PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES - United Kingdom Parliament

1547 Flood Insurance
26 MARCH 2013
1548
[Mr Raab]
Resolved,
That this House notes the Environment Agency’s estimate that
570,000 properties in England and Wales are at significant risk of
flooding; recognises the efforts of the insurance industry and past
and present governments to reach agreement to ensure flood
insurance will be made available to all homes and small businesses
beyond June 2013; calls on the insurance industry to negotiate in
good faith to conclude those arrangements; and further calls on
the Government to acknowledge the need to provide some support
for those arrangements and ensure that resilience and adaptation
to flood risks and other natural hazards are amongst its highest
environmental priorities.
Easter Adjournment
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That this House has considered matters to be raised before the
forthcoming Adjournment.—(Mr Amess.)
DEPARTMENT FOR COMMUNITIES AND
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
4.46 pm
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab): I am extremely
grateful for this opportunity to ventilate the important
issue of housing. A number of my colleagues applied,
successfully, to speak on this subject as it is of intense
importance to us. Although I and many of my colleagues
are London MPs, we do not claim for a second that the
housing crisis is unique to our capital city. The hon.
Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has a housing
waiting list of nearly 3,000 in his idyllic constituency.
This problem affects all of us.
The housing situation in London has gone beyond
inconvenience, awkwardness or even embarrassment to
something that it is now in a profound state of crisis. In
Ealing, the borough in which I have spent virtually all
my life, we have 23,416 people on the housing waiting
list and there is no chance whatever of them finally
finding accommodation. One reason for that is that in
London the average house price is £421,395, and the
average London income is £26,962. Even in dear, dear
Ealing, the average house price is £374,707, whereas
medium earnings are £25,392.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/
Co-op): Does my hon. Friend think that the Government’s
recent proposals in the Budget to provide cheap mortgages
to anyone will help the situation?
Stephen Pound: My hon. Friend makes a telling point.
In doing so she has rather stolen my thunder, but I
forgive her in that as I do in all things. The Government
may well have a policy, but it is retrogressive. The idea
that the solution to the housing problem in London is
to sell off the last few remaining properties at vast,
eye-watering discounts and somehow assume that, in
extremis, property can be sold as cheaply as £10,000,
and that that money will then go forth, multiply and
create a new property, is absolutely absurd. The other
strand of that—somehow to blame the whole housing
crisis in London on the immigrant community—proves
once and for all that it is a lot easier to find a scapegoat
than to find a solution. The scapegoat is being identified;
the solution is not.
Boroughs such as mine in Ealing are having to take
incredibly exhaustive steps to build houses. We have a
commitment to 500 new build houses over the next five
years, but we also have an estate regeneration programme.
We are using existing land to increase the estates that
already exist, so that with hard work—exhaustive work—
and a great deal of extremely fine officer time, we can
create 5,044 units from a total of 3,653. I pay tribute to
my colleague Councillor Hitesh Tailor in the London
borough of Ealing, who has somehow managed to
square the circle in the case of Copley close, an absolutely
typical old Greater London council estate. Allegedly—I
have never heard anyone disprove this, but I am told it is
true—the architect who designed the estate never set