Progress’ autumn lecture series: John Healey

Labour must again be the voice and champion for working people in the middle

I’m very happy to join Progress’s debate about the ideas Labour needs for the future. We need to start that task however, with an honest assessment of the difficulties we face. Those difficulties are formidable.

The economic cycle is against us. We have done the right things during the recession; led world action to prevent the complete collapse of the international financial system and a global downturn from becoming a global depression. But, pressure on jobs and mortgages will continue well into next year.

The electoral cycle is against us. We are a third term government. We carry the baggage of the necessary compromises of government and inevitable complexities. Everyone will have something they don’t like in what we’ve done.

The media cycle is against us. The media has made up its mind, I think too soon, that the Conservatives will win the next general election, so their narrative makes it more difficult to communicate our successes and make our case for Britain’s future.

Last week, new repossessions forecasts were published. At the beginning of this year, Britain was forecast to experience 75,000 repossessions in 2009. In the middle of this year this was revised downwards to 65,000. Last week I was due to comment on the latest forecasts. I was in Millbank waiting to do interviews with Sky, the BBC, ITN and others. When the figures came out that repossession forecasts had been reduced to 48,000, they all dropped the piece. I did one interview, for Sky News – and that stopped going out in the bulletins after 11am.

So the odds are against us. But we have won against the odds before. We’ve done great things before as a Labour government and as a party against the odds and expectations. You’ll see that in the Party Political Broadcast that we’ll be aired tonight.

This is a great opening. The big philosophical and ideological and political division is over the role of the state. The lesson of last year is that we need government to act and we need to act together to deal with the very biggest challenges. We are the party that believes markets benefit, but should serve the interests of society communities and individuals.

We believe in an active state. This doesn’t mean the state can or should do everything, or even most things – but we are not ideologically neutral on the role of the public sector. The economic crisis underlined the need for active government and responsive public services to protect the poorest, correct flaws in the market and secure the proper role and contribution required from the private sector in our community.

So, I think we have good reason to be confident about our ability to win the battle of ideas.

And with a general election six months away, the Tories will come under increasing scrutiny. People are looking harder at them and their policies. That’s an opportunity for us and a threat to them.

The Tories plan to pull government back; stop the support that we’ve put in place, cut back public services and let charities fill the gaps. This would put the recovery at risk, leave people to sink or swim - as in the early 1990s - and would create extra cost to the taxpayer. Every 100,000 people out of work costs the taxpayer £700millon.

People remain unconvinced and unenthusiastic about David Cameron. The polls show that they are even more uncertain about the Party behind him. The Times ran a poll before the Tory party conference this year and found 68% of people don’t believe it has really changed under Cameron.

They’re right. There are two faces to the Tory party: the spin, the smiles, the soft words of the leader, the front man for a fresh Conservative brand.

And the harsh ideas and ideology of those behind – and the public see this face too: uncompromising, uncaring, unchanging.

The Tories are showing remarkable arrogance at the moment; they are taking the election and the electorate for granted. After their years of cagey silence on policy, they have broken cover with proposals that would hit ordinary working Britons hard: the withdrawal of public spending in a still weak economy, the cutting back of the services people rely on, not just to save money now, but as a matter of ideology for the future.

So, we must take this opportunity to make clear how our policies and priorities differ.

As housing minister, I have sought to make housing more visible and more political. I’ve sought to make housing a central part to our response to recession and essential to our vision of the future. In doing so, I have sought to draw out the differences in policy and values that separate us from the Tories.

That’s why at the height of the recession, we’re building 112,000 affordable homes over two years: investment that is creating jobs now and building the homes we need for the future. The Tories oppose this investment and would see unemployment rise faster and families wait longer for homes.

We’ve acted rapidly to keep people facing repossession in their homes during the recession; help that was never on offer in the last recession and help that the Tories won’t commit to now.

As I revealed in my introduction, the forecast for repossessions this year has fallen from 75,000 to 65,000 and now stands at 48,000 – because we put our values first and said people should not be left alone to the ravages of the market. If repossessions took place at the same rate as the 1990s, we’d now be facing 91,000 a year.

We have committed to creating almost 3,000 apprenticeships in the construction industry, using public money to make sure private companies take on and train young people with the skills, they and we need in the future. The Tories oppose this. Their spokesman Grant Shapps recently said to housebuilders that this was ‘ridiculous and counterproductive’.

We’re the party defending and guaranteeing the rights of tenants in public housing. I recently announced that new national guaranteed standards for the 8 million people who live in public housing, covering issues like maintenance and tackling anti-social behaviour. We’re driving improvements in public housing and then enshrining those improvements as guarantees for all, just as in the NHS and the Queen’s speech today.

