8.41 p.m.

It has been said, and it is perfectly true and manifest today, that to be a Member of this House one must have the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon. We went in the course of debate from the ugliness of the mining villages in my constituency to the beautiful hills and valleys of Wales. I was saying before we were interrupted that land wastage in the town of Ince-in-Makerfield added up to 881 acres, or 40 per cent. of the total acreage of the town. I was appealing to the Minister then, and I reaffirm it now, that he should give some consideration to industrial towns where mines have ceased to operate and the local authorities are left with a legacy of the upheaval caused by industrial evolution—not revolution.

I have the good fortune or misfortune to represent a constituency in which five out of the seven urban authorities are affected by the result of mining operations. In the township of Ashton-in-Makerfield, 260 acres are covered by spoilage, 130 acres have been damaged by mining subsidence, and there are 180 acres of derelict land caused by other factors. All told, there are 570 acres which the township wants to reclaim for house building purposes, but it has not the wherewithal to do it.

I had expected that the Parliamentary Secretary would have made some reference to something being done for urban authorities which were so unfortunately placed. During the five years, 1963–1968, the local council wishes to reclaim this land, but it wants some help which can come only from the Treasury. Not very long ago when we were appealing to the present Chancellor of the Exchequer to make the district into a development area the right hon. Gentleman said that it was up to the local authorities to initiate matters. Here is an example of what is being initiated by these local authorities in the reclamation of derelict land. They cannot do it as long as the rateable value remains what it is. I appeal to the Minister to consider this matter and to give financial help to those local authorities which are anxious to reclaim land now lying dormant.

In the third township of Hindley pit heaps 120 ft. high rear their ugly heads, destroying the souls of the people who live in the neighbourhood. I want the Minister to understand the position of these people in the mining areas. They have behind them pit heaps and in front of them large mounds of earth thrown up by opencast mining. That has been going on since 1941. Local authorities in industrial and mining areas are not getting a fair deal from the Minister or from the Treasury, and I want the right hon. Gentleman to do something in that direction. It might be said,"What about the rateable value? Cannot they increase it?" How can they increase the rateable value when they cannot build the houses?

Take another district, Abram, with a small district council and a population of just over 6,000. The rateable value is £20,231. In Ashton-in-Makerfield the population is 19,440 and the rateable value is £72,551. All the districts that I have mentioned, Abram, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Ince-in-Makerfield and Hindley, have not the rateable value upon which they can raise the money to effect reclamation. I am complaining about the lax method of the Department in dealing with plans submitted to them. I repeal: what I have said before, that the Makerfield town map was submitted to the Department in 1960, and now, two and a half years after, that town map has not been finalised to enable the local authority to proceed with the work of reclaiming the land.

Not long ago a well-known photographer, in order to make some money, came into the district and I have here a photograph of six flashes and slag heaps. No doubt, the photographer made some money out of it. He gave it the title"Wigan by the Sea". Of course, we all know the joke about Wigan pier. Actually, it is no joke for there is a pier there, but there is no sea. There is, however, a tremendous amount of water caused by mining subsidence occupying acres of land which ought to be reclaimed by the Government, no matter which party is in power.

I have said before, and I repeat with great emphasis, that sooner or later this country will have to face with determination and seriousness the reclamation of derelict land. The Department has issued a pamphlet entitled Life from Dead Land. Here is an opportunity for the Department to help the county councils and local authorities to put that policy into effect. I plead with the right hon. Gentleman to assist these local authorities, which are facing these difficulties which are great but are not insurmountable. They can be overcome, given the will and determination to go forward in the direction which the right hon. Gentleman indicates in the pamphlet.

About a fortnight ago an important deputation met the Prime Minister. Incidentally, Mr. Royle, it was led by your brother, who is town clerk of Wigan. It is reported that in the interview which took place he spoke of the old Lancashire saying,"Where there's muck, there's money". The money has gone, but the muck is still there.

I beg the Minister once more to give better consideration to these unfortunate local authorities which, although the pits have gone, are left with the muck, the debris, the ugliness and sordidness of heaps, flashes and marsh land. The whole situation should be tackled at once. Let him go forward, with the assistance of the local authorities and the county councils, to make a determined effort to rid the north-west and the south-west of Lancashire of the ugliness and sordidness for which the people there now are not responsible.

One further word. I remind the Minister that he is going out into Skelmersdale in Lancashire and establishing a new town. It is proposed to take 33 farms, but nothing is being put back in the form of reclaimed land. Yet it could be the salvation of the district if land could be reclaimed equal to the acreage which is being taken for the new town. Two fine objects would be achieved. The place would be made more beautiful, and the amenities would be enormously improved by the restoration of the land. I do not suggest that it should be restored to its original condition because, of course, that cannot be done, but it should be restored to something like what it was before industry came in. I beg the Minister to help these local authorities to reclaim this land which is urgently needed for housing purposes.

8.52 p.m.

The hon. Member for Ince (Mr. T. Brown), in resuming his speech, said something to the effect that, in the House of Commons, we require the wisdom of a Solomon. I think that some of us at this time would be inclined to add that we need also the patience of a Job. We sit here wondering whether it is possible to get in at all. I realise that other hon. Members wish to speak and that we have promised to allow the winding-up speeches to begin at twenty past nine, so I shall concentrate on two points.

