Hilary Benn
Main Page: Hilary Benn (Labour - Leeds Central)(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House notes that the Government has failed to tackle the acute housing shortage which is central to the cost of living crisis and over the last three years has presided over the lowest level of new homes built since the 1920s, with home ownership falling, rents at record highs and rising faster than wages and a record five million people in the queue for social housing; further notes that net housing supply under this Government has fallen to its lowest level since records began, and that affordable housing supply dropped in the last year by 26 per cent, homes built for social rent dropped to a 20-year low, while there has been a 104 per cent increase in in-work housing benefit claimants since 2009; believes that the Government should take action to tackle the housing shortage; and calls on the Government to boost housing supply by reforming the development industry and introducing measures to tackle landbanking, bringing forward plans to deliver a new generation of New Towns and Garden Cities and giving local authorities a new right to grow to deliver the homes their communities need.
Before I begin, let me say that I thought that Mr Speaker spoke for all of us earlier in his eloquent and moving tribute to our dear friend and comrade Paul Goggins. His death is a tragedy. He was as decent, compassionate, principled and, I have to say, cheerful a man as one could have the privilege to meet, and we will miss him dreadfully. Our hearts go out to Wyn and to their three children, Matthew, Theresa and Dominic.
The fact that we face a housing crisis is common ground across the House. Why do we face that crisis? Because people are living longer and staying in their own homes, which is a good thing; because our population is rising; because every relationship breakdown increases the demand for housing; but principally because, as a society, we have not been building enough homes. Whether we look at starts, completions or net housing supply, the failure to build over the past three years could not be more starkly obvious.
It is good to see the Secretary of State taking part in today’s debate. By my count, he has participated in at least four major housing launches, and his Department has made nearly 400 announcements about housing in the past three years. I have brought some of them along. They are headed “Building more homes”, “Welcome rise in affordable housing”, “Plans to boost UK housebuilding”, and “Prevention is best cure for homelessness”. This is the question that the Secretary of State should answer: is he proud of his record over those three years?
The Secretary of State’s Department tells us that an average of 232,000 new households will be formed in England each year over the next two decades. However, in the three years for which he has been in charge, the number of homes completed in England has fallen to its lowest level since Stanley Baldwin was first Prime Minister. The number of affordable homes built fell by 29% last year, and the number of social homes built fell to its lowest level for more than 20 years.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I do not know whether my right hon. Friend noticed last week that house prices in Hammersmith and Fulham rose by 25% last year, and that the average cost of a property in the borough is now £693,000. Will he join me in condemning Hammersmith and Fulham council, which is selling off council homes by auction as they become vacant, and has just entered into a joint venture with Stanhope, a private developer, to empty and demolish council estates and replace them with market or near-market housing?
Hilary Benn
I shall come to the issue of house prices in London later in my speech. However, the situation that my hon. Friend has described in his own borough should concern Members in all parts of the House. Given the need for more social homes in London—and, indeed, in the rest of the country—it is hard to understand why a responsible council should take such action.
The number of housing starts fell by 11% last year, and, although it is now rising, it is still far from where it needs to be. Net housing supply is at its lowest level since the statistics began to be collected a decade ago.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is keen to talk about the Government’s record in England. Will he comment on the fact that as of July last year the number of housing completions in England had risen by 34%, while in Labour-controlled Wales it had fallen by 32%? How can he explain that, if he believes that Labour has the panacea?
Hilary Benn
I am here today to talk about housing provision in England and if the hon. Gentleman wants to compare the Labour record with the Conservative record, I will take any time our record over 13 years in government—
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way? I can help him out on this.
Hilary Benn
Will the hon. Gentleman bear with me? That is help from an unusual quarter.
The record is 2 million more homes, 500,000 of them affordable. I watched with interest the contribution of the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) to Channel 4 News last night, and I would just say to him on social homes—council houses and housing association social homes—that the Labour Government built more social homes in their last three years, which were the most difficult because of the recession, than this Government have managed to build in their first three years in office.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend appreciate that in London possibly more than most places, because of the ridiculous cost of private rented accommodation, it is essential that we have a supply of social housing? When the Government made a commitment to replace homes sold under right to buy, they said there would be a one-to-one replacement. Does he share my concern that that promise turned out to be totally worthless as they are replacing only one property for every seven sold?
