Housing Strategy

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, it is always an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who gave us a very timely reminder of some of the Select Committee reports that have pushed the very issues we have discussed this afternoon. I congratulate the most reverend Primates the Archbishops of Canterbury and York—his return is most welcome—on securing this “Easter is the new Christmas” debate and thank other noble Peers for their valuable contributions. I also congratulate the most reverend Primates and their commissioners on this excellent report, Coming Home; long-term strategy and politicians are often complete strangers, and this is a valuable way of getting all parties to the table.

Having first worked with Professor Christine Whitehead at Shelter in the mid-1990s, it comes as no surprise to me that she and others on the commission have not, as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his introduction, shied away from challenging the Church. I think that all parties which have had their hands on the levers of power over the past 40 years need to take a look back, challenge their own moments of power, take off the rose-tinted spectacles and understand how we got here and what we need to do to improve the situation.

When I first met Christine in the mid-1990s, the picture was very different. There were other challenges—new builds of social housing were rapidly disappearing and housing associations were increasing and coming into their own—but the private sector was not the wobbly and widely used crutch that it is now is for a whole host of poorer families who should not be there in the first place, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, described, and it has doubled in 20 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, described so well. As we have seen with some of Shelter’s campaigns, they are often unwelcome customers when landlords refuse to accept anybody in receipt of benefits.

It is particularly sad to be debating this issue given the loss of one of our own yesterday: Lord Greaves, a champion of local government. I associate myself with the many tributes we have heard today. He was a strong advocate of localism and believed profoundly in community politics: the empowerment of individuals in communities to have a say over their own lives and destinies. I see that theme echoed in the report we are discussing today.

That this report lays down the challenge for parties to all work together is so important, and the answer to all the questions is of course “yes”, including on working together to change the charity rules.

Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat 2019 manifestos committed to building 300,000 new homes per year. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party also set an annual target of 100,000 new homes for social rent although, as my noble friend Lord Shipley pointed out, only 7,000 were built last year. The precise mechanisms by which we get there may vary, but the target remains the same.

However, just like social care, this debate often drops into the “too difficult” or “too expensive” column. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, made clear, the disproportionate and eye-watering expenditure—the current expenditure on benefits, for instance, rather than the capital expenditure on bricks and mortar—continues to be such a waste and limits our potential to save. Why do you have to go back over 50 years, to 1969, to find the last time that over 300,000 new homes were built in the UK? All too often, landowners and developers are incentivised to sit on their hands and watch as their assets increase. If any Government change the rules, they will just hold tight until the next Government change them back.

The speeches today showed considerable agreement that the only way to crack the housing crisis is with a bold, long-term, cross-party commitment. I, too, pay tribute to the excellent conclusions of the Affordable Housing Commission of the noble Lord, Lord Best—and let us not forget that commissions of the charities Shelter and Crisis. All have concluded that building social housing is critical to underpinning any of these future strategies so that, regardless of tenure, people have safe, secure and affordable housing.

As I was writing this speech, I thought of the themes of this report as the six “S”s, or maybe the five “S”s plus. We agree to those standards; they are well put. On sustainability, I fear the cladding scandal of the future as today—right now—homes that are not up to the zero-carbon standard are being built. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, pointed out, the cost of retrofitting will be disproportionately high and, yet again, a whole cohort of people will be placed in a shocking position. It will cost today’s new homeowners thousands to put right and I fear that we have learned nothing from the cladding crisis.

Yesterday, I spoke to someone who, just over a year ago, was encouraged and enticed to be a first-time buyer by this Government through the Help to Buy scheme. She saved everything she had to buy a flat in Manchester but, following the Grenfell tragedy, its cladding is now deemed unsafe, with a hefty bill of £50,000 to put it right. On what planet is she liable for that? Our party fully supports the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester today and the earlier description of the vote in the Commons this week as a “grave error”. My noble friend Lady Pinnock will continue to work across all sides of the House to ensure that leaseholders are not made liable for the incompetence of others. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on this.

The most intriguing of the six “S”s is the aim of sacrifice, which is almost the opposite of nimby. I very much enjoyed the insight from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, into the experience of being a constituency MP, where this area is often a challenge, and from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, of being a local representative.

The sacrifice the Church of England has made is to offer more of its land for truly affordable housing developments. As we have already heard, 200,000 acres of land is enough to cover New York City. I applaud the Church’s change in strategy on the use of its land. In a debate in the Commons on 10 March, the Minister, Eddie Hughes, said that the Government are reviewing their land. Can the Minister share with us the planned timetable and methodology for this? Will it follow the pattern set by the work of the Church of England and Knight Frank? As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, also mentioned, where is the other potential for this? What is the latest news on, say, MoD land, given our recent reduction in boots on the ground?

Land is a critical part of this equation, as my noble friend Lord Shipley described. I particularly welcome the description of community land trusts by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Stroud. If anyone has not been to see the development in Tower Hamlets, I would thoroughly recommend it; it is well worth a visit.

The value of a home goes beyond pounds and pence. That the Church might now be now free to decline the highest bid from deep-pocketed developers—and that “value” can be determined by impact on people, not profit—is a great example.

The past year in particular and the Covid pandemic have, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Goudie and Lady Andrews, said, thrown into the spotlight the significance of a home—a real home. Young children whom I know of in my community were incarcerated in small high-rise flats for the whole of lockdown. Older children went from bed, then got up and worked at their laptop —if they had one—then back to bed again. This is happening and has been happening. It is shocking. There have been even worse experiences in temporary accommodation, as described by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York.

Too many flats are wholly inadequate and many are unhealthy, some with social landlords from whom we should all expect better—like the Croydon flats featured on ITV this week—but often with the more unscrupulous, rogue and unregulated private landlords. Local housing is not set as a median rent, as is so rightly recommended in this report, but at the bottom 30%—and with a freeze coming down the track. This completely constrains tenants, particularly poorer ones, from exerting any kind of buying power or choice to hold their landlords to account. What a far cry from the decency and dignity described by the right reverent Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle. While the threat of Section 21 no-fault evictions continues, tenants in the PRS will not have the security that they need. Over the winter lockdown alone, even with a stay on the use of bailiffs, there were, I understand, 500 private renters evicted.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, pointed out, 8 million people live in unsuitable, unaffordable or unsafe housing, and are currently in need. That these homes may have contributed to higher rates of death due to overcrowding and poor conditions is something that the Government must fully commit to examining in any future inquiry into Covid-19; I hope that the Minister will do so today. As Inside Housing recently reported through its own work and through research by the Health Foundation, one in three households in England had at least one major housing problem related to overcrowding, affordability or quality going into the coronavirus crisis. Housing conditions have affected people’s ability to shield from the virus. We know of the success of Everybody In, which got rough sleepers off the streets and into accommodation. It saved hundreds of lives and avoided 20,000 infections, according to the NAO, in stark contrast with what happened in, say, New York City, where rough sleepers were put together into emergency shelters and the infection spread with dire consequences.

I hope that this commission’s ambitions—particularly for 20 years’ time and the visualisation of what it will look like—will become a reality. I simply ask the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain in a little more granular detail how he intends to knock heads together and get politicians round the table if all three of us say “yes” in answer to his questions.

I was surprised in the post-World War Two scenario that we were not given a sense of Macmillan—someone who was a businessman and understood the value of bricks and mortar and created truly affordable homes. It would be great to see something like that.

Joy and expectation is something that everyone should have when coming home. I hope that this becomes a reality.