Debate on the Address

My Lords, I know that the House, not for the first time, has waited eagerly for this speech—the last from the Back Benches, not because it is from me. I congratulate the Minister and members of her team on having the courage to nail their flag to the masts in this debate. We are where we are. We could regurgitate the history of the past 20, 30 or 40 years but we would not get very far. The passion and ambition shown in the speech of my noble friend Lady Andrews augur well for the future. She more than once used the words ““challenge”” and ““challenging””, and they have a certain resonance. I know that not only the Minister’s many friends but those who are not very friendly will be watching closely for delivery as well as for promises and vision in these matters. I am confident that there will be delivery because, after a period of great dissatisfaction with many aspects of environmental policy, including housing, the hard choices will have been made. It is all very well for the Government to have policies and for this House and the other place to pass legislation, but at the end of the day the Government are not silly enough to believe that that is all that is needed. There needs to be collaboration, consultation and possibly compromise. Looking at the speakers list, I was interested to see the names of six people who share my experience of having been a Member of Parliament. The noble Lords, Lord Waddington and Lord Crickhowell, and other colleagues in this House have had the same experience, although my time as a Member of Parliament was more than 20 years ago. Things may have changed, but not very much. I recall that the worst aspect of my job was to sit in a committee room and to have ushered into my presence a constituent—or two constituents, if it was a man and his wife—who was in desperate straits over housing. Sometimes they did not have any accommodation; sometimes they had very bad private accommodation; and sometimes they had very bad council accommodation. I learnt very quickly that, when I looked at them, I was looking not just at a man and a wife but at a family. By the time I talked to them I realised that they were suffering—as every parent must—from the desperate need to do their best for their children but which they could not do. It is all very well for the noble Lord who opened for the Conservatives to say, rather sadly, that there is a desperate shortage of housing in rural areas. He ought to know that the main culprit in that was the sale of council houses. Although there were good aspects to the sale of council houses, it is no good coming to this House 20 or 30 years later and crying at the consequence of a policy that affected not only rural areas but many other areas as well. Land is the key. The Government need to beef up and create new land use, reference to which has been made more than once in this debate. I am particularly glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Best, is in his place, because he drew attention to the fact that in the community of private landlords, there are many unscrupulous people. As the secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Welfare of Park Home Owners, or mobile homes, I have some experience of this aspect of housing. Living in mobile homes seems ideal as there are 1,600 parks on which more than 200,000 people live. The majority of them are well run, with good relationships, but there are some unscrupulous site owners, just as there were in the time of Peter Rachman, and the same tactics are being used. The park home nexus lost a very good friend when my noble friend Lady Andrews took on other responsibilities—but she was sympathetic. I pay tribute, too, to Yvette Cooper, the Minister who brought through many changes in the Housing Act 2004. But the sad fact is that the unscrupulous site owners are bully boys who are taking advantage of the fact that many people living on their sites are elderly and frail and not capable of standing up to them. I very much look forward to the Minister, Mr Iain Wright—whom I have met and who I believe has the right credentials for tackling the job—doing the job of work that is to be done there. The people in this country will say yes to more houses, yes to speeding up planning procedures, yes to transport reconfiguration, yes to tenant-oriented housing policy and yes to making planning and building relevant to communities and not just driven by profit. We are at the beginning of an age, which I hope I live long enough to see, when there is a turn in the satisfaction and response of the people of this country to a Government who are well versed, well experienced and determined. What we want is passion, guidance and drive, and I believe that we will get that from this Minister. I rest my case.