Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Stunell

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 20 in this group, calling for the provision of safe and affordable homes for all. It references a definition of affordable homes that appears in Amendment 242, to which we will come in due course.

Mission 10 in the White Paper—although they are not actually numbered as such, but it is the 10th mission —sets a target that is only seven years away, focusing on creating a secure path to home ownership. According to the technical annexe to the White Paper, it aims to ensure that everyone has access to good-quality housing, with a particular focus on improving areas where quality is low—I underline that. That is a very big ambition and a very worthy one, and seven years is an awfully short time to deliver it.

It is very important because it is also going to be the gateway to tackling a whole set of other missions, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, set out in her speech on Amendment 7—which of course we support very much. Health and well-being are essentially connected to the housing quality of the people who are being measured, and that includes their overall capacity to participate properly in education. Is there somewhere for children to spread out their homework? Is there a bedroom that they can sleep in properly? There is no argument that this is a good idea, and indeed the Government have, within planning policies, an intention at least to make sure that affordable housing is provided.

However, what those non-governmental organisations, the homeless organisations and many local councils’ housing departments fret over is that affordability as defined in the planning regulations is actually unaffordability in real life. If we do not shift that definition of affordability and take a more realistic view about what it is, it is absolutely clear that, however much effort is put into housing and affordable housing, it will fail to deliver what the Government want to achieve by 2030. Homes will be simply too expensive for lower-income purchasers, while renters will remain trapped in overpriced and undermaintained property well beyond that seven-year target.

This amendment is designed to come to the rescue. It sets out clearly a route for the Government’s missions to deliver genuinely affordable and safe housing for everyone, creating enough space in the housing market for people with limited means to afford a roof over their head through either renting or buying or through shared ownership schemes. The amendment also requires homes to be safe. I have to say to noble Lords that 10 years ago it would not have been seen as necessary to include that point in a Bill, but the devastating revelations following the horrific Grenfell Tower fire have undermined that complacent view. Again, we know from Shelter and others working in the field that too many people are living in unsafe as well as unaffordable homes.

However, the substantive part of this amendment and the part I want to explore a little more is “an affordable home for all”. It is a great slogan, and of course it is at the heart of the housing debate currently running in our town halls and planning departments, and of course throughout the Government and particularly among their Back-Benchers, among many others. Every local planning authority has an affordable housing policy—and so do the Government. As I am sure the Minister will tell us, they are spending a lot of money on it. Why, then, does it turn out that so many affordable built under these carefully crafted policies are in fact unaffordable to those who need them most? The fact that undermined so many good intentions is that affordability in planning policy is being calculated by the Government by reference to house prices and not by reference to buyers’ income or spending capacity. Obviously, a home which is going on the market at 80% when the 100% figure is £1 million is a very different animal from one that is going at a time when the housing price is £500,000 or £250,000.

This amendment addresses the slippery word “affordable” head on and proposes a definition of affordable that is based on the income of those seeking a home and not, as at present, a notional discount on current market prices. That definition is set out in detail in Amendment 242, which obviously we shall come to in a different group in due course, which is referenced as “Meaning of ‘affordable home’” in Amendment 20. Briefly, we define affordable in terms of local housing allowance for units provided for renters and as a percentage of income in relation to the mortgage costs for buyers. It provides a fundamental reshaping of the term “affordable” so that there is an objective framework within which policies and funding can be deployed, with the knowledge that the homes delivered via that policy will be affordable to those in pressing need of them.

If we continue to misuse the term “affordable homes” in our public discourse and policy-making, we will continue to miss the targets and the Government will fail in their missions. Much worse than that, families across the country will continue to be left out and left behind, and the circle of deprivation will continue with it. I will add that many of the other missions which also have deadlines of 2030 will be compromised or fail completely. This amendment opens the door to a solution by reframing “affordable” in terms of the income of the family rather than the capital price of the home, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, my Amendment 21 joins a queue to add, amend or clarify missions. This queue can feel a little like a fanciful—farcical, even—wish list, but the Government only have themselves to blame for the fact that some of us are just trying to pin down these missions rather than rely on guesswork.

My guess is that, as much as the Bill relates to planning, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a housing mission. Indeed, in the missions published in February 2022 we are told so. However, I was shocked when I read its content: increase home ownership and housing standards, tick; more first-time buyers in all geographical areas, tick; and a 50% reduction in non-decent rented homes, tick. But, extraordinarily, there is no mention of increasing the supply of houses or of targets to build more homes at a time when we need that to happen with missionary zeal if we are to stand a chance of making levelling up more than a slogan.

If the Government are serious about increasing home ownership, having more first-time buyers and ensuring that the rented sector expands and improves, we need more houses or the policy will run into the housing affordability road block. We heard a lot about affordability from the previous speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Stunell. At present, the average home costs over eight times average annual earnings, as against the historic norm of three to four times. Put bluntly, house prices and rents have risen beyond what any reasonable person would think it acceptable to spend on one of the most basic human needs. Those high prices and rents are responsible for many of the social ills that the Bill is allegedly designed to address—from worsening living conditions, falling home ownership, rising homelessness and the spiralling costs of housing benefit.

Half of all first-time buyers—rising to two-thirds in the south-east—rely on the so-called “bank of mum and dad”, which is fine if you have parents who can do that for you, although, with more and more mums and dads suffering the brunt of the cost of living crisis, that might be on the wane, anyway. Those who cannot turn to their parents are not only left behind but, ironically, end up paying a lot more in rent each month than their peers with a mortgage. Meanwhile, renters in London spend 40% of their income on rent, which is simply unaffordable, and rental prices are being pushed up by supply not meeting demand. We therefore need to build more houses to bring prices into line with earnings, whether we are buying or renting.

