The Tories today condemned as an ``absolute scandal'' the 1.8 million families forced onto social housing waiting lists as record numbers of houses and flats lay empty.

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps said 4.5 million ``desperate'' people were waiting for a home, almost double the figure when Labour came to power.

He was speaking as new figures from the Empty Homes Agency estimate almost one million flats and houses are empty in the UK.

It said empty homes across the UK stood at 943,000 in 2008 and it is feared this will increase as the recession worsens.

Mr Shapps attacked the Government's record on social housing, claiming there had been a ``persistent shortfall'' in home building since 1997.

He accused the Government of ``fiddling the figures'' over the number of people sleeping on the streets. Ministers no longer required local authorities to estimate the number of rough sleepers.

This would allow the Government to report there were a ``laughable'' 214 people every night sleeping rough compared with the true estimate of more than 1,000.

Mr Shapps told an Opposition debate on housing waiting lists: ``Today there is an all-time record of 1.8 million families languishing on the housing waiting lists, getting on for twice that figure of 12 years ago.

``That equates to approximately 4.5 million people, each of whom with their sometimes very desperate stories to tell. The situation is definitely dire.''

Housing Minister Margaret Beckett conceded there was ``substantial unmet housing need'' but attacked the Tories' record.

The party had implemented a ``very popular'' policy of selling off council homes in the 1980s - but had failed to replace them.

They had been responsible for a net reduction in local authority housing stock every year they were in power and had also left Labour with a backlog of repairs to be carried out.

Mr Shapps said: ``My number one priority is the 1.8 million families, 4.5 million people who now languish on that party's waiting list trying to get a decent home. It is an absolute scandal.''

Mr Shapps warned the situation was likely to get worse as the recession deepened.

He said: ``The figures speak for themselves.

``There has been less new social rent housing being built every single year under this Labour Government, than in any year under the Thatcher and Major administrations. Less social housing every year.''

The number of social houses built for rent had halved over the last 12 years.

Challenged what his party would do to improve the situation Mr Shapps said he would provide ``incentives'' to give communities a stake in their housing needs.

He had called for local authorities to be allowed to keep some of the council tax when new homes were built.

Mr Shapps also criticised the Government's affordable homes schemes to allow people on lower incomes to gain a foothold on the housing ladder as ``complex, confusing, and sometimes completely contradictory.''

He said: ``The Government's record on housing is one of complete failure - top-down targets working against local communities, rocketing house prices followed by a crash and the door to home ownership being firmly slammed in people's faces.

``Housing is central to today's financial crisis and the collapse of our housing market is both the cause and consequence of the severity of Labour's recession.

``But the people who will hurt the most are those on the all-time record social housing waiting lists that this tired old Government seems either incapable or too incompetent to help.''

Ms Beckett said that the last Conservative Government's ``legacy of neglect'' had left a ``catastrophic deterioration of skill levels'' in the construction industry.

She told MPs: ``In the first quarter of 1990 there were 2.31 million working in construction. By the last quarter of 1993 that had declined to 1.79 million and it remained at similar levels throughout the 1990s. It was not until 2006 that the number climbed back to over two million.''

The Government's aim was to deliver 70,000 affordable homes of which 45,000 would be for social rent each year from 2010/11.

``I recognise the possible impact of the present downturn on those plans,'' she said. ``We have already taken steps to address that and to try and keep the overall programme on track.

``Not only have we brought forward investment, we have also been exploring new ways of securing new homes for social rent and affordable housing.

``For example, we have earmarked some £200 million to spend on good quality unsold homes from private developers. To date about £160 million of that pot has been allocated buying up almost 5,000 homes including 3,400 for social rent.''

The Government was taking steps to help home owners avoid the ``trauma and upheaval of repossession''.

``We have an agreement with lenders that repossession should always be a last resort and they have agreed to wait a minimum three months before seeking to repossess,'' she said.

The Government was working with lenders on a further scheme to help people who faced a sudden repossession because of ``a sudden drop in income''. ``We are continuing to work on such a scheme and hope to be able to bring it forward in the not-too-distant future,'' she added.

Ms Beckett said Tory leader David Cameron's budget proposals indicate the budget for her department ``would not be allowed to grow by more than 1% a year'' which would lead to a cut of ``at best about £800 million or a cut of 10,000 new homes for social rent''.

Liberal Democrat housing spokeswoman Sarah Teather criticised Mr Shapps' ``brazen bare-faced cheek'' for delivering his speech without any ``obvious sense of irony''.

She said: ``The Conservatives knocking the Government for failing to tackle social housing waiting lists is a little like Jonathan Ross complaining about the lack of moral standards at the BBC or maybe Jeremy Clarkson fronting up a new campaign for Scottish pride. It isn't very credible.

``I wonder what we are going to see next from the Conservatives... perhaps a motion condemning the sinking of the Belgrano, or one talking up the benefits of free milk for every child, perhaps one expressing posthumous solidarity with the 1984 miners strike.''

She blamed the ``shortfall in social housing'' on both the Tory and Labour Governments preventing councils from reinvesting locally the money from right-to-buy council house sales.

Ms Teather said it was a ``betrayal'' of the people who elected the Government, that ministers had failed to tackle the problem of people living in temporary accommodation.

