Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-23
Topic: Housing
Ruth Margaret Cadbury (Labour, Centre-left): The spin ahead of yesterday’s Budget announcements kept repeating that the Chancellor had no wriggle room, but why, after seven years, have the Government got no wriggle room? The Conservatives cannot keep blaming the Labour Government—not that they ever should have done, given that we had just come out of a global financial crisis in 2010 and that the UK came out of that global financial crash in better shape than many other countries. But here in the UK the Conservatives blew it all away with their fiscally illiterate austerity policy, which hampered the country’s growth and damaged our public services Seven years later, wages are down and growth is down. We now have the lowest growth of all the G7 countries. Productivity is also down—it is embarrassingly poor compared with that of our competitor countries—and borrowing and debt are up. Yesterday, we saw the further downgrading of growth projections and of productivity, thanks to the disaster that Brexit is to our economy. In seven years, cuts have had to be made to virtually all our public services, and there are deeper cuts still to come. Over 80% of the burden of those cuts has fallen on women’s shoulders. What of the little titbits on welfare benefits, housing and other public services that the Chancellor dropped into yesterday’s Budget? They make big headlines, but small beer Given the pressure on time, I will address just a few of the Chancellor’s proposals. Housing policies need to be evidence-based. All policies should be evidence-based, but never are they less so than in the bit about housing in the Chancellor’s Red Book. It states: "The government is determined to fix the dysfunctional housing market, and restore the dream of home ownership for a new generation." That is fine, but in my west London constituency many people just dream about having a home, let alone owning one. Young and even not-so-young people are unlikely to be able to leave their parents’ homes. Families are in poor-quality temporary accommodation that they can hardly afford, and they are always at risk of having to move—often for years on end. There is no hope for them. The Red Book correctly goes on to state that average house prices in London are 12 times the average worker’s salary, but then it says: "The only sustainable way to make housing more affordable over the long term is to build more homes in the right places." There is not a jot of evidence to show that building more homes in London would bring prices down in the current distorted housing market. Even if it did, shaving a few thousand off the asking price of a new home would not help my constituents earning less than £100,000 or who do not have a six-figure deposit from the bank of mum and dad The Chancellor expects to provide at least 25,000 new affordable homes through the affordable homes programme. Does he mean affordable homes, or does he mean homes for social rent? That is a drop in the ocean. Hounslow Council alone has 10,000 families registered as needing affordable homes, and most of them can afford only a social rented home. The last time that this country built more than 250,000 homes a year was in the 1970s, and 40% of them were council homes. We need to aspire again to building good-quality homes that are affordable to all, providing stable homes, a reduced benefit bill and help for productivity The Chancellor’s Red Book says that councils will need support to ensure homes get built as soon as possible. If he is serious, a monetary figure needs to be attached to that. He can start by making the lifting of the borrowing cap applicable to all authorities without them having to go through as-yet-unspecified hoops to be allowed to invest in new council housing, and give them the ability to reinvest receipts from council house sales in building new council homes The £3.2 billion stamp duty giveaway will benefit 3,500 buyers by about £2,000—nice for them—but that is a cost to the taxpayer of £924,000. How many council homes would that money buy? It puts up prices for those struggling first-time buyers; it mainly benefits those already on the housing ladder; and it will not help anyone earning less than £150,000 in west London In conclusion, the Budget only scratches the surface of the issues of those who are struggling as a result of the Government’s failed fiscal policies over the past seven years. It does nothing for those on low wages or insecure zero-hours contracts, nothing for those who need substantial growth in council house building and nothing for our councils and other local services or for those who work in them. The Chancellor brought little or nothing for the many and took nothing away from the few.