Inevitably, in discussing land values at this time, our debate takes place against the background of my right hon. Friend's White Paper. I very much welcome the White Paper. It has been described today as a document which merely brings together ideas which have been percolating through the House for a long time, but a truer description would be that it is a progress report covering the past 13 years and a forward look into the future by my right hon. Friend with the initiative and resourcefulness which lie has demonstrated ever since he came to the Ministry.

It has been rightly said that the bigger housing programme of the future depends upon the availability of land. This is the crux of the whole problem. It is true, also, that there is land available around many of our cities and towns which have not the pressing housing problems of the conurbations referred to in the White Paper, and that in such places land prices have not, perhaps, soared to the extent that they have in the London area and the larger conurbations. But, where the pressure is greatest, where the need for housing is greatest, where the shortage of land is greatest and where the greatest rise in the cost of land is taking place, the fact of the matter is that in certain local authority areas there is no land available at all and one has to go farther and farther a field. Although we try to take a national view of the situation, it is inevitable that individually we bring to bear in these debates those matters which are nearest to our minds, and the districts and parts of the country with which we are most familiar.

In this debate, I am concerned with Mersey side and south-east Lancashire, two of the specific areas mentioned in the White Paper—two of the areas in which all these pressures have come together. My right hon. Friend says in his White Paper in reference to land shortage that he has done two things. In the first place, he has taken a five-year view, as it were, with regard to building and a ten-year view with regard to planning, and in addition he is instructing various regional officers to take a view which will take us to about 1980. He says that regional studies are being made by two planning departments.

I suggest that where we are concerned in relation to the shortage of land and the rising price of land, we are concerned because the amount of land which is made available to us, piece by piece, is only just sufficient for the immediate programme ahead, and that while that obtains the price of land must inevitably continue to rise. If we are to take this longer view, if the two planning departments operating in a regional sense are to take a view of the land which will be positively required for housing purposes under any of the three-pronged attack which the Minister suggests, it should be possible to produce an exact date with regard to that land, and then my right hon. Friend will be in a position to create a land surplus rather than a land shortage. If he can do that, these rising prices will surely fall. If he will declare, as soon as these regional surveys have been completed in a positive way, that this is the land which will be available between now and 1980,and make it available at once, he will immediately change from a position of absolute shortage and scarcity in these areas to one of surplus in which prices are bound to fall. It may be that I have not merely over-simplified this problem but possibly ignored some fact which would destroy what I suggest, but at least it appears a tenable proposition at first sight.

The second point that I want to make is that my right hon. Friend is making provision for all needs, which we welcome very much. He speaks in terms of the three-pronged attack—home ownership of the future, extension of the 6·2 million homes occupied as a result very largely of the work of the last 12 years, and in terms of local authority building for those who cannot meet the full cost of housing; that is the slums and the redevelopment of the decaying areas. He speaks, thirdly, of something which has been in being for some time but to which he is giving by this White Paper an added impetus, new housing to let and co-ownership largely by means of these housing associations.

If we take the first and read the White Paper, every word that it contains is perfectly true if looked at in a national context. It is not true in a pattern equally diffused over the whole country. It is significant that in the very places where the greatest housing shortage still occurs the number of homes built for home ownership are fewer than those in other parts of the country. I believe that it is true that at this moment homes built privately in this way have been almost two-thirds of the total, but in one authority, of which some of us have some knowledge, out of a total of 46,000 built since 1945 only 7,000 have been built privately in this way.

It is easy to understand the reason for this. It is because of the grievous local authority housing shortage and the grave shortage of land so that the local authority, with its powers, naturally and understandably exercises those powers to get on with its own programme which results in some distortion of the pattern for the country as a whole.

On local authority building, I wish that we could get back to the very fair description in the White Paper of the idea of local authorities building for those who cannot meet the full cost of housing —that is, the clearance of the slums and the redevelopment of the decayed areas. This was the position when local authority building first commenced. This was why local authorities were first empowered to build houses. In the course of time, and for reasons which appeared to be good at the time, the pattern changed from one of housing need in the sense of financial need to the housing shortage of an entirely different character following the last war. Many homes, particularly in the last 18 years, have been occupied by people to whom one could not under any circumstances apply the description of people who cannot meet the full cost of housing". Again, that is understandable, but if the Minister is suggesting in the White Paper that we should get back to this, and is bringing in the third prong of his attack to make housing for rent available by other means as a supplement to the local authority shortage, that is something which I can well understand. It would be extremely useful if my right hon. Friend could give us some positive indication in this connection.

My right hon. Friend speaks in the White Paper of the Housing Corporation being given special powers. One paragraph states that it may be thought right to give the corporation a reserve power to buy land compulsorily, subject to adequate safeguards. If that recommendation were carried out, the Housing Corporation would be in exactly the same position as the local authority, with both going for land in exactly the same place where there is a grave housing shortage. How will these two bodies rank against each other? Will there be co-operation? Will there be direction? Exactly what will happen? I dare say it is a little early for my right hon. Friend to be asked these questions, but if he could help us on this point I should be very grateful.

