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Mr. Jack Straw (Blackburn) : Why?
Mr. Howard : I shall tell the hon. Gentleman why, if he will contain himself.
In its place, local authorities will have new obligations to consult their tenants fully on the way in which their homes are to be managed. Tenants will also have a new role in monitoring the performance. Some tenants, however, may want to go further. Our Bill therefore provides a new right to manage for tenant organisations. Local authorities will be required to pass over the
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management of estates to tenant organisations, where tenants are able and willing to take it on. The proposals thus represent the most important extension of the rights of tenants to influence the management of local authority housing ever put before the House.Mr. Eric Clarke (Midlothian) : As a Member of Parliament who represents a Scottish constituency, may I ask whether this legislation covers Scotland? I thought that the tradition was that changes to the law affecting Scotland were normally the subject of a Scottish Bill. Changes to the law affecting Scotland have been tagged on to the end of this Bill. Is that normal, is it a run-of-the-mill procedure, or is it a change of policy by the Government? Will matters affecting Scotland be tagged on to the end of all Bills, or is it a question of doing away with the Scottish Office altogether?
Mr. Howard : It is none of those things. It is a perfectly normal practice. Scottish provisions are entirely integral to the Bill as a whole and form an important part of it. I shall be saying a word or two about the Scottish provisions in a few moments.
Mr. Raynsford : On the compulsory competitive tendering issue, and tenants rights, it is important that the Secretary of State should be reminded of the answer that he gave to me only last week. He was asked, in anticipation of this issue being raised, how many tenants were consulted by the Government about their proposal to introduce compulsory competitive tendering. The answer was very simple--none. Will the Secretary of State please tell the House why there was no consultation whatsoever with tenants if, as the Government claim, they are supposedly acting in the tenants' interests?
Mr. Howard : The hon. Gentleman overlooks in his question the fact that the proposals as a whole were put out to consultation. It was open to absolutely anyone to reply to that consultation in the course of that exercise, and many organisations did so.
Mr. John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) : Can the Secretary of State tell us during the debate how many of the tenant organisations that responded to the document on compulsory competitive tendering said that they were in favour of its being a compulsory principle that should apply to all local authorities? I am still a member of Southampton city council, an authority whose housing management was judged by the Government last year to be well ahead of the field. Is the Secretary of State aware that preparation for CCT is enormously expensive and that that expense falls, in the largest part, on local authority tenants? How can he be so confident that it is right to place that cost on local authority tenants who, as yet, have shown no interest in their local authority being forced to put its services out to tender?
Mr. Howard : Because local authority tenants will benefit from the savings of compulsory competitive tendering. That is the short answer to the hon. Gentleman.
We are also using this opportunity to ensure that local housing authorities can provide the full range of welfare services to tenants who have special needs and to enable them to account for the cost of those services in their housing revenue accounts if they wish. These powers are
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being taken urgently following a recent Court of Appeal judgment that called into question the legitimacy of such provision. They are designed to avoid disruption to the delivery of the welfare services on which tenants with special needs depend so heavily. They will be introduced on Royal Assent and will apply retrospectively to protect authorities from further challenge.Clauses 118 and 119 of the Bill will restore a power to contribute to loan charges arising from expenses incurred by local authorities before 1 April 1989 in assisting owners of defective housing. This power was inadvertently repealed by the Local Government and Housing Act 1989. The intention is that local authorities should be reimbursed the full amounts that would have been due to them if the former power had not been repealed.
In summary, the housing parts of the Bill are designed to give greater control of homes to the people who live in them, by enfranchisement, choice of purchase or a greater say in the management of their property. I know that millions of householders will welcome that extension of their right to choose.
Chapter II of part II contains provisions on housing in Scotland. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Midlothian (Mr. Clarke), who asked a question a moment ago, did not wait for me to deal with Scotland. Most of the chapter's provisions stem from commitments in the tenants charter for Scotland and several of them mirror provisions that I have described for England and Wales. Taken together, they will strengthen and improve quality and choice in housing for public sector tenants in Scotland.
