The final housing debate of this parliamentary session was more interesting for what it said about Conservative plans for housing than Labour ones.
Grant Shapps was the only Tory to speak in a Westminster Hall debate that was ostensibly about the Communities and Local Government committee’s latest report on housing and the credit crunch. But his persistent attacks on the government drew questioning in turn from Labour and Lib Dem MPs. It was too much to expect many policy commitments but what did we find out?
We already knew from April’s housing green paper that the Conservatives want to replace ‘top-down targets’ with ‘a system of incentives that would allow communities to make some of their own decisions in return for money’ and that local authorities would get to keep 100% of the council tax from new homes they approve.
Shapps gave the example of the new eco-town at North West Bicester. If approved, the town would get £45-£50m ‘for the local area’ over the next six years. ‘That would be a huge incentive for local communities to develop and get something in return.’
The green paper had hinted at extra incentives for affordable housing and Shapps added that local authorities would get 125% of the council tax for any affordable homes they approve.
So what would happen if his bottom-up local initiatives did not deliver the number of homes needed? Shapps said Labour was obsessed with targets and the Tories would not increase them, but ‘if we find that not enough housing is being built, including affordable housing, we will increase the incentives’.
How will we know if the Tories have been successful if there are no targets? ‘The measure will be whether we have built more homes,’ he said. We will ‘know whether a future Conservative Government have been more successful because we will have built more homes and reduced the housing waiting list—two things that were achieved under previous Conservative governments’.
He was pressed by Nick Raynsford about Tory policy on the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). Though it was a ‘huge quango’ there would be no ‘barbecue of quangos’, he said. The HCA would have to prove itself between now and the next election by delivering but ‘I am not impressed when I see an agency that has 20 offices and spends £4.5m a month on salaries alone’.
And he had similarly lukewarm support for the Tenant Services Authority (TSA). ‘I am not terribly impressed that the authority has so far spent its time surveying 27,000 tenants to get responses and then writing a draft report about what it might do,’ he said. Ouch. He added that he wanted to get first-class service for almo and council tenants too and ‘I am concerned that it is taking so long to get things going’.
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