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Housing Waiting Lists

I declare my interest, as set out in the Register of Members' Interests; I am the director of a building company and a property company, and have one or two other entries. This is an interesting and important debate. Unemployment did not quite break the 2-million mark today, but many Members see people with housing problems in their surgeries. It is fairly clear that many of the people who come to see me time and again with great, long-term problems have difficulties that date from their being caught with negative equity in the early 1990s, when my party was in government. They have never quite recovered from the housing difficulties that they faced then. The difficulty today, as opposed to 10 or 15 years ago, is the level of personal debt; mortgage debt is far higher. I fear that as unemployment rises, the consequences for individuals will be pretty severe. One welcomes any kind of assistance with mortgages, but the reality is that if somebody is out of work for any time, they will get into financial difficulty. If there are two people in a household who work, and one loses their job, the household does not necessarily qualify for mortgage help. The rules mean that those who are highly geared up, in particular, will face problems. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), our Front-Bench spokesman, the figures show an increase in the number of people on the waiting list for social housing. I think that in the next two or three years, there will be a large growth in those figures. There was not much that I could disagree with in the speech of the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford); it was a well-turned speech on housing policy. Numbers are not the only issue, although they are important. The difference between this country and the United States of America, which has surplus housing, is that longevity and divorce mean that there will be continued housing demand here in the long term. However, we must ensure quality housing, and we must manage our housing stock better. Financial or tax incentives to manage our housing stock better are necessarily far more productive than sallying forth with targets for 3 million homes. We should bear it in mind that there are some 2 million empty flats over shops, and local authorities and social landlords still have quite a lot of void properties. There are far too many empty properties in the private sector, and a lot more could be done to use existing housing stock to house people. We have to consider the issue as a whole if we are to provide housing, that most basic requirement. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) mentioned the difference between the car industry and the housing industry. He was right; it is important that we house people, because the consequences of poor housing for families and children are substantial. I am on the Health Committee, which is looking into health inequalities, and the issue of housing tends to come up fairly regularly in relation to health inequalities. The issues are intricately linked. In the brief time available to me, I would like to raise an issue that I mentioned in an intervention. We are fortunate in my area to have Poole Housing Partnership, an arm's length management organisation. It does a very good job in providing housing for people. It is still within the housing revenue account system. This year, it is paying £3.4 million of negative subsidy—in other words, it pays that amount into the pot. Next year, it is expected to pay £4.5 million into the pot, which is about 20 per cent. of council rents. Our area has high housing costs, and we have a waiting list as a result. Social housing has to take the strain. Local people find it difficult to understand why, when they pay rent to Poole Housing Partnership, that money is recycled elsewhere and goes towards national public policies. It was pointed out in an intervention that if it is right to subsidise council rents, the subsidy should come from general taxation; it should not be other tenants who subsidise council rents. That is a powerful point. We are heading towards the decent homes standard, which is good; I think that we are all in favour of that. However, many authorities and arm's length management organisations will find it difficult to continue to maintain their houses at a decent standard if the sums that I have mentioned are to come out of their budgets. Poole Housing Partnership is worried that the current system may not be sustainable in the long term because of the sums that are taken out of the rents. Those sums could be spent on maintaining properties, reducing the number of void properties, and providing a real service. I make a plea to the Minister. I know that the issue is under review, and that there are no magic bullets. I know that things are difficult, because if we ended the system, there would be complications and difficulties elsewhere, but my constituents, particularly those in council housing, find it difficult to understand why they are subsidising other parts of the country. They have a good arm's length management organisation in Poole Housing Partnership; they will not forgive it if, in the long term, it has to become part of a bigger organisation because of the method of financing. As we all know, housing is a basic service. It is important to our constituents. The point that my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire made about the VAT reduction was valid. Given the situation in the building industry, the number of surplus building workers, and the fact that there is potential housing land on the market, the money could have been much better spent on a long-term objective that would meet the demand that many of our constituents want met.