I will come on to Walsall in a minute. I could give the House a barrage of statistics about how rough sleeping in my city is up by 1,000% since 2010; about how the number of homeless children has trebled; and about how we now have a crisis of overcrowding, with one in five homes in inner-city Birmingham and the Black Country now overcrowded. But I do not want to talk about statistics. I want to talk about a story. It is the story of a man I met in an underpass next to Birmingham New Street station when I was out on a Sunday morning last year with an amazing team of people called Outreach Angels. We saw a man lying on the floor in acute distress—a double amputee next to his wheelchair. This was in an underpass that stank of urine. He had been there for three days, and he was still dressed in his hospital gown with a hospital tag on his wrist. It took us nearly two hours to get that man an ambulance. How on earth have we come to this in this country?
Thank God across our region we now have a coalition of kindness that is fighting back, with extraordinary people and organisations, including Hope into Action: Black Country; Matt Lambert, who does great work in Wolverhampton; Nobby Clarke, the Coventry night shelter and Hope Coventry; Langar Aid and Khalsa Aid International; SIFA Fireside; the outreach teams across the west midlands, which are doing extraordinary work; and Councillors Yvonne Davies and Sharon Thompson, who do extraordinary work and who have taken back control of the Housing First programme in our region, because they understand that for Housing First to work we first need homes. Can we guess the grand total of the number of social homes built last year in the hon. Gentleman’s borough? It was zero. The number of social homes built in the west midlands last year fell by 17%, and is down by nearly 80% since 2010. So I will take his intervention, but will he at least agree that we cannot bring together a shared agenda to tackle this problem unless we start building council homes again?