Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Baroness Grender
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, if the noble Lord, Lord Best, will forgive me, I am not sure that that is correct. The chief executive of the National Housing Federation said:
“How this policy is paid for is a matter for the government, not for the National Housing Federation”.
That is known as the washing-of-hands defence.
Baroness Grender (LD)
My Lords, I will be extremely brief. I am trying to raise, by way of my probing Amendment 60A, the issue of exactly what happens when communities wish to object. In a way, it goes to the heart of some of the arguments that my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor talked about. In particular, if a piece of land has been given up in a small village and it has been assigned, in the view of the village, in perpetuity as a property, and that property is then sold under the right-to-buy scheme, what exactly can the local community do? Is there some kind of redress? Can they make an objection? This is merely a probing amendment; I support many of the other amendments.
I will ask the Minister a couple of questions, rather than add to the many arguments that have already been made on rural housing in particular. If, at the moment, only 8% of stock in rural areas is affordable housing, as opposed to 19% in urban areas, does she foresee measures in the Bill or elsewhere increasing that percentage stock? At the moment, according to the rural housing group, the only thing that is likely to happen is that that 8%, which is such a small percentage of affordable housing in rural areas, will contract. What is the answer to that?
My second question at the end of this lengthy debate is: if 90% of housing associations do not opt in to this—we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Porter, and we are getting a flavour of what the possible punishment might be—what percentage and proportion of housing associations delivering this policy, given that it is voluntary, will tip the Government into believing that there needs to be legislation to deliver their manifesto commitment? I tabled my amendment mostly because, as a former trustee of Wandle Housing Association, where we spent a lot of time trying to get tenant participation and engagement, I wonder about tenants’ engagement and whether they will be able to express a view, whether in favour or against, on right to buy in their housing association.
Finally, I attach myself to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, raised right at the beginning, which is one that I raised very late on Thursday. I completely understand why it was missed. It is about mortgage lenders not wanting to attach themselves to the product of starter homes, about the danger of market distortion, as they see it, and about their reservations in this area.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I will speak to this group, which includes the clause stand part debate. Last Thursday the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said that no one was opposed to council house RTB at the time. I was, for one simple reason: we were not allowed to retain the proceeds of sale to replace the stock. As a result we lost 10,000 houses, waiting lists have grown, and families are in unsuitable flats because our family houses have gone. I am not opposed to owner-occupation or home ownership in the slightest. We helped to rehab 12,000 mostly unfit Victorian terraced houses, rather than clear them, precisely to help young couples to be able to buy. Beyond that we built for sale, but that was a policy that damaged the possibility of people who would never buy entering decent homes.
What has happened since? Camden estimates that 40% of those right-to-buy council houses have become buy to let. In some authorities, according to last night’s “Dispatches” on Channel 4, it is now over 50%. As you walk around estates, as I am sure your Lordships do, you see the overflowing bins, peeling paint, unkempt gardens and tatty bits of curtain strung across bedroom windows. There you find either struggling, transient private tenants at double the rent and double the housing benefit bill—which we all pay for—or students. Existing communities have become more transient and more unsettled.
Overall, the IFS has noted, the proportion of dwellings in the social sector has fallen from 31% to just 18% of the country’s homes and now we are doing it all over again: housing associations have entered into a voluntary deal to sell—and replace, this time around—their stock. The deal works for them because they receive the property’s full value, since the huge discounts of £80,000 to £100,000 are funded not by housing associations themselves, or by the Chancellor, who has imposed this policy, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Porter, said, by the forced sale of high-value, vacant council houses with the levy to back it up in lieu.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Baroness Grender
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I support my noble friend in his Amendment 50F. If we do not do what my noble friend says and ensure that infrastructure and community support are built alongside housing, we will not be building communities, we will be building estates—and many of us know what that problem has meant. Back in the 1950s, Plymouth City Council built estates. It did not build the infrastructure to go along with the housing: community centres, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, shops and the like. As a result of things like the Essex Design Guide, steered in part I suspect by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in the 1980s, local authorities were encouraged when building developments—in the case of Norwich it was the Bowthorpe estate with something like 15,000 people on it—to build the infrastructure in with the first homes. This included not only shops, community halls, chapels and churches, and of course bus routes and so on, but also small units for industrial use to try to develop to some extent a self-sustaining community.
