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Housing Waiting Lists

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. It means that councils have no certainty about their income, thus making it impossible, when they are also losing receipts from the right to buy and do not know what their rental income will be from one year to the next, to plan. The plight of families waiting for housing will get worse with the recession. However, the ability of housing associations and councils to match the problem is getting weaker under existing policy. Housing associations say that building has ground to a halt as they are hampered by banks renegotiating existing loans and raising the stakes on new ones. Worse, they can no longer cross-subsidise developments through private sales and shared equity homes. As I said to the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn), councils that relied on section 106 agreements to get social housing built find that everything stops as private development stops. We must accept that, in the short term, a higher subsidy is required in many areas to keep homes being built. The Homes and Communities Agency has said that it is willing to be flexible. However, that needs to filter through to housing associations urgently. I think it will require the intervention of the Minister to ensure that that happens. We must keep building. If we stop building in this recession, when banks start lending again there will be a real danger of hyper-inflation in the housing market—need does not go away because people cannot get mortgages, and people do not stop needing social housing because there is not enough available. If we stop building, we will lose the construction workers who build the homes that we need, and if we lose their skills it may take a generation to replace them. But the recession is also an opportunity. Land is cheaper. Homes are cheaper. However, the Government have invested just £200 million in the national clearing house scheme to allow housing associations to buy up unsold property. The Government say that they want to build to create jobs, yet they have brought forward just £400 million to build 5,000 new homes. That will barely dent the list of need in this country. Instead of spending money on a VAT cut that made little or no difference to most families in this country, the Government could have spent the money providing insulation for 1 million people languishing in fuel poverty and building 40,000 new zero-carbon homes. If the Government really wanted to offer a VAT cut, how much more useful would a cut in the rate for renovation and rebuilding be? Today the Empty Homes Agency has said that it expects the number of empty properties in this country to reach 1 million for the first time. If we really want to tackle both the social housing waiting list and the blight of derelict properties in our communities, such a cut would be a tangible change that would make it cheaper to bring those homes back into use. Finally, I want the Government to go further in trying to prevent the recession from increasing the number of people who find themselves requiring emergency social housing. The Council of Mortgage Lenders has estimated that 75,000 families will face repossession this year. We have seen a raft of announcements that provide solutions for small numbers of families who meet specific criteria, but the announcement that held out the most promise for the most people—the pre-action protocol—is the announcement that suffers most from a lack of teeth. The Government urgently need to update mortgage law to drag it into the 21st century and give courts the powers to intervene if they see fit. I urge the Government to legislate and not to leave the problem until it is too late. Housing need is a serious and urgent issue—an issue that causes devastation for millions in this country, traps whole families in poverty, ruins life chances and extinguishes hope. In the face of this depth of need, we have seen from the Conservatives a motion that is so shallow and narrow in its solutions as to be insulting to my constituents who desperately want help. The Conservative party needs to start taking the issue seriously and come up with a proper policy. That is the job of the Opposition, and the Conservatives are failing in their duty.