HC Deb 02 July 1980 vol 987 cc1506-13
5. Mr. Weetch

asked the Secretary of State for the Environment what, in his estimate, will be the number of public sector and housing association starts in the years 1980–81, 1981–82 and 1982–83, respectively.

11. Mr. Dubs

asked the Secretary of State for the Environment what estimates are available to his Department of the number of public sector and housing association starts for 1980–81 and the two subsequent years.

13. Mr. Cryer

asked the Secretary of State for the Environment what is the anticipated number of local authority houses to be completed in the current year.

16. Mr. Straw

asked the Secretary of State for the Environment what estimates are available to his Deparment of the number of public sector and housing association starts for the three years 1980–81, 1981–82 and 1982–83.

18. Mr. Winnick

asked the Secretary of State for the Environment if he will estimate the number of public sector housing starts for the three years 1980–81, 1981–82 and 1982–83, respectively.

Mr. Heseltine

Accurate estimates cannot be made in advance. Starts by local authorities will depend on the proportion of their housing investment programmes which they decide to allocate for new building. Their submissions for 1981–82, to be received in August, will indicate the starts and completions they expect this year, though in past years even those have not been very reliable. Housing association starts similarly will depend on the present and future plans of associations. Final decisions for future years will only be taken closer to the years in question.

Several Hon. Members

rose—

Mr. Speaker

Order. I propose to call first the five hon. Members whose questions are being answered.

Mr. Weetch

Does the Secretary of State realise that the Government's public expenditure policies will have a serious effect on the level of local authority house building starts during the next two or three years? Does he further realise that in Ipswich the housing situation has never been more serious, and in its effects to cope with a record waiting list the Ipswich borough council is being frustrated by financial restrictions that are forcing it into a declining level of housing starts in the face of serious problems?

Mr. Heseltine

I understand that there is a declining level of public provision of housing—as there has been for the last four years or so. The question that the hon. Gentleman must join me in trying to answer is whether there is any way in which we can create the wealth that alone will sustain improved provision, unless we continue with the policies that the Government have adopted. My firm conviction is that there is no alternative.

Mr. Dubs

Does not the Minister accept that waiting lists are increasing, and that there are as many as 1 million people waiting for council homes? Will he explain to the House how he connived at these major cuts in expenditure on housing without knowing the consequences of such cuts?

Mr. Heseltine

The cuts that I have introduced are a continuation of the cuts that the previous Government—

Mr. Kaufman

Not true. Stop misleading the House.

Mr. Heseltine

As the right hon. Gentleman suggests that what I am saying is not true, it may be helpful if I remind the House again of the figures from 1976 to 1979.

Mr. Kaufman

No, no, no—

Mr. Heseltine

I was going to provide the facts. It may help the House to know that there were 176,000 starts in 1976, which declined to 81,000 in 1977, which declined to 67,600 in 1978, which declined to 46,647 in 1979. By my standards, that is a declining programme.

Mr. Cryer

This year there will be the lowest number of housing starts since the war—as the figures for 1979 were the lowest since the war. Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the Government's cuts are inhibiting Labour-controlled councils, such as that in Bradford, in providing decent, low-rent accommodation for newly married couples and elderly people? What message have his hard-faced Tory Government, most members of which have two or three residences, for the nearly 1,000 people on the housing waiting list in Keighley who see little relief from this Government?

Mr. Heseltine

The message is partly to explain that the situation has been deteriorating, along the lines of the figures that I gave, for years; partly to explain that if there is to be a real prospect of improvement in public provision of services for those people there has to be real wealth; and, finally, to remind them that the record of the last five years of the previous Labour Government was one of decline, in public expenditure terms, and in the whole provision of all goods and services in the public sector. That record is a devastating indictment of the economic failures of that Government. The reversal of those directions is absolutely central, and can be achieved only if we rein back on the public sector and allow the wealth-creating sector of the economy to expand.

Mr. Straw

Is the Secretary of State aware that he would be well advised to stop his parrot-like repetition of the Labour Government's record, which is daily becoming more flattering when compared with this Government's record? Will he admit that his personal contribution to the collapse of the United Kingdom's economy, which the Government are hastening, is to bring public house building to its lowest ever post-war record with rising waiting lists and increasing numbers of people being unemployed in the construction industry? The Secretary of State a moment ago said that the Government need to plan ahead. What do the right hon. Gentleman's future plans contain for public house building?

Mr. Heseltine

When the right hon. Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman) was master-minding the decline of the house building programme at the Department of the Environment, I am sure that he must at least have learnt the difficulties that a Government have in trying to predict what local authorities would do and in giving accurate figures for future building in local government. That is why it must have been galling for him to hear the Labour Government say that in 1977 there would be 95,000 local authority houses—actually there were 81,000—and that in 1978 there would be 95,000 when in fact there were 68,000. That indicates beyond peradventure that it is extremely difficult for central Government to make forecasts in advance of the events. I have looked carefully at all the statements made by Ministers in the previous Labour Government and realised that the lesson of those statements and predictions is that central Government do not know about the figures that they continually parade. Therefore, it is better to tell the House frankly that one does not know and to rely on what is patently the real situation when the local authorities send in accurate returns.