Hilary Benn
Indeed; my hon. Friend points out yet another failure with the promises the Government made on—
Pete Wishart
I know the right hon. Gentleman does not really want to talk about the devolved Governments Labour has run, but does he know how many houses Labour built in the last four years in government in Scotland? Obviously, it is a difficult question, but the answer is six: six houses, and none of them were on the Scottish mainland. Shetland was lucky enough to get six houses from the Labour Executive.
Hilary Benn
In Scotland and elsewhere local authorities have responsibility for building houses, but we are here to hold this Government to account, and homelessness—
Mr Hamilton
I would like to respond to the previous intervention and correct the record. Labour Midlothian council was building 1,000 council houses at that time, in what is the second smallest land-locked authority area, so the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was talking absolute rubbish.
Hilary Benn
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for putting the record straight. Perhaps I should have trusted my initial judgment and not given way to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart).
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Tory Government have in fact cut the capital budget for Wales by 40% and obviously one cannot build more houses with less money?
Hilary Benn
That is an extremely good point and it matches what the Government have done in relation to England, which I shall come to in a moment.
The Government said that they wanted to prevent homelessness, but what has happened? It has risen every year under this Government and rough-sleeping is up by nearly a third since 2010. House prices, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) mentioned a moment ago, are racing ahead of earnings. They are up 8.4% in the last 12 months according to Nationwide and up 15% in London, and today it takes the average family over 20 years to save a deposit for a house. If we are talking about records, that figure in 1997 was three years, so no wonder the rate of home ownership is falling. Therefore, it is not really working, is it?
Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
In Prudhoe in my constituency eight of the 10 houses that were purchased recently at the development by the hospital were bought under Help to Buy. Does the right hon. Gentleman now welcome the Help to Buy policy which has transformed the ability of people to bridge the difficulty he so correctly outlines?
Hilary Benn
I shall come to Help to Buy in a moment, but, yes, we have consistently said that we welcome measures that help people to buy, but there is a problem about supply and that is what this debate is about: the Government’s failure to ensure that enough homes are being built. The truth is we need to build a lot more homes as a country—roughly double the current rate. The question before the House today is not whether we are now seeing a rise in housing starts from the pitifully low level the Government have bequeathed themselves over the last three years. The question before the House today is: does the country have a plan that will see building on the scale required? Judging by the record so far, the answer is clearly no, and there is one bit of advice I suggest the Secretary of State takes, which he himself gave: he did at least have the modesty to put out one press release which was headed: “No complacency in the drive to build more homes.”
The Secretary of State should listen to the plans and proposals Labour have put forward about what more needs to be done. Let us consider affordable homes. What did the Government do? One of their first acts was to cut the affordable housing budget by 60%. [Interruption.] Indeed, it was the largest cut they made. We have tried to persuade them to use the proceeds of the 4G auction to build affordable homes and to listen to the International Monetary Fund calling for an infrastructure boost by providing more affordable homes. They have not done that.
I come now to the new homes bonus. The National Audit Office said there is little evidence that the bonus has significantly changed local authorities’ behaviour, and the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee says there is no credible data available to show whether it is working. Indeed, she has pointed out that the areas that have gained most money tend to be the areas where housing need is lowest and the areas that have lost most money tend to be those where the needs are greatest. That is a familiar story with this Government: whether it is local government funding or the new homes bonus, they like to take from those who are least well-off and give to those who are most well-off. What is more, the money that is taken from the least well-off goes to areas where in all probability the houses would have been built anyway, so in what sense is the new homes bonus
“a powerful incentive for local authorities to deliver housing”?
We know the new Housing Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), does not think it is an incentive because he told us so. On 25 November he told the House that
“the new homes bonus is not about encouraging people to build homes.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2013; Vol. 571, c. 11.]
That is what he said. If that is the case, what on earth is the new homes bonus for? Perhaps when the Secretary of State responds he could sort out the confusion in his own Department.
