Michael Meacher MP

Just when you thought that things can’t get worse, the screw is turned further.   According to the official National Housing Federation, the cuts in housing benefit which slasher Osborne announced in his Budget and which DWP are now about to launch will force over 750,000 people out of their homes, increasing 5-fold the 140,000 persons currently classified as homeless in Britain.   What is going to happen to soaring hundreds of thousands of additional rough sleepers when local authorities, facing 25-30% cuts like central Departments, only have a statutory duty to house people in ‘priority need’? (more…)

Yet another downward twist in the anguished saga of social housing. For the last 2 decades there have been between 1-2 million households on Council waiting lists (the number is currently 1.8 million), yet the number of social housing units built has been continually and drastically reduced and is now no more than a trickle. Under Thatcher the number of houses built by local authorities fell from nearly 100,000 a year to just 13,000 in 1990, driven by the concept of a home-owning democracy and right-to-buy sales. Under Major the sharp decline continued, down to just 450 in 1996-7. Under the Blair regime, the fall tailed off to a trickle, no more than an average of 160 a year over the decade and down to just 63 social houses built in 2001. This virtual elimination of Council house-building was then accompanied by measures to try to force tenants out of Council estates by refusing to carry out repairs and maintenance unless there was a transfer to a private landlord, a housing association, or an ALMO (an arms length management organisation, which managed the houses separately from the Council). This systematic and largely unreported-on campaign against Council housing has now been called off, or has it?

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The Government’s commitment announced earlier this month to build an extra 10,000 affordable homes in each of the next two years looks to be unravelling amid Whitehall in-fighting about its funding. The £1.5bn cost (at an average £75,000 per house) was to be found by making cuts elsewhere, but this is not surprisingly proving difficult to achieve. DCLG has been told to raise £600m, and proposes to do this by cutting both other existing LA housing programmes and refurbishment plans for 44,000 Council and 8,600 privately rented homes. A further £900m has to be found by other Departments. But rather than chopping other essential public services, what is really needed is a mini-public expenditure review across the board. That should certainly involve a drastic reduction in further taxpayer funding of the banks (which already amounts according to the IMF to a staggering £904bn – equal to over 60% of Britain’s entire GDP), chopping Trident and ID cards which are increasingly seen as having no relevant role, and raising taxes on the 2% richest over £100,000 a year who largely caused the financial crisis in the first place. A temporary surcharge of 5% on this latter group for 3 years in the current crisis would yield sufficient funding to build an additional 60,000 affordable homes, and the direct redistribution from rich to poor would galvanise public opinion which has been waiting for just such a message for so long.

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Gordon Brown’s recent remarks, which have gone largely unreported, potentially herald a major change in housing policy. He said: “In the past we have placed restrictions on local authorities delivering social housing…..we will now put aside any of the barriers that stand in the way of this (building social housing) happening….We will not allow old arguments and old ideologies to stop us getting on with the job together”. The only problem is, does he mean it? How exactly will it be funded and delivered on anything like the scale of what is required to solve the problem?

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As we enter 2009, there are four issues at the top of the political agenda – the handling of the financial-economic meltdown, post office privatisation, Government support for the third runway at Heathrow, and the collapse of policy to meet housing need. The first three have had a lot of attention, the fourth far less than it deserves. It should be centre-stage for 2009.

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The Government’s gross under-funding of local authorities to manage and maintain their Council homes is leading many, including now Oldham, to propose shifting them from an ALMO, externally managed but still owned by the Council, to a Housing Association which is a private company in law. This means the loss of secure tenancies, higher rents and charges, less democratic control of the housing service, and increased risks for tenants.

