Grant Shapps: How to track this general election in real-time using Twitter

Grant Shapps is the most followed Conservative MP on Twitter, having tweeted most days since March 2008 @grantshapps

On March 28th 1992 the then Prime Minister John Major hit the campaign trail in Luton.

Walking through a pedestrianised shopping centre he was jostled by a hostile left-wing crowd. Progress was slow until he spotted a soapbox and he decided to clamber on board. Grabbing a megaphone he retorted:

"No mob ever taking to the streets is going to stop us coming out and talking to the ordinary decent people of this country.”

That was a moment I particularly remember thanks to a completely new innovation in British TV. Three years earlier Sky had launched its News channel and this was the first general election to be covered around the clock. From then on the 24-hour news channels have been on hand to instantly capture moments of impromptu voter interaction; like the time when John Prescott throw a punch on an abusive voter in 2001.

Wind forward to the 2005 election and the speed of election coverage had taken yet another leap forward.

Blogs were all the rage and with commentary no longer restricted to the newspapers, every twist and turn in the 2005 campaign was reported online. Finding out what the commentariat thought of the campaign was no longer a question of waiting for the morning papers to report on an event from the day before. Now blogs became hourly accounts of the day's key election events.

And in this 2010 general election, technology has once again powered ahead. For better or worse, this is Britain's first ever twitter election.

Grant Shapps MP: After Labour's failure on housing, Conservatives have a wealth of ideas to smash the status quo

Grant Shapps is Shadow Housing Minister and Home Truths, his new compilation of speeches outlining Conservative housing policy, can be downloaded via his website.

Last week I debated the future of housing with Minister John Healey at the Home Builders Federation hustings.

In amongst the tired old rhetoric and self-denial about the scale of housing failure  was a startling lack of imagination when it came to solutions to our housing problems.

There are three simple facts by which Labour can be judged:

• Fewer homes are being built than in any peacetime year since 1924.
• Last year there were fewer first time buyers than since records began.
• In the last 13 years the social housing waiting list has almost doubled to 1.8 million families.

There’s a housing crisis of epic proportions and yet Labour’s ninth housing minister can’t bring himself to admit that they’ve been caused by the headline-grabbing, but utterly ineffective, top-down, Soviet-style housing targets. They’re not delivering and they’re hindering progress by ensuring that local communities feel backed into a corner and say no to new build.

Over the past few years I’ve travelled round the country to discover what is really going on with housing in Britain today. Then, over the past few months, I have made a series of speeches outlining how a Conservative government would do things very differently.

Grant Shapps MP: The 83,000 children without a permament home this Christmas should weigh heavily on the Government's conscience

Grant Shapps MP is the Shadow Housing Minister and helped set up he Conservative Homelessness Foundation, which carries out research into the causes and effects of homelessness with a view to proposing policy solutions. Next week the Foundation will publish its 10th report, 'Sobering Facts', which tracks the link between homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse.

Many of us will spend Christmas Eve chasing around shopping centres for those last minute gifts before going home and frantically wrapping presents for loved ones. It seems like stressful stuff, but while you're putting out a mince pie for Santa tonight spare a thought for the nearly 83,000 children who will go to sleep this Christmas without somewhere to call home.

Today I've published a new report, All I Want For Christmas Is A Place to Call Home, which draws attention to the estimated 20% increase in the number of children without a permanent home since 1998. This Labour Government has to confront the fact that under its leadership there has been an enormous increase in the number of children placed in vulnerable uncertainty – a revelation that should weigh heavily on its conscience, particularly as those within it are no doubt currently filling stockings and arranging presents around the tree.

The news that 82,780 children in England will wake up on Christmas Day in temporary accommodation this year and that 6,500 of the families lucky enough to exit temporary accommodation in the last year have been without a permanent home for more than three years, is something that must not be ignored or sidelined. It is an issue at the heart of our communities and one that many people have first hand evidence of as they go about their daily lives.

Of course, the issue of homelessness goes right to the core of our society - it is not just the uncertainty that comes with lacking a roof over their heads that these children have to deal with, but they are also confronted with a plethora of other factors that make their start in life far more difficult than it should ever be; for example, children in temporary housing are almost twice as likely to suffer from poor health as other children and a third of children living in temporary accommodation have no school to go to. No home, no education and poor health is not the start any child should have.

