Ex-Service Men (Housing) (Hansard, 27 October 1992)

§ 9. Mr. Paice
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what representations he has received regarding housing needs for redundant service men.

§ Mr. Archie Hamilton
My right hon. and learned Friend has received a number of representations regarding the housing needs of redundant service personnel.

§ Mr. Paice
Is my right hon. Friend aware that many local authorities, including South Cambridgeshire district council, do not believe that having been resident in married quarters in a district is sufficient contact with the area for the people concerned to be accepted on to the housing waiting list? As a result, when service men are being made redundant from bases in my constituency, they find themselves with nowhere to go. Will my right hon. Friend look again at the housing position, especially bearing in mind the fact that many of the bases have many vacant quarters on them, and find a way forward so we can ensure that service men who are being made redundant, many of whom have served in the Gulf, are not left homeless without anywhere to go?

§ Mr. Hamilton
Yes, although I hope that the situation is not as bad as my hon. Friend suggests. We are doing all that we can to make available such married quarters as we have to service men who are due to be made redundant, bearing in mind the fact that we always try to organise matters so that service men who are to be made redundant spend their last six months in the United Kingdom. We are using our married quarters for that purpose.

§ Mr. Eric Clarke
Is the Minister aware that, compared with the figure for the United Kingdom as a whole, a very large proportion of the Scottish population is involved in the armed forces, and that the problem of demobbed service men is therefore a serious one? My hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell, North (Dr. Reid) and I had a meeting with representatives of the CO Scottish Command at Glencorse barracks in my constituency, who proposed the formation of an organisation that could be funded by the Government to buy houses and take over Ministry of defence properties to provide rented accommodation for service men which they could eventually purchase. That could be a way forward. As those representatives said to us, the present demand for houses is only the tip of the iceberg.

§ Mr. Hamilton
We already make married quarters available for service men to buy at discounted prices. We are also making it possible for service men to part-purchase private properties and pay rent on the remainder. We are also reaching deals with housing associations, and are negotiating the transfer to housing associations of some 1,100 married quarters. We would keep a number of the allocations of those premises for ex-service men or service men who were about to leave. We have addressed the problem, and a lot of effort is being put into it.

§ Mr. Cormack
Does my right hon. Friend realise that he could solve the problem at a stroke if he would do the decent thing as regards the Staffordshire regiment, and have regard to the needs of the infantry? If he would think again about reprieving the Staffordshires and the Cheshires, we would not have so many redundant service men.

§ Mr. Hamilton
I do not quite follow my hon. Friend's logic when he says that if we did not amalgamate the Staffordshire and Cheshire regiments, we would have no redundancy problems. The fact is that we have made decisions about the amalgamations and there is no reason to believe that they will not go ahead.

§ Mr. Martlew
On 28 April the Minister gave the House an assurance that ex-personnel returning from Germany would be given accommodation for themselves and their families. Does that promise still stand, and is the Minister aware that many ex-service men will be unable to buy their own homes because they will come straight out of the armed forces on to the dole queue? What is needed is low-cost rental housing. What does the Minister propose to do to tackle that problem?

§ Mr. Hamilton
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on the occasion of his first contribution on defence matters from the Opposition Front Bench. I am sure that we shall be hearing from him in the future.
Let me go back over what I have said. It is not true that service men cannot purchase their own houses. Many can do so, because the serious amounts of redundancy money that they receive can go some way towards enabling them to purchase their own homes. In addition, the deals that we are doing with housing associations will make it possible for people to rent premises through those associations when they leave the services. We will keep a number of the allocations available.

§ Mr. Butcher
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the best way of solving the problem of housing redundant soldiers is to make fewer soldiers redundant, and that, given that the forces of reaction are gathering pace in Russia and that southern and south-eastern Europe are reverting to tribalism, this is not the time to pursue "Options for Change" with the vigour with which it has been pursued so far?

§ Mr. Hamilton
I hope that my hon. Friend will agree with me that one reason for our having large forces was that we were opposed by the massed forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw pact, both of which have now disintegrated. Given that the main strength opposing us had to some degree disappeared and had certainly been ameliorated, it was only right that we should look again at the level of defence expenditure that we were incurring.