Jon Trickett

I was disappointed by the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), who sounded complacent when he talked about the aspiration to buy a house. Of course, there is that aspiration, but does he not understand the aspiration of people on the waiting list? Millions of people, including 170,000 children in temporary accommodation, aspire just to have a key for a council house. Has he ever seen the gleam in a family’s eyes when they get that key and manage to get a secure home, knowing it is there for the future? It is not good enough to simply say that the aspiration to buy a house is more important than the aspiration to have a home, and one that is warm and secure. Also, there was no sense of contrition that the right to buy legislation resulted in 2 million council houses being sold, whereas only 250,000 new houses were built in that period. Of those 2 million that were sold, 800,000 now belong to private landlords. That is quite shocking because the rents that private landlords charge are a multiple of what a council or social landlord would charge. In my constituency, 6,000 homes have gone to private landlords. The council received about £140 million in capital receipts for those 6,000 houses. They are now worth £1.1 billion. This has been a racket; it has been like the gold rush in the Klondike, a race for money. In the meantime, rent levels in the remaining social housing are only 61% of the rents charged by the private landlords. It is totally anomalous that for two or three houses on the same street in the same estate a higher rent will be charged by a private landlord than that for the people next door who are still renting from a social landlord. The Government need to move fast. We cannot allow so many children and families to be left in that perilous situation—55,000 individuals are struggling in the district of Wakefield. Let me make one final point. The Treasury’s dead hand of economic orthodoxy prioritises house building by housing associations over house building by councils, which is a mistake. The Bill does not address that, but I wonder whether the Minister could respond on that in some way. A council can borrow money to build an asset worth more than what it has borrowed and receive an income from it through rent, yet that counts towards the national debt; for a housing association, it is different. I think those rules explains councils’ retreat from committing to build more housing rather than social landlords.