LABOUR TAKES £3.2 MILLION FROM COUNCIL HOUSING IN CHESTERFIELD

Speaking in the affordable housing debate yesterday in the House of Commons, Paul Holmes, Liberal Democrat MP for Chesterfield, said:

"Unbelievably, the present Government have a worse record than the Conservative Government in terms of building social housing.

"In the last five or six years, council-house waiting lists have soared from 1 million to 1.5 million. That has a huge effect, both on the price of housing at all levels and in terms of the human cost on individuals.

"I have repeatedly asked over the past five or six years: what is it about this Government, that they have such a dogmatic new Labour ideology that they oppose the principle of social housing in the form of council housing?

"First, in 1997, they effectively stopped council house building, and then tried to force every council in the country to privatise its council stock.

"More than 100 councils, including Chesterfield, have not done so, because their tenants chose democratically to stay with the council rather than privatise, but the Government are now vindictively penalising them for taking the "wrong" democratic choice.

"In the last financial year £3.2 million - 14 % of all the rents paid by Chesterfield's tenants - has been taken away to spend somewhere else in the country. How can it be that today the money must be redistributed elsewhere in the country, but tomorrow, under a private landlord, we could keep the lot?

"Will the Minister explain why a Labour Government continue vindictively to penalise and punish people in Chesterfield, which is primarily a poor working-class community?"