Orders of the Day — Housing

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 7 June 1945.

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Mr. McNeil:

There is no hon. Member who has any association with the industry, and certainly no Member of the Government whose job takes him remotely into the business of house building, who does not believe that prices for the main housing components are rigged. In Scotland we have had houses authorised by the Government, but when the tenders have come in the Government have not been able to approve them. There have been prices in excess of £1,250 quoted for houses which were being built for less than £600 in 1928. The Government had to throw out those tenders and the houses, some 60 of them, are still not built. It is not enough to plan the labour, it is not enough to promise that the control of scarce commodities is to be maintained; we must see that the houses when built are rented at prices which the people who need houses can afford. It will not be acceptable to hon. Members on this side that when the prices prove to be too high, the Administration will be permitted by some secondary subsidy device to hand out from the Treasury profits which the public would not sanction in rents. We shall be careful to watch that.

I ask the Government whether they are in earnest about seeing that there is a regular flow of components at the cheapest prices commensurate with good quality. Are they prepared now to place contracts for bulk orders? There cannot be any reason against that device. It is a device which has been employed frequently during war. The Minister of Works said that he is already experiencing different parts of the machine being out of step. He laid down three stages. He told us that the first stage was planning. I thought it not unreasonable to assume that planning had been done during the four years when no building was being done. If it was, and remembering the amazing somersault which the right hon. Gentleman performed in relation, to the initial Portal house, it is very difficult to believe that the planning was very effective. In between his rather scurrilous remarks about my right hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Greenwood), the right hon. Gentleman delivered himself of a few phrases about teething troubles and growing pains, and in illustration of them he told us that the preparation of sites was out of step with the erection of the fabric.