I thank my hon. Friend Ms Buck for securing the debate, for what she said and for all the fantastic work that she has done on housing policy in London over a very long time. That work has made an enormous difference and probably given the Minister a lot of grey hairs, although he has yet to show them. [Interruption.] I said that the Minister is yet to show his grey hairs; it was meant to be a compliment, but it was obviously a total failure. When I pay the Government compliments, they do not understand them.

We are debating the most serious issue that faces anyone in London. We could all say again and again everything that my hon. Friends the Members for Regent's Park and Kensington, North and for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) have said. Growing up in overcrowded accommodation is sheer misery. Sharing a bedroom with three or four siblings and being unable to do anything at home, to bring friends home, to study or to socialise in any way becomes an embarrassment. If we talk to teenaged children in secondary schools, we hear that they immediately divide into those who have a nice home to go back to—one where friends can come and stay over for the weekend—and those who just feel embarrassed about where they live. Such children feel a sense of failure, including towards their parents, and their parents feel a sense of failure, too. The whole experience becomes utterly miserable. These ought to be the best years of a young person's life, but they are often blighted by the horror of being ashamed of where they live and of the conditions there, as well as by a sense of failure. Of course, the parents are not failures; it is public policy that has failed them, and we must be able to do something about that.

I have been the MP for Islington, North since 1983. I was there in the early 1980s, when we had a very effective house building programme under a Labour council. It was a pleasure regularly to go to the opening of new council developments, but how many colleagues go to one of those now? Sometimes I was critical of the designs, and sometimes I was not, but at least things were happening. There was building, and things were going ahead. That was an interesting period.

We then went through the sale of council homes promoted by the Conservative Government, and the period of the Labour Government from 1997 onwards, to whom I pay tribute for really rapid, fantastic improvements in the quality of estates—new roofs, windows, bathrooms and kitchens, and things of that kind. All that made a difference to the lives of many people on estates, which are much better managed as a result of what was done and much better respected.

The downside, however, is that we have been far too slow in getting around to the problem of the development of new properties—places for affordable rent. That is what I want to talk about, because the effect has been to push housing authorities into the only solution that they can find, which is to shove homeless people away from hostels and bed and breakfast into leased properties. A fantastic scam—that is the only way to describe it—is going on, by which letting agencies all over London have an over-close and over-cosy relationship with their housing authorities, which accept a dozen, two or three dozen, or 100 homeless families, and plonk them in flats in constituencies, such as Edmonton, that are usually near an outer London ring. Those places are often disgusting, and we, the public, pay for that through housing benefit. I have been to places where I would not be prepared to stay the night, let alone live, and for which the public pay £300 a week in rent—places that no one can be bothered to inspect or repair and that are infested with vermin. In 21st century London that is simply wrong.

My council in Islington is Liberal Democrat-controlled and is consulting on a housing strategy. In the past five years, on council figures, the proportion of owner-occupiers in Islington has decreased by 4 per cent; that of council tenants by 6 per cent., and that of housing association tenants by 1 per cent. The proportion of private renters has increased by 9 per cent. The lowest cost of a one-bedroomed property has increased from £160,000 to £228,000. The lowest rent for a one-bedroomed home in the private sector has increased from £700 a month to £900 a month, and the annual need for affordable housing has increased from 1,800 to 4,400 units. The proportion of households in Islington living in overcrowded conditions has increased from 6.7 per cent. to 6.9 per cent. In council housing that figure has increased from 9.8 per cent. to 11.5 per cent. Those statistics are very interesting. They show the reality for my borough—which has an image of expensive restaurants, chic metropolitan living and all that goes with that—as one in which a minority of the population live in owner-occupied accommodation. The largest sector is council/housing association homes and there is a rapidly increasing private rented sector. The problems are that we are not able to offer places to people in Islington who are in desperate housing need. That leads to community break-up and other problems.

Another downside to the private rented, uncertain-future accommodation is that people do not know how long they will be there. It might be a week, a month, a year or two years. They have no stake or interest in the local community and are frightened to get involved in a community association, school governing body or anything else because they do not know what their future will be. That has a debilitating effect on community life as a whole. We need permanent housing to be built, urgently.

I have a couple more quick points to make, but I will be very brief. The current crisis in the housing market over mortgages and the rest may well lead to a slight reduction in house prices, if not to a rapid fall in some parts of the country. I suspect that it will also have the result that some of the developers who are now building private sector developments, such as flats, will suddenly be unable to sell them. That is a crisis for them; I understand that. It is also an opportunity for councils and housing associations to move in quickly, buy the developments and help to solve the current housing problem. I should be very interested to know whether the Minister can give us any help on that issue. I have asked representatives of several of the larger housing associations that operate in my area, "If something came up, could you get it quickly; could you deal with it?" Most of them say that, provided they had the capital available, they could process that quickly.

My last point is about London as a whole. We have a housing crisis in London. We have a crisis of homelessness and of need; housing is in crisis in many ways. It will not be solved by letting a free market rip in London. It will be addressed only by investing in new council housing. I tell local authorities that are still selling off assets, Islington included, that it is a disgrace to be selling them now when they could be converted to social housing.