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OLDHAM SHOWS SOCIAL HOUSING IS THE MOST NEGLECTED ISSUE TODAY
Today’s news that court applications in Oldham for repossession are now 31% higher than a year ago pinpoint the savagery of the deepening recession. Not all of these applications will of course lead to eviction, but it is likely that at least half will. And then there is nowhere else to go. Oldham Council already has 12,000 households on the waiting list, which compares today with its total housing stock of 12,500. A third of all those who come to my constituency surgeries are desperately searching for housing, often telling the most heart-breaking stories and saying that I am their last resort. It is agonising having to explain that the options available are so appallingly restricted.
Oldham, like so many other towns, has built hardly any houses since the mid-1980s. Last year however it did build 69 social housing units, but in the same year it was also obliged to sell off 250 houses under the Right to Buy and a further 300 were also demolished. So there was still a net loss of nearly 500.
Worse, the quality of Oldham’s social housing continues to slip steadily. The Council/ALMO needs an additional £9 million a year, over and above the Housing Revenue Account flow of revenues, to maintain homes brought up to the Decent Homes standard (a minimum standard that refers only to the external structure, roof, windows and insulation, not to the kitchen, bathroom or environment). The Housing Options review of all Oldham Council’s properties just completed revealed that on average £8,500 was required per property simply to bring them up to an adequate standard, at a total cost of some £100 millions To bring them up to a good standard would cost £11,000 per property (total cost £130 millions). And as a comparison, the PFI sheltered housing scheme in Oldham is providing £80,000 per property in order to modernise to a high standard.
So what should be done? The root of the problem is that Government expenditure on social housing nationally has plummeted from 6.1% of GDP in 1981 to 1.6% in 2005. What this means is that if the Government today were spending the same proportion of GDP on social housing as it was in the late 1970s, it would be spending no less than £22bn extra on housing for low-income families. In 1990, even at the end of Thatcher’s premiership, Britain was still building 13,000 Council houses a year. Last year it was just 200! New Labour has been as ideologically indifferent, or even more hostile, than Thatcher to the public rented sector. The inevitable result has been the misery and deprivation and anger spilling out at every surgery I hold in Oldham.
What is needed is a major national switch of resources back into housing, with the emphasis heavily targeted on building more and better social housing. Local Authority and Housing Association housing uniquely caters for about a quarter of the population, and the objectives in terms of adequate supply and high standards should match the owner-occupied sector. Nor is this a pipe-dream when what is chiefly needed in a severe economic downturn like this one is a major increase in public works, and house-building is the prime candidate for this role both because it meets a desperate social need and because it has a widespread multiplier effect in generating activity across the whole economy.

