Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Friday 20th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

May I apologise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to the Secretary of State for the fact that I will not be able to be present for the close of the debate owing to a long-standing constituency commitment?

It is a pleasure to respond to the right hon. Gentleman—probably, I suspect, for the last time in this Parliament. If I may say so, his speech had more than a touch of a valedictory air about it. I join him in his congratulations tweeted yesterday to Lord Kerslake on his elevation to the other place. Lord Kerslake marked that occasion by telling the Local Government Chronicle that the current state of local government finance

“shouldn’t be confused with saying that therefore there’s another round of savings of equivalent size that can simply be taken out...I don’t believe that.”

More of that later.

I hope that someone is keeping score of the number of times we are going to have to hear the words “long-term economic plan” during the whole of this Budget debate. [Interruption.] Well, we did not hear it from the right hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker). By my reckoning, it took the Secretary of State 59 seconds to refer to it in his speech. I suspect that the repetition is a comfort blanket for Government Members who, given this wonderful success that we have heard about today, cannot understand why, so close to the general election, they are neck and neck in the opinion polls. The reason is that people know they are not better off under this Government and the Government have failed.

Let me say something about the attempt to rewrite economic history, because it is important to place this on the record. I have heard more than enough times from Government Members the charge that somehow the previous Labour Government brought about the global economic recession. It is not true: fact. Prior to the global economic crash, debt and borrowing were lower. Investment in public services was backed by the pledge of the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister, to match Labour’s spending plans pound for pound. The action that we rightly took, against the advice of the then Opposition, kept people in their homes and kept them in their jobs, and not a single person lost a penny of their savings. I am still waiting, all these years after the event, for someone to explain to the House how the decisions taken by the previous Labour Government caused Lehman Brothers to collapse in New York. If anyone has an answer, I will readily give way. The truth is that the British economy was growing and unemployment was falling, and it does no credit to the Government to try to rewrite the past.

In 2010, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said:

“we are on track to have…a balanced structural current budget by the end of this Parliament.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 168.]

As we know, that has not happened, and people have paid the price. They are worse off, they have seen their living standards squeezed, many of the services they rely on have been cut, and the poorest people and the poorest communities have been hardest hit. In the words of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, UK households have experienced

“the slowest recovery in incomes in modern history”.

That is quite some record. Despite the Chancellor’s excuses, we now know that it will take twice as long to balance the books as he said it would, and his plans for the next five years will involve extreme cuts to public spending. Do not take my word for it—listen to what Paul Johnson at the IFS says:

“The cuts of more than 5% implied in each of 2016-17 and 2017-18 are twice the size of any year’s cuts in this parliament.”

No wonder the Liberal Democrats tried to distance themselves from all this in their rather unsuccessful yellow Budget yesterday, but the whole nation knows that they are up to their necks in it because they have been supporting the Tories over the past five years.

It is not only on the deficit that the Government have failed. What about housing, which the Secretary of State mentioned? Having enough homes is of course absolutely fundamental to the economic growth that Members in all parts of the House want to see. If businesses are looking to expand, they need workers to fill those jobs and those workers need somewhere to live. Yet homes are being built at half the rate we need, house prices are rising out of reach, one in four young people in their 20s and early 30s are still living with their parents, and more and more people are having to rent privately, with all the insecurity that that can bring.

Back in 2010, at least two of the Ministers who are present today sat behind their new desks and made a lot of promises about what was going to happen to housing. Appearing before the Communities and Local Government Committee, the then Housing Minister was asked by the Chair:

“do we take it that success for this Government, when you are eventually judged on your record, will be building more homes per year than were being built prior to the recession, and that failure will be building less?”

The Housing Minister replied:

“Yes. Building more homes is the gold standard upon which we shall be judged.”

That was a pretty unequivocal answer.

We must make some allowance for the fact that the then Housing Minister—now the chairman of the Conservative party—does not always get things right, but what have the Government actually achieved? Fact: they have achieved a lower level of peacetime house building than any Government since the 1920s, and a failure to build, in any single year, more homes than the Labour Government built in every single year in which they were in office. The number of new homes for social rent is at its lowest level for 20 years. [Interruption.] Ministers can chunter as much as they like, but those are the facts.

Starts and completions of social homes have collapsed, which makes the Chief Secretary’s claim to the House last week all the more extraordinary. He said then:

“we have the highest annual rate of social house building than under the previous Government or for the past 20 years”.—[Official Report, 10 March 2015; Vol. 594, c. 145.]

If one of the first acts of a Government is to cut the affordable homes budget by 60%, they should not be entirely surprised if there is a collapse.

The Secretary of State talked about affordable homes. He made great play of the subject. I have the figures in front of me—the figures from his own Department, headed

“National trends in additional affordable housing… Trends in gross supply”.

In 2009-10, the supply of “All affordable housing” was 57,980. In 2013-14, the figure was 42,710. During the last full year for which figures are available, affordable house building under the present Government was at its lowest level for nine years. Those are the facts. Ministers have not even returned house building to its level before the global recession. They set a gold standard on which they said they wanted to be judged, and they have comprehensively failed to meet it.

One of the other consequences of the collapse in social house building is the rise in the housing benefit bill over the current Parliament. This year, it reached £24 billion. Half a million more people now rely on help from the Government to pay their rent than relied on it when the coalition came to power—many of them work, but do not earn enough money to pay their rent and other bills and look after their families—and 2.5 million more people live in the private rented sector. There are now 11 million people who rent privately, including a growing number of families with children, but nothing has been done to help generation rent.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend has made an excellent point. There are people who are working—working in many of the jobs that have been trumpeted by the Conservatives—but are not earning enough to put food on their tables and a roof over their heads. That is one reason why the Conservatives are failing so shockingly on issues such as housing benefit while claiming to be trying to lower the welfare bill.

[Hilary Benn]

I entirely agree. That is one of the consequences of the cost of living crisis, which is why we want a higher minimum wage.

A Labour Government will do something for generation rent. We will scrap the charging of tenants for letting agents’ fees, we will legislate for three-year tenancies—the Government say that they are in favour of three-year tenancies, but they will not actually make them happen—and we will put a ceiling on rent increases during the second and third years of those tenancies.

As for those who dream of owning their own homes, the Conservative manifesto could not have been clearer, stating:

“We want to create a property-owning democracy where everyone has the chance to own their own home.”

I give credit to the Secretary of State and the Government for the steps that they have taken to try to help first-time buyers, including Help to Buy and the measures in the Budget. We support those moves, especially the help for first-time buyers. However, let me say gently to the Secretary of State that Ministers must know—they must have been advised by their officials, and by plenty of other people—that if demand is increased without an increase in supply, all that will happen is that house prices will rise even further out of reach of people who dream of owning their own homes, the very people whom the House wants to help.

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that under this Government thousands of homes in London have been sold to overseas investors who leave them empty, while throughout this city there is a growing housing crisis and people cannot find a home? How frustrating it is for them to see those homes kept empty when they have nowhere to live.

[Hilary Benn]

I agree that that is a particular feature of the housing market in London. The Government could do two things: the first is to say that homes in this country cannot be advertised for sale in other parts of the world before they are advertised in the United Kingdom, so that people in this country have an equal chance to buy them; and the second is to give local authorities greater power to disincentivise those who leave their homes empty, or who put in a stick of furniture and claim that they are occupied.

