricks and mortar and into housing benefit? It was a conscious policy decision and the consequence was not a shortage of money, but the spending of £22 billion a year on personal subsidy instead. As lower-income people are increasingly trapped in the expensive private rented sector, that is set to explode still further. The collapse in social house building is an extremely false economy.

I thank my hon. Friend who is very learned on this topic, and I bow to her knowledge. She is right: what we have seen is a transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector. A big chunk of that budget has gone into private pockets, as opposed to into public assets. Changing that is the ambition behind my motion.

That period was a watershed: it developed our unhealthy obsession with housing and a dependence on the fortunes of the private sector to satisfy it. Rising house prices were all the talk in the pub and they became the nation’s conversation, fuelled by the press and an insatiable media seeking feel-good stories and helped along by the Government of the day. House prices seemed an impossibly good driver of the economy. Those who had capital and a good wage could buy a place and, through the sell-off of council houses, those fortunate enough to have access to money could bag a bargain. What was not to like?

Perhaps most striking was the impact on young people who rapidly realised the possibility of ownership was drifting away from them: data shows that at the age of 27, those born in the late 1980s had a home ownership rate of 25%, compared with 33% for those born five years earlier in the decade and 43% for those born 10 years earlier in the late 1970s. With hindsight—perhaps for some of us at the time—the excesses of the heady 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, when access to finance was unlimited and we saw the mass sell-off of council housing, were akin to financial ecstasy, but it would only be a matter of time before the market would go cold turkey. Of course it did, with the credit crunch and the global financial crash of 2007-08. At the core of that financial disaster was over-leveraged debt and bad property debt. Lending had reached unsustainable levels.

We reach the present day, and housing has become simply too expensive—ridiculously so against relatively flat incomes. The average house price in my constituency is £285,000, 20% more than the average in England and Wales. Supply has been constrained for decades, but now the wrong housing is being built in the wrong places, and it is unsustainable. People are increasingly being driven out of the communities that they work in, such as in my constituency of Warwick and Leamington, and that threatens the local economy. Though average salaries are greater than the average for England and Wales, they are only 10% higher, meaning an absolute differential of 10% against the average house price. Put another way, the ratio of house price to wage is 9.2; for England and Wales it is 8.0.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing this debate. I share his disappointment about the attendance, which I will come to in a moment. If I may flatter him, he has not been a Member for too long, but he has, at an early stage, realised that we cannot influence and change everything. He has decided to focus on housing, which I would have thought was the No. 1 issue for all Members, because we do not want any more people sleeping on the pavement.

I hope this does not upset colleagues, but when she visited No. 10 Downing Street, Mother Teresa asked Baroness Thatcher, “What are people doing on the pavement?”. This is not a new phenomenon. I know it seems like it, but I have reached a stage where I have heard many of these things before.

I can understand the excitement, certainly in my party, at the result that has just been declared upstairs, but Parliament is not working well and I am increasingly worried. If the country and Parliament are split, we have to accept it and get on with the work. I want to see Parliament functioning. My colleagues may have decided that no one is interested any more in speeches made here, but it should not be like that. This House should be at the centre of everything.

I applaud the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington for focusing on the No. 1 issue of housing. I am not at the start of my career, but I hope that my hon. Friends who are fairly new and starting their careers will come to realise that this is an important place and that speeches made here should count. I hope our wonderful Whip has taken note of that, and perhaps we might organise things a little better. Although I am delighted to have the company of one or two of my hon. Friends, I am somewhat embarrassed. The hon. Gentleman takes this issue seriously and made his presentation to the Backbench Business Committee, and I can only apologise for there not being more support for his debate.

My hon. Friend is entirely right in outlining my priority for building above the high street and in the area between Southend and Rochford, so long as we get the right infrastructure—the so-called outer relief road that would link Shoebury to the wonderful Southend airport and beyond. So long as we get our fair share of infrastructure funding, there is space north of Southend and on the high street, if Ministers listen on planning to facilitate that and get everything joined together.

My hon. Friend makes a jolly good point, because all colleagues present agree that we have to make sure the infrastructure is there when we build— theschools, the transport and all those other matters. In my area there has been too much enthusiasm for building flats, and we have a parking nightmare.

With a new leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister, hopefully Southend will become a city next year, and Leigh-on-Sea has been nominated the happiest place in the country to live, so we have all sorts of people wanting to live in our area, and we do not really have the infrastructure to support them.

I ask the Government for a little more clarity on targets. The number of houses built for social rent has fallen from 40,000 in 1997 to just 6,000 in 2017. Shelter has given all colleagues a good briefing—one of my daughters works for Shelter, which is a very good organisation—and is calling for 3.1 million new social homes over the next 20 years, which, by my calculation, as the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington said, is 155,000 new properties every year. That is a little ambitious, but I would be very pleased if we got part of the way there.

If this Government and future Administrations are to get anywhere near that number, we must look at how we can re-energise and revitalise the construction industry to support that increase. There is much talk about Brexit, and some people say it is all terrible and that jobs are being lost in the construction industry because Poles and Bulgarians are coming over here, and all the rest of it. In that sense, we have ourselves to blame. We really need to make sure that we have the skilled workforce to build good-quality housing that does not lose heat—there are all sorts of issues to be considered.

As I have said, I was a beneficiary of the sale of council houses. When I was elected for Basildon, 40,000 properties were owned by the development corporation and the Commission for the New Towns. Of course, when Margaret decided that we should offer people the opportunity to buy, there were all sorts of restrictions on it; it depended on whether a person had lived in their property for 20 years or 30 years, and so on. I am not having a go at the Labour party, but the then Labour Members did not oppose the measure. [Interruption.] As the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Drew) says, they did not oppose it because it was popular.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. I absolutely agree that we need to build more social and genuinely affordable homes. What he is highlighting as working so well in urban areas could also work in rural areas. We can create new, green, sustainable villages or small towns to meet the unmet housing need that he is so well articulating. I agree that this is about communities coming together with the local authority and central Government to plan beautiful places where people want to live, with green infrastructure, schools, health services and places of work—places in which we would all be proud to live.

However long the present Government last, I want them to deliver on my hon. Friend’s vision for the future, because we cannot all live in London and the south-east. Scotland has huge, beautiful areas. Perhaps we could get some more houses built there, or in the midlands or the north, and so on. These are all factors. She represents a very beautiful part of the country, but people also need jobs, which is the other conundrum we have to look at.

I congratulate the Government on the 2017 White Paper, in which they acknowledged the need to build the right homes in the right places. As well as recognising demand, that statement applied to the use of brownfield land. As roughly 95% of local planning authorities have published their surveys of available brownfield land, it should be easy to identify the areas that are ripe for development. We have to get on and do this; surely it must be easy to identify them. I know that the Government are looking to have planning permission in place in principle for 90% of sites by the end of next year. I would be very disappointed if there were any unnecessary encroachment on our precious greenbelt land. There we are: I am introducing a bit of nimbyism.

If we are to increase the number of social houses in this country, we need to look at how to boost house building in general. Of course, there is no one policy that will invigorate the industry, but perhaps the most important factor is having a skilled British workforce, as I have said. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy must work hand in hand with the Department for Education to produce those skills. My party can be proud of the number of young people attending university, but that should not be seen as devaluing the high-skilled, often manual jobs required to ensure the immediate increase in the number of social houses. Just because someone is posh and well educated, it does not make them any better as a human being than someone who works in care homes or elsewhere. It is important that we have a high-skilled workforce. [Interruption.] I will rapidly move on with my speech, Madam Deputy Speaker.