Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Carrington of Fulham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 67B, moved so well by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. I want to talk about two aspects of this: proposed new subsection (2)(e), on restoration work, and paragraph (f), on transfers, about which the noble Lord, Lord Best, has just been speaking.
Unlike housing associations, local authorities retain a statutory responsibility for seeking to meet the whole housing need across their authority—whether they do it directly or indirectly, whether they are helping to place homeless people in temporary accommodation in the private rented sector, giving advice, or whatever. That is their responsibility. It belongs to them, and rightly so. Councillors are elected to deliver that legal requirement.
Why am I picking on these two paragraphs? I could have spoken on the others and on supported housing, but that would repeat some of the debates we had earlier on rent reductions for supported housing and how that will affect housing associations. I will just say that if supported housing has to become vacant, we will end up hoping that housing associations can pick up the slack. Many years ago I purpose-built supported housing for people with severe learning disabilities. I think it was probably the first in the country. It was hugely expensive. We had to provide extra sound insulation because of head banging, different types of carpeting, insulation, all the fittings and fixtures and so on, smart appliances to reduce the risk of gas leaks, along with all the other things we were advised to provide by the admirable architects from the then DoE, such as John Goldsmith. Those individual units would now fetch quite a lot of money. It was basically a sheltered housing scheme. If they were sold off, no one else would meet the needs of those severely disabled people and their families, for whom they had been purpose built. I certainly do not think that any housing association could have afforded to take that on.
I want to talk about restoration work in particular. My city, like Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and others, is an historic city. We have a lot of older properties, including some that are medieval, which were due for demolition. The city council moved in. We saved a street of 14th-century weavers’ cottages by one vote. We turned them into homes, which people rented. We maintained the ownership of them to assure proper maintenance. The maintenance on those properties was far too high for any owner-occupier reasonably to afford.
I also remember buying five gothic houses when high Victorian gothic was deeply unfashionable. We could have sold them off. Developers wanted to buy the site, knock them down and build three-storey blocks of flats. Instead, we rehabbed them and worked with a local housing association—indeed, the housing association I went on subsequently to chair. They became a network of houses in which, again, disabled people and their carers could live, courtesy of the housing association. The housing association could not have bought them; we bought them through DOs and CPOs, as an alternative to seeing them sold in the private sector and demolished. That was partly for their streetscape value, at a time when high gothic was not yet popular—but I thought it was “coming up in the lift”—but also to meet a local need that would otherwise not have been met.
During the last 20 to 30 years, my local authority has bought one-off Victorian houses around the city for Carr Gomm, Nacro, St Mungo’s, Edmund’s and so on. They could not afford to buy the property. We rented to them at very modest rents indeed—virtually token rents. At one stage we had some 40 of these properties going directly to housing associations supporting specialist, unpopular groups in the local population, such as anorexic young women—you name it. In addition, we bought houses that would otherwise have been DOed. I rehabbed them to make them available as temporary housing so that people did not have to go into bed and breakfasts.
All that required restoration and sometimes removal from clearance programmes. Sometimes I had to use CPOs. I avoided DOs, but as long as you render a house fit at reasonable expense, you are allowed to acquire on improvement grounds. Under the Bill, unless such properties are exempt, such recycling by the local authority of whatever comes their way would not happen. For example, the county council decided that it was going to widen a road. I remember this well. As a result, it bought a lot of properties along Duke Street. It subsequently decided not to do it. Those properties came to the local authorities and we were able to recycle them, for the most part, for special needs that otherwise would not have been met. Unless we protect the capacity of local authorities to use powers that housing associations have never had—legal powers of acquisition, such as CPOs, road widening and so on—and then recycle them into best use, we will strip out the ability of communities to meet needs that, unfortunately, are not always very popular but which it is absolutely right that we as a community should seek to meet.
My second concern here—I am very grateful that the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake and Lord Best, referred to this—is about transfers and exchanges. The Minister has not had very much to do with the bedroom tax, I think. The bedroom tax affected those who were not pensioners and who had one bedroom spare. Unlike the rather more civilised DCLG definition of underoccupation, which is two spare bedrooms, DWP decided to produce a new definition of underoccupation of its own, which hitherto did not exist in English law, of one spare bedroom. Some cases are now going through the courts as to whether, for example, people with severe disabilities are entitled to a bedroom each, and so on.