[Mr Pickles]

As far as I understand it, that is a new policy. Quite a lot of estate agents’ businesses are on the web these days, so how would that policy be possible? If adverts are on the web locally, they are on the web internationally. Will the right hon. Gentleman explain how it will operate?

[Hilary Benn]

There is indeed the web, but the right hon. Gentleman will be well aware, having studied the market, that some companies make a special effort to market properties elsewhere and do not make a similar effort to market them in this country. He surely does not agree with that. Everyone in Britain should have the same right and opportunity, and companies should not make a deliberate effort to try to sell to people from other countries before those in London have a chance to access such properties.

[Robert Neill]

Given that this is a completely new policy that, as far as we can see, is being made up as we go along—

[Robert Neill]

And it is being changed, so will the right hon. Gentleman tell us exactly what the policy is? What will the policy cost, how many bureaucrats will be needed to enforce it and what will be the impact on London as an international financial centre?

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Gentleman should have listened to what I said. There is no cost. The principle is very simple, and I would have thought that it would command support right across the House. The advertising and marketing of properties should be done in the capital at the same time as it is done elsewhere, so that people in this country have the same opportunity to buy. I would have thought that he would support that policy.

[Robert Neill]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

No, I will not. I have answered the hon. Gentleman’s question.

There is another policy that the Government—actually, the Conservative party—have said that they will put in place if they are re-elected, which is to sell homes at 20% off. To go back to the chairman of the Conservative party, he was recently asked several times on Sky News how exactly that would be funded. He was not able to reply, but others have said that it will be done by exempting such sites, first, from the requirement to build social housing, and secondly, from the zero-carbon homes standard. I would tell the Secretary of State that the consequence will be that other people have less of a chance of getting a home they can afford, and people who move into houses built to a lower energy standard will end up paying higher bills than they otherwise would.

I have another question for Ministers. In talking about that plan, the Prime Minister said the homes

“can’t be bought by foreigners”.

I would be grateful if the Minister who responds clarified what exactly the Prime Minister meant.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

They’ve gone very quiet.

[Hilary Benn]

Indeed. Suddenly silence falls on the Chamber.

Does that mean that EU citizens will be barred from buying one of these homes at 20% off? I think we should get an answer. The truth is that home ownership—[Interruption.] Well, I would give way if someone could give me an answer, but I do not suppose that I am going to get one. Home ownership is now at its lowest level for 30 years, and there are those with no home at all. Since 2010, homelessness is up by a quarter and rough sleeping is up 50%.

[Mr Pickles]

Because we count them.

[Hilary Benn]

That really takes the biscuit—trying to allege that somehow the Government are counting properly. The fact is that before the last election, the Prime Minister said that it is

“a disgrace that in the fifth biggest economy in the world…we have people homeless, people sleeping on the streets”.

I agree with him. It is a disgrace and people should hold him to account for his shocking record.

We shall deal with the housing crisis only if we have a comprehensive plan. We have one—the most comprehensive in a generation—in the form of the Lyons review, which we will implement from day one of a Labour Government. We will make housing a national priority for capital investment. We will work with housing associations and councils to make it easier to build council houses, building on the changes we made to the housing revenue account.

We need more firms to be building. Thirty to 40 years ago, two thirds of the homes in this country were built by small and medium-sized builders; that proportion is now less than a third. Ask small builders what the problem is and they say, “I can’t get access to land and I can’t get access to finance.” We will introduce a help to build scheme, which will allow small and medium-sized builders to get lower-cost bank lending, supported by Treasury guarantees. We will encourage local authorities and others to make more innovative use of public sector land, investing in it as equity instead of selling it to the highest bidder, because that will also help us to deliver more affordable homes.

We will use Treasury guarantees and financial incentives to support the building of garden cities, and we will ensure that every council has a local plan. The Minister of State, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), said that it is not necessary for every council to have a plan, but I think it is the responsibility of every local authority in England to have a local plan. Why would someone seek to be elected to an authority, or to be its leader, if they were not going to draw up a plan for the future of their community that included how they will meet the housing needs of the people who elected them?

[The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)]

Has the right hon. Gentleman looked through the details of the builders finance fund, which deals with this issue? Why does he not trust local councils to represent local people with a local plan driven by local people, for local people, instead of the top-down approach that failed for 13 years?

[Hilary Benn]

It is very simple: the Minister and I have a different view. I think every local authority should have a local plan. To be perfectly honest, I cannot understand why a local authority would not want a local plan, given the structure of the national planning policy framework. I think that is an obligation. The Minister and I disagree. He is entitled to his view and I am entitled to mine.

[Sir Andrew Stunell]

Does the right hon. Gentleman acknowledge that when the NPPF was introduced, it was discovered that only about a quarter of local authorities actually had a statutory plan, despite the requirement to have one? What did the Labour Government do in 13 years to ensure that local authorities complied with what he now asserts to be vital and necessary?

[Hilary Benn]

With respect to the right hon. Gentleman, the coalition cannot have it both ways. The Minister says we took a top-down approach and told people what to do, but the right hon. Gentleman says the very opposite. The fact is—

[Sir Andrew Stunell]

rose—

[Hilary Benn]

The right hon. Gentleman should bear with me. The NPPF has changed things. I support its basic structure, but the changes I would make would be, first, to ensure that local authorities calculate their housing need on a similar basis and, secondly, to strengthen the brownfield policy, which, whether the right hon. Gentleman wants to argue about it or not, was weakened in the final version of the NPPF. That is the difference. I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman again, but why does he think that any local authority should not have a local plan? Does he agree with what I am arguing?

[Sir Andrew Stunell]

I am asking the right hon. Gentleman whether the criticism he is levelling at the coalition Government for failing to achieve what he sets out also applies to him and his Government, who failed to achieve it in 13 years. This Government believed—my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I certainly did—that it was right for local authorities to proceed at their own pace. We provided a carrot, not a stick.

[Hilary Benn]

No one is arguing about the pace, because the time it will take local authorities to come up with a local plan will differ. I think most of us agree—although clearly not everyone does—that every local authority ought to have a plan. If they do not, are they taking responsibility for their local community? On that, we have a different view.

We will give new powers to local authorities to create housing growth areas and new homes corporations, so that they can assemble land and work with builders—small and large—construction firms and self-builders to get more homes built.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Mayor of London is undermining the social housing target by watering it down and making it an aspiration? In contrast, our policy is to set private developers a target on social housing and intermediate development of between 25% and 40%. Surely the Mayor of London is undermining any attempt to deal with the housing shortage, leading, frankly, to the social cleansing of people who cannot afford to buy houses that are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

[Hilary Benn]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As we have heard in this debate, the problem is most acute in London. The consequences of not building sufficient affordable homes are being felt in many ways, such as in the number of people who are privately renting, in higher rents that people cannot afford and in the housing benefit bill. Ultimately, it is a self-defeating approach.

One problem is that the process of house building has been far too passive for local authorities in many parts of the country. They identify the land and then hope that someone will come along with a proposal. The Lyons review is about creating the means—the tools—for local authorities. I bet Ministers wish that they had applied their minds and come up with a report like the Lyons review.

[Brandon Lewis]

Will the right hon. Gentleman at least acknowledge that as a result of trusting local people with local and neighbourhood plans, a record number of some 250,000 homes were given planning approval last year, which is way beyond what Labour was achieving? Why does he not just trust local people like we do?

