Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-23
Topic: Housing
Wera Benedicta Hobhouse (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): Yesterday’s Budget was supposed to be "the housing Budget." It was a crucial opportunity for the Chancellor to fix the country’s housing crisis. I listened carefully to the Chancellor’s speech, and it contained not a single mention of social homes for rent. That is the area where the biggest pressures are. A combination of factors has meant that the social housing stock has fallen dramatically and very little new social housing has been built. The figures are stark: 32,000 new social homes were built in 2011, but just 5,000 were built in 2016 In the past few years, local authorities have been encouraged to transfer all their housing stock into local housing associations, to wipe historical debt off the housing revenue account. The Chancellor announced that he will lift the borrowing cap for local authorities in high-demand areas, but that is not enough. It does not address the problem in areas where housing stock has been transferred and, if anything, it should be applicable to all local authorities. There is no need to restrict councils at all. All that does is to make it more complicated for councils and potentially delay the delivery. Why does it apply only from 2019—why not straight away The housing stock of my local authority, Bath and North East Somerset Council, is now held by a housing association. It needs traditional subsidies to build new social homes for rent. Let me give an example: Foxhill is a big housing estate in my constituency that is in need of regeneration, but it has to be completely self-financed and the housing association has to operate like a private house builder. Some 75% of the new homes built will be sold privately, and the overall number of social homes to rent on site will not change. The housing association has not been able to access any funding to build new social homes—and not for lack of trying or lack of will. The devil is in the detail. Will the Minister clarify exactly what has changed and how housing associations will now be able to access funding to build new social homes for rent On affordable housing, houses built and sold by the private sector are no longer affordable for an increasingly large number of people. The problem of affordability is not going away without a big change in housing policy. The Chancellor has talked about the problem of land-banking. This is hardly a new problem, and the announcement of a review is very small fry. The Government have had years to conduct a review and act on it. I can tell the Chancellor without a review that the problem most likely lies with the big house builders with deep pockets who can afford to sit on valuable land for years and build on it only drip by drip, to maximise profit. One solution would be for Government to parcel up public land into smaller pieces and to give small and medium-sized house builders a chance to purchase the land to build on immediately—and they will build on it immediately Government could go even further and sell their land at a discount with the guarantee that the homes will be affordable or for social rent and will be built immediately. My measure is about building more social homes for rent, because that is where the problems are the deepest and most urgent—I am talking about people on universal credit who can no longer rent privately; people who become homeless; and people whose mental health suffers because of the difficulty of finding somewhere they can call home I see many desperate people on a weekly basis at my surgery. We cannot turn a blind eye to their tragedies. This whole matter goes to the heart of whether we believe in a shrinking state or a caring state that helps the just about managing. The private sector has not solved this problem, and will not do so in the future. We have had years of an ideology of replacing public ownership with private home ownership. The two can go together, but there must be a place for social housing. Let us get building social housing again.