Mr. John Maxton (Glasgow, Cathcart) : It is rather strange that we are debating a major part of a Bill relating to Scotland, yet no Scottish Office Minister is on the Bench. The rent-to-mortgage scheme has been in operation in Scotland for some time. Local authorities have sold houses to Scottish Homes, whose tenants have been able to convert their rents to mortgages. How many tenants in Scotland have taken up the opportunity of this scheme?
Mr. Howard : An encouraging number of tenants in Scotland have taken advantage of the proposals. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, who is clearly bursting with enthusiasm to serve on the Standing Committee which will consider the Bill, will have an opportunity to explore the matter in great detail with the Scottish Office Minister who will be a member of the Committee.
Mr. Straw : Will the Secretary of State confirm that he has not the first idea how many tenants have taken up the offer in Scotland, and that of the total of 110,000 tenants eligible to apply only 200 have done so?
Mr. Howard : The news from the front is indeed encouraging and should reinforce the House in its determination to treat any quantified estimate of the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) with much caution. To the end of September, the number of tenants in Scotland who have bought under these provisions is not 200, as he suggested, but no fewer than 544-- more than 100 per cent. higher than he suggested. I am sure that the House will remember the inaccuracy of the hon. Gentleman's claim when he makes similar claims in future, as he doubtless will.
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I turn now to part III of the Bill. There are 150,000 acres of vacant land in the towns and cities of England. Added to that, there is land outside urban areas which has been left derelict by mining or by other industrial uses.There are many reasons for that desperate waste of a scarce national resource. Industrial and urban change--often desirable in its own right-- can leave physical scars. Land is often difficult to assemble in crowded cities. Ownership may be fragmented and uncertain. Infrastructure and access may need to be improved. Whatever the cause of the problem, we cannot afford the waste it represents. Our cities need land for houses. They need land for shops and places to work. They need open space and a good environment if they are to be pleasant places in which to live. Only then will they attract the life and investment so vital to their regeneration. The urban regeneration agency to be created by part III will be given the task of bringing that vacant and derelict land back into use. It will focus on the reclamation and regeneration of land, but it will operate very much with its eye on the impact of that land on the wider regeneration of the area.
Mr. Simon Hughes : Does the Secretary of State accept that one of the lessons of urban development corporations is that although development is a good idea, if we do not set out in legislation in whose interests the development should take place, the normal result is that it does not take place in the interests of the local resident population or of the local work force? May we please make the objects of the agency such that in future in areas where there are to be urban redevelopment programmes, local people and employment for local people come first?
Mr. Howard : I do not accept the hon. Gentleman's point. The extent to which the objects of an urban development corporation or of an urban regeneration agency can be achieved in the interests of local people depends significantly on local people themselves and on the part that they are prepared to play. If, for example, a council such as the London borough of Southwark turns down the offer of a place on the urban development corporation operating within its area, the input of the local authority into the workings of the corporation will be far smaller than might otherwise have been the case. That is the way in which these matters can best be dealt with.
Mr. Simon Hughes rose --
Mr. Howard : I have given way twice to the hon. Gentleman, so I hope that he will forgive me for not giving way to him again.
Mr. Anthony Steen (South Hams) : As my right hon. and learned Friend knows, for 14 years I have pioneered the Conservative campaign to involve the Government in getting rid of some of the public vacant land which exists in many of our towns. I congratulate the Government on responding after 14 years.