[Hilary Benn]

As the hon. Gentleman is well aware, I am a strong supporter of neighbourhood planning, and I have said so from this Dispatch Box on many occasions. He will just have to wait until his Government manage to complete more homes in one year than we managed in any one of our 13 years before he stands up and says, “Our record is better than yours”, because his record is much worse than ours.

[Brandon Lewis]

I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman being so generous with his time. To be fair, Labour finished off with 85,000 homes in its last year—the lowest level since 1923—and we have delivered some 500,000 homes in the last few years, so he really should think again.

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Gentleman is, of course, referring to the consequences of a global recession. [Hon. Members: “Ah!”] Well, it was a global recession. The Secretary of State made specific promises about what the Government were going to do and they have comprehensively failed.

The Lyons review says to communities, “In return for taking responsibility for building the homes that you need, we will give you the powers that you need when you identify sites.” I have listened to debates in this House in which Members, particularly Government Members, have said, “We don’t understand it. We’ve identified sites, but the developers come along and say, ‘I don’t fancy building there. It’s not viable for me. I’m going to put in a planning application for that greenfield site over there.’” Up and down the country, that is happening. It is a great frustration for local authorities and citizens, because if they identify sites, the deal in return has to be that that is where the development will take place. If we are just dependent on the big house builders, we will never get to the figures that we need and it will undermine the public consent that, we all agree, is fundamental to making progress on house building.

We must say to local authorities, “Here’s a range of tools that you can use to ensure that the kind of homes you want get built in the places you have identified and go to the people who need them.” That is why the one other thing that we will do is to give local authorities a planning power to say that in housing growth areas a percentage of the new homes that are built for sale should, in the first instance, be reserved for local first-time buyers. If we do that, we will turn quite a few nimbys into yimbys, because they will realise that their son or daughter, or their neighbour’s son or daughter, will have the chance to get one of those houses.

If we are to get to the target that we have set of 200,000 homes a year by 2020—I say to Ministers that surely their experience over the past four years has taught them that we will not do it by trying to put a bit more petrol into the old house building engine and cranking it up—there has to be a fundamental change in the way the house building market works.

Let me turn to economic evolution and growth. I acknowledge what the Secretary of State has done with deals for some cities—it would be churlish not to—but there is an unanswered question: if he and the Government are so committed to devolution, why has progress been so slow, patchy and piecemeal? Manchester aside, why have such limited powers been offered to a small number of large cities. Why, as the Local Government Chronicle put it yesterday, has DCLG

“almost seemed peripheral, a bystander to the devolution debate”?

Why has Lord Kerslake, now free from the responsibilities of office, said—again in the Local Government Chronicle—that

“it was only well into its fourth year that the government woke up to the benefits of devolution”?

I suspect there is plenty more where that came from. Why has the right hon. Gentleman stepped aside while the Chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister have had a row about whether powers can be devolved and whether we need a metro mayor? Perhaps he is not actually in charge of the policy.

What about the great counties of England? Until the Chancellor got up on Wednesday and finally adopted Labour’s policy on 100% retention of business rate income growth, which he said he would apply to Cambridge and Greater Manchester, the counties of England had frankly been ignored. The Secretary of State will be only too well aware of how angry his colleagues in the counties have been at his failure to stand up for them. It was noticeable last year that at the meeting of the County Councils Network—the great annual gathering of county councils—not a single DCLG Commons Minister could manage to clear their diaries to turn up to address what was mainly their party colleagues.

It is not a very long journey to Marlow—about an hour in the ministerial car—and I think the real reason is what happened to the Secretary of State the previous year at the 2013 conference. LocalGov.co.uk reported it thus:

“Mr Pickles received a hostile reception at the conference…During questions, the Tory leader of Leicestershire, CC Nick Rushton, asked the secretary of state: ‘Why are you always so rude to us?—

I am sure the Secretary of State remembers that well—

“It’s about time you spoke up for us in Government.’”

I sympathise with the Secretary of State because with friends like that who needs us on the Opposition Benches? It is the unfairness that makes people angry. The truth is that his Conservative colleagues in the counties know that they will get a better deal from a Labour Government than they have got from the Tory Government, and the same is true for the city regions.

[Robert Neill]

In what ways does the right hon. Gentleman intend to alter the operation of the formula grant to address sparsity in rural areas? How will he deal with adult social care, which it seems his Government want to nationalise and which is one of the principal cost pressures on top-tier authorities such as councils? How will that help the county council?

[Hilary Benn]

I will come on to that very point in just a moment if the hon. Gentleman is willing to be patient. He will have seen what Councillors Keith Wakefield and Peter Box have said about the new Leeds city region deal. Peter Box described it as “disappointing”, which I would call one of the kinder comments. What has really got up the noses of the existing combined authorities is that Labour’s offer of 100% retention of business rate income growth has been made to Manchester and Cambridge but not to the other existing combined authorities. Why is that?

For all the Government’s rhetoric about the “northern powerhouse”—now running a close second to “long-term economic plan”—the truth is that the most deprived parts of the country have faced the biggest cuts in local authority funding. Yes, Labour will change the formula because what the Government have done is unjustifiable. There is nothing empowering about taking a load away and then giving a little less back.

[Gregory Barker]

The right hon. Gentleman says that Labour will change the formula. Will he spend more money, in which case where will that money come from, and if he is not going to spend more money, who will lose out?

[Hilary Benn]

We have made it clear that we will have a fairer allocation from within using funding that is there at the moment. The right hon. Gentleman’s problem is that he cannot justify what the Government have done, and therefore applying more fairness so that everybody has to make a contribution is the right thing to do.

The National Audit Office and others have said there is not much evidence that the new homes bonus encourages house building that would not have taken place anyway. It is top-sliced from revenue support grant and tends in the main to be taken from the more deprived communities with the greatest needs and to go to communities that are less deprived with fewer needs. We will phase that out and redistribute the money back to local authorities on a fairer basis. Government is about making choices. We will devolve £30 billion of economic powers from existing money for county and city regions.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

I have been very generous in giving way, but I am going to bring my remarks to a close.

We will devolve that money so that local authorities, coming together, have powers over skills, business and employment support, housing and bus regulation. We have talked about London today. If bus regulation, the ability to control routes and fares, is good enough for London—and it is—why is it not good enough for the whole of England? That is something we will do.

The truth is that the Secretary of State has devolved in one other respect: he has passed responsibility for taking difficult decisions down to the areas with the greatest needs. As we know, the 10 most deprived local authorities have seen their council spending reduced by 16 times more than the 10 least deprived. He has taken most from the communities that can least afford it.

I asked the right hon. Gentleman at the beginning of this week about the real impact on social care for elderly people—I said I would come to this—of the decisions he has made, or, to be more precise, as a result of his failure to stand up for local government and social care. He tried to pretend that the fact that there are 220,000 fewer elderly people now getting a hot meal a day, which is what research demonstrates, had nothing to do with him. He even tried to blame the councils, but it is everything to do with the way he has unfairly applied the cuts to local government. If, as he claims, it has been fair to all, north and south, how can he explain cuts to social care being deepest in the councils he has hit the hardest as the result of the decisions he has made? That is what NAO analysis confirms. Everyone knows the answer to that question is that he has taken most from those who have least. Worse is to come. The Office for Budget Responsibility says we will see

“a much sharper squeeze on real spending in 2016-17 and 2017-18 than anything over the past five years.”