I welcome these housing associations. Perhaps I should declare an interest in that I have become a member of one of them. We have not been able to do a great deal up to now because of the shortage of land. If these housing associations are to flourish and go forward as the Minister suggests, we must be very careful about their formation. Because of the basic goodness of the idea, it would be so easy for them not to contain people who know the local authority working, who know exactly what they will come up against and who will be frustrated in the end to the extent that they will give up what they regard as a hopeless position. This has happened in some cases. I hope, therefore, that these associations will be formed very carefully and that they will be given the necessary power to carry out the third prong of the attack as indicated by the Minister.

9.14 p.m.

I hope that the hon. Member for Stockport, South (Mr. H. Steward) will forgive me if I do not follow him too closely. Since half-past three, I have been prepared to give devastating replies to the hon. Members for Holland with Boston (Sir H. Butcher) and Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) and every other hon. Members opposite, and now, equally, I should like to answer some of the points made by the hon. Member for Stockport, South. Time is short, however, and I will try to concentrate on the problem mainly from a constituency viewpoint.

I agree with the hon. Member for Stockport, South about the importance of the third prong, and I welcome that part of the Joint Parliamentary Secretary's contribution to the debate. The Minister knows that in my constituency we have pioneered the co-operative housing association as one of the means of dealing with out problem. I am surprised, however, that in the White Paper the Minister comes forward, as he has done, with support for the housing association, increasing the original £25 million, but failing still to call into collaboration and consultation the co-operative movement with its 11 million members. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, in Sweden this movement has played an important part in the development of participation by tenants in co-operative housing associations and the British movement has over a hundred years experience of co-operative organisation.

I should like to come down from the national view to the pressing problems which, like my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington (Mr. Parkin), I must approach from the viewpoint of my constituents. In the White Paper, the Minister fails completely to get to grips with the kind of problems that we seek to tackle in the community. Listening to hon. Members opposite, I sometimes wonder whether we live in the same world or even whether the Minister lives in the same world as some of his back benchers, who are obviously also seized of the importance of some of these problems.

The Minister talks of 60,000 slums to be cleared in ten years. The telling part of the White Paper, however, is that his plan will tackle most of the areas"except those with the largest concentrations," which are precisely where the slums exist. Sixty thousand will be a useful contribution, but the estimate which has been made in many quarters in the past few months is nearer to a figure of l¼ million and the position is not static.

The Minister hopes in ten years to make an inroad into the problem, but at the rate at which we are progressing in my constituency, with the number of people on the housing list—which has been revised during the past 12 months to eliminate those who are no longer still in need of housing—it will be not a ten-year programme but a 250-year programme.

In Willesden, we have 4,045 people on the housing list, plus 2,274 on the list for nomination to new towns. Last year, under our points scheme, we were able to rehouse only sixteen families. The Minister knows that this points scheme is a fair method of allocation. Points are awarded for such things as overcrowding, health reasons, residential qualifications and so on. In spite of the fact that we made 357 new houses available to people in my constituency during the twelve months, only 16 from the housing list were satisfied. The reason is that we have a large slum area. We were able to rehouse 267 from the slum clearance scheme, but these people have to be rehoused only at the cost of delaying those who are on the housing list. We also rehoused 74 hardship cases, most of whom had been evicted because of the Rent Act. In my constituency, the local ratepayers have had to find something like £156,000 to buy old property, sometimes dilapidated, and put it into a decent state of repair to cater for people evicted because of the Rent Act. Thus, our 4,045 people on the wating list are being rehoused at the rate of 16 a year.

In these circumstances, some of the complacency shown by the Minister about the housing problem does not strike a chord with me when on a Friday evening, in my waiting room outside my" surgery", man after man and family after family approach me because of their intense housing problems. I should like to draw the Minister's attention to the kind of eviction cases which have to be dealt with. One is a widow aged 84, with a married son and his wife and their son aged four and daughter aged nine. After 24 years at the same address, the family has been evicted. Case number 1247 is of a spinster aged 59, who has been evicted after 17 years at the same address. I could give details of case after case which needs to be rehoused.

In an intervention to my hon. Friend the Member for Paddington, North, the Minister raised the question of multi-occupation tenancies. I do not quite know what one does in the circumstances of case number 25877 in our housing department's files. On the ground floor in one room there are father and mother who is expecting a child in three or four weeks' time, a son aged 5, a daughter aged 4 years 6 months, another child aged 2; in another room on the ground floor another lady; another gentleman in a back room; seven people upstairs in one room and the two other rooms with one occupant each. It is the sort of cottage which would have sold for £250 before the war. Hon. Members know the sort of thing—two rooms on the ground floor and an extension room, the same upstairs, and a lavatory in the back garden.

The people living there will have to be rehoused, because of statutory over crowding but how can we possibly do it in the circumstances we have in Willesden, in spite of the Housing Association and in spite of the three-pronged attempts?

