The House will wish to welcome the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Duffy) who, in a knowledgeable and engaging speech, recounted the history of his Constituency—all except the fact that the right hon. Philip Snowdon was one of his predecessors. I only wish—and in these remarks I speak to the hon. Member for Willesden, West (Mr.Pavitt)—that the co-operatives, of whom the hon. Member for Colne Valley is rightly proud, had turned their attention to housing, so that we had a Swedish experience behind us.

The right hon. Member for Belper (Mr. G. Brown) made a speech cataloguing the main housing ills of the country. It is easy to make that sort of speech, but not quite so easy to find the solutions. To every point of complaint that has legitimately been made by hon. Members on both sides today about these remaining ills there is one simple answer; we need many more houses. We need many more largely because the population has been rising at a rate faster than the building programme that has been undertaken. Had the population not risen so fast more would have been achieved.

We will only manage to get the extra houses by raising the productivity of the building industry and by decentralising homes and work from the big cities, where land is running out. I do not know which is worse, to have to live in a slum or in over-crowded squalid conditions. Most people are today living in less over-crowded conditions than they were five or ten years ago. However, while housing conditions generally have improved, in the big cities there is a serious over-crowding problem.

I do not believe, and hon. Members must recognise the reality of this, that rent control is any way the answer. It would lead inevitably to much more selling of houses and flats when they become vacant and this would reduce the amount of accommodation available to let. We must build more houses and this can only be done by increased productivity, by decentralisation, and by increases of land. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport, South (Mr. H. Steward) and the hon. Member for Willesden, West made this plain.

The hon. Member for Paddington, North (Mr. Parkin), in an extremely strong speech, spoke of the exploitation of houses in some of the big cities. This is the sort of exploitation that led to the multi-occupation which, when seen by my right hon. Friend the present Home Secretary, led him, by the outrage he felt, to bring about the passing of the 1961 Act, Part II of which sought to deal with multi-occupation. That part of the Act was designed to deal with Rachman and his ilk.

The problem is to pin the responsibility for these bad conditions—for"sweating" houses; taking in people beyond sanitary or decent human standards—on to the individual responsible when he, for bad reasons, seeks to avoid responsibility.

The 1961 Act has been in force only a year. I have encouraging reports on its effect from Nottingham and from Kensington. I was most impressed by the vigour and sturdiness with which the local authority in Birmingham is using this power. It is true that the local authority of Paddington is only beginning to try to use this power, and has not yet made full use of it. I have asked all local authorities to report to me next year in what ways they think the power needs strengthening, and I shall wait eagerly for any recommendations from local authorities, even in advance of that time, to see what strengthening needs to be done.

Even so, the only answer is more houses and more land. It is true that prices of land in, near and for the big cities have risen sharply, although I am glad to hear from this debate that most hon. Members recognise that prices in much of the rest of the country have not risen much beyond, if they have risen at all, the changed value of money and the quintuple rise in the level of earnings. But, where land prices have risen seriously, they reflect a combination of prosperity, the desire for homes, the benefit of planning and the remaining shortage of houses. Above all, they reflect the shortage, the inherent, the absolute shortage of land in and near the big cities.

The only way to stabilise prices of land and houses is to acquire more land and build more houses. That, of course, is one of the main reasons why we are raising the house-building programme to a figure of at least 350,000 houses a year. It has been generally recognised that this is a realistic next step and, obviously, when we achieve it we shall seek to go faster still. But, to achieve it, we shall have to help the building industry to continue to raise its productivity.

The building industry is already fully stretched on a massive simultaneous investment programme in every field of social, public and industrial service, and there is a grave shortage of craftsmen, which is the main limitation on the pace of house building.

We are helping by dimensional co-ordination. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works is issuing advice on the use of standard dimensions. We are encouraging local authorities to go in for longer programmes, and we are encouraging industrialisation, which is beginning to make a small contribution. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. P. Williams) spoke of the need for large orders, of the sort I am glad to say Liverpool and the L.C.C. have already given to demonstrate the value that industrialised building can bring to the country.

But more houses mean more decentralisation of population, and that is why the regional plans which the Government are now preparing, and which will provide for a second generation of new and expanded towns, is so vitally important. Here, we shall remember what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Mr. Temple) about the size of new towns.

The pace of house building is not limited by finance or cost. All over the country there are vacancies for craftsmen far in excess of the number of craftsmen available. All parts of the housing programme, public and private, are rising quite sharply, and but for the bad winter we have just had we should have had a record year for housing completions. As it is, the April figure reached a record post-war level for housing starts, public and private, and there are more houses, in both the public and the private sectors, now under construction than at any other time since the war.

