Housing

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

I will make a bit more progress and then I will take more interventions.

For the reasons that I have given, in the spending review we announced the biggest investment in housing for 40 years. We are determined to invest in what matters most to young people and to British families. We want to pay off Labour’s debt and make sure we build the homes our country needs. Both are required to make this the turnaround decade.



In the spending review, the Chancellor said, “We choose housing” and delivered a further £20 billion. Our work will include: major investments in large-scale projects, such as Ebbsfleet garden city, Bicester, Barking riverside and Northstowe; £7.5 billion to extend the Help to Buy equity loan scheme until 2021; and supporting the purchase of 145,000 new build homes. In London, we are doubling the value of equity loans to 40%, providing the capital’s aspiring home owners with a better chance to buy. A new Help to Buy ISA is helping buyers across the country to save for a deposit.

The brand new Help to Buy shared ownership will deliver a further 135,000 homes by removing many of the restrictions that have held back shared ownership. For example, an aspiring home owner in Yorkshire can get on the housing ladder with a deposit of just £1,400. I am sure the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) will be encouraging his constituents to apply. Let me provide the House with some clear examples of why this matters. In the south-east, a deposit could be as low as £2,400, and in London £3,400. Our plans for shared ownership will make 175,000 more people eligible for home ownership. Just last week, the Prime Minister visited a family in Burton and I visited one in Didcot. They were excited for the future and the possibilities home ownership opens up to them. These possibilities will be open to anyone of any occupation as long as they earn under £80,000, or £90,000 in London.

We will provide other opportunities for working people, too: a £1 billion housing delivery fund to support small and custom builders; £8 billion to build 450,000 affordable homes; 100,000 homes for affordable rent; and, yes, 200,000 affordable homes will be starter homes available to young first-time buyers, with a 20% discount. That is the largest affordable housebuilding programme for many decades. Starter homes will be transformational.

Opposition Members may laugh and pour scorn on starter homes, and go against the aspirations of first-time buyers, but I ask Members across the House just to pause and think for a moment. A first-time buyer getting a 20% discount on a new home, linking that with a 5% deposit thanks to Help to Buy, saves thousands. For example, a two-bedroom home in Durham—in the constituency of the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods)—can be bought for just under £150,000. With 20% off, that will be £120,000. If used with Help to Buy, it means a first-time buyer can get a house with a mortgage of £90,000 and a deposit of only £6,000.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The average price of a property, according to the Metro today, is now over £1 million in my constituency. To get a starter home, if one could possibly be found for £450,000, an income of over £101,000 is needed. Is that what the Minister has in mind as affordable housing? Pathetic!

[Brandon Lewis]

That was almost a reasonable attempt by the hon. Gentleman, but let me just give him some facts for London. The average first-time buyer home is less than the cost of an average home generally. For example, in London an average first-time buyer home is £364,000. We recognise that that is a challenge, but with a 20% discount it will cost £291,000. If used with the Help to Buy scheme, a first-time buyer can buy that home for £174,000 with a deposit of just £14,500. I also point the hon. Gentleman to my comments of a few moments ago: shared ownership, even in London, means getting on the home ownership ladder for just under £3,500. We make no apology for our focus on affordable homeownership.

--- Later in debate ---

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is important that we show good local leadership and deliver good local plans setting out where homes can be built in communities and outlining the aspiration for good-quality homes and good-quality design. That is what local authorities and we in the House have a duty to do and what my hon. Friend has championed in the House over the last few months. This will be a defining challenge for our generation, yet the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne, who spoke for more than 32 minutes, gave not an iota of a start of a Labour policy to tackle this problem. Instead, he fell back on outdated politics. I am afraid it was the Soviet version of “Back to the Future” after all. There is the lazy assumption that there is a contradiction between supporting the dreams of home buyers and ensuring that more affordable homes are built. Nowhere is this clearer seen than in the right hon. Gentleman’s opposition to our extension of right to buy for housing association tenants.

In the last Parliament, we dramatically improved the right to buy for council tenants, with 47,000 tenants seizing this opportunity and over 80% of the sales occurring under the reinvigorated scheme, yet 1.3 million social tenants in housing association properties continue to get little or no assistance. That cannot be right. We promised the electorate that we would end this unfairness.

[Andy Slaughter]

Will the Minister give way?

[Brandon Lewis]

No, not at the moment.

Housing associations have recognised this inequality and have signed an offer to the Government that we have accepted—a historic agreement to end it. I thank the housing associations for doing that, and I applaud them for their forward thinking and their eagerness to help tenants own their own property, especially in light of the fact that this has bitterly disappointed the Opposition. Clearly, the housing associations have not followed the Labour party script and fallen obediently into line. Instead, what housing associations are doing is giving tenants what they want. That should not be a surprise, because the mission of housing associations is to deliver for their tenants. They are now passionate about doing that, providing tenants with an option to buy their home and a ladder to opportunity. Every property sold will lead to an extra home being built.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Members who picked up the Metro this morning on the tube will have seen that Hammersmith features in this week’s property page. They will have found out that the average price of property there is just over £1 million, although they managed to find a one-bedroom basement flat for £425,000, which would be just within the starter home bracket, requiring an income of only just over £100,000 to snaffle that up. The more typical development—the new development with no social housing given permission by the previous Conservative council—sees a two-bedroom flat in Fulham going for £1.2 million or a three-bedroom flat in the Queen’s Wharf or Sovereign Court for £2.2 million.

That is why owner-occupation has dropped from over 40% to just over 30%. Local people cannot afford to buy those; they are bought by foreign investors from United Arab Emirates, Malaysia or wherever, and are either left empty or rented out, which is why the private sector has gone up from 30% to 40%, but all properties are unaffordable. I am afraid that I have to include in that list of unaffordable properties the 85% of council right to buys, which are now rented out at market rates, and mainly to local authorities that are now paying three or four times what it would cost to live in council accommodation. We know what the Housing Minister thinks about this because he recently said that

“if people want to live and work in and around London, it’s actually making a judgment call about what you can afford”—

in other words, “on yer bike”.

One type of housing is affordable—30% of the accommodation in my constituency is still social housing. Most Governments in the past, irrespective of party, would have regarded that as an asset, but not this Government. What are they doing? They are selling off housing association homes so that they in turn can be turned into buy to let at market rates, and they are selling 50% of the remaining 12,000 council stock in order to subsidise that sale.

When voters voted to get rid of the Conservative council that was selling off empty council properties—it sold off 300 and was warehousing and emptying blocks of council flats and constructing zero social homes in new developments—they thought that they had got rid of all that. Now, however, we have a Government who are bringing it all back at the national level through the Housing and Planning Bill. There will be no social homes built in the future—nothing that is affordable to my constituents.

I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) is sitting next to me. Her speech hit the nail on the head when it comes to the most disgusting thing this Government are doing—removing security from people who live in council homes and telling them that they will have temporary housing as a form of charity rather than a permanent home in which to bring up their families.

The Government have reversed their position on “pay to stay” for housing associations, which is welcome, but they should do the same for everyone. They should let families on modest incomes continue to live in secure homes in London and around the country, and end this appalling business of removing security of tenure from council tenants.