Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, we all know that 14 years of austerity have left local government on its knees and, in many cases, reduced local government to little more than an agent of the Westminster Government. Huge percentages—almost all spending—are forced to go on statutory measures: that is, what is decided here in Westminster, not what is decided in local communities. Can the Minister tell me, either as a percentage or as a figure, how much extra money will be available in this financial settlement to local councils to spend on the non-statutory elements of their duties, such as protecting local green spaces, supporting and funding local libraries and looking after the local public realm rather than having to make expensive bids for pots of money to be able to improve it? How much non-discretionary money will be in this settlement?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes a very good point. I pay tribute to my colleagues in local government, who do an amazing job of continuing to deliver some non-statutory services in spite of the incredible financial pressures they have been under. For example, we still managed to keep a theatre open in my area. That happens all across the country, so all credit to local government for the work it does on this. The noble Baroness mentioned constant rounds of bidding for pots of funding. We think that is wasteful and unnecessary. It just sets authorities up against one another in competing for pots of funding. We will do our very best to get rid of that approach. As we develop the spending review proposals, we will build what local authorities need for the future into core funding.
Building Homes
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord. I gave an explanation of how we set the targets in response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. The fact is that everyone and every area has to play a part in this if we are to deliver these challenging housing targets. It is important that the new formula takes account of affordability and the demand for housing in local areas. Where they have challenging targets, it is because there is a demand in those areas, including a demand for more affordable housing.
We all know that statutory consultees play an important role in the planning system, providing advice on technical matters to ensure that new development is good quality, safe and situated in the right place. It is important that statutory consultees play their role too, to ensure that the planning system supports the housing and infrastructure development that we need. We will work with them over the next year to achieve that. Part of our work on the new homes accelerator will be to look at the statutory consultees to try to understand why the delays have come into the system, in relation to the responses of statutory consultees, and to see how we can work with them to alleviate some of those blockages and barriers.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. My first question follows on from that of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and her focus on social housing and genuinely affordable housing. The Green Party has a target of 150,000 homes a year for that. This Statement is all about so-called affordable housing. Have the Government taken account of the housing Select Committee report from March this year, which looks at the increasing and deeply concerning problems with shared purchase, also known as “part rent, part buy”? That is very much included in those so-called affordable targets. The report finds that
“rents, service charges, and the complexity of … leases make shared ownership an unbearable reality for many people”.
Will the Government take action to deal with this issue, which surely has to be a big part of the affordable housing target?
On the other side of the target issue, are the Government taking adequate account of the physical limits of this country? In Cambridge, a major development was recently turned down because there was no water supply. Many places are thinking about building on flood plains. The flood plain is not beside the river; it is part of the river. Where will we find suitable locations and how will we have the resources needed to make this possible?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness. She will know that we are working through a process—for example, some changes were made to leasehold arrangements. She is quite right to say that the tenure of a property is critical, and we do not want to trap people into tenures that cause them problems. We are working through the process of designing a new Bill on commonhold. Where there are issues with shared ownership, we will look at them. We are trying to eradicate some of the more knotty issues people have had with that type of property ownership. Sometimes people think that they are buying a home, but some elements of leasehold tenure mean that they do not have the ownership of the property that they thought they were buying into. We are very aware of that and have taken account of it, and we will work on that further in the new year as we make our way towards the new commonhold Bill. There will be plenty of opportunity to comment on that as we go through the process.
I turn to the physical limits that the noble Baroness described. I made two recent visits to Cambridge: one to visit the development forum of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and another to look at South Cambridgeshire. The great thing is that some very good and innovative solutions are coming up there to look at the water issues. That does not mean that that is everything we need to do, but solutions are coming forward. I do not have time to repeat it all now, but there is a big section in the report about flood mitigation and how we are tackling the issue of flooding. That is all contained in the new NPPF. I hope the noble Baroness will look at that. If she has further questions afterwards, she can by all means come back to me.
These problems are not going away. We need to be creative with the solutions we provide, because we have to build the homes that people need. I add that about 10% of the country is currently built on, while 13% is green belt. There should be land to build these houses on.