Those cuts would be extreme and irresponsible, and have a big impact, including on social care. The Health Secretary takes all the stick for the problems in the NHS, but the Communities Secretary is fanning the flames.

We need a different approach. Local communities and local government are crying out for a different approach. Times are tough, but there is no justification for applying the cuts to local government in such a fundamentally unfair way. There is no justification for taking decisions that mean elderly people in one part of the country are less likely to get social care or a hot meal a day because they live in an authority that has been penalised by the right hon. Gentleman. There is no reason why local communities and the people they elect should not be given the powers and the tools to build homes for their children and their grandchildren. There is no reason at all why all the city and county regions of England—all of them—should not get the economic powers to help them to build their own strong local economies, invest in skills, build homes and create jobs for the future. All those things are possible, but it will take a change of Government to make them happen.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

amendment of the law

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Let me say how grateful I am to the Secretary of State for his very kind words of condolence, which mean a great deal to me personally and to the rest of our family.

We have a chance today to discuss the impact of the Budget on families and communities when it comes to their chances of getting a home, deciding where that home will be built and by whom and whether the policy the Government are pursuing meets the simple test of fairness. Those are the things that I want to address in my remarks.

We know that housing is at the heart of the cost of living crisis facing many of our constituents. Parents worry about whether their children will be able to afford a home. Young people who want to get a foot on the housing ladder see house prices disappearing into the distance. People who are renting worry about the impact of rents that are going up faster than their wages. As I think the whole House will acknowledge, that is the result of a housing crisis that has come upon us over many years, as successive Governments have failed to build enough homes. Let me just say before anybody jumps up that it is a fact that, despite all the words we have heard from the Secretary of State and his colleagues today and on previous occasions, housing completions were higher in every single year of the previous Labour Government than they have been in any year under this Government. That puts into context what the Secretary of State had to say. Although I recognise that the previous Labour Government and our predecessors from both parties did not do enough to build homes, I would take our record over his any day.

[Jonathan Evans (Cardiff North) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman suggests that the Government before the previous Labour Government had a similarly poor record, but in fact theirs was better.

[Hilary Benn]

I am very proud of the record of the previous Labour Government: 2 million new homes, including 500,000 affordable homes, and a huge number of social homes that were brought up to decency standard. One thing that the previous Conservative Government bequeathed the previous Labour Government was a lot of council houses that were in poor condition because they had not invested any money in improving them. When the Secretary of State is next having a conversation with the Prime Minister, he might point out that the next time he walks down that famous staircase in No. 10 past the photographs of his predecessors, he will have to get all the way to Stanley Baldwin to find a Prime Minister with a worse record of building houses than the current occupant of that office.

In his 2011 Budget speech, the Chancellor told us that he would deliver an economy

“carried aloft by the march of the makers.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2011; Vol. 525, c. 966.]

Although, as the Secretary of State says, housing starts are now finally up, what has happened to construction output overall? It has fallen by 4.2%. I do not know how many marches the Chancellor has been on, but the general idea of a march is that one goes forwards rather than backwards.

Although the Government’s record of building houses has been poor, they have intervened in the mortgage market through Help to Buy, and last Wednesday the Chancellor made an announcement about extending the equity loan scheme to 2020. As I have said before from this Dispatch Box, we support help for people, especially first-time buyers, to realise their dream of home ownership, but if the Government simply increase demand and do not do enough to increase supply, all that will happen is that house prices will rise further out of reach of the very people we are seeking to help. That is why the Treasury Committee and the International Monetary Fund express concerns about Help to Buy. I presume that the Chancellor has now finally acknowledged that, as he told the House last week that he has asked the Bank of England

“to be particularly vigilant against the emergence of potential risks in the housing market.”—[Official Report, 19 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 783-84.]

That is progress, but could the Minister tell us when he replies exactly what that means in practice and how we and the public will be kept informed of how that vigilance is operating?

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

First, I offer my condolences to the right hon. Gentleman, as a fellow Leeds MP, for the loss his family has suffered. As a fellow Leeds MP, he will know some of the pressures of development in Leeds, with some 70,000 units to be built in the city, despite talk in the Leeds core strategy. Does he agree that we must be careful about where these large-scale developments are built? If we are massively to change the shape of the village of Scholes in my constituency, say, that would have the unfortunate effect of lowering house prices and putting people into—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I think that the right hon. Gentleman, as he knows the area so well, has the message.

[Hilary Benn]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. If he will bear with me, I shall directly address his point about where the houses should go in a moment.

We need to build more homes. Everybody recognises that. That is why, for example, we called for a help to build fund supported by Treasury guarantees to assist small and medium-sized builders in accessing finance to build some of those homes. I welcome the fact that the Government have listened and set up a builders’ finance fund, but history teaches us that we need to do more if we are successfully to change the way in which the market works.

Let me reflect on that for a moment. In the 1930s, when we reached the highest level of private house building ever achieved in the UK, the top 10 house building companies had a market share of 6% or 7%. In 1988, firms completing fewer than 500 units a year produced about two thirds of UK housing but by 2012 that had fallen to less than a third. In other words, as the number of small and medium-sized builders has declined and the big firms have grown larger, it has become easier for the more dominant firms to buy up the land. That is why small and medium-sized builders and custom builders say that it is hard for them to get access to land, so I agree that it is about helping them with finance, but it is also about enabling them to get the soil they need to build on.

The Secretary of State spoke about self-build and the House will remember that the former Housing Minister, now the chair of the Conservative party, promised a self-build revolution and pledged to double––double––the self-build sector. But the facts show that, last year, far from doubling the size of the sector, the number of self-build homes fell to the lowest level for 30 years. That is some revolution.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about the lack of house building. Will he therefore use this opportunity to support without reservation the development corporation that is being introduced to build houses in Ebbsfleet in my constituency?

[Hilary Benn]

I certainly support all measures that will help us to get housing supply up because that is an objective shared across the House. I shall have something more to say about Ebbsfleet in a moment.

We have also called for local authorities to have a higher proportion of small sites in their five-year land supply and to give guaranteed access to public land for small firms and custom builders, something to which the Secretary of State referred and that was also in the Budget. That is also why we have said that a proportion of homes in new towns and garden cities should be built by smaller firms and custom builders. The truth is that if we are going to make progress, we have to change the way in which the housing market and the building market work, which is something that Ministers have not yet acknowledged. Why? We know that the high cost of housing is driven by the cost of land. We know that not enough land is being released for housing development. We know that by the time that land is given planning permission, it is often prohibitively expensive and we know that this can create an incentive to bank, rather than build on, the land.

As the Planning Minister told me in a written answer earlier this year, as of January there were 538,000 units with planning permission that had not yet been completed. About half had been started and the rest were working towards a start or were on hold. He says that land banking is not an issue. He says that in many an answer to a written question, but he forgets that a 2008 Office of Fair Trading survey found that strategic land bought with options, which accounted for about 83% of land banks, was worth 14.3 years of production. That is about enough land to build 1.4 million homes.

