Housing

You may have seen Gordon Brown's announcement yesterday in the House of Commons making housing a central priority of the government in the coming months and years.

This is obviously something I very much welcome: housing is by far the biggest problem faced by people in Putney, Roehampton and Southfields - and it's a problem that affects the whole community, just in different ways.

I'm going to wait until the publication of the Government's Green Paper - their consultation document - next week before commenting in more detail on their plans, but there are five key areas they need to address:

1. Recognising that London's housing problems are very different from the rest of the country: affordability; capacity and the polarisation of very affluent areas next door to incredibly deprived ones.

2. Protecting the Green Belt: we do not want Stevenage, Reading, Crawley and Chelmsford to become suburbs of Greater London due to urban sprawl - and the only thing preventing that is the Green Belt

3. Clearing the party-political roadblock that stops the provision of affordable homes - as in our area - while preserving the right of local people to have a say on planning issues and tailoring housing policy to local need.

4. Building sustainable communities: affordable housing should be high quality housing, communities should have a diversity of housing tenures, property sizes and residents should reflect a diversity of backgrounds. And homes should be built closer to jobs.

5. Increasing housing mobility: more schemes to help first-time-buyers, help with stamp duty, more council homes to rent - and an end to the stigma that living in rented council housing is something to be ashamed of; a duty on councils to replace every home sold under right-to-buy with at least two new homes to rent.

These are just the first steps I think are needed to begin tackling our chronic housing problem. It's good that the Government has given housing the priority it demands; I'm optimistic that they'll bring forward ideas next week upon which we can - pardon the pun - build.