I could not have put it better myself. My hon. Friend speaks with great passion and I know that he always seeks to do the best for his area, but he makes important points that the Government would do well to take into account.
Is the situation going to get better? From what we know already, it is getting worse rather than better. Housing starts fell by 11% in 2012 to below 100,000. The construction sector has been hit particularly hard by the Government’s policies, which are hurting rather than helping. An estimated 80,000 construction workers are out of work and there has been an estimated 8.2% fall in construction output, despite recent signs of the beginning of change. Even in respect of home ownership, which one imagines this Government of all Governments would advocate, there are 136,000 fewer home owners than when the Government came to power. Home ownership has fallen from 67.4% to 65.3%. Crucially, on affordable homes, the official figures from the Homes and Communities Agency show that the number of affordable housing starts collapsed in 2011-12 by 68%.
I referred earlier to my own experiences when I worked on a homelessness project while I was a student in London back in 1979, which was one of the reasons that I got involved in politics in the first place. It is appalling that homelessness and rough sleeping are up by a third since the election. The Government must take responsibility for some of these awful situations.
The number of families with children and pregnant women being housed in bed-and-breakfast accommodation for six weeks or more has risen by more than 800% since the coalition Government came to power. A staggering 125 councils have had to house families in B and Bs for six weeks or more. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) is right: it is a waste of taxpayers’ money. It is not only a waste of money, which is important, but a human tragedy for the families living in those conditions. I ask hon. Members to pause for a moment and reflect on how they would cope if life events meant they had to live like that. What if they were uprooted from somewhere they had been staying and had to pack up their belongings? What if they found themselves, perhaps with children, having to live for an extended period in one room in bed-and-breakfast accommodation, with nowhere to keep their belongings, nowhere to call home, and nowhere to do all the things that we take for granted with our own families?
5.30 pm
Let us take a closer look at the Government’s so-called bold action plan. If the Housing Minister’s claims are to be believed, the new homes bonus will deliver an additional 400,000 properties by incentivising growth in planning permissions for new housing and the output of new homes, but the figures show that fewer homes are being delivered, not more. In reality, their flagship scheme has delivered a reduction in both permissions and outputs since 2010. In 2010, residential planning permissions totalled 135,000, but they were down to 115,000 in 2011, to just 95,000 in the first nine months of 2012, and in 2012 they fell by 11% to below 100,000.
A National Audit Office report stated that the Government’s assumptions about the new homes bonus were “unreliable”, “unrealistic” and
“contained a substantial arithmetical error”.
The report found little evidence that the new homes bonus is increasing house building or approvals for housing and that it is rewarding behaviour that would have happened anyway. It also found that the Government are not even monitoring the impact of the £1.3 billion of taxpayers’ money, which is another reason why it is important that we have the review.