What is more, under the current system, there is very little that local authorities can do about it, because existing compulsory purchase order powers are legalistic, expensive, time-consuming and complex. Authorities are in a weak position to try to get the land brought forward. That is why we have argued for and will deliver much greater transparency in the system by ensuring that developers register the land that they own or have options on. We will give councils the power to charge developers escalating fees for sitting on land with planning permission to incentivise them to actually build the homes they said they wanted to build.

The idea is denounced by the Secretary of State but it is supported by the International Monetary Fund and by the hon. Members for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) and for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) and indeed it was supported by the Planning Minister before he got his job. As a last resort, we will give local authorities proper compulsory purchase powers so they can, in the right circumstances, buy, assemble and grant planning permission on land that is being held back from development.

What is the purpose of this? It is to address the current imbalance in power between communities and developers. This is the point the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) raised. Where communities decide where new housing needs to go, which is what neighbourhood planning is all about and why I strongly support it, and when permission has been given, they should be able to do more to ensure that the houses actually get built. But there is a problem here, and it is the reason why the Planning Minister gets a lot of stick from many of his Back Benchers. When a five-year land supply has been identified, all the cards are stacked in the developers’ favour. They can look at one site and say, “That’s brownfield, too expensive to develop, there is contamination. We are not going there.” They can look at another site and say “That’s not viable.” They do not explain their measure of viability but just end the conversation by saying it is not viable. They look at a third site and say, “Okay we can do about 100 houses a year on that site”, even though, physically, it could take 250, 500, or say, 1,000 houses. Then, at the end of the process, when the numbers are added up against the council’s assessment of its annual housing need, what happens? Lo and behold, developers say, “Your five-year land supply is inadequate and therefore, we would like to build there and there and there.” That is what is going on up and down the country.

I think the deal is that communities have to take responsibility for identifying sufficient land for housing supply, but they then have to be able to ensure that the houses that are needed are built on the land that they have identified. What we have at the moment is a system in which communities and their local authorities have very little power and that is why change is required.

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

What does the right hon. Gentleman mean by community? How does he identify the community in this context?

[Hilary Benn]

First, the community is represented by the local authority, and, secondly, I think the community has a really important part to play by joining in the process of neighbourhood planning. We have seen from some parts of the country—Thame is probably the best example—that the community took responsibility. It consulted and had a referendum and, from memory, 73% of people voted in favour of the plan. It identified sites for housing development. I think that is the right approach, because for too long, we have had a system where no one has taken responsibility and everyone has pointed the finger at somebody else when it comes to housing supply. That is why we need change.

[Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman join me in urging the Labour Hounslow council in west London, which has development sites of 900 units, to include some affordable housing?

[Hilary Benn]

I am very strongly in favour of affordable housing—I was not aware that we had any county councils in west London, but I think that the hon. Lady was referring to something else. We need more private housing, more housing for rent and more social housing at a price that people can afford.

We also need new towns and garden cities, so what about what I would refer to as the great mystery of the highly reclusive new towns and garden cities prospectus? Just to remind the House, two years ago, the Prime Minister announced that he would be publishing a consultation by the end of the year on garden cities—does everyone remember that?—but 2012 came to an end and it did not appear, and 2013 happened and it still did not materialise. We then read reports in the newspapers that the Prime Minister was suppressing a document and had gone cold on the whole idea. Then, in January, the Housing Minister said that he was not aware of a report that was supposed to have been published, but the Deputy Prime Minister said that there was a prospectus and that the Government should be honest about their intentions. Then the Secretary of State contradicted his Housing Minister and said that he had been told by his Department that there was a report, but not a report from the Department for Communities and Local Government—I do hope the House is keeping up.

Then, last week, the Chancellor announced that there would be a new garden city at Ebbsfleet with 15,000 homes. The only trouble is that that is 5,000 fewer homes than the 20,000-home development announced for Ebbsfleet in December 2012. Only this Chancellor could proclaim a smaller development as a triumph—backwards not forwards. We look forward to the publication of that prospectus, hopefully before Easter, and if the Secretary of State has not already seen a copy, I trust he will ask for it. After such a lengthy gestation, I hope that it does not disappoint him or the rest of us.

That episode shows that there has clearly been fighting within the Government—within the Cabinet—about what should be in it. We now know, thanks to the Yorkshire Post and the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams), that the same thing is happening inside the Department for Communities and Local Government.

I feel very sorry for the Under-Secretary, whom I notice is not in his place today, because he does not always look entirely happy and that may be why he decided to unburden himself at the Lib Dem conference recently. He said that being compared to the Secretary of State—I think it was a joke—was

“the most grievous possible insult”

that anyone could deliver. I think that is unfair and unkind to his boss. He was complimentary about the Planning Minister but said that he was

“hated by many Tory MPs”.

That is possibly true, but I think it is also unfair, and since then, the hon. Gentleman seems to have been given all the pretty unpleasant jobs in the Department, defending the indefensible. I hope the fact that he is not here today does not mean that he is being held hostage in the Department by the Secretary of State and I hope that he retains his independent streak.

The most damning comments from the Under-Secretary were about a flagship policy of his own Department:

“The new homes bonus… I’m not a fan of. I don’t think it’s an incentive, necessarily, for local authorities to give planning permission. I don’t think it’s actually driving decision-making on the ground.”

He is in good company, because the National Audit Office agrees. As we are already aware, the Housing Minister does not seem to know what it is meant for either, because he has told the House:

“I am afraid the new homes bonus is not about encouraging people to build homes.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2013; Vol. 571, c. 11.]

We have now had it from two Ministers—it is not effective.

The new homes bonus is also profoundly unfair. It is given to councils according to the number of homes that happen to be built in their area and it is top-sliced from formula grant, which is distributed according to need. Therefore—surprise, surprise—the areas that are getting most of the money are those where the homes will probably be built anyway, which tend to be better off, while the areas that are losing funding are those where there is less demand for housing, which tend to be worse off. It is yet another example of this Government, in tough times, taking most from those who have least, and in so doing they fail that basic test of fairness.

The Government just do not get it. At a time when real wages are falling, as was confirmed by the Office for Budget Responsibility document published last week, they think that the most important thing to do is give millionaires a tax cut. They think that councils in the most deprived areas with the greatest need should face the biggest reductions, while some of the wealthiest councils get an increase in the money they have to spend.

There are 10 Members of Parliament lucky enough to have councils in their constituencies that will be better off in terms of spending power per household—the Secretary of State’s preferred measure—by 2015-16 than they were in 2010-11. Four of them are in the Cabinet. Two of them are Government Whips. Under this Secretary of State, the 25 most deprived local authorities in England will lose 10 times as much spending power per household as the 25 least deprived.

Not only are we seeing the biggest reductions in spending power in the areas with the highest need while there are increases in spending power in the wealthiest areas, but before long, the funding difference between those areas, having eroded, will in some cases be reversed. Within four years, under this Government, local spending power per household will be higher in Wokingham—I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) is no longer in his place—than it will be in Leeds, Sheffield or Newcastle, even though those cities face far greater pressures.

Most people would say that that is extraordinary. Most people would regard it as unfair and impossible to justify. So why does the Secretary of State think that areas in greater need should actually receive less? We know what he thinks already, because in tough times for councils some services are becoming unviable, with entitlement to social care disappearing in some cases, and libraries, the arts, Sure Start centres and women’s refuges going. What does he say to councils? He says, “What’s your problem? These cuts are really quite modest. What are you complaining about?”