The hugely impressive housing campaign group Priced Out, staffed by young people who are passionate about housing, explains this well. It says:

“The affordability of housing is a significant concern for millions of people. If we don’t fix the root cause of this problem, we will continue to ruin lives and futures”.


Priced Out has hopes that the Bill will tackle that root cause. So do I, and that is what my amendment is about.

Of course, there is more to this than a demand for paper targets. Just because something is written down, I do not necessarily trust it. Over the years, we have all heard endless pledges from Governments of all stripes included in all political parties’ election manifestos, yet we still have a supply problem. The UK remains one of the slowest and least prolific homebuilding countries among all 28 members of the OECD. Too often, under previous Administrations’ versions of housing missions, we have seen distractions from the core issue of increasing the supply side.

This Government in particular have tended to fall back on headline-grabbing demand-side quick fixes, such as help-to-buy schemes. However, this arguably makes things worse. Demand skyrockets by giving young, aspiring homeowners a state loan. But that means that prices go up, especially if we plod along with a fixed, stagnating supply of homes.

Building Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Stunell

Committee stage
Thursday 24th February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I obviously support what my noble friend Lady Pinnock said in relation to the training and independence of building inspectors. That is perhaps the most obvious of the necessities which we now know exist, as far as plugging the gaps in the current regime is concerned.

I want to focus my remarks on Amendments 116 and 119A, where mine is the lead name and which deal with fire risk assessors. We have never had before, in capital letters, something called “Fire Risk Assessors”. There is no such profession and this will clearly be a significant gap, which has to be filled very quickly if we are to achieve the aims of the Bill. We know that, right across the industry, there are shortages of skills, qualifications and competence. Above all, there is a shortage of capacity. One problem that I know the Minister has had to confront is that it has been difficult to get effective surveys of high-risk buildings because the people have not been available to do them. There are no such people, or at least insufficient people, with the right competences, skills and so on to do so.

I do not know whether the Committee will have seen the reports of the fire risk assessment that was done in advance of the Grenfell fire. The housing association had a fire risk assessor and he made a fire risk assessment. It turned out that he was a firefighter but not qualified in fire risk assessment. In order to secure the job, he had manufactured a set of initials which were accepted by the housing association as proof of his skill and capacity to assess fire risks. This is reported in the public evidence sessions of the Grenfell inquiry. It was further revealed that he was commissioned not just to assess the Grenfell Tower; he was commissioned by the housing association to be its risk assessor for the whole of the housing stock of that organisation.

That is where the importance of having a register becomes immediately apparent. You need a register of qualified people for two reasons, which overlap: first, you are not allowed to practise as an assessor unless you are on that register; secondly, as a purchaser of the skills of fire assessment, for instance a housing association, you need to be sure that the person who offers you a cheap deal to do some quick fire assessment work is somebody who is qualified, prepared and competent to do so. Amendment 116 is trying to establish clearly in the Minister’s mind the need to make this process of regulation transparent, with a publicly published register. We are obviously probing at this point, but I hope the Minister can give us some satisfaction that, if not in the Bill then in parallel with it, these matters will be dealt with.

What I have said about fire assessors may be the most dramatic and acute of the problems, but the building control function was of course also exposed as woefully insufficient in the case of the Grenfell Tower. Bearing in mind that it was a local authority building control function being exercised, it is also true that the person who was the responsible officer did not once visit that tower to make an inspection. It was purely from a desk study of drawings which had been provided to him. There is clearly a tremendous gap. Even when somebody is appointed to do a job, they may not have either the skills or competences, or they may not have the attention span or the time, to give effective service to the cause of fire safety. I hope very much to hear from the Minister that he takes these matters to heart and has in mind finding a way of establishing how this can be put right.

Our Amendment 119A is about training of fire assessors on the same basis as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, moved on the training of building inspectors. Every one of the professionals engaged in this fire safety regime needs to be a qualified and competent person. That is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said, but at the moment we are woefully short of the number of people we need. Indeed, it has already been referenced that the RICS and others have pointed out that, at the moment, there are not enough people with the competencies to step forward if the Bill comes into force as the Minister intends.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very sympathetic to this group of amendments, but I have a number of queries that perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, might address, just because I am not quite sure about them. One of the points just made is that a large number of people will be accountable —it seems to me to grow every time I look at the Bill. Although I understood what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, meant about the bonfire of bureaucracy, regulations and so on, there is always a danger that we are creating layer upon layer of bureaucracy and accountable people. I shall be moving some amendments later to this effect.

For now, it is obviously the case that we need qualified people involved in this, but, as has been described, there are so many new roles that the qualifications do not even exist. I am concerned about including in the Bill that you need to have the qualifications to do the role when the qualification does not exist. What does that mean? Will that hold up the process?

I am also concerned about saying that training is “compulsory”. I am concerned for the professional autonomy and integrity of those who are already involved in this area. I do not know whether legislation is the right way to go. However, it would be useful to understand from the Minister what he anticipates will happen. It cannot be, as it were, just any old Joe Bloggs given the role. Will attention be paid to talking to the professionals who already run practice qualifications in universities and further education? How will the Government manage the fact that they are creating all these new jobs with no attention, it seems, to how the qualifications will be awarded or who will give them? That is where I am very sympathetic to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, in having a register, but I am not quite sure that the amendment does it.

I am nervous, perhaps because I used to be involved in education, about another government demand on education that ends up giving people a lot of work to do when there is no capacity to do it, so it will just be a shoddy box-ticking qualification that will not mean very much. That is my concern, while being sympathetic in general.