What we should like to know is, just what is the Minister going to do to prevent evictions? And what does he regard as an exorbitant rent? I had a very courteous letter from the Joint Parliamentary Secretary about a case I referred to him only last week. The tenant concerned is on National Assistance. The rent has gone up to £6 10s. The Joint Parliamentary Secretary pointed out to me that that is six and a half times the gross value at 1956 and, as he also pointed out, the house is over 50 years old. It is in a bad state of repair and not worth any more rent than about £3 10s., which is what the National Assistance Board is prepared to pay. What does my constituent do when National Assistance cannot pay the £6 10s. rent which is demanded and which is six and a half times the gross value in 1956? Yet, obviously, if the tenant is evicted because she cannot pay the rent she goes on to the housing list and once again delays others on the points scheme. I do hope that the Minister will sometime or another just tell us what he thinks is an exorbitant rent for such property in terms of the 1956 gross value because this an acute problem in many areas other than Willesden.

I should like the Minister also to look again at land prices. He will recall that in a previous debate I told him of a portion of land being sold at £112,000 an acre. He may be interested to know that Middlesex County Council has now bought that piece of land. In 1953 during a housing scheme in my constituency land was purchased at £8,079 an acre. Last year a similar area of land in a comparable neighbourhood was at £54,318 per acre. How does one tackle the housing of 4,045 on the list when one has to pay that type of price for land? It is no good the Minister saying that we hope that somehow or another we shall solve the problem, because even with the greater densities, and despite the help the Minister has offered for grant for expensive sites, with land at prices like that we simply cannot cope.

We have already done a lot in Willesden and we are proud of our record. We spent last year something like £1¼ mil- lion of the ratepayers' money on rehousing, repairs, buying land, and housing schemes which include slum and prefab clearance. We accept these responsibilities, but we are getting absolutely no help from the Minister. We have had to buy 11 sites by means of compulsory purchase orders, but the right hon. Gentleman turned down two others we sought and let the sites go for private development. Willesden is close to London. This makes the building of luxury flats the tenants of which commute to the City a profitable business, but that makes it impossible for those on the housing list to be rehoused by the local housing authority.

So, in spite of the fact that we have pioneered a housing association, in spite of the fact that we have done a great deal to encourage owner-occupation and have given 880 mortgages—although we had to stop that for a period because there was not the money available—we are in an impossible situation. We shall be unless the Government helps us to meet it.

When the Joint Parliamentary Secretary and other Gentlemen opposite talk about encouragement of the owner-occupiers, I wonder whether they realise some of the problems which face young couples who do not have enough money to pay heavy mortgages and to meet that big difference between the valuation of the house and the amount which the mortgage society or local authority is prepared to advance. As a result a large deposit has to be found. The young couple are prepared to find it, because both go to work, but then they have a family and the woman can no longer go to work. The family gets into financial difficulties and, as a consequence, a number of human problems arise.

My time is short, but I should have liked very much to have talked a good deal about a number of other important housing matters which affect not only my constituency, but those of many hon. Gentlemen opposite, and certainly constituencies like that of the hon. Member for Stockport, South where there are crowded industrial areas magnets attracting workers without special housing accommodation for them. What we are asking for is less promises and more action, and in this White Paper I can see nothing which will give any hope or comfort to my constituents in the foreseeable future.

It will take 250 years to rehouse those on the housing lists with interest rates as they are, with the possibility of trying to find land where no land exists, and where it does exist, having to pay up to £112,000 per acre for it. The task is so formidable—a word used several times by the Parliamentary Secretary this afternoon—that I cannot see how it can be tackled until this Government departs and we get a Government who are more understanding of the real human and social problems and have less of the statistical doctrinaire approach of the right hon. Gentleman.

9.18 p.m.

I have about three minutes in which to make my speech. The hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt) has stressed what always happens in these housing debates. Each side of the House says that not enough houses are being built. We shall go on saying that if both Front Benches believe in this misleading statement about there being the same number of homes as there are houses at the moment. This statement is repeated again in the White Paper, that there are the same number of households as there are houses.

Any hon. Member who keeps in touch with his constituency by what the hon. Member for Willesden, West calls his"surgery" knows that that statement is unbelievable. If one looks at the census from which this was taken, one sees the fallacy of it. This is according to the 1961 census where it is said that there are the same number of households as there are houses, and it is based on this definition of a private household as a household which comprises one person living alone or a group of persons living together, partaking of meals prepared together and benefiting from a common housekeeping. It does not take into account the young marrieds living at home and waiting for a home of their own before they have children. It does not take into account those who have delayed marriage and are living at home until they can get a house. It does not take into account the elderly people who want homes of their own. It does not take any of these factors into account, and as a result a figure of 350,000 houses a year, which was the figure given by my right hon. Friend—and he is encouraged in this by the Front Bench opposite—is inadequate to solve the problem.

The hon. Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) would not come out with a target today. He talked vaguely about 350,000 houses a year being the correct figure. It is nowhere near the correct figure. In the period 1951 to 1961 the demand for households increased by 1 million. Over the next ten years it will be much greater than that; it will bean increase of 2 million.

If we consider the number of obsolete houses, and give a house a life of 100 years, it means that 3 million houses should be torn down and rebuilt in the next ten years. One needs only to look at figures like this to get the proper target figure of ½ million houses a year, and that is the number we need. If we continue with a target of 350,000 a year, our people will continue to suffer the tragedies about which we hear so much. I want a target of ½ million houses a year, and not one of 350,000.

9.20 p.m.