The Tories, in contrast, describe public housing as ‘barracks for the poor’ and plot to raise social rents to a market level and remove security of tenure. Using FoI we have uncovered these plans, discussed by four Tory council leaders, two deputies to the London Mayor and the shadow housing minister.

I have challenged David Cameron continuously to come clean about his plans for public housing. He won’t deny them, because he can’t deny them.

Labour remains the party of the poor and the vulnerable. It’s hardwired into us. It’s why we were needed, why we were founded 100 years ago. It’s why we are still needed and why we’re still fighting now.

I’m immensely proud of our record over the past 12 years helping those who’ve been dealt the toughest hands in life

In housing, we’ve ended the scandal of families living in bed and breakfast accommodation instead of proper temporary accommodation. We’ve tackled the appalling state of the public housing we inherited from the Tories. Over 1 million new central heating systems have been installed in council housing since we came to power.

But, we are not, were not and can never be a party only for the poor. We must show that the type of society Labour wants to build is one that delivers fair outcomes and greater opportunities to all, including and especially ‘middle Britain’.

When I talk about ‘the middle’, I mean something quite different to that of the metropolitan media world. If you scan the press on a daily basis, read the stories about those squeezed in recession, you’d rarely see anything about those who are truly middle earners.

Take the Telegraph’s description of those in the middle, those they term as the ‘coping classes’. I quote from an article last year:

‘A dual income middle-class family can easily earn £88,000 a year and our houses are routinely worth £390,000, but we shop at Matalan, discretely buy our prosciutto in Lidl and at the end of the month our bank accounts echo so empty that … a school trip to Belgium can plunge us into Chekhovian despair’.

The Telegraph goes on to bemoan that ‘while the working class is topped up with family credits, and hedge fund managers cream off millions, it is Britain’s beleaguered middle earners who are under siege.’

I have some sympathy for the point about hedge funds, but this is a typical but also remarkable description. Middle earners on £88,000!

The truth is that most people, the middle of British society, are families and individuals working hard for low and modest incomes. The median individual income in the UK is £19,604, the median household income is £22,880.

The true middle third have a household income between £14,500 and £33,800 per year – that’s 7 million families. It is composed of millions of people working hard in ordinary jobs that we all rely on: IT workers, HGV drivers, joiners, warehouse supervisors, teaching assistants, call centre supervisors, shop assistants.

This is what ordinary Britain looks like. It looks like the people I meet all the time as a minister and as an MP.

It looks like Paula and John Austin in Bootle – a young couple about to start a family, helped – through a government backed scheme - to buy their first home just two weeks before the arrival of their first child.

It looks like David Mullins, running his own building firm in the north east, surviving the economic downturn thanks to support we have put in place as a government to keep housebuilding on track.

And it look like the people across my constituency, Wentworth, in Rotherham – a town where the writer Julian Baggini spent six months a couple of years back because surveys and statistical indicators suggested it was here that he would find the real Middle England – the ‘Everytown’ that gave the title to his account of his experiences.

What begins as one man’s exercise in slumming it with the Common People and questioning other definitions of community, security and stability – and questioning the limits of personal ambition they have for themselves and their families – ends up eventually with him working out that for most of those he meets and spends time with, their apparently hard exterior hides genuine heart, hope and aspiration.

Such heart, hope and aspiration is there all over Britain – among those in the real middle.

We allow a mobile, metropolitan class to skew our understanding of society; too many of those in the media, politics and policy take people earning 50 or 60 or 70 thousand pounds or above as the reference point for typical working families.

Now I don’t want to minimise anyone’s difficulties or worries. I don’t argue that those on higher incomes are immune from money worries. But if families on £88,000 can barely cope, what then for the family on £22,000? What then for the 7 million who are genuinely in the middle?

These are the people who are overlooked by the press, over looked by the politics of the right, and found their voice with Labour in the 1990s. We must now rediscover our voice again for them and make sure our priorities are their priorities and our policies don’t go over their heads to meet the demands of higher end earners.

Even on the left, real middle earners are too often overlooked in arguments for a narrower focus on deprived communities and the plight of the most vulnerable. This is necessary but it is not sufficient. This debate overlooks our duties to middle earners.

Equally, arguments and debate simply about social mobility captures the aspiration to move up and away, but does not capture the aspiration for improvement through security, stability and community.

If we only see middle Britain through a lens of social mobility we risk seeing them as people who haven’t got on in life.