Mr. Winnick

Has the right hon. Gentleman any idea of the acute family and housing misery that will be caused throughout the country as a result of council house building virtually coming to a stop? Is he aware that the charge against him is that, instead of trying to defend housing at Cabinet meetings when discussing the cuts, he clearly has become the most enthusiastic supporter of the savage cuts which are taking place?

Mr. Heseltine

If I dare to venture a forecast which is helpful to the right hon. Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman, as well as to the hon. Gentleman, it is that we shall find that council house building does not come to a halt as has been widely forecast on the Opposition Benches. The House will have the information on which to make judgments about how informed the views of the right hon. Gentleman were when he said that there would be no more council house building, or words to that effect.

I understand the hardship that is created by an economy in decline. The hon. Gentleman was not with us at the time, but we were concerned to see the housing programmes fall consistently year after year. The question now is whether there is any way to reverse the decline unless we create the growth and the wealth to pay for the additional provision. It is that agonising readjustment that the Government are determined to make and that the Labour Party will frustrate and avoid at every turn.

Dr. Mawhinney

One of the difficulties about making estimates concerns the need to have a realistic assessment of future need. Will my right hon. Friend tell the House how helpful he found the 1977 Green Paper in making assessments of need for housing over the next few years?

Mr. Heseltine

I have seen the 1977 Green Paper. It made some estimates of need and it had the frankness to state that its figures were highly speculative. I had to decide whether there would be any public gain in going through that exercise again when the broad underlying facts about housing need will not have changed significantly. They may have changed by a few percentage points, but there is so obviously a need on such a scale that we do not need to have precision about that need to know that we require a significant housing programme.

If Opposition Members would pause to reflect upon the £1 billion programmes which exist in housing, they would realise that the Government are determined to apply what resources they can afford in that direction. The major change introduced by the Government is to give greater flexibility to individual authorities to meet housing needs in their own way in the light of circumstances of which they have a more detailed appraisal than the Government.

Mr. Hattersley

Why does the right hon. Gentleman persist in talking about flexibility of choice for local authorities when everybody knows that he has provided them with no money for house building, improvements or mortgages and that they cannot choose between any of those items because they have no money for any of them? We understand the right hon. Gentleman's reluctance to provide figures. However, I should like to ask him a simple question about his intention, for which presumably he is answerable to the House. Was his housing investment programme statement in February made with the intention of ensuring that this year there should be the lowest number of starts for public house building since the war?

Mr. Heseltine

It was not my intention, but it was almost certain to be the direction in which the level of starts would go, provided that the trends of the last four years were continued. It was not an unreasonable assumption that both Labour and Conservative-controlled authorities would continue in the direction in which they had gone in consequence of the policies of the past four years. So that the House may understand, there is a public sector provision for housing in excess of £2 billion. Anyone who can describe that as a non-programme is using language that has no real meaning.

Several Hon. Members

rose—

Mr. Speaker

Order. I appeal to the House for short questions and answers, if possible.

Mr. Gummer

Does my right hon. Friend agree that many local authorities would find it much easier to provide the housing necessary for the really needy if we could have all-party support for a system of shorthold to bring into operation housing which is already in existence and could be used were it not for the right hon. Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman) who has made more people homeless than any other Minister?

Mr. Heseltine

My hon. Friend has made a critical point. Significant numbers of people in the greatest need are now to be denied the opportunity of rented accommodation in consequence of the deliberate decision of the Labour Party to frustrate shorthold. There was an opportunity to move in a direction that would have opened up a new area of letting. The Opposition are doing everything in their power to keep those people without homes in a cynical way which I find inexcusable. The Government are determined to pursue their policies and to widen the opportunities for letting, particularly for council tenants who will have the right to sublet their properties to people who otherwise might not get homes. We are pursuing the widest range of initiatives in housing that this country has seen since the war.

Mr. Kaufman

If the right hon. Gentleman regards shorthold as so important a part of his policy, why in the talks that he held with my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) and me did he refuse to accept even one of the safeguards in the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Kensington (Sir B. Rhys Williams)? Why has he completely abandoned those safeguards, as a result of which the Labour Party maintains its pledge to repeal the shorthold tenancy when it returns to office?

Secondly, why does the right hon. Gentleman persist in peddling his fabricated and untrue statement about housing starts? Does he deny that in every year of Labour Government there were more housing starts than the number of starts that they inherited from the Tory Government in 1974?

Mr. Heseltine

The Labour Government, when they came to power, pushed up the levels of public expenditure and increased the number of public sector starts. They then found that they had bankrupted the economy and they had to pull right back, leaving the country with a projected public sector expenditure based on a wholly spurious level of growth.

The right hon. Gentleman suggested that I was being untrue in the positions that I depicted. I have constantly put the actual figures before the House to show the record of the Labour Government. The figures show that the rate of decline of the local authority house building programme under Labour and Conservative-controlled authorities, broadly at the same rate, was consistent and went on year after year. If, Heaven forfend, a Labour Government had been elected in 1979, the same decline would have continued. It would have continued for one economic reason: that local authorities of all parties realised that we could not afford to go on building council houses, the annual subsidy for which was well over £1,000 for every house that we built.