I am glad to have been able to give the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Graham Page) a chance to make his point, but it was unfair of him to accuse my hon. Friend the Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) of having encouraged the hon. Member's right hon. Friend in his sins.

In a way, this has been an unsatisfactory debate, although the Minister and I have tried to make up for it by getting up a good deal later than would otherwise have been the case. We have been affected by other business, and that has been a bit of a misery. Listening to the Parliamentary Secretary's lecture to us this afternoon, I was not very clear whether he realised that there was a problem. The Minister had better make it clear now. Does he accept that after 12 years of government for which his party has been responsible, there is still a considerable problem?

I often get the impression that the atmosphere in the House of Commons and that in the country are totally different. Ministers make speeches here and we may make speeches here, but all the time we are thinking of the atmo- sphere in the House and of the critics in the Galleries and we are acting as though we are actors putting on a show. [Hon. Members:"No."] I speak for all of us. Sometimes we impress each other and sometimes we impress the critics, but the people outside are not impressed. The Deptford by-election has made that absolutely plain. There the issue was housing. The electors of Deptford held not only the Government but the House of Commons to be responsible. In a cynical kind of way, they thought that none of us had any interest.

Listening to the debate today, I have understood that. From the beginning until now—I hope that it will now change—points have been made which may look very good in tomorrow's HANSARD but which have nothing to do with the problems of people living in miserable streets and in even more miserable—I was about to say"houses", but that is not the right term;"units" is the right term. They have none of the amenities.

In this London of ours there are 400,000 people, men, women and children, who are homeless. This can be reproduced in every other big city.

Sir K. Joseph rose—

I cannot give way. The Minister can make the point in his own speech. He pressed me very hard to sit down a couple of minutes earlier than I had intended and he cannot have it both ways.

It is 4,000.

Was that the only point? [Laughter.] I do not think that anybody would think that that was—[Laughter.] If hon. Members opposite are to take that view, any agreement I made with the Minister goes by the board. I meant to say 4,000. If anybody thinks that it is worth making the point, O.K., it is now made. There are 4,000 men, women and children in London who are now homeless.

How many in New York?

Let the 4,000 know—even more, let the constituents know—that that is the amount of interest in the housing problems of this country which the hon. Member has. That is the first half of the problem and it has increased in the last two years.

The second half of the problem is that 600,000 slums are still being lived in, despite the announcement of the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor some years ago that by now almost all the slums would have gone. There are 2,500,000 old houses recognised as being beyond repair or improvement at reasonable cost. Altogether, there are nearly 4 million houses without baths and mostly without hot water and without lavatories.

That is the problem. I ask right hon. Gentlemen and hon. Gentlemen opposite to stop scoring silly little points and to think of what it means to be living in houses or flats which have none of these amenities. The Opposition have had no responsibility for 12 years. We are building well below the need each year. People are overcrowding more, the older houses are becoming older and the whole problem is worsening. When the Parliamentary Secretary has scored his little point and the Minister has scored his, as he did in May, after 12 years of Tory Government and heaven knows how many Ministers of Housing and Local Government, from the Prime Minister onwards, this is the problem we are left with.

Of course, said the Parliamentary Secretary, the Government are building more in the beginning of the 'sixties than we were building at the end of the 'forties. I give him his silly little point. There were a lot of other things to be done when the war ended. It would have been absolute disaster if this Government were not building more houses 15 years after the war ended than we were building when the war ended. That is the silliest, stupid point to be making now. It was all right to make a year or two after they came to power, but not now. The fact is that a decade or more after the war ended they are failing to meet the challenge with which they are faced. The present Prime Minister, the present Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, the new chairman of I.T.A. and the present Home Secretary all guaranteed that within no time at all they would have solved this problem, but we are still being given another 10-year programme, even now.

Within the overall problem are they meeting the need? The Minister has to face this fact. Most of the houses which are being built, inadequate as they are in total, are being built for purchase at prices which are well outside the range of a very large sector of our people. I do not say that providing houses for those who can afford to pay for them is wrong—it is right. All families need houses, whether they are richer or poorer, but look at the borough in which I live and see for whom houses are being provided.

For the most part the only houses being provided in the Borough of Camber well are for those who can service mortgages on houses of £6,000 and upwards. I live in a borough with a tremendous housing need, but houses are not being provided for people who cannot pay such prices. It is the same in the borough in which I live in London and in the constituency I represent, Belper. The only houses provided, apart from special cases, are for people who can afford to service the mortgages on houses which, in the latter case, cost more than £4,000. Houses are not being provided for the general need of people who cannot meet that price.

Why the failure? The Committee and hon. Members opposite ought to face this. In the first place we are not providing a sufficient proportion of our gross national product for houses. It is a straightforward inefficient allocation of our resources. The last figure I got was 3 per cent. for houses. The Parliamentary Secretary asks from where we would take it. It is the business of the Government to decide the priorities. The sad business is that under this Government housing has been given a very low priority. [Hon. Members:"Oh."] I do not know how much lower hon. Members opposite think we could go than tenth out of 13 countries in Western Europe. How much lower can we go? We are simply not providing enough.