200,000 HOUSEHOLDS in 2006 HAD PRICE-TO-INCOME MORTGAGES GREATER THAN 6 TO 1
The scale and depth of negative equity, and the recklessness of the mortgage lending generating it, are revealed in the latest figures from the Regulated Mortgage Survey and Council of Mortgage Lenders. They reveal that in 2006 no less than 201,078 households were granted a mortgage that year (18% of the total) with a price to income ratio greater than 6 to 1. Of these, 80,289 (7% of the total) were lent mortgages with ratios in excess of 8 to 1, and 37,937 (3.34% of the total) actually had ratios in excess of 10 to 1!
These are staggering figures. Not only do a third of all the 11 million households with a mortgage have a price to income ratio above 3 ½ which is widely regarded as the upper safe limit, but half that number of households have ratios over double the safe limit.
Nor was 2006 the worst year in terms of numbers of families over-extended with their mortgage commitments. In 2004 the figures were even higher. That year 309,170 households were granted mortgages (a stunning 25% of the total) in excess of the 6 to 1 price to income ratio, including mo less than 62,931 households (5% of the total) in excess of 10 to1.
It is clear from these figures that the extent of negative equity substantially exceeds that at the nadir of the 1990-1 recession, and that the depth of that negative equity is also much greater than ever before.
There are three immediate lessons. Measures to protect home-owners from repossession have to be a great deal tougher than those already announced by the Government, including the right to switch to tenancy status to preserve their home. Secondly, we need a public sector bank specialising in mortgage lending to low-income families to protect poorer applicants from commitments they are unlikely to be able to honour. And thirdly, we need much tighter rules governing all mortgage lenders restricting lending to levels much closer to the 3 ½ price to income safe limit unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Cutting interest rates rapidly towards US levels of around 2% seems at last to be getting through to the MPC (but was it really such a good idea to give them this power in the first place when they invariably display the bankers’ prejudice to countering inflation irrespective of the real economy?). Yet there is still little sign of take-up of the other main weapon to tackle the recession – major public works building programmes, especially housing.
Repossessions are expected by the Council of Mortgage Lenders to reach 45,000 this year and to exceed next year the number reached at the nadir of the 1991 recession. In my constituency alone (Oldham) the number of repossession orders registered in court had already soared to 1340 in 2007, a very worrying 50% increase over the level reached at the pit of the recession in 1991, and must be considerably higher now. The only way to keep people in their own homes and to prevent a veritable national blizzard of repossessions by this time next year is to ensure that any persons threatened with eviction from their home can either convert their repayment mortgage to an interest-only one (saving nearly two-thirds of the cost) until such time as they can switch back to covering the repayment costs, or to allow them to transfer to tenancy status with a local authority or housing association until again they are economically able to resume purchase of their home. The Government has talked about this, but it needs to do it – urgently. I have written to Yvette Cooper, Chief Secretary, and to DCLG to ask for an early statement to be made of their precise plans and the timescale for implementing them.
The other desperate need is a massive crash programme for building social housing. The failure to do this is one of the greatest scandals of the last decade. In Thatcher’s last year 1990-1there were still 13,000 Council homes a year being built in England; by 2004-5 it was just 100 (according to DCLG statistics). The consequences of this New Labour prejudice against building Council houses (because Council tenants were being pressured to become owner-occupiers instead – a home-grown UK sub-prime market in the making) have been dire. In the North-west region housing waiting lists have risen 75% in the last 5 years, and house prices rose no less than 81% over the same short period – far more even than the national average rise of 58%. As a result, homes in the North-west cam to cost over 8.5 times average incomes.
There are now 1.7 million households on Council waiting lists, plus a further 80,000 in temporary accommodation and categorised as homeless. Again, in my constituency alone there are 12,000 households desperate to get a Council flat or house, but none is being built, and even the existing stock continues to be whittled away by the Right to Buy. This year the Government has announced it aims to raise its social house-buildingnationally to 2,500 units. This is certainly better than recent years, but it scarcely scratches the surface of the enormity of unmet need. What is needed is an annual target of at least 50,000 social houses a year, to be reached within 3-4 years. If £100bn can be found by the State to save some of the banks, £10bn can certainly be found by the State to tackle the social evil of homelessness and seriously poor and inadequate housing, especially since its counter-cyclical potential is so powerful. The Government’s fate at the next election may well turn on how forcefully and extensively they deal with this disfigurement of our society.

