amendment of the law

Debate between Hilary Benn and Jonathan Evans

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?