Housing

Part of Adjournment (Easter) – in the House of Commons at 6:12 pm on 2 March 1989.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr John Bowis Mr John Bowis , Battersea 6:12, 2 March 1989

I must say to the hon. Member for Truro (Mr. M. Taylor) that my hon. Friends do not think that everything is right, but he is wrong when he says that everything is wrong. My hon. Friends are more realistic about their record of achievement. However, they have achieved a tremendous amount in comparatively few years. No doubt that achievement will continue.

I want to return to the subject of inner cities and the area that I represent in inner London, and to comment on some of the achievements and some of the problems waiting to be resolved. This Government of all Governments have accepted the major challenge to provide a better quality of life for people living in urban areas. The problems in accepting that challenge are considerable. Areas such as Wandsworth face the major problem of dealing with the designers and planners of the past and with vast numbers of high-rise dwellings. The high-rise dwellings of former Socialist administrations in Wandsworth have resulted, 10 or 20 years later, in the crime, deprivation and isolation that we see today and there are mammoth problems to be overcome.

Such problems affect families and communities because we have areas in which people feel that they do not know each other and in which they feel that they can no longer send their children out to play with other families and know that they are safe. They have either to keep their children indoors or let them go out, where they pick up bad habits from their role models who are, of course, older children. Sadly, we cannot pull down those tower blocks because that would be too expensive a solution, but we can remedy the problem. If we had been able to pull down the tower blocks, we would have been able to house the same number of people on the same area of land in terraced houses with gardens and we should have kept the communities that we have lost.

That is a major problem, and in trying to solve it we have other problems. In my area, there is a paucity of land available for development. That is not true of all areas, but it is true of my part of inner London. In some areas the Land Registry can help in identifying and releasing land for development, but not in mine. We also have the continuing problem of social change. We have higher rates of divorce, young people leave home earlier, there are more single parents and more people coming out of institutions and looking for accommodation in society.

I salute the Government's achievements, which have been many. An enormous amount has been achieved through the Estate Action programme, for example. Hon. Members need not take my word for it. They can come to Wandsworth and see what a Conservative Government and a Conservative council have done together to rejuvenate an area of high-rise council estates.