Today the House of Commons debated housing, and in particular the acute lack of social affordable housing almost everywhere in the country. There are three main problems. One is that the demand for such housing far exceeds the Government’s present plans to provide it. Second, it is unrealistic to rely on the private sector to provide the decent, secure homes that people on lower incomes need at prices they can afford, nor is there evidence that the Housing Associations are rising to the challenge to fill the gap. And thirdly, there is nowhere near enough funding for local authorities to maintain and repair their existing stock, let alone build the new houses desperately needed.
It is good that the Government is proposing to raise the number of houses built per year from 200,000 to 240,000, to reach a total of 3 million new houses built by 2020. But the current baseline is only around 170,000 a year, and that number is anyway likely to fall for some years ahead because of the sub-prime market crisis and the credit crunch. Moreover, the numbers of specifically social and affordable houses needed is estimated to be an extra 50-70,000 a year, rather more than the 30,000 proposed by the Government, if the large backlog of homelessness and poor or unsatisfactory housing for low-income households is to be cleared within a reasonable period.
In the current economic climate there is no way that the private sector can remotely fill the gap. Nor indeed would it be wise for them to try to do so anyway. A Parliamentary Answer I received in November revealed that there are already more than 200,000 households who have taken out mortgages with a house price-to-income ratio in excess of 6:1, including 38,000 in excess of 10:1. We are already in danger of generating our own sub-prime market disaster in this country too, not just in the US, and we should certainly not risk making the present downturn any worse. Besides, there is probably a fifth of the population who have such low incomes and such uncertain employment prospects that they will never be able under present circumstances reliably to afford to buy and maintain a home.
For them what is clearly needed is good-quality secure public housing at rents which they can genuinely afford. And that is the message which the current levels of unmet housing demand are crying out to be heard. There were 1.6 million households on Council waiting lists in 2006, and the number is probably nearer 2 million today. In Oldham the number on the Council waiting list is now 12,000; yet the total Council housing stock in Oldham is now only about 12,500 – down from some 27,000 homes twenty years ago. In addition, across the country there are nearly 100,000 households who are homeless in temporary accommodation, including several hundred in Oldham.
Yet despite the pressure cooker conditions now prevailing in public rented housing, the demand to stay in Council housing, and to have more Council housing, could not be clearer. No less than 2 ½ million existing Council tenants in nearly 200 areas across the country have still opted in transfer ballots to remain as Council tenants even though they have been told that if they don’t vote for either stock transfer to a private landlord or to a housing association or to an arm’s length management organisation (First Choice Homes in Oldham), they will be denied funding for proper repairs and maintenance. Tenants know they will not get from private landlords or even housing associations the same security, socially affordable rents (at least till now) and a publicly accountable Council to complain to if things go wrong.
That’s why it’s now so vital that the Management and Maintenance Allowances and the Major Repairs Allowances which Councils get from the Government should be paid to all Councils (even where the tenants in a ballot have declined to shift) and that they are pitched at an adequate level. At present they are fixed far below this level. A report from the Government itself, issued this month, says that current allowances “undercut basic investment needs by 43% over 30 years”. That is a staggering admission – that the funding provided for Council housing is little more than half of what is basically needed.
It is this huge shortfall in allowances which is driving Councils to privatise their homes, even against the wishes of their tenants. It means also of course that many local authorities can’t meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard and that many others who may be meeting it now will be unable to sustain this standard in the longer term.
At present, the net funding trail is, perversely, going in the opposite direction. Council rents are actually rising faster in order to close the gap with private rents in the locality, though ideologically that seems to be turning the whole purpose of Council housing on its head. And Council rents are even rising higher than expenditure so that tenants will actually be paying a tax to the Treasury this year of some £180 millions, and a Parliamentary Answer of 18 December even suggested that this would rise to nearly £1 billion by 2022. This is on top of the £1.5 billions already being taken each year from Council Housing Revenue Accounts, ostensibly to repay historic debt, though since tenants don’t own the asset, it is difficult to see why they should be burdened with servicing the debt.
The amendment to the Housing Bill I moved tonight in the Commons is about justice for tenants which is long overdue. I moved it because at every surgery I hold in Oldham I am distressed, hurt and angry that usually half the constituents attending have come because their housing situation has become intolerable, and yet I know that in current circumstances I can do nothing. What is desperately needed is that a major Council house-building programme should now urgently be re-started, and if the Government cannot afford that in the present financial climate, then local authorities should be permitted to borrow the necessary funds on the open market against the collateral of their existing housing stock. It is because I believe this so passionately that I voted against the Government tonight along with 27 other Labour colleagues.

The Planning Bill, up for second reading in Parliament today, gives business exactly what it wants – de-regulation of the current planning system in order to prioritise economic growth over environmental, social and democratic objectives.
The Bill sets out that new National Planning Statements will be drawn up for an array of major developments – nuclear power and nuclear waste facilities, coal-fired power stations, airport expansions, major road schemes, and large waste incinerators. These Statements will pre-determine such issues as the need for, the safety of, and even the location of some projects, and will have more weight than any other statement of national, regional or local policy.
Then a new body, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, will decide on major project proposals in accordance with the National Policy Statements. The decisions of this new quango will be final, with Ministers no longer able to take decisions in this area. In other words, it removes all direct democratic accountability.
The public will also lose the right to be heard and to cross-examine witnesses in public inquiries. Instead, the Commission will decide whether individuals can give evidence, and in what way. But no questions can be asked about whether the project is really needed, or whether it’s safe, or where it’s located. Most people would describe this process as a complete bureaucratic stitch-up.
Even more extraordinarily, it is proposed in the case of major infrastructure projects that the community consultation will be carried out by the developer himself! As though the promoter of the development will seriously examine alternative development options!
The removal of the needs test will hugely favour supermarkets like Tesco and Wall Mart in getting more out-of-town supermarkets. If we didn’t already pick up the Government’s biases over the planning system, the Planning White Paper says that it aims to “promote competition and consumer choice, and not unduly or disproportionately constrain the market”.
The Government justifies all this by saying it is necessary to make it easier to get these major infrastructure projects through in order to tackle climate change. But the opposite is true, because these are precisely the projects that increase carbon emissions and increase pollution in the first place. The real way to tackle climate change is a massive increase in renewables and decentralised low/no carbon energy systems while phasing out fossil fuels.
These ‘reforms’ are fundamentally anti-democratic because they remove the need for the developer to consult and to gain consent. The public will not even have a right to be heard when far-reaching policy is being drawn up in the National Policy Statements, let alone when decisions are made on the ground. There will be no trust in this new process if people’s involvement is at the discretion of unaccountable bodies with (appropriately) ugly titles like the Infrastructure Planning Commission.
Ominously, this introduction of faceless grey bureaucratic quangos is paralleled by a similar device in the Government’s recent Housing Bill – OFTENANT, who will replace elected local Councils in setting criteria for allocating tenancies, determining rents, deciding how far housing need will be met and in what way, dealing with tenants’ complaints, and even regulating anti-social behaviour on housing estates.
Doing deals behind-the-scenes with the vested interests involved in big infrastructure projects is yet another example of this Government giving priority to corporate power over the public interest. That’s what we would expect of the Tories, not of Labour.