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
When the new homes bonus policy came in, my local authority in Gateshead literally did not know what to do with its new homes bonus. Because the new homes bonus was netted off because of any demolitions that had taken place, Gateshead got a grand total of £64,000. We literally did not know what to do with £64,000 to implement a housing policy in Gateshead.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend illustrates the problem. As we know, this is money that has been top-sliced from all local authorities and is being redistributed in a way that clearly does not appear to be fair and, judging by the findings of the PAC and the NAO, is not terribly effective.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
In my constituency in Brighton increasing numbers of people are on the council waiting list as people struggle under the Government’s austerity measures, yet for the whole country the Chancellor has increased the borrowing limits to build council houses by a mere £300 million, which is nowhere near enough. The Labour motion refers to
“giving local authorities a new right to grow to deliver”
new homes. Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify that that means a Labour Government would completely remove the hugely damaging borrowing cap so more housing can be built, as well as ending the sale of council houses?
Hilary Benn
As the hon. Lady may be aware, the Lyons commission established by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition is looking at that question. Labour councils are outdoing Conservative authorities in building new council houses because of the reforms to the housing revenue account the last Labour Government put in place.
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend rightly highlights the extraordinary story of the new homes bonus. The one thing he has not mentioned is the cost. Because it is a cumulative bonus that works over six years, the commitments that have already been made involve expenditure commitments of over £7 billion. Is it not extraordinary that a Government are committing to £7 billion-plus of expenditure on a policy that the NAO does not see having any effect and the Housing Minister does not believe acts as the incentive it is supposed to be?
Hilary Benn
My right hon. Friend makes an overwhelmingly powerful case. That is the problem with the new homes bonus and that is why we are urging the Government to think again about it. Indeed, when the Chancellor tried to persuade the Treasury Committee that the Government’s actions were going to boost supply, the Treasury Committee said the arguments being made were “unconvincing”.
I shall turn now to the Help to Buy scheme. I said in answer to an earlier intervention that we support measures to assist people in realising their dream of home ownership, but if one of the consequences is that house prices move further and further out of people’s reach, there will be a problem. We cannot boost demand for housing, which is what Help to Buy is doing, if we do not also increase the supply. There is a growing list of voices expressing concern about the scheme, the latest of which belongs to someone who happens to sit at the Cabinet table with the Secretary of State. I refer, of course, to the Business Secretary. Talking recently about the state of the economy, he said that
“we risk it being derailed by a housing bubble…It’s not my job to tell the Bank of England what to do, but I get a sense that the Governor of the Bank does understand this is a serious problem.”
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
May I urge the right hon. Gentleman to expand his remarks to cover areas beyond London and the south-east? As a Leeds MP, he will know as well as I do that there is not a housing bubble there, and that house prices are not running away. The Help to Buy scheme is making a real difference, because the price of a house in my constituency—and in many parts of his constituency—is eight to nine times more than the average salary in those areas. The scheme is really helping people there. He has made the point that prices are increasing in London, but will he please ensure that this debate is about more than just London and the south-east?
Hilary Benn
The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly fair point. As he knows, the housing market varies enormously between different parts of the country. In the city that he and I have the privilege of representing, the council’s assessment—which is supported by all the parties—is that we will need roughly 70,000 new homes in the next 15 years. That is a question of supply.
Hilary Benn
I have given way a great deal. I want to make some progress, because lots of people want to speak.
Let us look at the situation in London. Here, we see new blocks being built and marketed to foreign investors, making it much more difficult for Londoners and others to get a chance to buy those homes. The shadow Housing Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), has said that that is wrong and called for action to require such homes to be marketed to Londoners and others who live in this country first, rather than being sold off-plan to investors abroad.
Hilary Benn
I want to make some progress.
In the capital, about 50,000 homes are now sitting empty. That is why Labour would allow councils to double the council tax on empty properties. We would also deal with the loophole that allows overseas owners to claim that a property is their second home, simply because they have put a table and chair in it.
I asked the Secretary of State a specific question last March about whether foreign buyers would be able to benefit from the Help to Buy scheme, and his reply could not have been clearer:
“This scheme will not be available for foreign buyers; this is a scheme to help people from this country.”—[Official Report, 25 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 1311.]
