Chris Hinchliff

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. As usual, he makes a good point, and I wholly agree. As our whole nation loses out on the stifled energy, talent and creativity of so many people held back by not having a secure home where they can put down roots and flourish, it is ever clearer that the magic of the invisible hand of the free market is little more than a fairy tale told by economists to justify a refusal to meet our obligations to the least well-off members of society. However, if we look to our past for inspiration, we see many parallels between the challenges confronting us now and those facing the great post-war Labour Government who took office 80 years ago. Then, Labour came into office determined to change the “devil take the hindmost” approach to housing policy in which, as Aneurin Bevan described: “The higher income groups had their houses; the lower income groups had not. Speculative builders, supported enthusiastically, and even voraciously, by money-lending organisations, solved the problem of the higher income groups in the matter of housing”—[Official Report, 17 October 1945; Vol. 414, c. 1222.] while the rest were left behind. Bevan’s solution was to start at the other end and focus on meeting the needs of the working class. Our current state of affairs is much the same. We need the same priorities to get to the root of the contemporary housing crisis, because while house prices in many parts of the country are eye-wateringly high for all, the reality is that higher-income earners—frustrated though some of their ambitions may be—can find a home, while too often those at the other end of the spectrum cannot. Simply flooding the market with speculative developments will not address the problem. The only way to get high-quality homes that those on waiting lists can actually afford is to directly plan and deliver housing for people on low incomes. That is why we must have council housing —not housing built to maximise profits for developers’ shareholders—offering rents linked to local incomes, and hundreds of thousands of them. I will be quoting Bevan extensively, given his achievements in delivering high-quality council housing in this country.