We may be asked how we can increase the resources allocated to housing. It must be borne in mind that we cannot plan positively unless we also plan negatively. We must restrict people. What the Government have never understood is that planning involves both positive choice and negative restriction. Over many years there has been building in the big cities which we could have held back had we decided that housing, schools and hospitals were our first priority. It could have been done. It was not done—and this is the consequence.

The second reason for the failure is the withdrawal of a systematic and fair allocation of resources within housing. Hon. Members must face it. They have given private enterprise a bit of a free range—more than bit of a free range; and the consequence is that we have not been building houses for people whose need came first.

The third reason is the withdrawal of the annual subsidies for local authorities for general need housing—the Minister must not shake his head at this—and the substitution of a new formula based upon the potential rent resources. This was a straightforward distortion. When they were getting the subsidy based on general need and on the housing requirement in the area, local authorities could do much more than they have been able to do under the new formula.

The fourth reason for the failure has been the cutting back of the local authority housing programmes by Ministerial administrative action. Whenever they were going ahead, they were cut back.

The fifth reason was dear money. In the May debate the Minister said that it was nonsense to talk about dear money being one of the factors which held up housing. He said that it was nonsense to talk about land prices being a factor which held up housing. May I give him the figures for the borough in which I live? I ask the Minister to note these figures because they were given to his Parliamentary Secretary last September, a reply has been awaited ever since, and none has been given. In 1951, when the Labour Government went out of office and a Conservative Government came into office, the interest on the loan debt in the Borough of Camberwell was £65,000. In 1962 the interest on the loan debt in the Borough of Camberwell was £450,000 per annum—and the whole of the difference was housing, arising from the cost of land and the cost of interest on the money which we have to borrow in that borough to try to service what we are attempting to do. This was put to the Parliamentary Secretary in September, but we have had no reply and no help in the matter at all.

Every single house, flat and conversion, every housing operation in the borough in which I live, costs the ratepayers there a loss of £150 a year for 60 years—and they are charging more than the 2⅓times the gross value, the limit which the Minister suggests is right. Why is this? Because of the price of land—and the price of land is due to the action which the Government took—and because of the interest rates which flow from the Government's policy of dear money. These are the fundamentals of the problem. If the Minister believes that the cost of land and the cost of borrowing money for housing programmes are nonsense, then he is totally inadequately equipped for the job which he is trying to do.

The Government forced up prices. They placed a limit on what can be done, even though we spend this amount of money in Camberwell, even though we force this on our ratepayers. The point is that we cannot house people. Apart from that, those providing houses for owner-occupier ship cannot house them, because the rents get out of reach, the mortgages get out of reach, the rates get out of reach, the whole thing puts too much pressure on people. Therefore, we limit the number of houses which can be provided for a given sum of money.

On top of all that, there is the Rent Act. By next year about one-half of the houses that were controlled when the Act came into being will have been decontrolled. We have a thing called creeping decontrol—"creeping"does not seem to be the word—at the rate of 300,000 houses a year. The argument used was that, if we put up with the disadvantages of decontrol, private enterprise would then have a real interest in providing houses and flats to let. The short answer is that it has not. We have got all the disadvantages. We have the increase in rents. We have the pressure on people. We have, as we saw yesterday in the piece about Rachman in the Sunday Times, all the overcrowding. The only thing we have not got is the provision of more flats and more houses for people to rent. This has vastly increased everybody's problems.

Is it not time that the Minister admitted that the action of his colleague, whatever motivated it, has turned out in retrospect to have been totally wrong? It has vastly increased the problems of local authorities and everybody else. It has increased rents to almost everybody. It has not provided more housing accommodation. It has not brought about any improvement in the standards of houses. Ought we not to face up to this? Is it not absurd to talk, as the Minister does in his White Paper, about the tenants of decontrolled, or easily decontrolled on movement, flats and houses forcing their landlords into making improvements? When I read these things I wonder how out of touch Ministers can possibly be with life as it is lived outside. It is time that they gave up blaming—these are the Minister's words in the last debate—local authorities for having a lack of"housing management drive". They have got that, but they also have problems. They are not able just to toss them aside in the way the Minister does here with an easy speech.

The way out is certainly not, in our view, along the lines of the White Paper, although parts of it, were they supported by an attack on interest rates and on the price of land, would not be all that out. But they must be supported by that. It appears to be the aim of Ministers today to pick holes in our idea for getting at, for breaking the back of, the land crisis. Unless we do this, unless some Government do it, there will be no answer to this problem. This is the thing that will make every Tory Government fail.

Uthwatt onwards through the Silkin Act have all tried this. They have all failed, for one reason or the other. The present Government offer no proposal for this. Indeed, they have argued this afternoon that it is wrong to try. We believe that the proposal we are now making with the Land Commission taking over land at the point of development and being entitled to lease it back for development on flexible terms, which was what the Silkin Act did not provide for, and which will leave something in to encourage development, is probably the best answer. The point is that it is flexible. It allows room for movement. Just to say that this involves nationalisation and principles which Tory Members do not like is not the answer. Unless we deal with land when it becomes available for development and, at that stage, impose conditions and terms for its development, there is no way by which we can solve this problem.

