Speeches by Curtis.

“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?”

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

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

“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…”

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

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

“That is build to rent.”

“Can I just pull out a couple of things that you mentioned, Vicky? You talk about us not wanting to be building rubbish things. I do not think anybody disagrees with that. Part of why building new homes is perhaps not going to decrease the overall cost as much as it could is because of regulation. The specification of w…”

“Coming back to Peter’s point, it is very hard to find many people who are not convinced by stamp duty being a bad tax that we should probably get rid of. Ultimately, as part of wider property tax, the rest of the property taxes are incredibly regressive. Stamp duty is the only progressive one. If you are going to get r…”

“It would be difficult to use that in order to help smooth the curves of the development market, though.”

“We spend a lot of time pretending that Help to Buy is a great scheme to get people into home ownership, whereas actually the original use of Help to Buy is to support the development of the house building market at a time when it might be struggling. There is possibly an argument for doing that to smooth out the curves…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 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…”

“Back to scarcity again.”

“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…”

“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…”