Oral Answers to Questions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

20. What recent assessment he has made of (a) trends in the level of home ownership since 2010 and (b) the opportunities available for council and social housing tenants who wish to buy their homes.

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

Home ownership has been stable over the past four years at about 63%. The right to buy has helped more than 86,000 council tenants into home ownership since 2012, under the reinvigorated scheme. This summer we launch a major pilot of the voluntary right to buy for housing association tenants.

[Diana Johnson]

Since 2010, we have seen home ownership levels fall to a 30-year low, while homelessness has doubled. If we want to end this dual failure to meet housing need and aspiration, and put choice in the hands of the many, not the few, should we not invest in building and renovating enough council and affordable homes to rent and buy, without taking away the rights that council tenants’ have had for 38 years under the right to buy scheme?

[Kit Malthouse]

The hon. Lady is definitely right to say that the solution to everybody’s housing problems is to build more homes—as many as we can—across those parts of the country that need it.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Brokenshire]

I am certainly willing to meet my hon. Friend, who is right to champion innovative ways in which we can build and innovative techniques within the construction sector. That is why we have the £3 billion home building fund to provide loan finance to builders using those methods, as well as our modern methods of construction working group looking at ways in which that can be advanced.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

T4. The Secretary of State has just talked about councils’ role in prevention. Given that they are now responsible for public health and the Local Government Association claims that public health cuts of £600 million mean that they are unable to deal with unforeseen outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases, is he concerned that we have the highest rates of syphilis since the end of the second world war, and strains of gonorrhoea that are resistant to treatment?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

I thank the hon. Lady for highlighting those particular cases, the details of which I am not intimately familiar with. I would be happy to look into the matter. She is absolutely right to highlight the important role that local authorities play in prevention, particularly when it comes to public health. As we approach the spending review and the fair funding review, I would be delighted to talk to her to see how we can best capture the role that local authorities play in delivering that.