DWP sought to tackle something like 500,000 families that had, in its view—though this is being tested by the courts—one spare bedroom. If such a family “wished” to stay, it would expect to see something like £14 a week removed from its housing benefit. What do those tenants do? Of those who stayed, something like 65% are now in arrears and local authorities are having to decide how best to help them—whether they have to seek eviction notices and all the rest. What mattered here was that local authorities did not have the stock or the capital resources to build the single-bedroom units that DWP thought it was cost-effective for such tenants to occupy. Why? Because local authorities and housing associations had, for the most part, been building two-bedroom flats because they are the most flexible form of accommodation whatever your need—whether for young families, older people with disabilities, or the frail elderly.
Because we have been unable to build, tenants have been faced with a choice. They have not been able to move within council house stock to a local authority new build, because local authorities have not had the resources to do it. They have not been able to downsize into a local authority property. So what have they done? Either they have stayed put, as I have said, and the arrears have mounted—this is now a really serious problem across local authority housing revenue accounts—or they seek to exchange. They cannot move into the private rented sector, because not only are the resources scarce but the housing benefit bill goes up and they then get caught by the local housing allowance. So their only option is to transfer.
DWP will tell the Minister—perhaps she knows these figures already—that nearly all the movement that has come from downsizing as the result of the pressure of the deeply unfair bedroom tax has come from transfers. Without that, the downsizing could not happen and the tenant would be locked into paying the bedroom tax almost in perpetuity and arrears and possible evictions would grow and grow. What the Minister will do, unless she is prepared to accept the substance of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is lock those tenants into that situation. They will not be able to exchange, because that property would then immediately be available for forced sale by the local authority, so they will be locked into making good the reduction in their housing benefit, as a result of the bedroom tax, of £14 a week.
What does the Minister suggest that they do? It is not possible to go into the private rented sector and not possible to downsize into an existing housing association or local authority new build, because they do not exist. Good housing authorities rely on trying to encourage transfers and exchanges between their tenants to make best use of their space. If we say that the moment such a transfer or exchange comes into the purview of local authorities, that property is immediately available for forced sale, what the Minister will do is freeze the sensible use of local authority housing stock. I cannot believe that this is what she wants to do. It makes no sense, but as far as I can see, all the flexibility that she is talking about is actually the flexibility of the Secretary of State, not the flexibility of local authorities, which are being stripped of it, left, right and centre.
Will the Minister please understand the decades of social policy behind some of these exclusions that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, seeks to put into the Bill? If she does not, and if she does not give those assurances, the ability of local authorities to work with housing associations to provide the homes they need for their special needs, as well as our ability as local authorities to allow our tenants to escape the problems of the bedroom tax, will come to a stop.
Lord Carrington of Fulham
My Lords, this afternoon we have heard many examples of potential housing crises and disasters caused by the way that tenants will be treated under this Bill. Most of the examples, of course, depend on the properties in consideration being high-value properties, and therefore available for sale. So a lot of the problems would be resolved if the Secretary of State determined what a high-value property was in negotiation with representatives of local authorities.
Clearly, there will need to be further negotiations in some cases to decide how you tackle particularly difficult cases. Putting all that in the Bill would indicate that we could produce a solution to these problems covering the whole of the country rather than one which reflects local circumstances, local authority by local authority. That is what we need to do, perhaps by means of the regulations which—as has been said many times, not least by my noble friend the Minister—we have not yet seen. We do not know when we will see them, but a resolution of this issue will be down to the good will between the Secretary of State and the local authority negotiators.
Some problems have not been addressed, one of which applies particularly in London. The noble Baroness, Lady Grender, touched on it slightly but I thought rather overegged the issue, if she will excuse my saying so. If a local authority sells a high-value property and uses the proceeds to build two other properties, the two other properties will probably not be high-value properties. Just the arithmetic, apart from anything else, makes that unlikely. However, London house prices are going up at a very high rate, and have done so historically. They are not going up at a high rate at the moment. In fact, in some places they are positively coming down. I am told by my friends in the property world that that trend may well continue for some years. If that is the case, the point I am about to make will not arise for some time. But I think we can expect that in due course the replacement properties that the central London local authorities build will rise in value.
It is conceivable that in a very strong domestic property market, a local authority will build a housing unit—if I can use that ghastly expression—which is currently below the high value but, because of its land value, is still quite a high-value property but not high enough to trigger the sale. But within a very short period of time, which could be as short as 12 months, or possibly two years—who knows?—it could become vacant, and at that time its value could rise just above the threshold. So there is a problem here. I think it applies particularly to London. I suspect that it will be less of a problem elsewhere. But it depends totally on the definition of high value in each area, as I said earlier. The key to making this policy work is to get the definition of high value right area by area and district by district.