Caroline Voaden

I will make some progress. When a social rented home becomes available, the competition is extraordinary. There were 119 bids for one home in Marlborough, 113 for one in Salcombe, and 190 bids for one house in Brixham. The measures in the Bill are not fringe ideas. The Devon Housing Commission recommended both more social and affordable homes through rural exception sites and tighter controls on second homes and holiday lets. The Devon and Torbay combined county authority has built those recommendations into its local housing plan, and they are the considered view of the people who know Devon best. I urge the Government to take the Bill seriously. I am deeply disappointed that they have chosen not to back it today. Perhaps it is the politics of it being a private Member’s Bill from someone on the Opposition Benches, or maybe it is because they really do not understand what is going on in large, dispersed rural communities. Whatever the reason, it is really poor that the Government cannot get behind a Bill introduced by someone with the years of experience that my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives has in dealing with the tragedy of homelessness in Cornwall. If anyone is really interested in understanding what it looks like down there, I cannot recommend highly enough reading “Homesick” by Catrina Davis, a heart-wrenching book about what the housing crisis in Cornwall really means. I want to see the Government back a stronger community right to buy, so that a community land trust like the one in Salcombe has a realistic chance of finding the space it needs to transform people’s lives. Everybody needs a home, and this Bill is one way to make that happen. I hope the Government will give communities in places such as Hope Cove, Salcombe and Kingswear the power to protect homes for permanent residents, and I hope they will look hard at the economics of small sites, so that building 10 homes in a village is not 10 times less attractive than building 100 far away. Without homes for local people, my local schools will keep closing, the shops and pubs will shut their doors, and the buses will stop running—if we had them; we do not have enough buses, but that is another matter. It is already happening across South Devon. My hon. Friend has introduced a Bill that would give communities the power to stop this. I implore the Government to listen and to give our towns and villages the chance they need to stay alive.