A number of other things need to be done. We must lower interest rates, reform the subsidies as they are now operated and deal with the effects of the Rent Act. I do not mean that we must just repeal it: we must deal with all that flows from it. We must then help local authorities to deal with houses that are in disrepair and, above all, we must provide money for housing at interest rates which make it possible for the job to be done—and that means selective interest rates.

There is a way in which our housing problem can be tackled. For 12 years hon. and right hon. Members opposite have tried. For 12 years they have failed. The Minister's White Paper is no nearer getting at the problem, because it ducks all the essential issues.

9.41 p.m.

The House will wish to welcome the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Duffy) who, in a knowledgeable and engaging speech, recounted the history of his constituency—all except the fact that the right hon. Philip Snowdon was one of his predecessors. I only wish—and in these remarks I speak to the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr.Pavitt)—that the co-operatives, of whom the hon. Member for Colne Valley is rightly proud, had turned their attention to housing, so that we had a Swedish experience behind us.

The right hon. Member for Belper (Mr. G. Brown) made a speech cataloguing the main housing ills of the country. It is easy to make that sort of speech, but not quite so easy to find the solutions. To every point of complaint that has legitimately been made by hon. Members on both sides today about these remaining ills there is one simple answer; we need many more houses. We need many more largely because the population has been rising at a rate faster than the building programme that has been undertaken. Had the population not risen so fast more would have been achieved.

We will only manage to get the extra houses by raising the productivity of the building industry and by decentralising homes and work from the big cities, where land is running out. I do not know which is worse, to have to live in a slum or in over-crowded squalid conditions. Most people are today living in less over-crowded conditions than they were five or ten years ago. However, while housing conditions generally have improved, in the big cities there is a serious over-crowding problem.

I do not believe, and hon. Members must recognise the reality of this, that rent control is any way the answer. It would lead inevitably to much more selling of houses and flats when they become vacant and this would reduce the amount of accommodation available to let. We must build more houses and this can only be done by increased productivity, by decentralisation, and by increases of land. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport, South (Mr. H. Steward) and the hon. Member for Willesden, West made this plain.

The hon. Member for Paddington, North (Mr. Parkin), in an extremely strong speech, spoke of the exploitation of houses in some of the big cities. This is the sort of exploitation that led to the multi-occupation which, when seen by my right hon. Friend the present Home Secretary, led him, by the outrage he felt, to bring about the passing of the 1961 Act, Part II of which sought to deal with multi-occupation. That part of the Act was designed to deal with Rachman and his ilk.

The problem is to pin the responsibility for these bad conditions—for"sweating" houses; taking in people beyond sanitary or decent human standards—on to the individual responsible when he, for bad reasons, seeks to avoid responsibility.

The 1961 Act has been in force only a year. I have encouraging reports on its effect from Nottingham and from Kensington. I was most impressed by the vigour and sturdiness with which the local authority in Birmingham is using this power. It is true that the local authority of Paddington is only beginning to try to use this power, and has not yet made full use of it. I have asked all local authorities to report to me next year in what ways they think the power needs strengthening, and I shall wait eagerly for any recommendations from local authorities, even in advance of that time, to see what strengthening needs to be done.

Even so, the only answer is more houses and more land. It is true that prices of land in, near and for the big cities have risen sharply, although I am glad to hear from this debate that most hon. Members recognise that prices in much of the rest of the country have not risen much beyond, if they have risen at all, the changed value of money and the quintuple rise in the level of earnings. But, where land prices have risen seriously, they reflect a combination of prosperity, the desire for homes, the benefit of planning and the remaining shortage of houses. Above all, they reflect the shortage, the inherent, the absolute shortage of land in and near the big cities.

The only way to stabilise prices of land and houses is to acquire more land and build more houses. That, of course, is one of the main reasons why we are raising the house-building programme to a figure of at least 350,000 houses a year. It has been generally recognised that this is a realistic next step and, obviously, when we achieve it we shall seek to go faster still. But, to achieve it, we shall have to help the building industry to continue to raise its productivity.

The building industry is already fully stretched on a massive simultaneous investment programme in every field of social, public and industrial service, and there is a grave shortage of craftsmen, which is the main limitation on the pace of house building.

We are helping by dimensional co-ordination. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works is issuing advice on the use of standard dimensions. We are encouraging local authorities to go in for longer programmes, and we are encouraging industrialisation, which is beginning to make a small contribution. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) spoke of the need for large orders, of the sort I am glad to say Liverpool and the L.C.C. have already given to demonstrate the value that industrialised building can bring to the country.

But more houses mean more decentralisation of population, and that is why the regional plans which the Government are now preparing, and which will provide for a second generation of new and expanded towns, is so vitally important. Here, we shall remember what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) about the size of new towns.

The pace of house building is not limited by finance or cost. All over the country there are vacancies for craftsmen far in excess of the number of craftsmen available. All parts of the housing programme, public and private, are rising quite sharply, and but for the bad winter we have just had we should have had a record year for housing completions. As it is, the April figure reached a record post-war level for housing starts, public and private, and there are more houses, in both the public and the private sectors, now under construction than at any other time since the war.

Prices, of course, are vital, and local authorities have every right to know that their financial needs will be constantly reviewed so that they can discharge their housing responsibilities. Such a review has just started. It will cover the cost of land, for which there is already an expensive-site subsidy, with the object of enabling local authorities to plan ahead with confidence.