She repeatedly called for councils to be able to keep the receipts from right to buy sell-offs and re-invest the money in new social housing.

``The plight of families waiting for housing is only going to get worse in the recession,'' she said. But the downturn was a time of opportunity too, with lower land prices.

Instead of cutting VAT, which had made little or no difference to people's lives, the Government should be building thousands of new zero carbon homes.

Labour's Clive Betts (Sheffield Attercliffe) called on the Government to increase the amount of money available to housing associations.

Mr Betts, a member of the Communities and Local Government Select Committee, said: ``We know that one in six deals are not going to be done in the current climate... We know that where local authorities are looking to develop housing companies now to enable them to build homes, those companies are not going to get off the ground in the current climate.''

Housing associations needed ``much higher'' levels of social housing grant to build new homes, he said.

Tory Anne Main (St Albans), who also serves on the select committee, said the ``skills shortage in planning'' across the UK was a major factor in the problem of empty residences.

She said: ``Surely if there are tools in our toolbox to get back empty usable serviceable homes back into use so that families can get into them, surely that should be a first duty. I don't know why the Government has abandoned this.''

Labour's Andy Slaughter (Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush) accused the Tories of playing ``student politics''.

He said: ``I'm frankly appalled by the triviality and the content-free stance that the Opposition chooses to take on this issue. This is student politics.

``This is picking an issue which is a Labour issue and on which the Conservatives have an atrocious record over many decades and seeing how far they can get with it.''

Mr Slaughter accused Tory-run councils in London for seeking to run down council housing to socially engineer boroughs.

Referring to the former head of Westminster Council who was embroiled in the homes-for-votes scandal, he said: ``I think the Tories who are currently running London make Shirley Porter look like [philanthropist] Joseph Rowntree.''

Tory former housing minister Sir George Young defended his party's decision to bring in right to buy schemes in the 1980s.

He said it was ``a progressive and enlightened social reform, bitterly resisted by opposition parties at the time which enfranchised millions of people, made a reality of home ownership which had previously been a dream, transformed monolithic local authority estates, generated large sums of money which either reduced public debt or were recycled back into public housing, and I make no apology at all for being a keen supporter when it was introduced.''

Sir George also said the £12.5 billion spent on the VAT cut would have been better used buying up land or empty properties, which would have provided assets for the country.

His constituents were questioning why Government money was being spent on rescuing the car industry but not on housing.

``People have a need of a home more than they have a need of a car,'' he said.

Sir George argued that building more council housing was a ``dead end'', arguing that the ``time is right'' to attract private finance into social housing through new investment vehicles.

Labour former housing minister Nick Raynsford said successive government had set a ``simplistic'' target for building a certain number of homes without paying attention to their quality or sustainability.

He said: ``At this time, what is required is not sloganising, not simplistic political debate but a serious analysis of how we guide our way through difficult times, how we do build as many homes as it is possible to achieve in difficult circumstances, but above all how we build them in ways that meet the quality objectives and the sustainability objectives which we now understand are fundamental to a good housing policy.''

Liberal Democrat Bob Russell (Colchester) said: ``Short of failing to defend the realm, the biggest sin of any government is to fail to house its people.''

Calling for more council houses to be built, Mr Russell asked: ``If the Government can fund arguably an illegal war in Iraq, if the Government can bail out the bankers, why can't it fund the housing sector?''

Winding up for the Tories, Justine Greening claimed that if social house-building rates had continued under the level they were when her party was in power there would now be 250,000 more social homes.

Ministers had allowed the right to buy policy to ``wither on the vine'' and social homebuy schemes were ``falling well short'' of the Government's own targets.

She said: ``As an individual, as a community, as a country, all of us aim for better lives for ourselves and our children.

``At the heart of this hope for the future is an aspiration to often own your own home.

``But as we have seen today it is a building block that this Government does not apparently value. That is demonstrated by the facts that we have heard today about the decline in social house-building that we have seen over the last 12 years.''

She added: ``What we need to kick-start the housing market is actually a General Election.

``That is the best way to start reversing some of the challenges that we all see and to get our housing market back on track, to get social housing back on track and to get those waiting lists back down.''

For the Government Iain Wright said Labour had inherited an ``appalling legacy'' of disrepair in the housing sector. Britain had become an ``object of shame'' across the world as the number of homeless people rose by thousands under the Tories.

He said the Conservatives could only come up with ``shallow and superficial'' arguments. Mr Shapps was ``vague'' about his own housing policies, talking of ``incentives'' but not specifying what they were.

He told MPs: ``The Government has invested over £29 billion since 1997 a very definite and right decision to re-build the fabric of our appallingly maintained housing stock with a target to bring all social housing up to a decent standard and over £40 billion will have been invested by 2010.''

He conceded there was a ``problem'' about the numbers of people on housing waiting lists but claimed there was an ``element of duplication'' in the figures.

``Frankly I could go onto a housing waiting list in Hammersmith and Fulham, I could also go on one in Hartlepool.''

He said the number of households in temporary accommodation had ``stabilised'' and had been reducing since 2005.

The Tory motion expressing concern about the implications of the Government's policies for future supply of housing and for families and the most vulnerable in particular, was defeated by 311 votes to 229, majority 82.

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