Housing and Regeneration Bill

I will make a brief speech. It is born out of having represented a constituency which the European Union, due to what in my view is its statistical errancy, thinks is part of the richest area in the whole of the Union. I do not think that that is absolutely correct, but I shall not go into the argument. While it has that background, it also has a characteristic which I suspect makes it unique among Conservative seats, in that it appears among the 100 poorest constituencies in the country when a calculation is made according to what proportion of households meets standard poverty indices. I have made the case before, but I shall make it again, because it responds to both the amendments in this group. I am not extrapolating from it to the larger scale, but using it as a single instance of where these amendments could make a difference. This relates to my longstanding campaign that postal workers should be regarded as key workers for housing purposes. I shall give a brief example. In the constituency comprising the two cities in the centre of London, there are at least a dozen or up to 16 postal districts, if NW3 and W1 are each counted as a postal district. Much the two largest are W1 and SW1. To the surprise of some, SW1 has plenty of affordable housing and consequently the quality of postmen delivering letters in the district—a fairly key area in the context of the national economy—is high. They can walk to work and deliver the correspondence entrusted to them extremely efficiently and expeditiously. In W1 there is very little affordable housing, so people come in from outlying suburbs. The quality of people employed by the Post Office in W1 is not remotely of the same standard as that of those working in SW1. Some 96 per cent of the mail goes to businesses in W1, and there can be no doubt about the deleterious effect on the economy in the centre of the city of the fact that the postal work is done less efficiently. I do not mean this in any way as a criticism of the Post Office, since members of Post Office management have made these comments to me over the years. However, I know from the complaints that I received over a period of 25 years from constituents who were on the receiving end that there was a significant difference. I am certainly not criticising Westminster City Council, but the term ““monoculture”” was used earlier, and I am saying that the concentration of a particular type of housing and the absence of certain other kinds can have severe consequences in terms of how a great city works.