Private enterprise building for owner occupation is rising sharply at the moment. From record levels, we have had such a huge increase of owner occupation as is most impressive—from 29 per cent. of the total of houses built when we came to power to 44 per cent. now. It is true that people often strained their resources in order to buy houses, and that is just why the Government are proposing to start a third arm of housing, which may start quite small at 15,000 houses a year but which, by co-ownership and like means, will bring new housing within the reach of people who, until now, could only by great effort get a house of their own. It may start small but it may grow to great heights and stand on its own feet and make a very large contribution before long.

House prices will be stabilised for local authorities and for private enterprise only by increased productivity and closing the remaining gap between supply and demand. It is no good looking for those easy panaceas which are the Opposition's favourite weapons. Today we had a clamour again for special rates of interest. This would be the most utterly indiscriminate way of helping housing that could be imagined. It would help wealthy authorities and poor authorities alike, and wealthy men and poor men alike, and it would not produce a single extra house.

The hon. Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) said that a lower rate of interest would enable local authorities to build more houses, but it would not. The limitations are craftsmen and productivity. It would simply enable more people than now to compete for the apparently bargain houses and up would go the price fast. It would put extra profits in the pockets of the builders without adding a single extra house.

As for the Land Commission idea of hon. Members opposite, which Socialist Commentary itself described as extraordinarily vague, we have learned a little more about it today and we shall need to study in detail what the hon. Member for Fulham said. One thing is clear. The proposal is to buy development land at less than the value which the market will pay for the use to be allowed. This will mean virtually that no land will come forward voluntarily. There will be no willing land sales. All or nearly all will have to be bought by compulsory purchase order. Views on that may vary from one side of the Committee to the other but surely we are all agreed that this will slow down things desperately. There is bound to be great delay in wresting land from its owners by means of compulsory purchase orders.

The hon. Member for Fulham rides off this little difficulty by saying that, once acquired, the land can be passed on sometimes at full value—no benefit of cheaper land there—and sometimes for less. In those cases where the land is passed on at less than full value the queue to get the bargain, which would then be sold at a profit, would be endless. There would have to be a rationing scheme and an allocation system.

All this would have to be done in order to get some of the price of the land for the taxpayer, but it is not necessary to do this to cheapen land for the local authorities. There is already an"expensive site" subsidy which may well have to be reviewed on the evidence which local authorities will give us. It have been running for several years and is doubling in expenditure at the moment, and exists purely to cheapen land for local authorities so that those who cannot afford market prices can get housing more cheaply.

The hon. Member for Fulham was clearly not proposing to pass on all or any of the cheapness obtained by way of Land Commission purchase to the householder. No one necessarily has to like all the financial implications of our present planning policy. But to limit the profit individual land owners may make and take some of the money for the taxpayer does not seem sensible if it would risk slowing down the only solution we have to the housing problem, that is, the building of more houses.

From every side, from the hon. Lady the Member for Liverpool, Exchange (Mrs. Braddock), from Birmingham and from London, we hear that local authorities are sitting on land which could be being developed. This may or may not be true, but at least there is plenty of land not now held by local authorities. Our system at least brings land to the market. Would we have as much land being developed if all the land people most want had to be wrung unwillingly from its owners at confiscatory prices by compulsory purchase order and then kept pouched by a great bureaucratic machine? The Land Commission idea is full of obscurities but one thing is plain—one of the casualties of the scheme would be owner-occupation as we know it today. I grant that some holders of small plots would be allowed to develop land as now. The rest would either get leaseholds, which hon. Membesr opposite are always indicting as a criminal method of tenure—a householder would never finish paying for his house—or they would get a house which the occupier would not be able to sell except with the Land Commission's approval and at their price.

No one under a Socialist Government, for houses which have not yet been built, would ever be able to call his home his own. This vast bureaucratic machine—confiscation plus rationing plus controls—is no longer put forward confidently to cheapen prices. There was very little argument about it cheapening prices, and it would not build a single extra house. It would not tackle the real problem—the remaining shortage due to a rapidly rising population.

That is the problem the Government are tackling on every front. We are tackling it by regional plans for new and expanded towns. We are tackling it by subsidy review. We are tackling it by encouraging increased productivity and by industrialised building. We believe there is a choice in housing policy—on the one hand a free market, more land, good credit arrangements, adequate subsidy, more houses, but at prices and rents reflecting current earnings and current willingness and ability to pay

for better accommodation; or, on the other hand, an attempt to distort the market, to hold prices at bargain levels, slowing down the natural incentives at each stage and leading to controls, distortions, more controls, no more owner-occupation, fewer houses and no cheaper prices. That would be the result of the Socialist panacea.

While the Opposition dream about bringing prices down, the Government are getting on with putting the housing programme up.

I beg to move, That Item Class VI, Vote 1 (Ministry of Housing and Local Government), be reduced by £5.

Question put: —

The. Committee divided: Ayes 198, Noes 260.

Original Question again proposed.

Sir Stephen McAdden (South end, East) rose—

It being after Ten o'clock, The Chairman left the Chair to report Progress and ask leave to sit again.

Committee report Progress; to sit again Tomorrow.