Covid-19: Economy Update

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

The noble Lord asks an important question. I do not speak as a health expert, but a lot of these tests are simply not reliable enough. The worry is that we would create a false sense of security which could then cause further problems. I might be incorrect but, as I understand it, some of these tests cannot pick up the infection when it is still gestating in the gut of an asymptomatic person. I am aware that a number of universities and employers are taking their own decisions and using their own technologies. It is much easier for independent organisations to do this, knowing the risks, and they can respond accordingly.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, tier 3 restrictions are hugely disruptive to the economy and will lead to the collapse of yet more businesses. In these circumstances, as many Conservative MPs in these areas now say, it is imperative to provide clear information about the exit route from tier 3 so that businesses can at least try to plan for the future. Will the Minister tell the House what measures will be used and how will they be weighted when the decision to exit is made?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I agree with the noble Baroness that tier 3 has a devastating impact on businesses and on people’s lives, but it is how we are trying to control the spread of the virus. We see what is happening in Spain at the moment. That is the nightmare that we are seeking to avoid. As I understand it, the overriding way of monitoring whether an area can come of out of tier 3 is when the percentage of those being tested for the virus falls below a certain threshold. This information gives some indication to businesses that they may be coming out of this nightmare.

Economy

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister is hesitant to address this because it was a very strong manifesto commitment and he is very anxious not to break those. As we know, in politics it is very easy to break promises.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, the Statement claims that new investment is being provided in training and apprenticeships. Can the Minister elaborate on what is new rather than already announced? Can he tell the House whether the Government will ensure that workers on reduced hours have real opportunities to use the time they have to develop much-needed additional skills? What conditions will be required from employers to fulfil that need?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, the announcements last week included a number of matters around the extension of existing loan facilities and keeping open the window for loan applications under the various support schemes that the Treasury has created. On encouraging part-time working to enable staff to use the spare time for training, I think that that has to be an individual matter between employees and employers. However, to me it seems fairly straightforward that a part-time employee can access, in particular, online training, which has become the method by which most training is now distributed.

Social Housing

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chair of the Orbit group, a large housing association. Few areas of public policy are more pressing than the crisis in the supply of social housing. There has been a terrible failure by successive Governments to address it. Since 2010, the situation has worsened. Both the coalition and Conservative Governments have not taken it seriously enough. Recently, there have been some welcome changes in policy, but they should have been introduced much earlier and they are not nearly ambitious enough.

Decent housing is vital to the quality of life of our citizens, which is greatly damaged if their homes are damp, cold, squalid and overcrowded. It is disgraceful that many children grow up in such homes. The experience will often damage them permanently, denying them the ability to reach their potential at school or beyond. Government investment in social housing should be seen as an investment in well-being and better economic outcomes.

It is also shocking that in a country as rich as the UK there are so many homeless people. The shortage of social housing means that local authorities struggle to meet their statutory duty to provide homes for people sleeping on the streets.

I want to make four points about the Government’s policies. First, the decision to raise the cap on local authority borrowing is welcome, but it is not sufficient. Why not allow local authorities to keep 100% of the receipts from sales to invest in new homes? I hope that the Minister will reply to that. Secondly, why not curtail the right to buy altogether, as has happened in Scotland? We have heard today the figures on the outcome from right to buy. Thirdly, new government grants to both local authorities and housing associations need to be very much higher if the supply of new social housing is to meet the agreed targets. The reduction in the shedloads of money going on housing benefit would in the longer term outweigh the extra investment via government grants—I am sure that the Minister will agree with that.

Finally, as others have said, the availability of land is vital. As my noble friend Lady Warwick implied, the Government need to reform the Land Compensation Act 1961 so that a fairer proportion of the rise in land value is shared in the community. Will they produce a transparent database of land ownership, including that owned by government departments or their agencies, with a view to enforcing the sale of some of that government land for new housebuilding, especially for social housing?

Building More Homes (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I must declare an interest as I chair the board of Orbit, a large housing association. I want to focus on the supply-side issues that the Select Committee identified as being of crucial importance in rectifying our housing crisis but that have been neglected by successive Governments. I was a member of the committee when we undertook this inquiry. It was a great pleasure, not least because the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and I agreed on both the nature of the problems and the solutions—surprising as that may seem.

The spiralling rise in house prices was central to the committee’s concerns. Following nearly 40 years of stability in these prices, they have risen dramatically since the 1970s and particularly fast in recent years. In London, the average price of a house is nearly £500,000 and in the rest of the country £220,000. As my noble friend Lord Hollick said, rents have also increased vastly. Private renters spend 43% of gross income on rent; in London it is 60%. In the past, many couples could save to put down a deposit and buy a house within a decade. Today, many will never be able to do so. Aspirations are dashed and increasing numbers of families live in poor accommodation and in poverty because of its high cost, greatly affecting the quality of their lives.

