Housing (Bradford)

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Andrew Stunell)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Streeter, to serve under your chairmanship. I am pleased to have the opportunity to have the opportunity to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward).

My hon. Friend said that he was a councillor as a young man; those in the Chamber can see that it can only have been a year or two ago. He has a long history of serving his constituents with great diligence as a member of the council and, since last year, as a Member of Parliament. He painted a clear if at times rather bleak picture of Bradford, and of the extremes of poverty and riches there and the problems for his constituents in respect of education, health and, as he rightly said, housing.

The Government certainly share my hon. Friend’s view that housing is an important component of building a growing economy. That is why we are continuing to invest in housing, through the Decent Homes programme, to bring social housing up to an acceptable standard, and through a new-build programme. We are not simply rolling forward the programmes that we inherited, although we are continuing with them, but developing a new programme using the affordable rent model. I hope that I can give my hon. Friend some comfort that the Government appreciate the problems that Bradford faces—and other places, too, but my hon. Friend highlights Bradford—at a time when, of necessity, the UK economy is in a period of stress.

My hon. Friend asked a number of specific questions. One is easier to answer than most. I think that he has invited me to speak in Bradford. I am happy to speak in Bradford—and, indeed, more or less wherever I am invited—and to say something about the Government’s policies.

[Mr Ward]

I invited the Minister to come to Bradford to listen.

[Andrew Stunell]

That was a very proper correction, from a most diligent constituency MP. I would be even happier to go to Bradford to listen than to have to give any kind of response or speech. I am sure that we can come to a way of operating that provides both of us with what we need.

My hon. Friend asked whether the affordable rent model might work to Bradford’s benefit. I shall say something about that in a moment or two. He also put in a plea that the Government should not try to micro-manage how Bradford chooses to operate. I hope that he will take some comfort from the actions of the Government so far; in particular, I draw his attention to the fact that we have de-ring-fenced—a new phrase—many of the specific grants that were the bane of local government when budgeting and making policy. That gives Bradford far more flexibility to decide its priorities and how it should spend its money for the benefit of its citizens. Further measures will assist, under the local government resource review, details of which are likely to be published next month. I can promise to visit Bradford, and I can promise that there will be ever less micro-management, although we doubtless need to keep prudence thoroughly in mind.

The Government are committed to increasing housing supply across the country. We have an investment programme designed to achieve that—in fact, we will add 150,000 affordable and social homes during the life of this Parliament. Included in that is bringing back into use 5,000 extra empty homes, which I hope will be some consolation to my hon. Friend. However, I cannot guarantee that they will all be in Bradford. Clearly, we are also looking at ways in which we can bring empty homes back into use, stimulate action and promote good practice without necessarily requiring money to be spent either by us or by Bradford. We are investing in new homes and in getting empty homes back into action.

My hon. Friend mentioned the new homes bonus. Let me remind him that Bradford has benefited from the new homes bonus to the tune of £2.8 million this year, and that was without Bradford even trying. The figures that were used in allocating that money were simply based on the number of additional homes that became available in Bradford during last year, before the council or anybody else knew that that was how we were measuring things. In future years, there is the opportunity for Bradford and its partners to work harder and more diligently to bring empty homes into use, for which the new homes bonus is payable, and also to bring new homes into use.

The growth that my hon. Friend has reported for Bradford is part of a general growth across the whole country. More households are being formed each year. They are being formed at their highest level since the 1940s, and yet the number of homes being built is at its lowest level since the 1920s. The previous Government left the country in a position in which house building was at its lowest peacetime level since 1924. We inherited social housing waiting lists at record levels. There are currently 250,000 families living in overcrowded conditions. The reality is that the number of social homes in the country has gone down by a significant number. We have seen a reduction of more than 400,000 social homes available for rent since 1997. Of course that frustrates people. It frustrates my hon. Friend, and it certainly frustrates his constituents who are left on the waiting list. We have a clear intention to address that situation.

Let me pick up on my hon. Friend’s point about how our new policy of affordable rents might benefit Bradford. I want to make it clear to him and to the partners who deliver housing in Bradford that there is no ring-fence on funding from the conversion of re-lets to prevent money being generated in Sutton by Affinity Sutton and used to fund development and build in Bradford. It is true that the affordable homes framework document encourages partners to reinvest the capacity generated from affordable rent in the area from which it was generated, but that is all that it does. It encourages such practice; it does not place a ban on doing something else. My hon. Friend has it in mind that there was a scheme for Affinity Sutton to build 200 homes in Bradford, but because it offered us a reason for not going ahead with it, a rule was passed that prevented it transferring the benefits of affordable rent elsewhere to use the money to invest in Bradford. That is not the case. Perhaps we can discuss that separately. If he needs me to reinforce that point, I would be happy to join him in meeting the Homes and Communities Agency .

The affordable rent model allows the Government to build more social and affordable homes than they would have been able to do if they had kept in place the model that they inherited. That model required more than £80,000 of subsidy per home in order to produce a home for someone to occupy. The model that we have will require less than half that money per home. We are stretching the resources so that we can build the largest number of affordable homes possible. There is nothing in that model that prevents money being spent in Bradford to deliver the homes that my hon. Friend wants.

I have spent a long time dealing with some of those points, but I hope that my hon. Friend gets some sense that the Government take seriously the kind of situation that he has so eloquently outlined.

I also want to make it clear that among the other things that are available is the green deal, which will allow many homes, especially in the private sector but not exclusively so, to have investment to bring them up to a more acceptable standard and to make real inroads into fuel poverty for my hon. Friend’s poorest constituents. That plus the energy company obligation, the money that we are investing in empty homes and the other work that we are doing to make more efficient use of the social housing stock will, I hope, give my hon. Friend some comfort that we are making a good attempt to deal with the problems that he has identified.

My hon. Friend said that the test for this Government would be whether we took seriously the towns, the cities and the communities, such as his constituency in Bradford. I say to him that we are taking all parts of the country extremely seriously. That is reflected in the way in which we amended our grant-making formula at the start of this year to increase the amount of stress that we place on poverty and the way in which money should be distributed. It is why we introduced the transitional payments and why we have the regional growth fund. Areas such as Bradford could bid for RGF funds which could then be matched by European regional development funding.

My understanding is that Bradford did not submit a bid to the first round of regional growth fund applications. I do not know whether it has bid for the second round, but a route exists for investment to be made in Bradford, using the Government’s regional growth fund.

I look forward to my visit to Bradford and to listening to my hon. Friend’s constituents very carefully. I hope that I can reassure him that Bradford will be free to deliver as it sees fit with the money that it has available. I look forward to working with him over the next few years to make absolutely sure that at the end of this Parliament he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has improved Bradford with the help of the Government.