Prices, of course, are vital, and local authorities have every right to know that their financial needs will be constantly reviewed so that they can discharge their housing responsibilities. Such a review has just started. It will cover the cost of land, for which there is already an expensive-site subsidy, with the object of enabling local authorities to plan ahead with confidence.

Private enterprise building for owner occupation is rising sharply at the moment. From record levels, we have had such a huge increase of owner occupation as is most impressive—from 29 per cent. of the total of houses built when we came to power to 44 per cent. now. It is true that people often strained their resources in order to buy houses, and that is just why the Government are proposing to start a third arm of housing, which may start quite small at 15,000 houses a year but which, by co-ownership and like means, will bring new housing within the reach of people who, until now, could only by great effort get a house of their own. It may start small but it may grow to great heights and stand on its own feet and make a very large contribution before long.

House prices will be stabilised for local authorities and for private enterprise only by increased productivity and closing the remaining gap between supply and demand. It is no good looking for those easy panaceas which are the Opposition's favourite weapons. Today we had a clamour again for special rates of interest. This would be the most utterly indiscriminate way of helping housing that could be imagined. It would help wealthy authorities and poor authorities alike, and wealthy men and poor men alike, and it would not produce a single extra house.

The hon. Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) said that a lower rate of interest would enable local authorities to build more houses, but it would not. The limitations are craftsmen and productivity. It would simply enable more people than now to compete for the apparently bargain houses and up would go the price fast. It would put extra profits in the pockets of the builders without adding a single extra house.

As for the Land Commission idea of hon. Members opposite, which Socialist Commentary itself described as extraordinarily vague, we have learned a little more about it today and we shall need to study in detail what the hon. Member for Fulham said. One thing is clear. The proposal is to buy development land at less than the value which the market will pay for the use to be allowed. This will mean virtually that no land will come forward voluntarily. There will be no willing land sales. All or nearly all will have to be bought by compulsory purchase order. Views on that may vary from one side of the Committee to the other but surely we are all agreed that this will slow down things desperately. There is bound to be great delay in wresting land from its owners by means of compulsory purchase orders.

The hon. Member for Fulham rides off this little difficulty by saying that, once acquired, the land can be passed on sometimes at full value—no benefit of cheaper land there—and sometimes for less. In those cases where the land is passed on at less than full value the queue to get the bargain, which would then be sold at a profit, would be endless. There would have to be a rationing scheme and an allocation system.

All this would have to be done in order to get some of the price of the land for the taxpayer, but it is not necessary to do this to cheapen land for the local authorities. There is already an"expensive site" subsidy which may well have to be reviewed on the evidence which local authorities will give us. It have been running for several years and is doubling in expenditure at the moment, and exists purely to cheapen land for local authorities so that those who cannot afford market prices can get housing more cheaply.

The hon. Member for Fulham was clearly not proposing to pass on all or any of the cheapness obtained by way of Land Commission purchase to the householder. No one necessarily has to like all the financial implications of our present planning policy. But to limit the profit individual land owners may make and take some of the money for the taxpayer does not seem sensible if it would risk slowing down the only solution we have to the housing problem, that is, the building of more houses.

From every side, from the hon. Lady the Member for Liverpool, Exchange (Mrs. Braddock), from Birmingham and from London, we hear that local authorities are sitting on land which could be being developed. This may or may not be true, but at least there is plenty of land not now held by local authorities. Our system at least brings land to the market. Would we have as much land being developed if all the land people most want had to be wrung unwillingly from its owners at confiscatory prices by compulsory purchase order and then kept pouched by a great bureaucratic machine? The Land Commission idea is full of obscurities but one thing is plain—one of the casualties of the scheme would be owner-occupation as we know it today. I grant that some holders of small plots would be allowed to develop land as now. The rest would either get leaseholds, which hon. Membesr opposite are always indicting as a criminal method of tenure—a householder would never finish paying for his house—or they would get a house which the occupier would not be able to sell except with the Land Commission's approval and at their price.

No one under a Socialist Government, for houses which have not yet been built, would ever be able to call his home his own. This vast bureaucratic machine—confiscation plus rationing plus controls—is no longer put forward confidently to cheapen prices. There was very little argument about it cheapening prices, and it would not build a single extra house. It would not tackle the real problem—the remaining shortage due to a rapidly rising population.

That is the problem the Government are tackling on every front. We are tackling it by regional plans for new and expanded towns. We are tackling it by subsidy review. We are tackling it by encouraging increased productivity and by industrialised building. We believe there is a choice in housing policy—on the one hand a free market, more land, good credit arrangements, adequate subsidy, more houses, but at prices and rents reflecting current earnings and current willingness and ability to pay