Speeches by Curtis.

“You talked at the start about the 1.5 million homes that we committed to build at the last general election over the course of this Parliament. Obviously, the numbers in the first year are not looking particularly great. If anything, they are down a bit. All of us accept that the legislation and the things that we are …”

“This is the point that I wanted to get to with the question, though. The numbers are down, but they are not down uniformly. Most of the drop has been because of London. Why has it been such a disaster for housebuilding in London over the last year?”

“They are down.”

“You are very open-minded towards development corporations in some cases.”

“Just on that point, what is the expectation for the Department of the average length of time it would take to set up a development corporation?”

“If you run through that calculation at the moment, given that we are existing in an environment where house prices are not going up massively, five years ago, you would obviously have agreed with the Chair’s point that renting was far worse value than owning. Do you think that that is true in the current market?”

“I am Chris Curtis. I am the MP for Milton Keynes North.”

“I will make some comments about the unfairness of the council tax system in a moment. We can have a conversation about tax and spend, and there is a much wider conversation to have, but today’s debate focuses on a very specific cut in a very specific part of property taxation, and there is a problem with having that co…”

“I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his speech, and for his fight and campaign within his party in favour of abundance and against scarcity. I hope it is a fight that he can win, given the damage done by there not being enough of that attitude when the Conservatives were in power. Given that this debate cannot be isol…”

“I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has asked me to comment on the 14 years of Tory failure—years in which his party failed to grow the British economy and created a number of the problems that the country faces. While the shadow Chancellor made many good remarks in his opening speech, there was a little bit of amn…”

“Back to scarcity again.”

“With respect, I think that I have already taken the debate a little bit away from stamp duty, and I do not want to go into the wider tax system—although, as I have said, it is important to broaden the debate and engage in a wider conversation about property taxes, as I have tried to do. If the Opposition genuinely want…”

“Yes, go on. Last time.”

“I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the importance of creating abundance in the housing market. Does he therefore think it was wrong for his party and the Prime Minister at the time to come to my constituency during the general election and campaign against the new homes being built there, which this country so…”

“I was going to jump back in on Help to Buy. You talked a little bit about it before. Looking at the schemes we have done in the past, there are, I suppose, two questions. Did it work? Should we do it again?”

“Sorry, I have one more. I know that we have gone slightly off topic, but there is still the same number of people looking for a property. If there is that fall in house prices, surely it should all balance out, because you should have the same number of people moving across to buying properties. Therefore they are decr…”

“It is not just the speed. It is pushing up the price while they are doing it.”

“Do we know, first, what is happening and, secondly, what we are expecting to happen to those properties? This argument always seems to happen. It is not the institutional investors and the build to rent, which hopefully we are going to see an explosion of in the coming years, but often we seem to talk about those peopl…”

“Yes, and part of the reason why we have some of the smallest homes in Europe is because we have some of the oldest housing stock in Europe. We have some of the oldest housing stock because we are not building enough new homes. I think we can agree that the size of the homes that we are building is bigger than the homes…”

“I was not using the phrase “driving down standards”. On space, for example, we have very high standards.”