May I have two undertakings this afternoon from my right hon. and learned Friend? First, I hope that he will involve the private sector in a big way in providing the additional money because, as I understand it, there is no additional money coming from the Government. Secondly, will he consider issuing a directive that land that is vacant, derelict and dormant in the public sector should be utilised first for housing before using the green- field
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sites outside the urban areas for housing development? In that way, we would give a priority to filling in the urban areas before we destroyed the green fields outside.Mr. Howard : I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his long campaign and for his undoubted work over a substantial period to encourage the Government to take action in those matters. On his two specific points, I certainly confirm that the urban regeneration agency will give great priority to the levering in of private sector finance. The record of UDCs in making use of private sector finance is second to none. The URA will certainly want to continue in that tradition. I am sure that the URA will have an important part to play in achieving the objective of using urban land to make it less necessary to use open land in the countryside for development.
Mr. David Trimble (Upper Bann) : Does the Secretary of State accept that the problem of blighted and underused land is not exclusively confined to England but besets other parts of the kingdom, too? Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman be recommending to his colleagues who have responsibility for other jurisdictions within the kingdom that they adopt similar measures?
Mr. Howard : I am sure that my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland shares the objectives that we seek to achieve through the Bill in England, and will consider the most appropriate way of achieving them in Northern Ireland.
Mr. Hartley Booth (Finchley) : I welcome part III of the Bill, which deals with a matter on which I have campaigned for some time. Does my right hon. and learned Friend recognise that urban regeneration is a long-term process, and will he give the agency freedom from Treasury restrictions so that it can use money as patient money--money invested now at no interest to give returns in the long term?
Mr. Howard : It would be a little rash of me to give my hon. Friend the assurance that he seeks in quite the terms that he asks. I pay tribute to the work that he, too, has done on these matters, particularly before entering the House. I freely acknowledge that, and I have no doubt that we shall want to consider carefully the points that he has raised. I hope that he will forgive me if I do not give him quite the assurance that he seeks.
The agency will take over three separate land-related programmes--English Estates, derelict land grant and city grant. Those initiatives already have many successes to their credit. For example, since 1980, £28 million of derelict land grant has helped to reclaim the 180 hectare site of the former iron and steel making works in Corby. Half a million square metres of floorspace have been constructed and nearly 15,000 new jobs have been created. The £7 million contribution made by English Estates to a joint venture with ICI at the Belasis Hall technology park in Billingham has brought much-needed white collar and service industry employment to Teesside.
Mr. Michael Bates (Langbaurgh) : Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?
A £7 million city grant in support of four projects at the heavily contaminated Round Oaks steelworks site in Dudley attracted nearly £30 million-worth of private sector investment.
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I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Langbaurgh (Mr. Bates), who speaks on these matters for Teesside.Mr. Bates : Has a decision yet been reached on the location for the headquarters of the new urban regeneration agency? If not, may I wholeheartedly commend to my right hon. and learned Friend the north-east of England--and Teesside, in particular--as a shining example of what can be achieved by Government-sponsored urban regeneration programmes?
Mr. Howard : No decision has yet been made about the headquarters of the agency, but on this, as on all other matters, before taking a decision, we shall listen carefully to my hon. Friend's powerful voice for Teesside. My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the example that Teesside provides.
The urban regeneration agency will build on the successes that I have described. It will be able to support the whole process of reclamation and development of vacant and derelict land. It will be a single point of contact and will have the powers and ability to see the job through from start to finish. It will be a body with the skills to maximise the potential of the schemes that are put to it and to seek out new opportunities of its own. It will be a centre of expertise for all those involved in land reclamation and development.
We consulted on the agency over the summer and received wide support for the principle of our proposals.
Mrs. Helen Jackson (Sheffield, Hillsborough) : Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Howard : No. I must make progress, or I shall be accused of taking far too long.
Of course, the consultation exercise also raised some points of concern. Some in local government feared that they would be marginalised by the URA. Let me assure the House that I intend the agency to work hand in hand with local authorities. We are already receiving requests from local authorities for the agency to work with them. I will want the agency to work with willing partners wherever possible. I hope and believe that that will be the norm.