It is not just communities that are being hit; it is the people in the greatest need in those communities. What has the Secretary of State done? He has forced up council tax bills for people in work on the lowest incomes: carers, the disabled, injured veterans and war widows. Summonses have been issued and bailiffs are knocking on doors, because people are poor. That is why they are being affected.

The Government are forcing people to pay the hated and immoral bedroom tax, undermining community, neighbourliness and a sense of place. Once again, that hits people on the lowest incomes, most of whom are disabled. Let us consider for a moment a family receiving housing benefit, a mother and father with two children living in a three-bedroom council house. If one of the children leaves home to get a job, the Government are telling that family, “Move.” Two years later, the second child leaves home and gets a job elsewhere. What do the Government say to that family? They say, “Just move again”, leaving mum and dad in a one-bedroom property. Then, three years later, the father’s mother becomes ill and needs to come and live with them so that they can care for her. What do the Government say? “Oh, just move again.” I cannot think of a policy more calculated to undermine family life, and you know what? That family will not even have a spare bedroom so that their grandchildren can come and stay. That is why people are so angry about the bedroom tax and why, if we win in 2015, we will abolish it.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Gentleman has had a go. I am going to bring my remarks to an end, because many people want to speak.

Only last week, when the Chancellor had the nerve to get up in the House and say, “Oh, well, we are all in this together”, and the OBR confirmed that real wages were falling, what did we discover? That some Cabinet Ministers had been giving hefty pay rises—to whom? Their special advisers. The architect of and chief apologist for the bedroom tax, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, gave his special adviser a 36% pay increase in one year alone. If that is not proof that this Government stand up for the wrong people, I do not know what is.

This is a Budget that provides too little, too late to deal with either the chronic shortage of houses or the cost of living crisis, and the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government have shown once again that they do not really understand, and are not prepared to take the action that we need to make life better for the British people.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

amendment of the law

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I draw the attention of the House to an indirect interest, declarable but not registerable, as my wife receives rental income from a property.

We welcome this opportunity to discuss the Budget and housing. The housing crisis has come upon us over many years—people living longer, a rising population, the breakdown of relationships and new families looking for a secure home. There is rising demand but not enough supply. The well housed—the majority—are affected only when they think about where their children can afford to live, whether they want to rent or to buy; while the younger generation, priced out of the market, see their dream of home ownership recede into the distance.

The Minister responsible for planning, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), expressed the consequences eloquently in his Policy Exchange speech earlier this year, when he talked about the misery of young families forced to grow up in tiny flats with no outside space, and working men and women in their 20s and 30s having to live with their parents or share bedrooms with friends. Doing something about that is a task for all of us. We have to harness land, money and consent to build the communities we need so that young people and families can build a better future.

Ministers have made big claims for what was announced in the Budget. Of course we welcome steps that will enable people to get a foot on the housing ladder, and where they work, we will support them; after all, helping people to get a home is exactly what we have been calling on the Government to do. But the proof will lie in the detail of the schemes and on progress in actually managing to build more homes. As always with the Secretary of State, the issue is not so much his stated intention as his delivery. Perhaps that explains why we have had four major housing launches over the past three years and more than 300 announcements on housing; and why, in his recent speech to the Conservative spring conference on what he had actually achieved, the Secretary of State devoted three words to building more houses, and 194 words to talking about closing down a bar in the basement of his Department.

In the past few days, headline after headline has queried the Government’s grasp of the detail of its latest scheme. The Chancellor did not seem to know, and neither did the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, whether the scheme could indeed act as a spare-home subsidy, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor memorably christened it; whereas they certainly know that they are forcing social tenants out of their own homes because they have a spare room.

Let us begin by examining the facts about the Government’s record. Housing starts fell by 11% last year to 98,000. The number of private homes started was down; the number of local authority homes started was down; and the number of housing association homes started was down—indeed, the figure of 19,460 was the lowest for eight years.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that in 13 years of Labour government fewer council houses were built than in the entire period of the Thatcher Government?

[Hilary Benn]

I will happily confirm that we did not build enough council houses, although that began to change in 2007. Indeed, 70,000 affordable homes for which this Government have tried to take credit in their target of 170,000 were started by the Labour Government.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

I urge my right hon. Friend to resist the temptation raised by the Secretary of State to be too political, and commend to him the partnership work of Labour Tameside council and New Charter housing trust, which together have set the ambition and the reality of producing one affordable home a day for the next three years. That is Labour in action.

[Hilary Benn]

I welcome the efforts that my hon. Friend has described. I said a moment ago that this is a responsibility for all of us, but I cannot promise to resist the temptations presented by the Secretary of State, given what he had to say.

Ministers do not want to talk about housing starts, because the figures are bad, so instead they want to focus on completions. Let us have a look at them. The facts are pretty stark. The number of completions in England in each of the first two years of the coalition Government was lower than in any one of the 13 years of the Labour Government. In other words, we completed more homes in every one of those years than the Government have managed in either year since they were elected. Indeed, the Secretary of State has the dubious distinction of presiding over the lowest level of completions by any peacetime Government since the mid-1920s. That is some achievement. No wonder the construction industry has been so hard hit. Eighty thousand construction workers are out of work, and output has fallen by 8.2%, contributing a great deal to the absence of growth in the British economy. The rate of home ownership has fallen, and there are 136,000 fewer home owners than when the Government came to power. That is hitting the youngest hardest, because the average age of a first-time buyer is now 37.

Official statistics from the Secretary of State’s Homes and Communities Agency show that affordable housing starts collapsed in the last financial year by 68%; homelessness and rough sleeping are up by a third since the election; the number of families with children and/or a pregnant woman housed in bed-and-breakfast accommodation for six weeks or more has risen by over 800% since the coalition came together; and 125 councils have had families in bed-and-breakfast accommodation for six weeks or more. As private rents have continued their relentless rise and incomes are squeezed, more people in work have to claim housing benefit to help them pay the rent.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

I am struggling with an inconsistency on the Labour Benches. The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), said that housing was essentially a private sector operation and that the public sector need not be involved in it.

[Hilary Benn]

I simply say to the hon. Gentleman that if he cares to look at the record of the Labour Government, he will see that 2 million more homes were built during those 13 years, 500,000 of which were affordable homes that we provided, and 1 million more families were able to buy their own home. That stands in comparison to the Government’s miserable record over the past two years.

[Clive Efford]

In response to the previous intervention, I remind Members that this Government inherited the biggest council house building programme for 20 years, but one of their first decisions was to scrap it, which is why we have so few social housing starts.

[Hilary Benn]

My hon. Friend is correct. That is a consequence of the 60% cut.

The number of people on housing benefit has gone up by 300,000, almost entirely accounted for by people in work. When the Prime Minister launched NewBuy, the previous scheme, in March last year, we were told that it would help 100,000 people to get a mortgage. A year on, how many people has it actually helped? The answer is 1,500. Firstbuy, which was slightly more successful, has helped 6,000 people against a target of 16,500.

Then there is the strange case of the remarkably reclusive infrastructure guarantee. It was launched by the Chancellor in the autumn statement. He said that he would set aside £10 billion for investment in housing. It sounded good and we supported it, but we now know that not a single penny of it has yet been used to support house building. The facts are clear: lots of promises, precious little delivered, and not a lot for the Secretary of State to crow about.

