Clause 2
Housing and Regeneration Bill
1:00 pm
Roberta Blackman-Woods (PPS (Rt Hon Des Browne, Secretary of State), Ministry of Defence; City of Durham, Labour)
May I take this opportunity, Mr, Gale, of welcoming you to the Chair this afternoon and say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship?
I want to speak against new clause 7, but not because I am not interested in the issue of rough sleepers. It is important to put on record that the Government have put a substantial amount of effort into decreasing the number of rough sleepers. Indeed, Opposition Members recognise that numbers have fallen by 73 per cent. since 1998. The Government have signalled their intention to continue the reduction, with a range of measures to tackle new homelessness. A key aim of the Bill is to enable more accommodation to be made available to help tackle the problem of rough sleepers. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham that the problem of rough sleeping goes much wider than the availability of accommodation and involves issues of individuals and their wider circumstances.
I want to correct the impression given by the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield that the Government have not invested in social housing, which is not accurate. By 2010, the Government will have invested about £40 billion in social housing and bringing homes up to the decent homes standard, and about 3.6 million homes have already been brought up to that standard. That is important, because the Government have rightly accepted that the emphasis and priority with social housing should be about not only improving numbers, but improving quality and trying to tackle the decades of under-investment in social housing under previous Conservative Governments. I want to put on the record my support for that and for Labour’s record on tackling homelessness and investing in social housing. Of course, we want to invest a lot more in social housing—hence, the Bill—but the record is reasonable, which should be acknowledged.