Grant Shapps MP: How the innovative Conservative house-swap scheme would give social tenants nationwide mobility

Grant Shapps MP is Shadow Housing Minister and explains here the policy he announced this week of a national house swap scheme.

Here's something that not a lot of people know. If you happen to live in social housing - in other words your landlord is the local council or a Housing Association - then you are four times less likely to have moved home in the past year than your private sector counterpart.

Does this really matter?

I guess that just depends on whether you've got a desire to relocate, perhaps for work or family reasons. Sadly, if you do, then you're going to find that moving home is actually a big problem.

Surprisingly, there's no nationwide house-swap scheme which would allow you to move from your current area to where you need to be for that new job. And as a result, even for those social housing tenants who managed to move in the past few years, a third went less than one mile from their old home and just one in ten moved further than ten miles.

In other words, if you're in social housing the system expects you to stay put, more or less forever. Your aspirations are squeezed, your expectations lowered, and your horizons limited. Automatically - if not intentionally - you are being treated like a second class citizen.

So, ironically, social housing is actually polarising society, driving the 'haves' and 'have nots' further apart.

Of course tenants, understandably, don't want to give up the security of their home to take a chance and move around the country in pursuit of work. So in areas of economic decline where jobs - particularly in manufacturing - have disappeared, this lack of mobility has hastened the creation of sink estates with unemployment and deprivation all too prevalent.

Grant Shapps MP: Labour's Mortgage Rescue Scheme has hardly rescued anyone

Grant Shapps MP is Shadow Housing Minister.

The Prime Minister, in his attempt to grab a quick headline, should be ashamed of the way he has offered false hope to thousands who face the heartbreak of repossession.

Anyone who has ever owned a home will understand just how much the thought of being repossessed can lead to fear, anxiety and sleepless nights.

Right now in Britain there are tens of thousands of homeowners worried that they might not be able to meet the mortgage repayments this month and facing up to the grim possibility of having to tell their children that they are leaving their homes.

It was for those families that the Government’s £285 million Mortgage Rescue Scheme offered so much hope when it was announced last September.

The scheme, which formed the centre-piece of Gordon Brown’s Autumn 2008 re-launch, helps Housing Associations to purchase equity in the homes of vulnerable families at risk of repossession.

We were told by Ministers that the elderly, families with young children, the disabled and pregnant women would be helped and that 6,000 homeowners would be able to stay in their homes as a direct result of this policy.

With the number of repossessions rising and predicted to rise even further to 75,000 in 2009, everyone agreed that action was required and the Mortgage Rescue Scheme was widely welcomed.

It finally launched in January but since then just six families have avoided repossession because of this scheme. At this rate, less than 30 mortgages will be rescued during the two year duration of the initiative. In short, the Mortgage Rescue Scheme is failing.

Grant Shapps MP: Sleeping rough

Grant Shapps, MP for Welwyn Hatfield and Shadow Minister for Housing, describes his experience sleeping rough on Christmas Eve.

A constituent of mine called Jamie was kicked out of his family home when he was 13. He spent a year sleeping rough and after a chequered adolescence he’s now grown up and is married with kids. Jamie will tell you that it was his wife that turned him around by giving him an ultimatum which revolved around continuing his substance abuse or losing her. Fortunately he made the right choice, so when he offered to spend one more night sleeping rough on the streets of London, my first response was to check with his wife. It turned out that she had encouraged Jamie to offer his assistance and I’m pleased she did, because he turned out to be a tremendous help.

That in a civilised society anyone, let alone young people, should live without a permanent roof over their heads seems self-evidently wrong. But what to do about the problem is of course far more complex. A good starting point is to understand the scale of the problem. And frankly the figures are alarming.

For me it started with a set of Government stats which only recognise 498 rough sleepers throughout the country.  On investigating I discovered a flaw in the data-collection system. A form returned by Local Authorities requires ‘bracketed’ responses. If the 0-to-10 Rough Sleepers In Our Area box is ticked, then the Government counts it as Zero every time. And a re-analysis of the same data in my ‘Roughly Sleeping’ report revealed that the true number of those sleeping on our pavements and parks is likely to be nearer 1,300 each night.