[Mr Sheerman]

Many of my constituents are fed up with listening to Punch and Judy debates like this. They are getting tired of hearing, “They did this, but we didn’t do that.” Could we not offer the Government a proper agreement to discuss the way forward to deliver affordable housing now, because it is a national emergency? Is there not a possibility that the parties in this House could get together for a change?

[Hilary Benn]

Well, I have already told the Secretary of State that when he has proposals that will work and succeed, I will support them. If he wants the benefit of further advice from the Opposition, I would be happy to see him in his office, especially if he is buying the tea and biscuits himself.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I wish to make a little more progress.

I will now turn to the Budget. I have some questions to put to the Secretary of State. We know that the Government have a soft spot for people who earn a lot of money, but why is he proposing that his new deposit and mortgage scheme should be made available to anyone earning any amount, including millionaires, so that they can buy a house worth up to £600,000? Why is he changing the rules in that way, given that Firstbuy is currently only for those with family incomes below £60,000, and given that the Treasury document published last Wednesday states that the scheme is meant to help

“households struggling to save for the high mortgage deposits required by lenders”?

How many struggling top rate taxpayers does he expect to take advantage of the new scheme? No doubt they will be very grateful to him for his generosity.

In respect of the mortgage guarantee element of the help-to-buy scheme, can the Secretary of State clarify once and for all whether people who already own a property will be able to use it to buy a second home? He did not quite answer that earlier—[Interruption.] No, he did not. On Thursday, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills could not answer the question. When asked, he simply said:

“The scheme has not yet been designed in detail.”—[Official Report, 21 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 1102.]

At the same time, the Minister for Housing told “World at One” that second-home purchases would not be allowed. The BBC then reported that No. 10 had had to clarify the position. It seemed that the Housing Minister had been referring to another part of the help-to-buy scheme relating to equity loans. So yesterday we all turned on “The Andrew Marr Show” to watch the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and far from ruling it out categorically, he said, in a formulation that the Secretary of State has repeated today:

“Our intention is not to help people to buy second homes”.

If the Government do not want it to happen, why do Ministers not simply make it clear that it is not going to happen? Otherwise, reminiscent of last year’s Budget, we will have fanfare followed by farce.

In the event that these schemes are over-subscribed, what criteria will be used to determine which applicants are going to get assistance? I listened very carefully to the Secretary of State when he said that foreign nationals would not be eligible for assistance from the scheme, but where in the Government’s scheme description does it say that foreign nationals will not be eligible? I have looked at the mortgage eligibility criteria, and they do not say that. Has he taken any advice on whether EU nationals who are resident in the UK will be barred by law from taking part in the scheme?

What estimate has the Secretary of State made of the impact that “help to buy” will have on the housing market, given that we know that it is the lack of supply that has led to high house prices? The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has warned that the Government must be careful not to create “another housing bubble”. It seems that the scheme is not even a done deal with the lenders, because the Council of Mortgage Lenders has set out certain conditions that it wants to be met, or else, it warns, the scheme could be made “uneconomical”. How many additional homes, in total, does the Secretary of State think will be built as a result of the scheme?

[Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend also seek clarity on whether, in the event of a family break-up and a parent wishing to buy a home, that parent will be restricted in the number of bedrooms they can have in that home, or is aspiration only for some and not for others?

[Hilary Benn]

That is a very good question that has already been asked. I am very happy to give way to the Secretary of State if he wishes to answer it. Does he wish to answer? No, he does not.

We need a lot of new affordable homes because of the decision taken by the Government nearly three years ago to slash the affordable housing budget, when £4 billion was taken away. We are then asked to be grateful to the Secretary of State when we hear in the Budget announcements that an additional £225 million will be made available, although it seems that only £125 million of it will be spent before 2015. That figure is dwarfed by the original £4 billion cut. We are told that this is a time for tough choices. A quarter of a billion pounds was identified by the Secretary of State to try to persuade councils to collect the bins in the way that he thinks is correct. It was such a failure that only one council took him up on his offer. A quarter of a billion pounds and one council: think how many affordable homes that money could have been used to build! If the Government want to be taken seriously on affordable housing, they have to will the means. That is why we called for the 4G auction proceeds and the bankers’ bonus tax repetition to be used to build 125,000 new affordable homes to get the economy moving.

The Secretary of State referred to councils. We know that he is presiding over cuts to the local authority sector that are bigger than in any other part of the public sector and that the cuts are being unfairly applied. Councils need as much money as they can find to help, in part, to build homes. When the Secretary of State was asked about these cuts earlier this year in front of the departmental Select Committee, he said that in his view the cuts were “modest”. In private, however, it seems that his views are rather different. When it was reported last month that the Chancellor was looking for further cuts from certain Departments, including CLG, The Times said that

“sources close to Mr Pickles”—

[Interruption.] It certainly was not me. The Times said that

“sources close to Mr Pickles made clear that he was not accepting the latest reductions, arguing that council services had already been cut to the bone.”

It seems, therefore, that the Secretary of State’s private views are rather different from his public views. We are used to hearing Liberal Democrats say one thing to one audience and another thing to another, but I am surprised that the Secretary of State is also doing so.

This is a familiar record. The Secretary of State, as the statistics show, is not very good at getting things done. It is not just me who thinks that; the Chancellor does, too. Apparently the Chancellor was in a fiery mood at the Cabinet meeting following the loss of the triple A credit rating and challenged Ministers about the poor rate of growth. The Daily Telegraph reported:

“Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, was given a ‘dressing down’ for failings in the Government’s flagship enterprise zone programme, according to sources.

With less than a month until he unveils his Budget, the Chancellor criticised Mr Pickles over figures that show that one in three enterprise zones is failing to attract enough businesses. Mr Pickles is then said to have attempted to deflect the blame on to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, by accusing him of failing to convince foreign businesses to invest in the schemes.”

It is a very familiar story: Cabinet members are so busy fighting and blaming each other that it is no wonder that they cannot sort out the problems facing the country.

The reforms to the national planning policy framework were supposed to streamline the planning system, but it seems that they have left councils less able to decide applications quickly. The national rate of decisions taken on major applications within 13 weeks has fallen from 62% in 2011 to 57% in 2012, and the same is true of minor applications determined within eight weeks, which are down from 72% to 69%, and the transition period is about to finish.

The planning Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford, said recently that he wants further relaxation of the planning laws. We would be very interested to hear what he has in mind.

[Richard Graham]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. May I confirm for him that the relaxation of planning laws introduced by the new planning Minister has been incredibly helpful to my constituents? It has ensured that work on three brownfield sites is now going ahead, which will be a great boon to the people of Gloucester.

The right hon. Gentleman also made a point earlier about the Secretary of State’s problems with delivery. Given that the right hon. Gentleman agreed earlier with one of my Liberal Democrat friends that delivery was a problem for his party when it was in power, is it not better to focus on the Budget announcements and—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Mr Graham, please keep interventions short. Sixty-one Members wish to get in and speak. If we are going to get on, we must have short interventions.

[Hilary Benn]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) for agreeing that the Secretary of State is having problems with the delivery of housing. I have already indicated that we will support any measures that will help.