Many of those who responded to the consultation exercise stressed the importance of existing derelict land grant and English Estates programmes outside urban areas. For instance, much of the present work of derelict land grant falls within coalfields and other former mining areas. The agency will have to establish its priorities in the light of guidance to be issued to it, but the Bill will allow it to operate on vacant, unused, derelict and contaminated land outside urban areas.
The agency will operate at all times within the framework of the planning system and planning policy guidance. The local authority will normally retain full planning powers. However, it is important that an obstructive local authority is not able to prevent the agency from tackling an important area of dereliction. That is why the Bill enables me to designate areas where the agency will possess development control on the UDC model. Designation orders will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Within those areas, the URA will still work within the framework of the planning system and will be
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expected to take account of local authorities' development plans and regional planning guidance unless there are very good reasons for doing otherwise.The House will already be aware that Lord Walker of Worcester is to be the first chairman of the agency. I can think of no better person to oversee that work. He has long experience of urban renewal and a track record that is second to none. I am confident that under his guidance the agency will get to work quickly with local authorities and the private sector to bring forward imaginative new schemes for regeneration and renewal.
I said at the outset that the Bill was about choice, standards and opportunity. It gives 550,000 owners of leasehold flats and houses the choice to buy their freehold. It gives 1.5 million council tenants a new choice to buy their homes. It also gives them and the remaining 2.5 million tenants the right to decent standards of repairs, management and maintenance. It brings new opportunities to those living in our deprived urban areas. I commend the Bill to the House.
4.31 pm
Mr. Jack Straw (Blackburn) : Britain today faces a worse housing crisis than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the second world war. There is record homelessness, record repossessions, record bankruptcies of building firms, record numbers of building workers on the dole and record numbers of families trapped in homes worth less than they paid for them. There is record and rising demand for affordable homes to rent and a record and dramatically falling number of homes being built for rent. There is also a record slump in public investment in housing which has been slashed from its level 13 years ago by more than 50 per cent. in real terms--by £6,000 million a year--as a deliberate act of Tory policy.
That is the worst housing record of any Government in living memory and it contrasts starkly with the speech of stupefying complacency and supercilious self-congratulation that we have just heard from the Secretary of State.
The Government have neither the ideas nor the will to match the needs of the moment and the Bill shows why. It has 162 clauses, 21 schedules, 234 pages, 130,000 words, but not a single line in the Bill will build a single home. Not a single subsection will house a homeless family. Not a single section will lead to a revival of the housing market or put a single unemployed craftsman back to work. The Bill speaks volumes for the poverty of imagination of the Secretary of State and his Government. It is therefore first a tragically missed opportunity and that alone would be reason to vote against Second Reading. However, there is worse in the Bill. In the doctrinaire pursuit of the privatisation of council housing management, the Bill takes away a central right of tenants to choose who should manage their estates.
Under the provisions of the Housing Act 1985, which was passed, by the way, by the Government, tenants had the categoric right to veto changes in the management of their homes. Section 27 of that Act states that the Secretary of State shall not give his approval to a change of management if a majority of tenants of the houses to which the agreement relates do not wish the proposal to proceed. That provision has meant that tenants' ballots have had to be held on any changes of management. If the tenants have voted against, their will has prevailed.
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Under the Bill, those rights of ballot and of veto are to go--abolished by the Secretary of State. In their place, as we heard from the Secretary of State a few moments ago, comes a piece of condescending gobbledegook by which tenants will be informed of any change of housing management and can then"make known to the authority their views"
on the proposed changes.
But there will be no ballot and no veto.
The reasons for the removal of those rights of ballot and of veto are simple if chilling. In housing, as in virtually every other aspect of government, the Conservative party has only one policy--privatisation. It does not matter if the prescription is completely inappropriate if it leads, as with the Secretary of State's former pet scheme, water privatisation, to higher charges and prices. It does not matter if the privatisation leads to the loss of thousands of jobs and the destruction of scores of mining communities, as happened with electricity privatisation. It does not matter if the privatisation will ride roughshod over the wishes of the people in whose name it is supposed to be carried out--the tenants-- as it will with the scheme in the Bill.
