I will certainly do that, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I apologise to the Minister if, given that we are going the distance, I have to leave before he speaks because I have a meeting before 7 pm.
I am sitting alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) and the Chairman of the Communities and Local Government Committee, and that is as near as I will come to pretending expertise in my comments. Instead, I will give a consumer’s view of this subject, based on my experience as a constituency MP. My constituency admittedly has some of the highest housing costs in the country and—not unrelated to that—some of the greatest housing stresses and needs, but it is not untypical of London and other high-value areas, particularly in the south of the country.
As someone who has spent 20 years trying to build housing that is affordable to local people, I know that even at the best of times that is not easy because of land prices; subsidy is always difficult, particularly at the moment. Nevertheless, there is currently a development boom in west London, and it is envisaged that in three opportunity area sites in my small borough, 22,000 new properties will be built over the next 10 years or so. Those are the major sites but there are many other similar sites.
Housing policy states that at both regional and local level, 40% of houses built should be affordable, which is right. A third of existing housing stock in my constituency is affordable social housing, owned by the local authority or a housing association. At the same time, however, 11,000 people are on the waiting list because of severe overcrowding, conditions in the private rented sector and homelessness—I said that 11,000 people are on the housing waiting list and they will be for another four weeks until it is abolished on 1 April. Some 1,500 people will then possibly be rehoused at the subjective discretion of the local authority, depending on their individual merits as assessed on things such as community contribution, previous employment and matters not
specifically related specifically to need. Other aspects of the Localism Act 2011 are being introduced with alacrity on short-term tenancies, affordable rents and other matters that, for the first time in generations, put at risk the right to a secure, affordable home for many people.
In those circumstances, one would think that using existing resources would be a priority, but in fact the local policy in my constituency says that there should be no new social housing because too much is available. Therefore, when social housing properties become vacant for any reason, they are liable to be sold. Consequently, the stock is not increasing; it is diminishing. When those 10,000 or 11,000 people go from the waiting list, they will not disappear; they will still be there, often living in conditions of severe housing need.
The bedroom tax has been proposed as though it could be an option to build new affordable housing, but, as I said in my earlier intervention, of 824 council households in my borough subject to the bedroom tax only 48 will be helped, according to the council’s figures, and other social landlords have another 1,840 such households. The people who are moving or who are likely to have moved are those who have been subject to the caps on local housing allowance—540 families so far—and those who are likely to be subject to the overall benefit cap when it is introduced, not now in April but later in the year, sometime between April and September. The date is yet to be revealed. Again, the local authority estimates that that will affect another 800 families.
Where will those people move to if they can no longer afford to live in west London? One answer is Peterborough. I saw a headline on the BBC News site two weeks ago: “Plan to move London homeless to Peterborough is ‘social cleansing’ says MP”. I was perhaps not surprised by that—I thought that perhaps the shadow Housing Minister had been using the media effectively, as he often does, or that my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) or someone of that ilk had done so—but the article says:
“Plans to allow a London council to build homes in Peterborough for its tenants have been criticised by an MP as ‘social cleaning’. Peterborough MP”—
it names the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), who was here earlier but is not in his place now—
“said he could see ‘no advantages for the city’. ‘This is about social cleansing in Kensington and Chelsea,’ he said.”
Those of us who have said for many years that this process of social cleansing has been under way in Conservative boroughs, particularly in west London, dating from the Porter era and subsequently, and who were partially vindicated by the Mayor of London’s former pronouncements now have it written in stone from the hon. Member for Peterborough that that is happening.
In other words, people who are in housing need who could be helped in whatever difficulty are becoming the victims of political ideology and the strategy to alter the social and economic make-up of the area in which they or their families have often lived for generations.