Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I totally agree. We are attempting to show how unappealing the measures put forward by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) are and how they simply will not tackle the problem for Londoners.

Part 4 of the Bill is nothing but an attack on council housing and council tenants, who have already suffered under the Government’s bedroom tax and cuts to council services. Adding the pay-to-stay provisions and reducing the stock available for rent amounts to a full blown attack on the council housing sector. Housing associations do not fare much better, as the right to buy could deplete their stock without adequate replacement. This is a further attack on people on low incomes and, most worryingly of all, will do almost nothing to tackle the housing crisis that so many people are facing.

We would like to remove most of part 4 of the Bill but simply do not have the time for the necessary votes. As an indicator of our great displeasure, we are going to press clause 142 to a vote, when appropriate. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting will press amendment 89. We call on the whole House to reject this awful Bill later today.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

I shall not detain the House for long, as I am not sure that anyone would hear me. However, my constituents would expect me to raise the exceptional challenges of the central Oxfordshire housing market. Many of the Bill’s measures will be welcomed locally: more stringent measures to tackle rogue landlords, the brownfield register and measures such as Help to Buy, starter homes and the Prime Minister’s commitment to commission thousands more affordable homes directly.

Although commendable, the raft of policies to build more affordable houses is not in itself enough. Houses need to be built in areas that need them most. High-cost areas are either where growth is the highest or where markets are sclerotic because sites are hard to come by, infrastructure is at capacity and planning authorities are weak. In some areas such as Oxford, both those factors apply. High growth is becoming constrained by failing local housing markets. Many colleagues have local difficulties with housing, and I wish to explain briefly what our challenges are.

Median full-time earnings in Oxford are now £26,500; median house prices are £427,210. That means that house prices are 16 times the earnings of the average worker. The Centre for Cities analysis has found Oxford to be the least affordable city in England when prices are set against local incomes. The number of people owning their own home in the city is well below the national average, and median private rent for a three-bedroom house is £300 a week, more than half of median earnings. Some 30% of residents rent compared with 25% in London. The House of Commons Library has found that Oxford City Council delivered zero affordable homes in 2013-14 and only 20 in 2014-15; it is ranked as the fourth worst in the country for delivering housing of any tenure. Yet Oxford requires 1,400 homes to be delivered each year until 2031.

There are lots of specific local problems. To give the council its due, I should say that we have relatively few brownfield sites and all sorts of challenges, given that two thirds of land is in private ownership. That complicates active public management. The city has a relatively low density and development is highly restricted due to the amount of protected and listed buildings. It also has 400 hectares of green-belt land within its local authority. Nevertheless, if we compare Oxford with Cambridge—a reasonable comparison—we see that Cambridge provided 550 affordable homes in 2013-14 and 320 in 2014-15.

It is reasonable for us to call for more to be done because the issue is obviously causing significant problems for our local private and public sectors. One in two senior academic appointments fails because of house prices. Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spends more than £100,000 a week on agency staff: it cannot recruit permanent staff because of local housing affordability. Some 30% of local businesses cite housing costs as their top barrier to recruitment. The failure to build homes where they are needed in cities constrains growth. The issue matters to the national economy as well, as such cities are the most productive and have the most jobs. If people cannot afford to live in these cities, they cannot access those jobs and businesses cannot sell to them. The economy suffers.

We are not yet getting this issue right. Between 2008 and 2013, in respect of local incomes, relatively more homes were built in Barnsley—the second most affordable city in Great Britain—than were built in London or Oxford, which are the least affordable cities. More of these homes need to be built in our most successful cities, where affordability is lowest and demand is highest.

In justifying Government amendment 112, and acknowledging the exceptionalism of the London housing market, the Minister has accepted that housing in Britain’s most economically successful cities is the least affordable and that we need policies that target our affordable house building efforts towards our least affordable areas. That is little more than common sense, but we have all known too many occasions when common sense has fallen by the wayside in our legislative process.

Amendment 112 will ensure that enough receipts from the sale of high-value homes go to the Greater London Authority for it to build two affordable homes for every one sold. Obviously, the receipts left with the GLA would have to be sufficiently high to allow that. I am of course very pleased for Londoners that this important measure has been secured for them, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) on the efforts that he has gone through to do so. This is possible for Londoners largely because house prices are so high that huge amounts of money are generated from sales, so it is reasonably easy to fund two for one without putting too big a dent in the revenue stream going to central Government.

In my view, unsurprisingly given my bias towards Oxford, this should also apply to other high-value areas such as Oxford, Bath and St Albans. I will set out how it might work in practice in our case. About 12% of council homes in Oxford would be deemed to be of high value and so the council would be under a duty to consider selling them when they become vacant. Given vacancy rates, this works out at 29 homes a year being sold rather than going to the next person on the waiting list. Our estimates suggest that 29 council homes sold on the open market in Oxford each year would generate about £8.6 million in receipts, so a similar two-for-one provision would ensure that £8.6 million stays with the council for it to provide two extra units of affordable homes for every one sold. If, say, each high-value council home sold for £293,385 each—£8.9 million divided by 29—that would ensure that enough was still going to central Government for them to do as they plan, but we would be able to provide two for one for Oxford.

Amendment 112 gives the Secretary of State the power to create exceptions to subsection (4) for other local authorities along the lines of the two-for-one provision that my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park has so valiantly provided for London, so that is written explicitly into the Bill. Such an exception would be essential for Oxford to ensure that we have sufficient social and affordable housing. However, I remain to be convinced that the power will be sufficient to ensure that this is delivered, following the challenges that we have faced.