After three decades of neglect and 1,634,000 households stranded on council waiting lists by 2005 (probably nearer 2 million by now), a house-building programme is finally getting under way. But it is nowhere near enough.
Investment in public housing has plummeted from 6.1% of government spending in 1981 to just 1.6% in 2005. What this means is that in current price terms the government is now spending £22bn less a year on public housing than it was spending at the end of the 1970s. Added to that the rent-setting formula for council housing has now been changed from the formula known as “pooled historic cost” to one that is partly related to the value of owner-occupied housing in the area. Rents have climbed steeply as a result. Those in council housing cannot hope to buy their way out in the private sector when the ratio of mortgage loans to income can be as much 8 or even 10:1.
A small increase in housing output will not necessarily stabilise, let alone bring down, house prices when the flow of house purchase lending, now at the staggering level of nearly £1tn a year, is rising so much faster. If extra house-building increases the stock by 1-2% a year, which the housing and regeneration bill – given its second reading yesterday – aims to achieve, while at the same time the credit available to buy it increases by, say, 5% or more a year, house prices won’t fall.
What is really needed is a return nearer to historic levels of housing investment and a construction drive targeted at decent-quality council housing made available at rents related to the cost of construction and completely decoupled from ballooning prices in the private sector.
The government’s aspirations are not ambitious enough. It proposes 200,000 new homes a year to 2016 (last year’s total was 169,000), then 240,000 a year to 2020 – 3 million in all. But new household formation alone is now running at 220,000 a year, and if the accumulated unmet housing need of the half-million or more households living in overcrowded, bad quality or damp housing is to be dealt with within a 10-year programme, then at least an extra 270,000 homes a year is now required.
More pressing still, the government is proposing to build an extra 15,000 social rented homes a year, nearly all through housing associations. Council housing still remains largely taboo, since the Blair government only built an average 300 council houses a year compared with the 14,000 built even at the end of Thatcher’s reign in 1990. But the latest surveys show that at least a further 20,000 social homes for rent are needed each year over and above the extra 15,000 in order to meet what is called “urgent newly arising” need and to halve, as the government intends, the numbers who are homeless or in temporary accommodation (currently 101,000). To achieve this, local authorities should now be allowed to borrow on the open market, as housing associations can, against the security of their existing housing stock. At present local authorities are forbidden to do so.
Less appealing in the new housing bill is the proposal to create an unaccountable regulator which would transfer key responsibilities away from elected ministers. This new quango will have control over such sensitive issues as the criteria for allocating accommodation, the nature of housing demand to be addressed, the extent to which demand is to supplied, the terms of tenancies, the levels of rent, procedures for addressing tenants’ complaints, and even anti-social behaviour. After stock transfer, RSLs, ALMOs and right to buy have shifted half of council housing away from local government, this latest move could now go a long way to removing all the rest out of local democratic control.
Worse, profitmaking companies are to be allowed for the first time to register as social landlords under a lighter burden of regulation. And for the first time means-testing is to be included in the definition of social housing. This abandons one of fundamental founding principles of council housing which was to provide high-quality housing for all sections of society, not housing of last resort for those who can’t afford anything better. Only 30 years ago, according to Professor John Hills, 20% of the richest tenth lived in social housing. Now, if this bill goes through, council estates will further concentrate deprivation and council housing will be further stigmatised when what the government ought to be doing is to promote council housing as a tenure of choice for those who wish it.
From