Councils will have to make proper assessments of their housing need. On the Prime Minister’s announcement today on council and social housing and migration, the Secretary of State knows that people cannot just get off a plane and get a council house. He will be familiar, of course, with section 160A of the Housing Act 1996, and he will know that councils already have the power to put in place allocation schemes, because the previous Labour Government issued guidance in 2009 and an increasing number of them are doing so. It would be helpful if we could get clarity about precisely what is being proposed, given that the housing lead of the Local Government Association, Councillor Mike Jones, who is a Conservative, has queried the need for the guidance, and given that this morning’s papers reported that the Government plan to impose an expectation on councils. How exactly is it possible to impose an expectation on councils? [Interruption.] I say to the planning Minister that I have a little bit more experience of Government than him—and it shows.

Ministers are looking to councils to identify housing need, but I say to them that the Growth and Infrastructure Bill will not assist councils in doing so, because clause 1 threatens to take away the power of local communities to decide whether housing is provided. The planning Minister, who is being very vocal, said that “vanishingly few” councils would be caught by that provision. However, to judge by the latest figures, as many as 21 local authorities could be stripped of their democratic accountability in taking decisions on housing planning applications if developers choose to go straight to the Planning Inspectorate.

How does the planning Minister think that will assist communities to take responsibility for housing provision? All of us have to face up to the need to provide more homes. That is the point that he has been making. However, is it better to let developers decide where houses should be built or to allow communities to take that responsibility for themselves?

I turn, finally, to one of the effects of what the Government are doing, which was not mentioned by the Chancellor in his speech on Wednesday. That is the effect that the decisions taken by the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions will have on people on low incomes and their homes. So far in this debate, we have talked about the need to build homes so that people can move into them. I want to turn to the problem of people being forced out of their homes because of the Government’s bedroom tax and the Secretary of State’s poll tax.

One consequence of what the Government are doing is likely to be rising rent arrears. That is exactly what councils and housing associations up and down the country are anticipating. Last week, the evidence from the universal credit pilot showed rising rent arrears. That is creating a lot of uncertainty, not least for housing associations. A number of them have had credit rating downgrades recently. If lenders think that housing associations will have difficulty collecting rent, it could put up their borrowing costs, which could impact on their balance sheets and their ability to borrow. Ultimately, it will affect their ability to build the homes that the Secretary of State says he wants to see. All of that will create huge challenges for families, councils and housing associations, not least because of the debt that people will get into.

At the very time when the Chancellor has decided that the most important thing to do is to cut the top rate of tax, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has brought in his new poll tax and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has brought in the bedroom tax. What is so astonishing is that they are both singling out one group of people in our society. Whether they are working, seeking work or unable to work, the people who will be affected are those on the very lowest incomes, because that is why they get council tax benefit and housing benefit.

Given that the fundamental problem in the country is a lack of growth in the economy—the Chancellor’s crowning failure—have Ministers paused for a second to consider what impact those two taxes will have on the economy? All the evidence shows that when people who are on low incomes have money, they tend to spend it. In Leeds, £9.4 million—[Interruption.] I know that the planning Minister, who is chuntering from a sedentary position, does not want to hear this, but the people on the lowest incomes in Leeds are going to lose £9.4 million that they do not have because of rent increases and council tax rises.

Incredibly, last week the Secretary of State tried to blame local authorities for his policy, when he said that they

“seek to persecute and to tax the poor.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 611.]

That is extraordinary. The only person who is to blame is the Secretary of State. It is his legislation. He is the reason why bills are landing on people’s doorsteps that many of them will find hard to pay. Ministers know that people will do their best to stay in their own home—indeed, the Government’s assessment expects that to happen—because they want to stay with their friends, family and community.

[Kate Green]

Is my right hon. Friend interested in research just released by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies which shows that the Government’s welfare reforms, and the loss to family incomes, mean that on average 80% of money lost will be lost to the local economy as a result of reduced local shopping, reduced use of local transport, and reduced socialising?

--- Later in debate ---

[Hilary Benn]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: the reforms will have a damaging economic impact and be bad for families who cannot afford it, although they will try to stay if they can because they value community, friends, neighbours and a sense of place. Ministers know that even if people downsize, there are not enough smaller properties for them to move into. That is why this is a tax: people cannot avoid it because they cannot move.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

On the bedroom tax, does my right hon. Friend agree that Nos. 10 and 11 Downing street are social housing? Will the occupants of those homes be moving out in light of the fact that—[Laughter.]

[Hilary Benn]

My hon. Friend is right on the first point, although I am not entirely sure that the occupants are claiming housing benefit. We wait to be informed.

People with disabilities will be forced to move and the new home will have to be adapted all over again. Divorced dads who are trying to keep in contact with their children will be told that they have to pay the bedroom tax on the spare bedroom where they stay at the weekend, but as we know, some people will have no choice but to move. The final absurdity—the Chief Secretary should be interested in this—is that if people do move to the right sized property in the private rented sector, because of higher rents the housing benefit bill is likely to be bigger than that paid on the social home from which the family was forced out.

[Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

I will conclude now, because many other Members want to speak. I have been generous in giving way but I want to finish on this point.

Last Friday a constituent came to see me in my surgery. He is a man in his late 50s who has worked for the past 42 years, until last December when he became unwell. He currently has to live on £71 a week and has just received a council tax bill for £108.25. He is not sure how he is going to pay it and he asked me—it is quite something when someone says this to a Member of Parliament, because we had not met before—“Can I tell you that I can no longer keep the heating on in my flat because it costs me £25 a week and I do not have the money to pay it?”

The Chancellor, the Secretary of State and other Ministers are fond of telling us that we have to make really tough decisions, but I wonder how difficult it was to decide to give those on highest incomes a tax reduction at the beginning of next month, while imposing a reduction in council tax benefit and the bedroom tax on people. They are taking money from those who are poor—that is what we are talking about—and giving it to those who are rich. That is why they should scrap the cut to council tax benefit and get rid of the bedroom tax.

The Secretary of State was full of his usual bravado and occasional bluster in what he had to say, but the cold hard reality of the collision of his policies with people’s lives shows that those policies are not well thought out and are incapable of being delivered. Because of that record, we have a promise of growth that has not materialised, a promise of localism that is not what it seems, and a promise of homes that have not been built. This Chancellor, this Secretary of State, and this Budget have nothing to offer the people of Britain.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Business without Debate

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[James Duddridge]

Not moved.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Government are clearly in a state of chaos when it comes to tuition fees. Yesterday, the Leader of the House tried to move a motion and it was objected to, much to the anger of the Chief Whip, as you know. Today, the Leader of the House tabled one motion in his own name and two motions in the name of the Prime Minister but, as we have just seen, did not have the courage to move the motion in his own name.

I am sure that you understand the deep sense of anger that there is in the House at the amount of time that the Government are proposing to give Members on Thursday to debate the biggest change in tuition fees and support for higher education that we have ever seen. Since the House is being treated with contempt by the Government, may we now have a statement from the Leader of the House to tell us what on earth is going on? Will he indicate how much time we will have on Thursday to debate the increase in tuition fees? [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order. The concern of the Chair is always that matters should be handled in an orderly manner. [Interruption.] Order. That has happened, whatever the disquiet or consternation the right hon. Gentleman or others may feel. I know that he will understand that it would not be right for me, from the Chair, to say anything more on the matter. His concerns have, however, been forcefully registered.