John Healey
Main Page: John Healey (Labour - Wentworth and Dearne)
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Gavin Barwell)
I hope we can rise to the challenge. If every local authority was building at the rate that my hon. Friend’s local authority is building, we would be building 370,000 homes a year. That is a sign that it is possible to build the homes that this country needs; it just requires the political will to do it.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
My question is for the Secretary of State: where is his housing White Paper? We were promised it in the autumn. We were then promised it alongside the autumn statement, then before the end of the year, and then first thing in the new year. We were told that it was in the Government’s grid for publication today. It has been delayed more times than a trip on Southern rail. I say to the Secretary of State: what is the problem?
Sajid Javid
The right hon. Gentleman will not have to wait long for the housing White Paper. When he sees it, he will see that it does a lot more than happened under the previous Labour Government. When he was the Housing Minister, I understand house building fell to its lowest level since the 1920s.
John Healey
The right hon. Gentleman has shown us exactly what the problem is: the huge gap between the Government’s rhetoric on housing and their record. Under Labour, we saw 2 million new homes, 1 million more homeowners and the largest investment programme in social housing for a generation. For seven years under Tory Ministers, we have seen failure on all fronts—higher homelessness, fewer homeowners and less affordable housing. Even the Housing Minister has said that affordable housing is “unacceptably low” and “feeble”. Does the Secretary of State agree, and what is he going to do in his White Paper to deal with this crisis?
Sajid Javid
Under Labour, we saw housing affordability, measured by median income compared with the average house price, double—going up from three and a half times to seven times. We saw the number of first-time buyers fall by 55%, and the number of units available for social rent decline by 421,000. That is Labour’s record on housing.