Extract from my contribution [scroll down to 3.09pm] to the Queen’s Speech debate, 14 November 2007
I believe the Government urgently needs some commanding themes by which its distinctive vision can be clearly understood. I want to propose three.
The first is democratisation which the PM himself adumbrated in his first statement to Parliament. But it has to stretch a great deal further than simply giving Parliament a vote before the country goes to war. Parliament needs real new powers on a much broader front – electing Select Committee members, ratifying (or not) Cabinet nominations made by the PM, approving (or not) the membership and terms of reference of Committees of Inquiry proposed by the PM, and setting up our own Parliamentary Commissions to investigate matters (like extraordinary rendition) when the Government itself refuses to do so.
But it isn’t just in Parliament where there’s a democratic deficit. A far bigger one now exists outside. Power has become so centralised over the last 30 years and the regulatory authorities so enfeebled that so far from regulating corporate power, the biggest businesses have increasingly co-opted the power of the State for themselves for their own commercial ends. The current loosening of controls over major power station, airport and incinerator developments, the failure to regulate unhealthy food advertising because of objections from the food industry despite the epidemic of obesity, the withdrawal of the SFO investigation into corruption allegations against BAE, and the relaxation of the gaming laws to permit a flood of gambling casinos are just a few recent examples.
Accountability today has all but vanished. Perhaps the most telling case is Northern Rock. It is now costing taxpayers £23bn in loans, plus a £2bn interest charge – almost equal to the entire annual defence budget – yet nobody is held responsible. The Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury are all blaming each other. What action is being taken, and by whom, to face up to the fundamental mistakes made that led up to this crisis, including the reckless lending practices of the chief executive of Northern Rock as well as the flawed structure of regulation put in place a decade ago? Why wasn’t Northern Rock temporarily taken into public ownership, as was done in the case of the secondary banking crisis in 1974, in order to avoid a run on the bank and to retain depositors’ confidence without this colossal haemorrhage of public funds? The answer to that of course is that the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation, de-regulation and unfettered markets is still, unaccountably, being imposed above everything else, even at phenomenal cost to the taxpayer so that public ownership, even temporarily, is ruled out.
And what action is the Government going to take over the mania for securitisation, collateralised debt obligations and all the other opaque and dodgy financial derivatives which have so dramatically and comprehensively destabilised the markets? Despite all its de-regulatory instincts, does the Government now acknowledge that stricter regulation of financial markets is now necessary if the frenzy for newfangled financial instruments, which are actually designed to be deceptive over risk and value, is to be curbed?
Equally, at the other end of society, the checks and balances against the arbitrary use of power have all but evaporated. Civil liberties have been drastically eroded, and the introduction of ID cards and 2-months detention without charge, both of which I deplore, are still being mooted. Workers who have been in their jobs less than two years can still be arbitrarily dismissed without any rights, and temporary and agency workers remain an exploited underclass – mainly at the behest of the CBI which this Government should be much stronger in resisting. Accountability, or indeed any redress, against alleged misdemeanours by the police, judges, banks, private utilities or big corporations is almost non-existent. Today powerlessness is widely felt to be endemic throughout society, and it will require an awful lot more than focus groups or citizens’ juries to put it right.