Housing Supply and Homelessness
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for securing this debate, which has been so well attended by noble Lords.
When we talk about housing policy, what is really noticeable is that the Government’s focus is on supply. For the Green Party, the focus is on what kind of homes the homeless need and how they will get them. We can all agree that fixing the current crisis of homelessness is a crucial priority for our society. It not just the people we see right here on our doorstep, on the streets of Westminster and in the Tube stations, sleeping increasingly uncomfortably and at danger to themselves, as winter draws in. There are also—and what damage is this doing?—the families in temporary accommodation. For England, the numbers are at the highest level since records began 22 years ago, with a 15% increase in the year to June. There are also the young—and not so young—people forced to rent a room in overcrowded shared housing. They are inadequately housed, with no realistic hope of future improvement, as reluctantly tolerated couch-surfers or in homes with several households squeezed in to them.
Yet when we hear the Government talk about housing, the focus is always on housebuilding. The milestone that Sir Keir Starmer set out with much fanfare this morning was “building 1.5 million homes”. The talk was about foisting homes on unwilling communities, with planning “reform”, despite the fact that a third of homes receiving planning consent are not being built. That means that more than a million approvals handed out since 2015 have not resulted in homes. Had all those homes which were granted planning permission been built, the previous Government would have hit the target of 300,000 new homes a year in eight out of the past 10 years.
So why are these homes not being built? They are mostly large-scale schemes of a handful of mass-market developers, whose entire aim and whose legal responsibility to their directors is to maximise profit. Their responsibility is not to build homes. What generally makes the most profit? It is so-called executive homes, often free-standing and wasteful of the scarce resource of land, built to poor energy-efficiency standards on greenfield sites without public transport provision, and feeding into already congested roads. What will those do for the homeless people on our streets, for the families crowded horribly into B&Bs without housing facilities, and for young people who have moved back home with the family, for want of a rental deposit?
The Government are applying the theory that suitable housing will eventually trickle down to those who need a decent, secure and affordable place to live. But, just as trickle-down economics has been a total failure, so has trickle-down housing policy. We need to build, or repurpose and refurbish, genuinely affordable and high-quality homes close to transport and other facilities, that meet the needs of people rather than focus on the profit for the market.
Of course, relying on an underregulated and non-competitive monopoly in the private sector to supply housing has not resulted just in a failure of housing numbers. The Grenfell tragedy exposed, in a huge disaster, the deadly failure of quality and safety. The campaign group End Our Cladding Scandal estimates that 600,000 people in Britain still live in homes at a heightened risk of a fatal fire, and 3 million own homes that they cannot sell, for fire safety reasons. Since Grenfell, more than 15,000 people have been forced to move out of their homes indefinitely.
What is the story behind that? I go to an account from James Meek in the London Review of Books of the now infamous Skyline Chambers in Manchester. The building was completed in 2007 by a company called Space Developments UK, which was bought by the multinational Ireland-based housebuilder McInerney. When it went down in the financial crash, Skyline was picked up from the creditors by Wallace, a company owned by an Italian investor sometimes styled “Count di Vighignolo” in official documents. It is a Cambridge-based network of companies owned by a Gibraltar-registered company, Perseverance Ltd, which in turn is owned by the Guernsey-registered Hauteville Trustees. That is what is supposed to supply housing.
What do we need to do to tackle homelessness to reshape our housing policy and our society, so that they work for people and the planet, rather than human needs and planetary essentials being ground down by the demand for profit? We need to shift our understanding to housing primarily as homes—affordable, secure and quality places for people to live—rather than simply as financial assets. We need to tackle the financialisation of our housing supply, just as we need to tackle the financialisation of our public services and our whole economy.
The Government are starting to demonstrate, just a little, that they realise that these old 20th-century economic models are not working. In Sir Keir’s speech this morning, we saw something of a shift, as previewed by Politico’s London Playbook, starting to realise that just talking about growth provokes the question: who is it for and who benefits from it? The same question must be asked about our housing supply.