Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(8 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville
My Lords, I support the amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Cameron of Dillington, Lord Best and Lord Beecham, to which I have added my name. We debated rural housing at length in Committee and I remain concerned that we will see a radical change in housing in rural areas as a result of the implementation of this Bill, if it remains unamended. I welcome the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, with which I completely agree, as well as those of the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Beecham.
I have seen and read the Minister’s letter—not the one that came today—on this subject, and I am afraid that I do not believe that tenants in rural areas will be disadvantaged in the way that she indicates, or be treated differently from other tenants in more urban areas. I regret to say that it often appears that the Government do not always understand the countryside and rural areas. I have found from personal experience, when working in the Palace of Westminster in the past, that it was often extremely difficult to get people to understand the impact of their policies on residents in Greater London, outside Westminster, and completely hopeless to get any understanding of the impact on those further afield. That is especially true if one lived in an area that was considered as somewhere where one went for a holiday and did not actually live your life there. I therefore fully support the amendment and welcome the assurances from the Minister so far on safeguards and exclusions from rural communities, and I wait to hear what she has to say.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I would press the Minister for some help on this. We have not yet had the details of what seems to be proposed in the Minister’s reply—and we are on Report, which is very difficult, because we cannot behave as though we were in Committee and press her further for elucidations. So we have difficulties, although obviously we welcome the concessions that she might propose to bring forward. However, as I understand it, local authorities, which know their areas, will have to persuade the DCLG, presumably on a case-by-case basis, not that there should be a one-for-one but there should be a like-for-like. I have no doubt at all that the Minister and her Secretary of State have good intentions and will not seek to use this inappropriately, but why should civil servants recommend to a Minister, who has possibly not even visited a particular county, to tell a local authority that they know better than the local authority whether it is appropriate to have not just a one-for-one but a like-for-like replacement? In the name of localism, are we really going to see local authorities argue with the Secretary of State’s officials on a particular property or five properties in a village in some deeper part of the country, whether it be Somerset, Norfolk, Cumbria or wherever? That seems an extraordinary amount of Whitehall power over local government decision-making. I hope that it will be operated in good faith, but what happens when there is a disagreement? The Secretary of State is presumably always not only judge but jury and has the last word in this.
I would have liked to see more confidence expressed in local authorities, perhaps because it is monitored through the local plan—or, alternatively, perhaps the Minister will respond with the proposal that we will have a report back to Parliament two years after the Bill takes effect to see what exactly has been the response of local authorities and to what extent central government has been able to respond positively to local authorities’ description and assertion of their local need.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville
My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 71C. As has been said many times during the passage of this Bill, its implications will have very wide ranging consequences. It is therefore necessary to monitor those consequences adequately and consistently, and not leave it to hearsay and conjecture. The Secretary of State should conduct a proper review of the composition of the housing stock of local authorities and housing associations after three years. By then, it should be possible to ascertain exactly how many new homes have been produced, the state of the affordable rented sector, and what measures will be needed to redress any gaps in the market or enhancements needed to fulfil the Government’s aim of addressing the current housing crisis.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I also would like to support this amendment. I do not mean to be impertinent to the Minister, but I think that she owes us this—and I will say why, if I may. There have been considerable worries around the House as to just how “skeleton” this Bill is. We have been promised regulations which, although they may now be affirmative thanks to the good efforts of our colleagues on the Cross Benches, will none the less come in after the Bill has become law because the consultation exercises on which they are based started two-thirds of the way through the parliamentary process. We all know that they should have been concluded before the parliamentary process, so that they could have shaped the form of the Bill and thus been amended in an appropriate way.
In area after area we do not know what is going to happen. We do not know what is going to happen with starter homes, with the potential take-up or with the priority order of the money from local authority sales. We do not know what number of properties will have to be sold and levied to meet that, or how the sums are going to add up. We could make a shopping list of the things we should know and the Government should know, but that we have not been told. I think that that is because the Government do not know. All this work should have been done, in my view, long before this Bill took shape. This is the result of having, in the first year of a Government, a Bill that should have been delayed, as a Member of the Benches opposite said, for at least a year while some of this evidence was collected. We could then have had a more informed and sensible debate in the long hours of Committee and now at Report.
At Report, the Minister and the Secretary of State are beginning to respond to a lot of the arguments raised in Committee, and we are very appreciative of that. However, the Government could and should have foreseen those arguments at the Commons stages; they could and should have foreseen them at Second Reading; and they could and should have had answers in Committee. What we are now getting are promises at Report. We will come to Third Reading and, if those responses are not adequate, we will have to go into questions and the consideration of ping-pong, which will then put a question mark over the whole timetable of the Bill.
Through no fault of the Minister, the department has failed to put in the preliminary work on this Bill. There are many people in this House who have been Ministers and taken Bills through it who know how much preparation is needed to have a Bill that is informed with the proposed regulations in draft. The LegCo committee, as was, would not have allowed this Bill to go forward in my day with the regulations as vague as they now appear to be because we are still awaiting the results of the consultation exercise.
At the very least, therefore, we need a proper, evidence-based, data-collected report three years down the line on whether all these offerings, suggestions, proposals and possibilities that we all see and argue for in this Bill actually come to pass or whether, as a result of skeletal scrutiny of a very skeletal Bill, we have missed out major issues which then bear heavily on people who can ill afford to see their housing need pushed ever further back in the queue. I therefore suggest to the Minister in all gentleness that she owes us this amendment.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville
Could the noble Baroness say whether this will take into account regional and area variations in the price of properties?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Can the Minister also tell us whether all this information—and as a result, the Government’s estimate of the size of the levy and the contribution to be made by local authorities, according to their turnover and so on—will be available before we get to Report?
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville
The issue is that the taxpayer has paid a 20% discount for that to happen.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
On top of that, the taxpayer will then go on, in appropriate circumstances, to pay the housing benefit on rents that have doubled or tripled.