Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, the Bill seeks to accelerate housing growth via home ownership solutions. The emphasis on stimulating the supply side of housing is to be welcomed, but the Bill does little to tackle the crisis in social housing provision, and will almost certainly have some unintended adverse consequences on both provision and community cohesion.

On high-value sales, I see absolutely nothing wrong with a council selling a high-value property and using the money to build more affordable homes, if it is a local decision taken at local level by councillors accountable to local people. If councillors are forced to sell off high-value vacant properties, or to find the money to pay the Government an equivalent sum from either the general fund or the housing revenue account, they are likely to be left with less provision for families, and the housing crisis will simply go from bad to worse. As councils sell off their most valuable and desirable properties, values in those areas will almost certainly rise as further gentrification sets in, and further council properties will have to be sold, because their increased values now qualify them for sale.

The proposals for local planning authorities to promote the supply of starter homes is likely to lead to a reduction in other forms of affordable housing, if developers can offset current planning policy requirements for social-rented and shared-ownership homes against higher-cost starter homes. I have great concern about how the emphasis on starter homes could affect estate regeneration. It may make it impossible for local authorities to regenerate their estates without pricing their existing tenants out of them. The Bill’s proposals may make it less likely that tenants will be offered a right of return to new estates, making it unlikely that proposals for regeneration will ever gain their consent.

The introduction of “pay to stay” for so-called high-income social tenants could result in huge rent increases for households with an income of more than £40,000 a year in London and £30,000 a year elsewhere. While providing £4 billion to help to build shared ownership homes for people earning up to £80,000 a year, and while funding a 20% discount for people buying new starter homes, the Government propose to soak up any improvement in social tenants’ finances by charging higher rents, thus reducing the chance that they can ever save enough to be able to afford one of the new shared-ownership starter homes.

The proposals for short-term, insecure tenancy terms —an acknowledged weakness in the private rented sector—for all future social housing tenants will have a devastating effect on many tenants and increase property management costs for all social landlords. The proposals in the Bill are already having an impact on registered providers, some of which have started to sell empty stock rather than risk financial loss under right to buy. Others have signalled that providing housing at social rents will no longer be viable. In addition, a number of councils anticipate that some developers may seek new planning permissions to reduce the proportion of social rented housing in preference to starter homes. These proposals will result in dramatic reductions in the availability of social housing and huge increases in waiting lists. Yes, up to 1.3 million tenants will have been able to buy their homes, and I have no doubt that many will exercise the option, helped by a substantial discount, but we know from the experience of council right to buy that stock will not be replaced on a like-for-like basis. There will be diminishing numbers of homes available for social rent, and there will be more households in temporary accommodation.

The Bill recognises that there is a housing crisis in our country but does nothing to address the crisis in social housing provision and little to encourage more construction of rental property in the private sector. It appears to be designed to help those in moderate need of housing at the expense of those in desperate housing need.