Housing and Regeneration Bill

I take very much what has just been said about the decisions to operate the current provisions on social homebuy needing to be monitored carefully by those with responsibility nearer to the action; but I am hostile to the concept. Whether you like it or not, there are millions of people in inadequate housing who are desperate to get a tenancy for a council house or a housing association property, and they are denied it. The people we are talking about who would be affected by the amendment are already very lucky people because, after waiting for a period or living in bad conditions, they have got to the top of the list; they have been preferred and they obtain a tenancy. My experience is that council tenants are among the most privileged in the land by comparison to those renting from private landlords. My time in local government and responsibilities both in the other place and here stretch back to the period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when, whether the council wanted to or not, or whether there was a desperate need in that community to maintain a stock of community-owned houses that had been paid for by the taxpayer and the ratepayer, they did not have a choice; the legislation simply took that choice away. We will hear, perhaps in this debate but certainly in others, about desperate need in rural areas where affordable housing no longer exists. Of course it does not; the people who were about then—perhaps they are in this Room at the moment—were happy to see the affordable housing in their community disappear, because they believed, as I do, in home ownership. The sad fact was that once a home left the purview of the local council, people in the community—with a wave of people always coming forward desperately in need of better housing—found that the home their parents had been glad to get 20 or 30 years before was no longer there. People would fall for the line that if they have lived in the house for a certain period, and if they had paid enough in rent for the house, they deserved to buy it. It was not a question of buying the house; it was a question of getting mobility. In my experience in Edmonton, many of the people who bought their homes sold them again, and they were then sold again. Over time, a home that was well built and well maintained, which had been bought for £7,000 or £8,000 was sold, sold and sold again; and a three-bedroom, semi-detached house in Edmonton now fetches nearly £200,000. You would not believe it; although you would, because that is the situation. Any attempts to militate against the public provision of housing for those in need—council tenants or housing by any other means—ought not to be looked at lightly. The Minister may well say, ““We are trying to provide a range of provision””. I applaud the genesis of the Bill, and I applaud what we are trying to do with the measures to provide access to ownership. Frankly, I cannot see the sense in the public, through the public purse both local and national, providing a home for someone who desperately needs it, only to have a mechanism one way or the other for that person to capitalise on it. Good luck to the council tenant who wishes to become an owner-occupier. But I say—not of this house. If they want to own another house, they should by all means aspire to that, and there is a range of opportunities to do so. I remember that the most poignant and heart-destroying periods of my life as a local councillor and as a Member of Parliament were listening to, believing and seeing the abject misery of inadequate housing: badly built housing, badly maintained housing, or no housing at all. I will listen to what the Minister has to say, but if it is put in the Bill that it is the responsibility of the authority to provide ““a proportion””, that begs the question, ““What is the proportion?””. If the proportion is movable or negotiable, I fear the worst. I have lived through the past 25 to 30 years hoping that more sanity would be brought into the provision of housing. I have ranged over history—although I have strayed during the past five minutes, I cannot help it; I have been so close to it. I am one of the unlucky ones in life; I have never been a council tenant. Others who have been and have then become owner-occupiers will be forever grateful to the mechanism and to the Government and Prime Minister who drove through the provision that meant that a working man or woman with nothing behind them found manna from heaven, access to money that they had never dreamt of, which they then used. But the community has been deprived and access is now difficult. So I take with a pinch of salt those who say that it is the right of a person in public housing to buy it. It is our right to prevent that happening as long as there are long queues of people who deserve the housing. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.