For the Tory party, privatisation has become a god. Privatisation now comes before all--before common sense, before financial probity, and certainly a long way before tenants' rights.
Nothing is to get in the way of yet another seedy scheme of privatisation from the Secretary of State. As we can see from his speech, the Secretary of State is very sensitive to the charge that he is taking away tenants' rights, but he has had precious little to say in explaining why he has done that. In the press notice which he issued on the Bill he did not say a word about what he was doing to tenants' rights. Instead, he left it to his officials who put out what was rather hopefully described as a factsheet which blithely claimed that the
"tenants power of veto over the delegation of housing management" was "inappropriate".
Given that explanation, I pressed the Secretary of State on why it was inappropriate. I wrote to him. When he replied, the Secretary of State explained in some detail how the system of contracting out would work. He went on to say :
"In the circumstances I am sure that the vast majority of tenants will see the continued existence of an obligation to consult tenants by ballot as no longer relevant."
What arrogant, arrant nonsense from the Secretary of State. How can he be certain if he is not going to allow tenants to express their will? As my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) claimed, is he not aware that overwhelmingly the tenants' associations which commented on the consultative document have opposed the loss of their right of veto? If the Secretary of State is as sure as he claims in that letter, why does he not trust the tenants and ask them by ballot in the only certain way of finding out? Why indeed is the Secretary of State yet again treating council tenants as second-class citizens? Under the Bill, private leaseholders are to be given the right to choose who should manage their blocks of flats at exactly the time that the same right is to be removed from council tenants.
I will tell the House why the Secretary of State is taking away the right of tenants by ballot to choose who should manage their estates. He will not let tenants vote because he knows that his schemes for the privatisation of council
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house management are so inherently unpopular that they would be rejected across the country in one ballot after another on one estate after another.I spoke about the record of the Secretary of State. There is another record that the Secretary of State will achieve by the Bill. Along with water privatisation and the poll tax, he will go down as the Conservative Minister who took away tenants' rights, and we shall not let him forget it.
Let me turn to the issue of right to repair. No. 6 of those oxymoron, Department of the Environment "factsheets", attempted to explain away the loss of tenants' rights. Factsheet No. 3 in the same series tries but fails to give details of the new right to repair which, as the Secretary of State said, is another feature of this Bill. Everyone--hon. Members, councillors, and, above all, tenants themselves--has every right to expect a high standard of repair service and speedy remedies if things go wrong. That is not at issue. What is at issue is whether the Government have the remotest notion of how to achieve that shared and laudable end, and whether the right to repair in this Bill will be anything more than yet another ill- thought-through proposal which fills a page in the citizens charter but helps scarcely a single tenant.
The House, after all, has been here before. In 1983
Mr. Straw : My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Maxton) has a long memory and he says that that is right. He will remember this--he spoke in the debate.
In 1983 Ministers introduced a right to repair into the Housing and Building Control Bill, with a fanfare of publicity and many overblown claims. I notice that the Minister for Housing and Planning is looking sheepish about this, and well he might, because when we complained, in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury, that the then scheme was "half-baked", the then Under-Secretary responsible for housing--and, my word, how he has risen up the scale in the nine years since--none other than the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton (Sir G. Young), now the Minister for Housing and Planning, sought to rubbish our criticisms of the scheme by "doubting the commitment of some Opposition Members to the concept of a right to repair scheme."--[ Official Report, Standing Committee B, 10 November 1983 ; c. 601.]
Yet we were right and he was wrong.
Three years after the introduction of this much-vaunted scheme and after £40,000 had been spent on publicity for the scheme--most of it in the run-up to the 1987 general election, by some strange coincidence--just 75 tenants had received £7,300 compensation under the scheme. It was, in other words, a dead duck. The scheme has been such a failure that Ministers have even stopped collecting figures on it.
