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Appendix 1 London Assembly (Plenary) Meeting – 7 December 2016 Transcript of Agenda Item 4: Question and Answer Session – Gavin Barwell MP – Minister of State for Housing, Planning and Minister for London Tony Arbour AM (Chairman): Good morning, Minister. It was good of you to come. There will be a lead- off question, but I understand that before I put the easy question you would like to make a statement. Gavin Barwell MP (Minister of State for Housing and Planning and Minister for London): Thank you, first of all, Mr Chairman, for your invitation. It is a pleasure to be here and I hope that this can be a regular thing. It is very useful to have a close dialogue between Members of the Assembly and me. I will just say a few very brief remarks because I am conscious that time is short. First of all, the Government is committed to working with the Greater London Authority (GLA) and with the boroughs. London plays an absolutely critical role in terms of the United Kingdom (UK) economy and certainly, in terms of my responsibilities for housing and planning policy, the part of the country where the deficit between what we are building and what we need to build is at its greatest in this city of ours. In relation to the Autumn Statement, there was some extremely positive news in terms of the affordable housing settlement, which I am sure we will come on to talk about in a second, and also some progress on devolution in relation to the Work and Health Programme and adult education. I very much look forward to answering my questions. I will try to keep my answers as brief as possible to allow as many people as possible to ask me questions. Tony Arbour AM (Chairman): Thank you very much. The very easy starting question is: what do you see as the greatest issues and challenges facing London? Gavin Barwell MP (Minister of State for Housing and Planning and Minister for London): I am not sure how easy a starter question that actually is, Mr Chairman, but probably, given my particular interests, I would refer to the housing situation in the capital. If London is going to continue to perform economically, it is vital that people can afford to live and work in the capital. We have seen for 30 or 40 years that across the country as a whole but particularly here in London we have not been building anything like the number of homes that we need to build. As a result, both house prices and rents have risen faster than earnings and certainly in some inner London boroughs the affordability ratio - the ratio of median earnings to median prices - has now reached a completely unacceptable level. Addressing the housing crisis that we face and making sure that we build more homes of all types so that ordinary working people have a chance to own their own home in this city would be the number one issue, in my opinion. Tony Arbour AM (Chairman): Thank you very much. Florence Eshalomi AM: It is great to see you here as a London Member of Parliament (MP) for Croydon, not too far from my constituency in Lambeth and Southwark. 1 One of the main issues that has been on your agenda and I am sure in your inbox as well has been the issue around Southern Rail. In the run-up to the mayoral election, quite a number of the candidates committed to looking at further rail devolution in London and it is right to say that it is something that has worked quite well with London Overground. Given that there is a lot of cross-party support not just from this Assembly but from councillors, council leaders and even MPs, including some of your Conservative colleagues, why do you feel that the Government is not supporting this move and looking at additional rail devolution at this time? Again, in another example this morning, we know that Southern Rail has strikes on and Brixton Station this morning was just a nightmare to get to. I am sure some of your constituents from Croydon were trying to get on that route this morning. Gavin Barwell MP (Minister of State for Housing and Planning and Minister for London): Let us start with the areas where we are all in agreement. The first thing to say is that the service on Southern Rail at the moment is wholly unacceptable and it is causing misery to tens of thousands of people on an almost daily basis. The reasons for the problems are complex. The company itself: its performance has been not acceptable. A lot of the problems that your and my constituents experience are to do with the infrastructure that Network Rail is responsible for, not the operator, and there are issues about the action that the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) has taken as well. The second area where I hope there is a strong degree of consensus is that the Government very much wants to work with Transport for London (TfL) to improve services on those franchises in south London. Where you are quite right to say there has been a change of approach - and you will have heard the Secretary of State for Transport’s statement to the House of Commons yesterday - is that he has looked into these issues and feels very strongly that the right way to deliver the improvements to services that we all desperately want to see is to get much better integration between the running of the signalling and the track and the people running the service and to bring that much closer together in the franchise. He wants to work with both TfL and Kent County Council in relation to Southeastern, which is the first franchise that comes up, to try to achieve that. His view, which he expressed very clearly, I thought, in the Commons yesterday, is that if you try to separate out the services that serve London and the inner southeast from the services further down to Kent, that kind of major reorganisation of the network could make things worse rather than better. That is why he has come to that judgement. Tony Devenish AM: Minister, thank you very much for the £3.15 billion. If we listened to the Mayor, we would think he had written the cheque rather than you, but we do appreciate the cheque that came from you. One of my concerns is the lack of actual detail we have had from the Mayor on how he is going to deliver the 90,000 affordable houses and the rest of his commitments. Are you looking for more detail from the Mayor in due course to make sure he delivers? You have given him the money. He now needs to get on and build the homes. Gavin Barwell MP (Minister of State for Housing and Planning and Minister for London): We will want to hold the Mayor to account but also other people around the country that we give money for affordable housing to make sure that the homes get delivered. The prospectus has been published by the GLA, to be fair, very quickly after receipt of the money. Just on the figure, it is worth pointing out that the news is potentially even better than the £3.15 billion. The £3.15 billion is the share of what the Affordable Housing Programme was prior to the Autumn Statement. 2 London is getting 43% of the England-wide budget, which is a record amount and the Mayor has been generous enough to say that. It is the best ever settlement for affordable housing London has ever had. However, in the Autumn Statement, the Chancellor announced a further £1.4 billion for the England-wide affordable housing budget and London will get a share of that money. Therefore, there is even further good news to come in terms of the level of funding that we are providing. It is absolutely critical that we do that because it is clear from the data that the affordability crisis is at its worst in London. I would just end by stressing one thing, which is that in terms of making housing in this city more affordable, there are two things that we need to do. First of all, we need to provide more shared ownership and more housing for submarket rent, but we also need to build more homes generally. The reason housing has become more unaffordable is because the supply of housing across this city for years and years has not kept pace with demand. Therefore, we need to get overall supply up as well as providing record levels of funding for subsidised housing. Tony Devenish AM: There has been lots of cross-party support in terms of trying to get more building by small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by co-operative societies, by councils and by housing associations. The Mayor seems a little bit slow in getting going and at the moment and he is mainly working with the same old major developers. Can you urge him to broaden the supply chain so that we can actually get building in London? Gavin Barwell MP (Minister of State for Housing and Planning and Minister for London): That is a critical issue. Our Housing White Paper is to be published early in the New Year. Our view is that in order to tackle the housing situation we face in this country, it needs action on all fronts.
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