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Some useful proposals – though the devil may lie in the detail, not yet revealed – but disappointing on the vision and no razzmatazz of new ideas for a new leader, largely because Gordon Brown has already been leading on the domestic policy agenda for the past ten years and now has nothing much new to say.
It’s good that after two decades of neglect of social housing amidst the triumphalist ideology of private ownership, the national scandal of housing need is now at least being noticed. Council waiting lists are now above 1 ½ million and there are over 100,000 homeless, yet only 100 Council homes were built last year (down from 13,000 a year at the end of the Thatcher era). The housing stock is only growing by some 185,000 a year at present, yet the number of new households being formed each year is about 220,000. We are still going backwards. Building an extra 40,000 homes a year, as the Government proposes, is clearly nowhere near enough to meet the yawning gap of housing need. And how many of the 40,000 will be social housing anyway? And why are local authorities still not being allowed to build more Council houses themselves if they wish, borrowing against the security of their own existing housing stock?
Changes to the planning system, as is proposed, might seem sensible when some planning decisions have clearly taken far too long. The 8 years spent on the Heathrow Terminal 5 decision is usually quoted here (though much of that was accounted for by the time spent on Ministers’ desks after the planning report was submitted). But today’s proposals are motivated by very different criteria. National Policy Statements will be drawn up which will enable an array of major developments – nuclear power and nuclear waste facilities, coal-fired power stations, airport expansions, major road schemes, and large waste incinerators – to be put through without the public having a say on whether they are needed or safe, or where they are to be located. This rather conflicts with Brown’s stated wish to bring more democracy into public decisions.
A Climate Change Bill is very welcome, but again its contents leave a lot to be desired. It promises a review of progress in cutting carbon emissions every 5 years which is far too lax when the UK is way off track to meet the Government’s objectives. Clearly annual targets, published and enforceable, are urgently needed. Moreover, air travel and shipping emissions are omitted, even though they are the fastest rising sources of emissions. Nor are mere targets sufficient anyway when other Government policies, notably a tripling of airport capacity by 2030, are diametrically opposed.
Democratisation has also been one of Gordon’s ostensible goals, which is also desperately needed. But it has to stretch a great deal further than simply giving Parliament a vote before the country goes to war – a concession which after the Iraq debacle would probably be inevitable anyway. Parliament needs real new power on a much broader front – electing Select Committee members rather than letting the Whips use the patronage to gain a wider acquiescence, ratifying (or not) Cabinet nominations made by the PM, approving (or not) the membership and terms of reference of Committees of Inquiry proposed by the PM, and setting up their own Parliamentary Commissions to investigate controversial issues (e.g. extraordinary rendition) when the Government refuses to do so. Nor can the idea of greater democracy cut much ice when the Government is still intending to pursue the ID cards folly and, even worse, extend the 28-days detention without charge in defiance of the 800 year old habeas corpus.
And what is not in the Queen’s Speech is perhaps even more important than what is. There’s nothing about redressing the centralisation of power which is such an indictment of the current state of Britain. There’s nothing about redressing the grotesque inequality of income and wealth – nor was there is in the Pre-Budget Report a month ago. And there’s nothing about restoring the ethos of public service which has taken such a battering under Blair – indeed it’s taking a further hit currently with the huge cutbacks in BBC funding which threaten public service broadcasting. Et tu, Gordon?

Yes, the new Housing Green Paper does promise 70,000 affordable houses a year to be built by 2010-11, including 45,000 social homes, and that is more than double the (very low) number built in 2004. But that still leaves a lot of key questions still unanswered:

How many of these will be Council houses, under the democratic control of local authorities? The Government won’t say. Yvette Cooper, the Housing Minister, made clear they still hanker after other forms of tenure – RSLs (housing associations), ALMOs (arms length management organisations), shared equity ownership – anything but local authority housing. In recent years a miniscule 100 houses have been built a year by local authorities because of central government cold-shouldering the idea, despite the fact that homelessness and Council waiting lists have doubled.

There is still no commitment to the Fourth Option (i.e. that Council tenants will not be blackmailed into agreeing to transfer to a private landlord or an RSL or an ALMO under the threat that otherwise repairs and improvements to their Council houses will not be carried out).

There is real doubt whether the Government’s figures stack up. They’ve promised £8bn for investment in more affordable housing by 2016, but the Local Government Association thinks half as much again will be needed.

Making new homes from 2016 all zero-carbon and setting out bids for 5 new eco-homes of up to 20,000 homes each is good. But these 100,000 homes are less than 0.5% of the housing stock. What plans for reducing carbon emissions and radically improving energy efficiency in the other 99.5%?