We are in this mess because for many years we failed to build anything like as many houses as are needed to meet demand. The starkest of statistics is that between 1955 and 1975 local authorities built 2 million homes, but between 1995 and 2015 they built just over 12,000. As other speakers said, including the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, the private sector completely failed to replace local authority housing construction. Moreover, the three biggest builders have 200,000 plots in short-term land banks and more than a third of new houses granted planning permission between 2010 and 2015 have not yet been built.

The Select Committee set out these shocking statistics which demonstrate that the housing market is not working. The Government have been too slow to acknowledge this and not so long ago came up with policies that were no solution. Indeed, they stoked up demand resulting in further house price increases and made the problem worse. I congratulate the Government on moving away from those policies and for stating categorically in the White Paper that the housing market is broken. I welcome this change of direction.

However, like many commentators, I am sceptical about whether the Government will meet their target of 250,000 new homes. Moreover, it is doubtful whether this target is large enough to deal with the enormous backlog and continuing population growth. As my noble friend Lord Layard said, the committee estimated that at least 300,000 new homes are needed annually for the foreseeable future to stop things getting worse. Why is the Government’s own target quite a lot lower than the committee and independent experts calculate is needed?

As chair of a housing association that is also one of the largest housebuilders in the sector, I am acutely aware of the struggle to find suitable land, which many speakers in the debate referred to. The committee’s report advocates a more aggressive approach to the release of public land. Some government departments and their agencies hoard land for which they have no current use. In their response to the committee’s report, the Government were vague, saying just that they would work harder to release this land. In the White Paper, they are much more specific, mentioning the 160,000 homes they plan to build on public land. Can the Minister tell the House what mechanism the Government propose for monitoring progress in reaching this target and how the release of public land will be co-ordinated across government? Perhaps the great Mr Barwell, who has received so many accolades today, can be asked to take this on, but he needs support from the top to make this happen.

I welcome the fact that the White Paper proposes consultation on allowing local authorities the flexibility to dispose of land to be used for housing,

“at less than best consideration”.

Can the Minister also say what the Government’s plans are to deal with the hoarding planned by land traders? I welcome the Government’s determination to improve the planning process and their decision to consult on much-needed increases in density in areas where demand is high. We lag behind many of our neighbours in Europe in this respect. The £45 million land release fund to help local authorities identify surplus land for housing is welcome, although given the size of the problem I wonder whether this sum will go far enough. The costs of decontamination alone for many brownfield sites are enormous. Can the Minister say how the Government intend to address this?

The White Paper proposes to allow local authorities to increase planning fees by 20%. This, again, reflects a recommendation of the committee. It is right to stipulate that this should be reinvested in planning departments, which have suffered from reductions in skilled staff as a result of a 46% cut in funding between 2010-11 and 2014-15. Housing associations want well-resourced local teams, and they will be willing to pay a little more to achieve this.

I have already referred to the gap between the number of planning permissions granted and the number of homes built. Measures in the White Paper to speed up the delivery of new houses are welcome, but the Government’s failure to accept the Select Committee’s recommendation to levy council tax on those developments not completed within a set time is disappointing. Again, perhaps the Minister could comment on this.

The committee recommended that the National Infrastructure Commission should oversee the release of public land for housing. A number of speakers have referred to this. Perhaps we missed a trick by failing to include a bigger role for the commission in setting the agenda for large-scale housing developments across the country. The £2.3 billion committed in the White Paper to a housing infrastructure fund in areas of greatest social need to help unlock the delivery of new towns and developments of 1,500 homes or more is welcome, but could the Government agree to the commission assessing the infrastructure needs in the interests of speeding up the process and getting more homes built quickly? If these infrastructure issues are not addressed, nothing will happen.

The Government’s obsession with home ownership at the expense of other types of tenure concerned the committee greatly. The White Paper’s new approach, with social and affordable housing and private renting at last on the agenda, is really refreshing. It is vital to improve the housing of those who cannot afford to buy their own homes and to help them escape from poor-quality accommodation provided by private landlords. But to achieve this it is important to make it much easier for local authorities to provide new homes on a much larger scale, as many speakers have pointed out.

