Orders of the Day — Housing

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 6 February 1973.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mrs Doris Fisher Mrs Doris Fisher , Birmingham, Ladywood 12:00, 6 February 1973

No one on the Government side of the House has taken upon themselves the responsibility, which is entirely the Government's, for the disastrous housing record. We have had a lot of specious arguments, a lot of excuses, but no one has accepted the responsibility which belongs to the party opposite.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) has said, we have had the biggest cutback in housing subsidies made by any Government since the war. The Secretary of State gave us a smokescreen about housing subsidies. It is a smokescreen because the cutback represents a definite cut in money amounting to nearly £500 million over the next four years. It is not a saving. This must result in a reduction in the availability of houses for those most in need. For hon. Members opposite to talk with their tongues in their cheeks about helping those in greatest need is sheer hypocrisy, because they supported the Housing Finance Act knowing full well that it would lead to a cutback in a housing programme that could only help the less fortunate in the community.

But there are large local authorities—and mine is one of them—which have massive slum-clearance schemes. We find time and time again that we have to face a land shortage. Time and time again we have pressurised the Secretary of State for overspill. Time and time again it seems to take him months and months and years and years to come forward with his recommendations. When the previous Secretary of State was in office Birmingham always wanted to go into the Worcestershire area. I do not know whether the previous Secretary of State did not like the Birmingham people, or was thinking primarily of his own seat at the next General Election, but he was very hesitant about letting us go out into the wonderful pastures of Worcestershire.

We have this highly speculative commodity, land. The Government can freeze all kinds of things, but not land. I would have thought that this Tory Government, capable as they are supposed to be, should have been able to do this very simply. We on this side of the House hear trade unionists being assailed by a plethora of clichés and platitudes designed to make them feel very guilty if they utter a word about the freeze; they are consequently labelled unpatriotic. But it seems as though those people who deal in land and property speculation are not guilty of acting against the national interest. It appears that profits can transcend patriotism, hut not in the case of trade unionists.

I would like to bring to the attention of the Minister and support the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Mr. Dormand). One of the main causes of the lack of housebuilding and the figures from the large conurbations has been the problem which my hon. Friend the Member for Easington mentioned—the impossibility of obtaining tenders for housebuilding contracts. With fixed price tendering at a time of escalating prices there has been a definite reluctance on the part of contractors even to put in a tender for a contract, and in the city of Birmingham it has not been unusual to invite as many as 20 firms to submit a tender and have one or two contractors put in a price. There must be something in that for the Secretary of State to answer.

It is no good his trying to delude himself by saying that he was not aware of the difficulties concerning the cost yardstick. At a meeting of the Birmingham City Council today a report from the housing manager on behalf of the housing committee came forward. I should like to read a few lines from that report about the cost yardstick. It said: This problem"— of the cost yardstick— started to become acute towards the end of 1971 and by March 1972, when there was a very sharp escalation of building costs, it had started to become impossible for your Committee"— the housing committee— to obtain tenders within the yardstick level. This is the point I want the Secretary of State to listen to very carefully: The strongest possible representations were made to the Department of the Environment upon this matter. That was in March 1972, when this sharp escalation of building costs was very apparent, but it was not until November—eight months later, when the housing building programme in Birmingham had come to a complete standstill—that the Department of the Environment and the Secretary of State decided that they might be able to permit some kind of market allowance. I might go so far as to say that for the housing cost yardstick to be of any importance it will have to be increased from 45 per cent. to 50 per cent.

I was interested in one thing in the amendment being put forward by the Government on the encouragement of local authority housing in areas of stress. Let me quote two figures. Last year Birmingham City Council built only 1,444 houses.