amendment of the law

Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pickles]

This is the second time the hon. Gentleman has asked whether I am willing to see him. I am; indeed, only this morning I sent out, at my own expense, for some high-quality tea and better biscuits for him. We are looking forward to seeing him.

Seven out of 10 councils have published a local plan, and the figure continues to rise. Nearly nine in 10 planning applications are approved—a 10-year high. Indications are that there are fewer planning appeals, meaning that local decision making is to the fore. The latest data from Glenigan show that planning approvals for new homes are up 62% year on year, and 33% up on the previous quarter.

However, brushing the cobwebs off the planning system is only part of the plan. As a result of Labour’s inaction, this country is crying out for more homes to meet that desperate demand, so this Government are helping to get development off the ground. Locally supported, once-mothballed large-scale sites—such as in Cranbrook, in Milton Keynes, in Eastern Quarry and in Wokingham—are now being kick-started. We should contrast that with Labour’s top-down eco-towns, which delivered not a single home.

Our programme is set to deliver 170,000 new affordable homes, almost 63,000 of which are already completed, by 2015. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says that home sales have reached their highest level in more than two and a half years, while builders from Barratt to Bovis say that Government schemes are driving increased sales, putting people back on the property path.

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

We can give moderate support to the expansion of the Firstbuy scheme, which sounds good. Indeed, I recently visited such a scheme on the old Jaguar site in my constituency, which has proved a great help. However, does the Secretary of State not agree that making the mortgage expansion scheme available to second home buyers would be quite obscene, given that we are imposing a bedroom tax on those who can ill afford it?

[Mr Pickles]

The hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point, and if that were a way in which Mrs Pickles and I could obtain a second home in Frinton, it would indeed be a scandal, but that is certainly not the Government’s intention. However, in our endeavours to ensure that I do not end up with a nice little flat in Frinton, we have to be careful not to rule out people whose marriage has just broken down, or situations in which parents are acting as part-guarantors. By September, we will be able to satisfy the hon. Gentleman on this issue.

We know that the demand is there, but it is also clear that for many individuals in very good jobs the housing ladder simply remains out of reach. Under Labour the number of first-time buyers plummeted to a 30-year low. Labour’s 2005 manifesto promised 1 million more home owners, but home ownership fell by a third of a million in the last Parliament. The industry is clear about what lies at the root of the problem. The British Property Federation says:

“Helping people needing a deposit has for some time been cited as the missing piece of a coherent housing policy”.

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[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

May I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?

I listened attentively to the Budget statement and tried to hear something that was positive, not just for exports, but for manufacturing, for business and for productive industries. There were just two things that we, of course, welcome: the £2,000 off national insurance contributions and the increase to 10% of the research and development credits for those investing, which I am pleased to say several companies in my constituency have already welcomed. The trouble is that those two things pale into insignificance when we look at the scale of the problem we face; they just are not going to tackle it.

The problem can best be measured by looking at the plan from 2010 and the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts attached to it. Two crucial elements were going to support that plan and those forecasts. I recall saying in the debates that followed that they seemed to be the two most solid pillars on which the Government were building, but that, as far I could see, there was nothing underneath to support them or the OBR’s very optimistic forecasts. Those two elements were: manufacturing exports—exports on the visible account; and the increase in output from manufacturing. We were told to expect a 10%—I believe the figure given was 9.8%—increase in output from the business sector, but what have we had in the two years to the end of 2012? An increase of less than 5%—barely half what was projected. The hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) said that we are doing well on exports—I am not sure whether we were more interested in exports or Reading—but compared with what was projected and with what we need, the outcome in those two years has been terrible. I believe that the projected figure was 6% and we achieved minus 0.3% to December last year in the value and volume of exports.

I am not saying it is easy, but one thing I am sure about is that either the OBR has no idea about forecasts or we need to reconsider the OBR model, as it continually gets everything so wrong. My right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), the former Chancellor, was kind enough to say that he thought the estimates were optimistic—that the sunny uplands kept moving to the right and that the further out the OBR went, the more optimistic it became, but that was the case from the very beginning and nothing has changed. We should now be in those sunlit uplands. I do not understand why the OBR, with its much-vaunted independence, continues to get things so hopelessly wrong. Somebody needs to rethink that model. It is not enough to take responsibility out of the Treasury and pop it somewhere down Victoria street—one should not think that that will put everything right. There we are; that is one problem.

One part of the Budget that I thought might lead to some positive movement concerned the construction industry and the house building sector in particular. In an intervention on the Secretary of State, I welcomed the Firstbuy initiative, and a development on the old Jaguar site in Coventry has made quite a contribution, but the extension of the mortgage scheme, which is much bigger, is—yet again—a measure that has not been thought through. The problem with this Government is that they are totally incapable of thinking anything through. They should not be consulting on whether millionaires can have subsidised mortgages for second homes. That should have been ruled out in principle right from the beginning, before the consultation began. Many things require consultation, but not that. I cannot imagine why it was left in as an option—well, I can; things were not thought through.

We are in real need with housing starts down 11%, 70,000 construction workers unemployed and the lowest house building programme since the ’20s. That is the scale of the problem and such tiny measures show that the Government are fiddling around the edges—fiddling while Rome burns, as it were. Central to it all is the attitude of the Treasury and the Chancellor. If the Chancellor has lost self-confidence to such an extent that it impacts on confidence in the business community and consumers in the UK, he must consider whether he any longer has the vision, courage and self-confidence—whether he ever had those things is, of course, another question—to do what is necessary and change course.