A Labour Government. That was a deliberate mistake—you never know how these coalitions will be formed. As for their possible coalition partner, the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, did not give quite such a ringing endorsement of his leader’s new pledge yesterday that 300,000 houses would be built per year. What fun it will be in Liberal party meetings when they discuss the implications of, “Vote Liberal, vote concrete”. I am sure that shortly after that has sunk in, we will see our fun-filled Nigel Farage produce a pledge of probably 500,000 a year. We are all in this together.
The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, who is not in the Chamber at the moment, called for a new consensus on getting more people into higher forms of apprenticeship. I agree with him entirely. Equally, I think that we all have to speak honestly and outwardly about the effects that new building can have and about our determination to have new-build houses and flats of a high quality. I am afraid to say that sometimes the quality is very poor. It is legendary in my area of the south-west. In a housing estate that has just sprung up quite close to me, one of the new house owners put a three-pin plug into a socket and nothing
happened. She asked the builder, who came round to the freshly built and quite expensive house and said, “We seem to have forgotten to put any wires up to the socket” into which the plug went.
I also think that builders themselves sometimes pay scant attention, and local authorities even less, to high-quality design. It tends to be the rolling out, in this housing bonanza that we have, of four or five different sorts of houses, which they stick a porch on the front of—if it is in a half-timbered area, the porch is half-timbered; if it is in a stone area, it is built in stone; and if it is in a plaster area, it is covered in plastering—but we get the same low-quality, very often cramped housing across the land. I remember someone in the building industry telling me some years ago, “One of the best ways, son, to sell a house is to make quite sure that in your show house you take all the doors off inside so it looks much bigger”. The dimensions, we have to say, are rather limited.
None of us in the political world, including my noble friends in government, can get away from the fact that we need to use our bully pulpit to promote among the building industry and others involved the need to build the sorts of houses that improve the landscape and do not diminish landscape quality. The newly built can be landscape enhancing, not destroying, as it all too often is, whether it is on a brownfield or greenfield site.
In his introductory speech, my noble friend Lord Livingston of Parkhead, when referring to the role of government in job creation, said quite rightly that it is not the state’s task to create new jobs; it is the state’s task to provide the framework and the environment in which more jobs are created. I urge my noble friends and noble Lords in all the other political parties represented here to be absolutely clear that one of the critical ways of persuading people to accept new housing is if it is well built, environmentally responsible and nothing more than that.
5.21 pm