Mr. Maxton : In Scotland the position is even worse than that because there the Government introduced the legislation with secondary legislation required to bring it into force. So far the statutory instruments required to bring the legislation into force have not been laid.
Mr. Straw : I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing out that, as always, the situation in Scotland is worse than
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that in England, not least because in Scotland there is a form of imposed colonial administration on the good Labour voters there.Mr. Clive Betts (Sheffield, Attercliffe) : Reference has just been made to the attitude of Opposition Members to the right-to-repair legislation in 1983. Is my hon. Friend aware that at the same time, when consulted, the local authority associations, both Conservative and Labour, both the Association of Metropolitan Authorities and the Association of District Councils, told the Government that they supported the principle of the right to repair but that the scheme would not work? They offered a scheme which was one page in length compared with the Government's 16 pages, and they simply said that the tenants would not understand it. Will my hon. Friend reflect on whether the Government this time round are doing more to consult local authority associations or take any more notice of them than they did on the last occasion?
Mr. Straw : I am sorry to disappoint my hon. Friend, but they are a bit like the Bourbons : they learn nothing and they forget nothing, these Conservatives. There is no evidence whatever that the Minister, for example, has learnt anything from his past mistakes.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) said, my hon. Friends at the time quoted at length what the local authority associations on both sides were saying and gave extensive examples of how the Government's proposals for a right-to-repair scheme would not work. At every stage the Minister for Housing and Planning, then the Under- Secretary, dismissed our complaints and amendments and said that his scheme would work. It worked as an excuse for publicity for the Tory party, paid for by the taxpayer, prior to the general election, but it worked in no other respect and it has flopped.
Mr. Jonathan Evans (Brecon and Radnor) : I wonder whether the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) would at least concede that there would be no need for Parliament to legislate on the right to repair if his friends in local government repaired the housing in the first place?
Mr. Straw : If life were perfect, there would be no need for this place to be here, and no need for the Tories to be here. Of course we need schemes to remedy problems when they arise, and that is not an issue between the sides, but our objection to the scheme that the Under-Secretary brought forward, with the full approval of Government Members, in 1983 was that it would not work ; and we are at least as sceptical on this occasion about whether this scheme will work.
Mr. Mike Hall (Warrington, South) : Will my hon. Friend agree with me that one of the reasons why right-to-repair schemes will not work is that they are not backed up by the necessary revenues in the housing investment programmes which the Government have cut year on year, and that is one reason why we have all the problems that are being mentioned today?
Mr. Straw : My hon. Friend is right. In my judgment and experience, it is Labour authorities that deliver a
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decent repair service, and Conservative authorities and private landlords represented by Tories who deliver a lousy service.Mr. Charles Hendry (High Peak) rose -- Mr. Straw : No. I have just taken five interventions on the trot, so the hon. Gentleman must excuse me.
In the factsheets that the Department of the Environment officials dished out when the Bill was published, there is in every other factsheet describing the measures in the Bill a section entitled "How will the scheme work?", but there is no such section on the right to repair, explaining how this scheme will work, so the answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Attercliffe is that I do not know how the new scheme will work and I doubt very much whether Ministers themselves know how it will work. But I warn the Ministers that from what little we have been able to glean it looks as though the scheme could turn into a bodgers' charter, with unending scope for argument between tenant, council and contractor, and plenty of opportunity for the scheme to become a nice little earner for unscrupulous contractors working in concert.
Let me give one example on emergency repairs. Under the scheme each tenant must be sent a work order form along with a list of approved contractors who can be contacted if the job cannot be done in a specified time. But how will this improve the standard of service for emergency repairs where a 24- hour service is required? Who will issue this work order form in the middle of the night when the water is gushing down the stairs? How long must the tenant wait before getting another contractor out of bed--two hours or 24?
The 1983 scheme was abandoned because it was, in the words of the consultative document,
"excessively bureaucratic and had a low take-up".
