Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I have a simple question—this is not a speech—to ask the Minister. As far as I can see, the only effective constraint—apart from the price or value of the property—is the age of the applicant for a starter home, who has to be under 40. We all share a common wish to ensure that home ownership is available to people on modest incomes where it makes sense for their lives, but what about the displacement issue? In quite a number of cities where there are universities, colleges and so on, people do not expect to enter the home ownership market until they are around 30 or so—they are doing PhDs and so on—at which point they enjoy relatively generous salaries and could well afford first-time homes on the open market without taking any advantage of the discount. However, because the discount is there with no income-cap qualification to its retirement, we will see people who have quite generous incomes—and whose income increases will also be quite generous—able to pocket this public subsidy paid for by taxpayers, often with incomes much lower, and then trade up as soon as they get their first promotion. Why is the Minister not considering an income cap as well as an age cap to ensure that people who can buy without discount should?

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, all sorts of scenarios have been put forward, many of which I agree with, including the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, that there will be people who will find ways around the regulations and buy these houses unscrupulously.

I remember when I was a local councillor it was decided that local councils should not be owners of property and we sold off houses near to here on the basis that they were offered to sitting tenants at an incredibly low price. It is hard to believe that you could buy a house near Smith Square for £50,000, but that is what they were. After we sold all of these properties to the sitting tenant, one was left vacant and sold for £150,000. There was a huge difference between the property values; in fact, I think the sitting value was out of touch with values at the time. It annoyed me to discover that one of the people who had bought as a supposed sitting tenant was nothing but a front man for someone who could well have paid anything. So, a lot of the abuses suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will happen—I hope not too many, but someone is always working out a way around things to get a personal advantage.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, commented on the issue of whether a person has bought a property as a genuine place to live in and whether, to ensure this, there might be letting restrictions and various conditions applied. This leads me back to the point which has been made again and again, that until we have regulations we honestly do not know how we are going to care about and deal with this. That is the greatest worry of all.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I want to speak to government Amendment 45B. I was wondering if I should wait until the Minister had spoken to it but I think it is probably better that I speak now and that she hears what I have to say. If the Committee is happy for me to do that, I will.

The amendment proposes quite an extraordinarily far-reaching Henry VIII power. It simply says:

“Regulations under this section may amend this Chapter”.

That is as far-reaching as is possible. It suggests that the Government are not quite sure—perhaps it is stronger than that—whether they have got it right in this chapter on starter homes, and therefore that they want a provision to be able to change it in any way and at any time, subject to parliamentary approval. Of course, we keep being told that the House of Lords is not allowed to oppose these things, anyway.

In what ways can this chapter be amended, either as we go through this procedure in Committee now or in the future by regulations, to deal with the fundamental problem, which I keep banging on about, that housing markets are different in different places? There are parts of the country—not just in north-east Lancashire but in lots of other areas too—where the housing market is not buoyant but flat and fragile. In these places, the introduction of starter homes into the system could have serious unintended consequences which harm the market rather than boost it.

I want to give noble Lords the prices of three or four houses for sale at the moment. In so doing, I refer to the asking prices in the property supplement of the wonderful newspapers, the Nelson Leader and the Colne Times, published on Friday—so they are up to date. I have to say that in our area houses often go for less than the asking price; the idea of forcing prices up is not known to us.

I was taken by one of the featured properties at the beginning of this supplement because it is in the ward I represent, which is normally not featured. It is one of their top properties and a two-fronted terrace house. It is described as:

“Immaculately presented and substantial in size … dwelling has two reception rooms … three bedrooms”,

et cetera. It is obviously highly modernised. It continues:

“The garden has an area of hardstanding … and views toward Pendle Hill”.

What more does anybody want? An offer—and this is incredibly high for a terraced house in this part of Colne—of £110,000 is being sought by the owners.