On behalf of the House, I would like to mark the passing of Group Captain John “Paddy” Hemingway, the last surviving battle of Britain pilot—one of those strikingly few brave young men who turned the tide of the war and kept our nation safe from Nazi invasion.
The fire sale of military family homes by Conservative Ministers in 1996 was probably the worst privatisation ever. The Government were paying £600,000 a day to rent back the homes and then paying all the repair costs, with no power to plan or to do the major upgrades needed. We bought back 36,000 forces homes in January, we started the defence housing review in February, and we aim to publish our housing plans in the summer.
I thank my right hon. Friend for that response. The men and women of our armed forces perform the ultimate public service. They and their families make considerable sacrifices to keep all of us in the UK safe and secure. Does he agree that the least we owe our servicemen and women is decent housing that they can proudly call home?
My hon. Friend is right; the sacrifice that those who serve in uniform make to keep us all safe is exceptional. The least that their families deserve is a decent home—it is, after all, the heart of all our lives. The steps we have taken with the buy-back of the Annington homes is a decisive break with the past, and we will now put in place the necessary plans to upgrade forces family homes for the future.
The Ministry of Defence owns more than 300 houses in the former Arborfield garrison in my constituency. Only a handful of them are occupied by service families; the remainder are let privately. But increasingly they are being left vacant, which, with the estate not being maintained, is affecting the lives of constituents. I am told that no decisions can be taken on the future of the site until a housing strategy is completed. Can the MOD make an early decision on the Arborfield housing, to stop the neglect and return much-needed, affordable housing to the market?
If the hon. Gentleman writes to me with the specifics, I will certainly look into that. He sets out for the House the character of some of the neglect and decline that we have seen in our forces housing for so long, and the bind that previous Governments have been in, without the power or control to make the upgrades and plan for wholesale renewal for the future. That is what our housing review will start to fix. We cannot fix these deep-seated, long-running problems overnight, but we are determined to do better than we have done in the past.
Can the Secretary of State reassure forces families in North Durham that the Labour Government are ending the previous Conservative Government’s failed approach of papering over the cracks, and are instead taking action to deliver new, high-quality family homes for our service personnel over the years to come?
I can indeed. My hon. Friend and I stood on a manifesto, on which we were elected as a Government, that committed to ending the scandal of forces family homes. The buy-back that we have put in place is the start of delivering on that promise for armed forces families and delivering, as we are doing on a number of fronts, for defence.
The litany of complaints I receive from service families in accommodation in Gosport include damp, black mould, unsafe electrical wiring and waste water flowing into homes. One constituent wrote to me that:
“The overall condition of our flat is unfit for purpose, unhygienic and quite frankly a threat to our safety.”
This has been going on for decades, under successive Governments, and our service people and their families quite simply deserve better. What I want to know from the Secretary of State, on behalf of my constituents, is when we will begin to see tangible differences. Pinnacle and VIVO are not fit for purpose; when will we see them replaced with an organisation that can do those repairs, and do them properly? I invite him to visit Gosport to see some of that appalling service family accommodation for himself.
The hon. Lady is right; it is shameful. Her Government had 14 years to fix the problem; we are now doing that job. We have a policy in place that means that no one should be let a home with apparent damp and mould problems. There is a special, dedicated report line for those problems, and if they are severe, service families should be offered alternative accommodation. The defence housing review, which is now under way and will report in the summer, will set out plans for a long-term overhaul of these deep-seated problems, which are overdue and have been neglected.