HOUSING (1)

Invest more?

keg Freeson About eighteen million people greeted !he New Year in two million slums and 'our million obsolescent homes. These total about one third of Britain's housing is3tock. How to end this must continue to central to government action, not just :ords, and must be reflected in its overall 4cial and economic strategy. tIstiesPite all that has been done to date, e hearts of our cities are a housing bi,,sgrace, The problems cannot be solved cutting local authority housing proWhich is what most councils save done since 1968, as exhorted by the ecretarY of State for the Environment, in They won't be solved if councils persist a underestimating the number of slums tlel,(1 near-slums in their areas, and refuse iv, use outer city land to rehouse families tF;a), congested, decaying inner areas. And ex'Y won't be solved by cuts in public exJenditure, which the Government Kends. Expansion is needed. 41905 to 1968 saw a 30 per cent rise in (4,,asing investment by public authorities c'art from subsidy expenditure). Apart ,rorn million private homes built, clo'Lncil building rose from 160,000 to over starts a year; slums cleared from At TA) to 90,000 a year, and slums made ill°. 100,0000 a year. tod is growth should have continued, but Deray Yearhousebuilding is down to 150,000 slum clearance to 67,000 and 180-08,,,,lnade fit to 51,000 — offset by only with old houses modernised, compared 00 a year pre-1969 Housing Act. ellas present policies are quickly bekt ged, the figures will worsen in the three Years, dropping to about 1974u.°0 local authority housing starts by To 'llortanend slumdom, obsolescence and anthoritie by 1981 postulates: public building on average 200,000 for osurannUally for ten years, for rent and 'nillie,-ner`occupation, rising to a quarter 100,06', annually at the end of the decade; and sub-standard homes modernised The 0 slums cleared annually. 'hotter s,cale of construction, clearance and r"sation which I have summarised 14\restnia build-up of annual public capital the Yea „ "ild-1970 Tent in housing to £1,500 million by urb s, with £200 million a „ ratle an renewal, expensive site and ' a 'solar Lati e cost subsidies. No government cind ecari--,e such spending from other social 1,° What rnic needs. But it should seek to aDer s totally absent from the White air Deal for Housing — evaluate

the scale of new building, slum clearance, housing improvements, land and property purchase required and possible, in relation to other needs, as a basis of expanded investment. This should be quantified in forward expenditure planning at least as firmly as now exists in education, defence and other fields.

Question Time and housing debates in the Commons see a constant series of claims that the Government is expanding the housing effort to meet the pressing needs of the vast stress areas in our conurbations, summarised in the opening paragraph of this article. But if one wants to learn a government's real intentions, one looks at the annual White Paper on public expenditure, the latest published on November 25 (Cmd 4829).

On housing this document can only be described as either deliberately misleading or totally incompetent.

The Government's Housing Finance and Housing (Financial Provisions) (Scotland) Bills state that the Government's new subsidy system will result in a net charge on the Consolidated Fund of between £370 million and £425 million per year from 1972 to 1975. Of this £246 million to £300 million will go to tenants as rent rebates and allowances; and about £125 million per year will subsidise house-building and slum clearance.

However, the housing subsidies figures in the Government's White Paper (top line Table 2.11, page 40) average £471 million per year from 1972 to 1975. And the text (paragraph 3) says that this figure "includes rate fund contributions . . . payment of arrears under the existing system (of subsidies) . . the growing payments by the Government under the option mortgage scheme and improvement grants." If one deducts the £425 million of government subsidy stated in the two Housing Finance Bills from the average of £471 million subsidies in the Government's White Paper, we are left with £46 million. This, according to the White Paper, must

cover rate fund contributions of between 10 and 25 per cent towards subsidies required by the two new Bills, as well as rising expenditure on the option mortgage scheme and on improvement grants by the Government and local authorities.

Yet the 1971 estimates give the current figure on option mortgages as £15 million

and for improvement grants as £19 million. That is, a total of £34 million on these items alone, without allowing for future rises in such spending or for rate fund contributions. No explanations of these disparities has been given by the Minister of Housing and Construction, the Secretary of State for the Environment or the Chief Secretary to the Treasury who presented the White Paper on Public Expenditure to the House of Commons last week. They are so gross and so important that I have referred the whole matter to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Expenditure for investigation.

But there are two more sets of figures in the Government's White Paper which are even more serious for our country's housing effort. The first appears in Table 1.2. This table (page 13) gives the figures for the average percentage increases in various programmes between 1971 and 1975. Housing is due to increase annually by 0.2 per cent. This is the slowest and the lowest rate of growth of any major public service programme in the list.

Defence, overseas aid, the Common Market, research, nationalised industries, roads, law and order, the arts, education, social services, administration range from 1.4 to 8.3. Housing is 0.2.

The same picture is shown by the second set of figures I wish to quote. They appear under 'Investment and central administration' of the Individual Programme for Housing (page 40 of the White Paper): 1970 — £740.5m; 1971 — £690.6m; 1972 — £689.0m; 1973 — £732.0m; 1974 — £74.0m; 1975 — £738.0m.

These figures show a sharp fall in capital investment this year, and a further fall next year. There will then be a slow rise; but at the end of the five year period we will still be investing less in the public sector of housing than last year.

Recently we have seen a sharp reversal of government policy on public expenditure which, with a series of sudden increases, is being used to stimulate investment and reduce unemployment. But housing has been totally absent from all the public expenditure programmes to be restored or increased. There has been money for roads, schools, the health service, welfare services, defence — but nothing for housing.

Yet the building trades are among the most hard hit by present unemployment, and according to calculations which must be available to the Government an increase

of 100,000 housing starts in 1972 could reduce unemployment by over 100,000.

Presumably the present Government's commitment against public authority house-building runs so deep that not even a figure of 140,000 unemployed building workers will persuade them to change policy.

In the light of one million unemployed and millions of sub-standard and decaying homes in slum environments, the Government's cut-back on capital investment in housing is a scandal. It makes all Mr. Peter Walker's fine words empty hypocrisy. For at present building rates well over ten million people will still so live in 1981 and large areas of slumdom will stay well into the twenty-first century.

Reg Freeson, MP for Willesden East, is Labour front bench spokesman on Housing