But how will this scheme be any less bureaucratic than the one it replaces?
Turning to the question of rents to mortgage, there is perhaps no better example of the irrelevant, not to say perverse, priorities of the Government than the proposal for a rents-to-mortgage scheme at this time. With thousands of people facing repossession, why has not the Secretary of State come forward not just with a rents-to-mortgage scheme but with an effective mortgage-to-rents scheme of the kind that we in the Labour party have proposed so that owners about to be thrown out of their homes can convert their tenure to a rental one during the recession ?
We have heard many claims about the right to buy. The Secretary of State did not say that the right to buy is virtually non-existent at present ; the number of people seeking to buy homes at present has dwindled to 17,000 in the first half of this year.
Mr. George Howarth : They would like the right to sell.
Mr. Straw : As my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North (Mr. Howarth) says, what former tenants would like is the right to sell rather than be trapped in the homes that they once wanted to buy. Given the collapsed state of the housing market and the large number of low-income purchasers in serious difficulties, we must question whether now is the time to launch the scheme nationwide. Compared with renting, the rents-to- mortgage scheme that the Secretary of State suggests offers a very poor deal for the tenants. Rents-to-mortgage purchasers will not have repairs done
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by the council, will have to pay for their own buildings insurance, and will be ineligible for housing benefit, but they will face repossession if they do not keep up with their payments. This scheme will only potentially be of interest to those tenants who cannot afford to buy their homes under the right-to-buy scheme. The Secretary of State is attracting people to take on financial responsibility from exactly those groups who ought to be counselled against the idea of purchasing their own home at a time of such financial uncertainty.As my hon. Friend the Member for Cathcart and I pointed out to the Secretary of State, where the scheme has been piloted it has not been a success. The Secretary of State had better ask his officials for another billet doux. I can tell him, however, that 5,000 sales were predicted under the scheme in Scotland, with 1,000 occurring in the first year ; only 200 were achieved. I can also tell him that, according to parliamentary answers, £800,000 has been spent by the Scottish Office--mostly before the election, surprise surprise--on publicising the scheme : £4,000 was spent for each sale. That is a disgraceful example of the Conservative party's use of taxpayers' money to publicise party-political propaganda.
The scheme has not been a success in England, either. In Milton Keynes, just 67 sales have been completed ; in Basildon, in my home county of Essex, just 264 of the 6,000 eligible tenants applied to take part in the scheme. Only 39 have completed sales. I should have thought that, given the scheme's palpable failure in England as well as Scotland, the Secretary of State would devote his time and resources to a rather more important way of reviving the housing market.
The proposals for leasehold enfranchisement take up well over half the Bill. The Secretary of State treated us to an interesting historical ramble, from Edward I to the Law of Property Act 1925, which is burnt on the brain and breast of everyone who has ever had to take law exams. He was, however, his usual disingenuous self when he implied that the Conservatives were in power in 1967. It was the Labour party that steered through the 1967 legislation giving leaseholders of houses the right to buy their freeholds. As we saw from the display on the Conservative Benches, it did so in the face of intense opposition from Conservative Members who represent the landed interest in the House.
I am sorry to see that the right hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling) and the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Wiggin), who opposed the Secretary of State, have not had the courage or the courtesy to stay for the rest of the debate. Let me inform them, however--and let me also inform the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls)--that, as the Register of Members' Interests has not yet been published, I hope that Conservative Members who are accepting paid consultancies from landed interests such as the Duke of Westminster will declare their interests before speaking in the debate, and that they will tell us how much money they are taking.
Mr. Nicholls : The hon. Gentleman talks of interests that ought to be declared. Perhaps he, like me, has a lease on a flat in a block in London and will be able to enfranchise it as a result of the Bill. I do not expect my landlord to be deprived by my not paying the market rent. Does the hon. Gentleman expect to deprive his landlord?
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