So what are the policies and what action should we take to benefit real middle earners and show our Labour values?

We should do all we can to support working people. That’s why I believe that that public housing shouldn’t just be for the poorest or the workless, but that it should also be there to support working families on low and middle incomes. I am looking at a package to help those in employment in public housing to make sure they are as well off as they should be in work.

In the same way we support people’s aspirations to own their own homes. Over 110,000 people have been helped to own their own homes with government help; the vast majority are middle earners, with an average income of around £21,000. We must do more to help first time buyers who struggle to get the deposit or loan needed to own their own home.

We must be unstintingly on the side of those who obey the law. We’re working with the Home Office to provide more support to help communities tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. In housing, I’m making the Respect Standard on ASB mandatory - so that every tenant can expect early intervention from their landlord, early intervention to nip problems in the bud.

I want to find ways to support people who save carefully and need to save for a deposit.

Not everyone wants to buy a home; there are lots of good reasons to rent. Even before the credit crunch reduced lending to first time buyers, the numbers of younger workers wanting to own their own homes was falling.

That means we must make private rented homes a better option and public housing an option for more working people.

We – Labour – must again be the voice and champion for working people in the middle.
The Tories can’t do it: we must do it. They don’t understand ordinary lives and their values don’t respect or respond to middle earners’ needs. They consistently pitch their policies over the heads of people that need and deserve government help.

The Mayor of London wants to increase the income limit for those eligible for low cost homeownership to £74,000. His priority for London is to give public subsidy to those earning more than three times that of a family in the middle, reducing therefore the money that goes to those lower down.

At the same time, Tory councils are giving the go ahead to housing developments with no affordable housing elements, reducing the chances further for middle income families to get a secure home that is within their means. 2.1 million working people rely on public housing and lower rents to support them in work. The Tories want to see less of this housing built and conspire to hike up rents beyond people’s means and reduce their security of tenure to just two months.

Inheritance tax. The Tories remain bound to an ideology which demands an ever smaller state that does less and less. In the modern world this would fail the country and fail the people who need an active government most: the poorest, the most vulnerable and those in squeezed middle Britain. 7 million households make up the middle third in Britain. The Tories’ top priority is a £200,000 tax cut for 3000 millionaires.

I believe that the ideological cycle is with us, and I believe the ideological cycle can turn the electoral cycle. We have every opportunity to win the battle of ideas.

There are 7 million households in the middle of British society and enough votes to win an election next year.

Labour is the British mainstream. We understand the hopes and aspirations of ordinary working people. We remain the party of and the party for middle Britain – though people do not see it clearly enough.

We have to show them.

Rt Hon John Healey MP is minister for housing and planning, and the Labour MP for Wentworth

Comments

Posted by Diversity on 19 November 2009, 4:45:11 PM
"We remain the party of and the party for middle Britain – though people do not see it clearly enough." Isn't there something deeply adrift here? That is exactly what Michael Howard would have said five years ago.

Posted by Jeremy Killingray on 19 November 2009, 5:19:16 PM
I was disappointed by John Healey's speech last night. Of course I and I dare say most of the audience were in agreement with much of the generailities that he raised in his speech. However, I wanted to hear more about his vision for getting more new homes built and what he thought a Labour fourth term should offer the electorate. I felt he didn't attempt to answer my and others questions about generating new house building. How to tackle property developers who are land banking (waiting for a more profitable return on sites earmarked for development when the up turn comes) and confronting local planning policies outside of London and our inner cities that unhelpfully restricts new developments to no more that two storey buildings (this makes a good many small development schemes potentially attractive to Housing Associations unviable). What happened to Labour's vision on developing Eco-Towns? - these schemes seems to have been abandoned at the first sign of local planning opposition - thankfully a more robust approach to such nimbyism has not damaged the Olympic site development - why can't a Labour fourth term demand a similar Olympic effort to Eco- Town development? Furthermore, there is a case to be made for developing new homes, Council/Private and other social/affordable housing options as an antidote to recession and getting the economy moving again. He could have made the case for this, but instead all we got was how 'wicked' the Tories will be. The electorate will not be interested in us frightening them with how life will be terrible under the Tories - we need to put forward a much bolder radical message that is positive, challenging and engaging.

Posted by Ethel Red on 19 November 2009, 6:52:11 PM
Erm, the first four eco-towns were announced back in July, with plans for the other six outlined as well... And as for attacking Nimbys, why not read this pair of Healey related items from last weekend: http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2009/11/14/a-plan-for-strategic-success/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/6569471/Green-belt-future-set-to-be-election-battleground.html