Will he confirm for the record that EU nationals who have come to the UK will not be eligible for assistance from the Help to Buy scheme? I will give way to him to allow him to answer. I notice that he does not wish to intervene. Perhaps a nod would do. This is the third time I have asked him about foreign buyers in relation to the Help to Buy scheme, and it is the third time he has been unable or unwilling to give me an answer.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Given that the Help to Buy scheme is such a major plank of Government housing policy, does my right hon. Friend not think that the Government should have made a detailed assessment of its likely impact on house building and house prices before introducing it? When the Treasury Select Committee asked officials from the Department for Communities and Local Government about that in November, they said that it was not a matter for them; they said it was a matter for the Treasury. When asked whether any officials at DCLG had had any discussions with Treasury officials about the impact of the scheme, they said no. Is not that a complete dereliction of duty on the part of DCLG with regard to this important policy?
Hilary Benn
I agree; my hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have called on the Bank of England to look into the operation of the Help to Buy scheme now, rather than in a year’s time, precisely so that those points can be taken on board.
I want to move on to discuss what else could be done to get the land, the finance and the planning consent required to build more homes. Ministers seem to argue that nothing is really wrong with the way in which the land market is working. I have to say to the Secretary of State that we disagree. The planning Minister, in his latest written answer to me, has said there are more than 523,000 units with planning permission, of which 241,500 have not yet even been started on site. That represents a lot of homes that could be built, yet companies are sitting on the land, with planning permission, waiting for it to increase in value and not building on it.
The Office of Fair Trading looked into this matter and found that strategic land banks, including optioned land, were worth 14.3 years, which is about enough land to build 1.4 million homes. That is why we think it perfectly reasonable for communities that have given planning permission to say to those who sought it, “Look, will you please get on and build the homes you said you wanted to build? And if you don’t, then after a time we will start levying a charge. After all, if you had built them, we would now be getting council tax revenue. In the most extreme cases, we will use compulsory purchase powers to take the land off you, with the permission, and sell it to someone else who will build the homes.”
I know that Ministers spluttered into their Cornflakes when we announced that policy, and that the Mayor of London described it as a “Mugabe-style” land grab, but I would gently point out that among those who support the idea of charging when permission has been granted but no houses have been built are the International Monetary Fund and someone who goes by the name of Boris Johnson, who, when I last checked, was the Mayor of London. Moreover, the planning Minister once called for a tax on land to “deter speculative land banks”. The hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen has also spoken up in favour of the proposal, and the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) has tried to claim it as a Conservative idea. With such illustrious backing, how could Labour’s proposal be anything other than a very good plan indeed?
Hilary Benn
I am going to make some progress.
When Kate Barker carried out her review of the housing market a decade ago she found two factors that we need to consider. First, she said that
“limited land supply means the competition tends to be focused on land acquisition rather than on consumers”.
Secondly, she found that
“many housebuilders ‘trickle out’ houses…to protect themselves against price volatility”.
[Interruption.] Hon. Members say that that was a decade ago, but it is still going on. Roughly translated, it means that not all house builders have an incentive to build all the homes for which they have planning permission as quickly as possible or as quickly as the nation needs them to. That is a problem, and we have proposed a way of dealing with it. Even when times were good, when mortgage credit was readily available and house prices were booming, the house building industry was unable to build the number of homes required.
Mr Marcus Jones
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the previous housing boom in 2006-07. Will he explain why the number of first-time buyers fell to its lowest level on record at that time, and why, following the moves made by the present Government, we are seeing the strongest growth in first-time buyer numbers for more than a decade?
Hilary Benn
As the hon. Gentleman is well aware, there was a very difficult period—[Interruption.] No, there was a collapse in the global economy. It is no good the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen shaking his head. The problems that we experienced in the United Kingdom were caused in particular by problems in the housing market in the United States of America. That is why we should be concerned by the threat of a housing bubble returning to the United Kingdom.