Within those developments half of the properties went to social housing and half went for sale. In Norwich we could not get builders to build or building societies to lend, so I went to Companies House and got a company from the books in order to make sure that we had a balanced community. To my delight, once when I was in one of the leading stores in Norwich, I heard someone say to someone else, “I see you’ve bought one of those new houses up at Bowthorpe. What’s it like?”. She said, “Oh, it’s very nice with lots of support and amenities. There’s only one thing wrong with it. You can’t tell the difference between my home and a council house”. That was exactly the compliment I wanted to hear.
What we learned from that development and from the Essex Design Guide, which stressed respect for the local environment, was that if you do not put in the infrastructure along with the housing, what you get are soulless estates that are empty during the day and problematic at night. It is deeply important that any developer or local authority which is seeking to develop extensive sites for starter homes should take this into account. I am sure that the Minister knows very well indeed, given her local authority background, that if you do not, you will be building a problem estate from the day you begin.
Baroness Grender
My Lords, Amendment 53, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Shipley, calls for an annual report by the Secretary of State containing information on the construction and sale of starter homes in the area, and a report on the composition and incomes of people who have purchased starter homes in each area during the relevant period. The amendment has two purposes. The first is to assess progress and the second is to understand who is benefiting from it. I also take this opportunity to say that we support the other amendments in the group. In particular, 50 years on from Shelter being started, the fact that children are still in temporary accommodation reflects a failure for all of us.
Shelter calculates that the starter homes scheme is a significant public subsidy of £8.4 billion, working on the assumption that starter homes sell at 20% less than the average price paid by first-time buyers in England, and that the subsidy per home will be worth about £42,200. Other noble Lords have raised concerns about starter homes being in place of social housing. The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, set out in some detail how inaccessible this product may be, particularly to families on low wages currently in the private rented sector. But it is worth reminding ourselves that Shelter calculates that the average starter home will be unaffordable even to families on average earnings in some 58% of the country.
Given that starter homes will be sold at a discount from the market price and that this discount will be paid for through a reduction in the usual obligations, and with such a large amount of public subsidy going to the buyers of starter homes, it is vital that the Government and regulators such as the National Audit Office have good evidence as to who is benefiting from such subsidy. This will help them and others to assess whether public money is being well spent in the context of the wider housing crisis.
We have already explored possible abuses of the scheme in some detail. It is critical that the Government take steps to know who is living in them—that is the second part of the amendment—what their incomes are and whether we are reaching the all-important gap in the market that the Minister described today. Given that we already know that 40% of right-to-buy sales are now buy-to-lets, we do not want the same thing to happen with starter homes. I welcome the Minister’s reassurance earlier this afternoon that there will be some kind of mechanism to ensure that that does not happen: I am glad that we have learned that lesson.
I shall talk very briefly—I know it is getting late—about the market confidence among developers in this area. I promise I shall be brief. We have already heard Jones Lang LaSalle referenced a few times as part of the development sector. It says that the UK housebuilding sector will need to see a near 50% increase in capacity if it is to meet the ambitions of the Government’s 200,000-plus homes per annum. The jury is very much still out for the Council of Mortgage Lenders: while it is working with the Government to try to make this happen, it worries terribly about this being such a distortion of the market.
There was a very interesting report by Pocket, which is exactly the kind of innovative, private-sector thing that we should be encouraging in London and which produces the kind of homes that starter homes actually look and feel like. It is a highly innovative company, but it says that there is a real danger that this could put off developers such as itself. Its report states:
“For lenders, it is virtually impossible to value a product that only has a five-year shelf life. Lenders will, as a result, limit their exposure to developments with Starter Homes, which, without sufficient credit, will fail to grow in number”.
I am sure we will explore issues of market distortion and how developers are feeling—whether they have full confidence in starter homes—over the next few days, but I felt it important to raise it now because it is one reason we believe in this amendment: there should be some mechanism for annually looking at how this is progressing.