I conclude on what I think has been the main theme of the debate. In his White Paper, the Secretary of State trumpets a “bold, radical vision”, but with respect to local authorities’ freedom to build, it fails to be either bold or radical. It does not give councils the borrowing powers they need, nor the right to retain right-to-buy receipts to invest in new affordable homes. It also fails to recognise that interfering in the rents that housing associations can charge damages their capacity to build more affordable homes and to reach the 120,000 target mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. Lenders’ appraisals of risk are affected, as are housing associations’ business plans. Will the Government think again, first, about liberating housing associations in this respect and, secondly, about local authorities’ powers and freedoms to build?

A change of heart would diminish the scepticism of many commentators, which I referred to at the beginning of my speech, about the likelihood that the White Paper targets can be achieved. Only then will we reduce the housing benefit bill and make the progress needed to alleviate the misery of so many people who are suffering because of wholly inadequate housing.

Palestine: Recognition

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. The present impasse in reaching a negotiated settlement is a tragedy not just for Palestine but for Israel. The failure of the peace process after 20 years leaves Palestinians as oppressed, stateless people, but it also leaves Israelis still fearful about their security and citizens of a country drifting towards becoming a pariah state because of their current leaders’ lack of respect for international law. Only last July, Netanyahu ruled out ever accepting a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Ever more illegal settlements make a two-state solution increasingly unviable, suggesting that he rejects its establishment. Can anyone believe that this is in the long-term interest of Israel, let alone Palestine?

All political parties in the UK have long supported a two-state solution. There is now a consensus that every effort should be made to establish this without greater prevarication and delay. Action, not words, is now needed. After many failures in the US-brokered bilateral negotiations, it is time to accept the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. I suggest that those speakers in this debate who will say it is premature are wrong. Perhaps they should be reminded of the history of the state of Israel. In 1920, as the holder of the mandate for Palestine, we made a commitment to guide Palestinians to statehood and independence. For those who may argue later that Palestine does not have the attributes of a state, a reminder is needed about the circumstances in which Israel was recognised as a state in 1948: it had no effective Government; there were warring factions, including the terrorist Stern gang; its borders were unclear; and it had no capital city. Nevertheless it was recognised, rightly, and it is now right to recognise Palestine as a state, taking the 1967 borders as the basis for its territory.

I also want to refute the view that the Israeli Government have a right of veto over the future of Palestine as a state. In exercising such a veto, they are denying the Palestinian people the dignity associated with self-determination that they so deeply crave and which the Israelis also wanted after 1947. No wonder the Palestinians are now seeking a unilateral route rather than relying only on the increasingly futile bilateral negotiations. It would be easier to sympathise with the view that an agreed settlement involving Israel is the only right route had successive Israeli Governments respected international law, discontinued the blockade of Gaza and ended the occupation of the West Bank. Instead they have annexed more land, destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza last summer—killing many innocent people, half of whom were children—and continued the daily harassment of ordinary people on the West Bank.

I make a plea to those who have come to this debate to speak against the resolution: please think about what it is like to be a young person in Palestine. They have grown up experiencing oppression and misery, their older relatives being stripped of their land and a blighted economy. Their hopes of self-determination are dashed with every failure of the peace process. If we want them to reject violence, as surely we should, we must give them hope. To support the recognition of Palestine as a state will of course not be a total solution, but it will be a message to them of our belief in their right to self-determination and a symbol of our support for it. In politics, symbols sometimes matter.

Gaza

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, I welcome the improvement in access to Gaza to provide humanitarian aid. However, the facts are clear: the people of Gaza are suffering greatly because of the blockade and have to fall back on humanitarian aid, rather than providing for themselves and their families through normal economic activity. In other words, a vicious circle is at work here. The people of Gaza are unable to obtain building materials to repair and maintain their homes, or to reconstruct the seriously damaged infrastructure. They are unable either to import or export enough goods to sustain anything like a normal economic life. As a result, unemployment is greatly increased. Around half of young people are out of work.

My noble friend Lord Warner mentioned fishing. Some 85 per cent of fishing waters, which are an important source of food in Gaza, are inaccessible as a result of the blockade. Such fishing as there is takes place in polluted waters as a result of a deteriorating waste infrastructure. In turn, that has a serious effect on health, including the health of children. Existing treatment plants are inadequate, so large amounts of sewage are discharged into the sea. Nearly one-third of houses are not connected to the sewage network and have to rely on totally inadequate cesspits.

This environment can lead only to an embittered people and, in particular, to large numbers of embittered young men who are denied some of the most basic requirements for human needs. It cannot be conducive to the long-term security of the Israeli people, which I and many others in this House of course want to see, to force these appalling conditions on the Palestinians of Gaza. I ask the Minister in his reply to say what Her Majesty’s Government are doing—of course, working with Israel and the international community—to seek a change in this policy so that vital improvements to the infrastructure, which continues to deteriorate, can be secured.