Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

It does not, does it?—[Laughter.] I have already commented on what I believe will be included in the planning Bill, so I shall say a little about what will not be in it. One obvious example is any commitment to supporting sustainable communities through the planning system. I know from my own experience in steering my Bill through the House that the London borough of Merton got what it wanted in respect of sustainable planning guidelines only when it threatened to take the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to the High Court. The reality is that the current Department for Communities and Local Government is not yet taking the sustainability of communities seriously. We believe that that matter should be included in the planning Bill. We also believe that greater discretion should be given to local authorities on the policies that they introduce in respect of affordable housing. It has to be said that, despite the words of the Secretary of State, no commitment to tackle affordability can be seen in any of the Department’s Bills. Indeed, she kept remarkably quiet about one particular aspect of affordability—the fact that, since 1997, which seems to be her benchmark year, the Government have disposed of 500,000 social housing units bought under the right to buy. My party and I do not have a problem with that, but we do have a problem with the fact that the money raised has not been reinvested in social housing. We find that while the housing stock has been reduced by 500,000, council house waiting lists up and down the land have increased by 500,000. It is astonishing that a Labour Secretary of State, boasting of her Government’s record, could stand before the House in a Queen’s Speech debate and say that she has no proposals to deal with that problem. I turn now to the Mayor’s powers Bill. As I said before, powers cannot be created and destroyed, only redistributed. The hon. Member for Meriden put her finger on the problem of where the powers will come from. We understand that they will come primarily from the boroughs, and perhaps some will be taken away from the Greater London assembly’s scrutiny role so that the Mayor can get on with things without having too close a look taken at what he is doing. If one thing is quite clear, it is that the powers will not come from the Government office for London. London can be regarded as the one devolved area in England, but even in London, the Government office spends £55 for every £45 that the Mayor and the assembly spend. Out of every £100, the devolved structures get only £45. We will therefore look at the Mayor’s powers Bill with an eagle eye to see how any transfer of powers from central Government to the devolved Administration can best be achieved. I have already commented on the absence of any measures to deal with the affordability of housing. I was surprised that the Secretary of State had nothing to say about last week’s report that 40 per cent. of key worker homes built in London remain empty because the structure of the scheme makes them unaffordable and unsellable. In passing, I simply comment that the Conservatives have a housing policy of sorts. I heard their housing spokesman speaking about the need for more bungalows and gardens that were not on green belt sites, green sites, brown sites or in back gardens. Multi-storey bungalows will presumably turn out to be the solution.