New boy Prisk says Government 'should be proud' of Right-to-Buy during tit-for-tat Commons debate

Published by Max Salsbury for 24dash.com in Housing and also in Central Government

The new Housing Minister Mark Prisk has claimed that the Right-to-Buy scheme is a "policy of which the Government can, and should, be proud."

The MP, who replaced Grant Shapps as Housing Minister earlier in the week, was speaking in his new role in the Commons for the first time, in a debate over a motion brought by the Shadow Housing Minister, Jack Dromey.

Mr Dromey's motion called for a tax on bankers' bonuses to fund the building of 25,000 additional affordable homes. The motion was subsequently defeated 222 to 297.

Much of the debate revolved around Mr Dromey and various Conservative MPs blaming one another's governments for the housing crisis and disputing the true meaning of assorted statistics.

At one point, Mr Dromey boasted of the previous Labour government's housing record. He said: "[Labour achieved] A record of 2 million more homes, 1 million more mortgages holders, half a million more affordable homes and 1.6 million homes brought up to the decent homes standard is one that we can rightly be proud of."

The record failed to impress Mr Prisk, however. The minister said: "I note with interest a whole series of assertions in the Opposition’s motion. However, the fact cannot be ignored that under the Labour Government, house building fell to the lowest peacetime level since the 1920s. Labour had its nine different Ministers, its top-down targets and its 10 different housing Acts, but for all that activity it delivered very little. Maybe that is why it has taken it two and a half years to muster up the courage to have a debate on the subject."

Labour's Jamie Reed complained that his constituency of Copeland was experiencing a sharp rise in homelessness and the greatest gap between salaries and house prices in the country, and requested that Mr Prisk write to him about what the Government could do to help.

Mr Prisk declared that he would "go further than that" and he would meet with Mr Reed, adding that as he was new to the position he would rather be fully aware of the facts before commenting on the situation.

On the subject of Right-to-Buy, Mr Dromey said that "Labour is the party of inspiration" and that it supported the scheme. However, he said that the coalition's approach was "fundamentally flawed" because councils will be unable to retain all of the receipts and because it had not yet been defined how the one-for-one promise would be delivered.

Mr Prisk mocked Mr Dromey's comments by replying: "I think that was, 'Yes but, no but, yes but, no but'.” He added that he hoped the entire Labour party would adopt the Right-to-Buy scheme and "recognise that we should all be standing behind aspiring tenants".