Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow). He is always eloquent and I concurred with much of what he said, especially about reproductive health.

It is a great privilege to speak in the debate. We are considering a welcome and positive process. I agree with the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) that it has the potential to be excellent and I hope that I can use it today, and in years to come, on behalf of my constituents.

I want to talk about three things. The first is the housing and regeneration Bill, about which I am especially excited because the pressure on housing in London is extreme and my borough is no exception. In Newham, housing benefit spending is currently £245 million a year. Nearly one third—£67 million—is spent on keeping homeless people in temporary accommodation. It will be a measure of our success when that is reduced through the provision of affordable housing.

The expansion of affordable housing will provide an opportunity for my local council—a good local council—to ensure that much-needed social homes are built. I further welcome the commitment to increase the provision of affordable housing in east London and the UK as a whole, to ensure that young people who are not fortunate enough to inherit property can afford to buy their first home. There are so many young people in my constituency who see homes priced out of their reach and for whom the opportunity to buy is a vague dream for some time in the future. I hope that adequate levels of social housing will also dampen down the inflationary tendencies that have, I fear, made London the European capital for housing inequality.

I remind the House that the waiting time in my area for a four-bedroom property is more than 13 years. There are families on waiting lists who will never receive that home, because they will have grown and family members will have flown before it becomes a possibility. Let us not misunderstand what that means to those families. They are often shunted from home to home, as the lease finishes. That means that they do not have the stability that comes from making a community where they live, and that the children might have to move schools or travel large distances, with long journey times, to get to school. That does not make for a community.

Moving home is also an expensive business, as many of us in the House know. When people are poor and in temporary accommodation, often paying their rent out of their wages, which do not meet those needs, the moving costs on top of that add costs, problems and stresses to families already under pressure. The waiting list in my community in 2006 was 29,574, which is equivalent to the entire population of San Marino—I thank my researchers for that one.

There is also something to be said for not putting all our faith in supply. I would certainly welcome measures, which might be under consideration, to cool the overheated buy-to-let market, which has helped both to ratchet up the cost of temporary accommodation, at such an extreme cost to the Exchequer, and to decrease the affordability of housing for ordinary working families, above all in the capital. That is without mentioning the concurrent social difficulties experienced through unsuitably located households in multiple occupancy. I come from an Olympic borough, where we now have a population of migrant workers, who often live in small homes, with many to a room. That is causing stresses in local communities, as buy-to-let properties are inhabited in such a highly multiple-occupancy fashion—if that makes sense and is good English.

I have lost count of the number of complaints from constituents about absentee landlords, which stems from the huge increase in buy-to-let properties in Newham over the past decade. The high cost of rents in the private rented sector and the resulting overcrowding of properties by tenants often compounds those problems. More importantly, in the long term it might prove difficult to maintain West Ham’s strong sense of community cohesion, of which I am immensely proud. Although I accept that the private rented sector provides much-needed flexibility and choice for those who cannot purchase a home or do not wish to, I would welcome moves to ensure that our dream of building mixed sustainable communities is not hampered by the sheer extent of buy-to-let properties in particular areas.

With a significant prospect of housing gain as a consequence of the Olympics, my constituents need rock-solid assurances that our expectation of more affordable housing as a result of the regeneration of the Olympic boroughs meets the needs of the families currently on the waiting list. There is a real fear that the properties that will be built in Stratford and along the regeneration belt in the Lea valley will be one and two-bedroom properties, which will not meet the needs of our growing families, particularly those who have been waiting on the housing list for more than 13 years for a four-bedroom property in the area.

A second theme of great importance for the people in my local community relates to the proposed counter-terrorism Bill, which includes a number of new proposals aimed at tackling the continuing threat from criminals bent on causing indiscriminate damage and death. When we strive to engage our communities in tackling this threat, however, it is vital that a meaningful consultation be undertaken in all our communities on proposals such as stop and question, and the extension of the limit of detention without charge, to ensure that alienation and disillusionment are not the unintended result of such moves.

The wonderfully diverse communities of West Ham want to work together to defeat this threat and to contribute constructively towards its defeat. They will therefore strongly welcome the consultation on the new security and anti-terrorism measures, and it is my genuine belief that, through honest and open consultation on the legislation, we can help to avoid community isolation and alienation and build stronger cohesive communities in the UK. I am sure that the many diverse communities in my constituency will be keen to play as constructive a role as possible in this important debate, and I welcome the Government’s decision to give them the opportunity to do so.

My third theme, like the others, seeks to strengthen the sustainability of the communities in my constituency. The Green Paper, “In work, better off: next steps to full employment”, has already appeared and attracted some comment. I applaud the commitment to encourage long-term benefit claimants to sustain and make progress in employment, particularly through strengthening the skills base of people who have not worked for some time. Despite recent falls in the probability of leaving work, lone parents are still almost twice as likely as non-lone parents to leave their jobs. One in five lone parents who leave income support return to it within six months, and more than a quarter do so within a year. One third do so within two years, and almost two fifths within three years.

I fear that one of the reasons for that is that, when women are encouraged to go into work, the costs that they will face—including travel and child care costs—along with the reduction in their benefits are not properly assessed before they make the move. I have conducted a focus group—for want of a better term—with local communities on these issues, and it has become clear that, when women leave employment in those circumstances, they feel demoralised because they have not been able to sustain a job. That is bad enough, but they also leave with heavy debts. They have often been forced out of employment because they could no longer afford to work and to live. That is particularly an issue in London, where it is related to the housing and child care costs. We need to ensure that such women receive the very best assistance before they take the step of leaving benefit in order to obtain work.

Lisa Harker’s report into child poverty at the end of last year projected that, if the rate of job exits among lone parents was reduced to that of non-lone parents, the Government’s target of 70 per cent. employment could be met without any increase in the number of lone parents entering work. While skills and support are vital, messages from the Government also play an important part. Once additional skills have been achieved, with real effort and at some personal cost, the pay rise can be gained and the lone parent is ready to enjoy the fruits of their hard work. However, for some of those women, the loss of help with child care costs, rent and tax credits can mean that they face what I would call a marginal tax rate as high as 96 per cent.

At the centre of the marginal tax rate is housing benefit. I am bombarded with evidence about how it combines with other sources of income to create a poverty trap for those already in low-paid work. At the centre of that is a 65p in the pound withdrawal rate of housing benefit as income increases. As the Hills report stated, a couple with two children paying a typical private rent of £120 a week—frankly, if £120 a week was the price people were paying for their rent in West Ham, they would think that all their Christmases had

come at once, but let us stay with the Hills report—would, as a result of reduced benefit and tax credits and a higher rate of national insurance, gain only £23 if their earnings rose from £100 to £400. For those in temporary accommodation with high rents paid through housing benefit—in my constituency, two-bedroom flats can go for more than £1,000 a month—those effects extend to even higher levels. If we are to make serious progress with making aspiration pay in the UK, I believe that the housing benefit regime merits further and urgent investigation.

Let me reiterate, as I draw to my conclusion, that this legislative programme is ambitious and forward looking. It proposes measures to tackle the most pressing issues facing Britain as a society, as an economy and as a nation. Such measures can only be improved by this inaugural opportunity to debate the draft legislative programme in advance.