One of the answers must be to get more people building houses. [Interruption.] I am glad to see the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen nodding in agreement. Forty or 50 years ago, two thirds of the houses in this country were built by small and medium-sized builders. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman can carry on nodding; that is fine. I am grateful for his support. Nowadays, the figure is only one third, and when we talk to small and medium-sized builders about the problems they face, they mention two things: the difficulty of getting access to land and the difficulty in obtaining finance. Something needs to be done about both.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
In addition to the situation facing small builders, is it not also an indictment that, at 20%, we have the lowest level of self-builders in Europe? In the housing policy we develop we need to encourage communities such as the one in Saddleworth where more than 20 people want to build their own individual homes.
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)
Let me take a step back in terms of land where planning permission has been obtained. We need to address the issue of big developers grabbing every large piece of land, as has happened in Stoke-on-Trent, and smaller developers who want to move on and develop land not being able to do so because the big pieces of land have already been snapped up and are held on to very firmly.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend makes a good point about the nature of the land market, why reform is required and why that is one thing we have asked Sir Michael Lyons to look at in his work.
The next problem the Government should start looking at is the difficulty faced by local authorities in places such as Stevenage, Oxford, Luton and York, which want to see houses built to meet demand but do not have the land and neighbouring authorities are not co-operating and making that happen. Ministers recognise that there is a problem, because that is why they put the duty to co-operate in the national planning policy framework.
Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way? On Stevenage?
Stephen McPartland
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way on the issue of Stevenage, where he went with some of Labour colleagues, without informing me, to launch their housing policy. Is he aware that Labour-controlled Stevenage borough council has still not asked neighbouring North Hertfordshire district council whether it will have any houses required in its local plan, because Stevenage borough council believes it can meet its need within its own administrative boundaries?
Hilary Benn
What the hon. Gentleman has just said absolutely does not square with what the leader of Stevenage borough council has said to me—
Hilary Benn
Excuse me. It also does not square with the figures that I have looked at on the proposals for development to the north of Stevenage, which have been consistently blocked. The truth is that a duty to co-operate is not a duty to help each other out or to reach agreement. So in those circumstances, what is a council supposed to do? That shows why the right to grow would provide a means of overcoming this problem by requiring neighbouring local authorities to work together to ensure that the houses that need to be built are built. It is not a top-down—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
No it is not. You are quite right, Mr Benn. I was just about to call Mr McPartland to make his point of order.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
That is not a point of order. Points of order are not clarifications of debates. The hon. Gentleman can, if he wishes, stand to try to catch my eye, but at the rate we are progressing through this debate he will be lucky if there is any time left, because this debate has to finish at 4 pm and a large number of Members are here. However, I am sure that he will try to pursue his point in other ways.
Hilary Benn
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have two other points to make, one of which is about new towns and garden cities. The Government used to be very keen on those at one point, but they seem to have become less enthusiastic. I hope that the Secretary of State will say something about that when he responds, because it is hard to see how we will make progress without those things . We have to incentivise local authorities to come forward, which is why the Lyons commission is going to look at how we can help new towns and garden cities to be established and why a Labour Treasury would use guarantees—the Government are currently using guarantees for Help to Buy—for “help to build” for these new towns.
Finally, we need communities to take responsibility for building new homes. On that I am with the planning Minister, because I believe that neighbourhood planning is the way forward. For too long, we have had a system in which nobody has really taken responsibility for building new homes. Thame in south Oxfordshire provides a good example of the new community plan. If communities feel that the new houses that they give consent to will solve the housing problem in their own neighbourhood, they will be much more likely to give agreement. That is why we need plots for self-build and local allocation policies for social housing, and why we need to give local people first call on having the chance to buy new developments in their area. That will give communities confidence that the homes will meet their need.
The progress so far has not been considerable, but the task is. I do not know whether the Secretary of State in the end believed all his press releases and announcements, I do not know whether he thought that blaming councils would be enough and I do not know whether he was taken in by what I have to describe as the bombast of this Government’s first Housing Minister, who boasted consistently of the Government’s record. The problem is that the Secretary of State’s record speaks all too clearly for itself. Therefore, the country needs a new plan. The public need it because they are the ones paying the price for failure. Homes give us security and a sense of community: they are where we build and raise families; they are places for children to do their homework; and they are good for our health. However, rents are rising twice as fast as wages, house prices are moving out of reach of families, and 5 million people are in the queue for social housing. This country needs something different, and I urge the House to vote for this motion.