Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Baroness Hollis of Heigham and Lord Harris of Haringey

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I also would like to support this amendment. I do not mean to be impertinent to the Minister, but I think that she owes us this—and I will say why, if I may. There have been considerable worries around the House as to just how “skeleton” this Bill is. We have been promised regulations which, although they may now be affirmative thanks to the good efforts of our colleagues on the Cross Benches, will none the less come in after the Bill has become law because the consultation exercises on which they are based started two-thirds of the way through the parliamentary process. We all know that they should have been concluded before the parliamentary process, so that they could have shaped the form of the Bill and thus been amended in an appropriate way.

In area after area we do not know what is going to happen. We do not know what is going to happen with starter homes, with the potential take-up or with the priority order of the money from local authority sales. We do not know what number of properties will have to be sold and levied to meet that, or how the sums are going to add up. We could make a shopping list of the things we should know and the Government should know, but that we have not been told. I think that that is because the Government do not know. All this work should have been done, in my view, long before this Bill took shape. This is the result of having, in the first year of a Government, a Bill that should have been delayed, as a Member of the Benches opposite said, for at least a year while some of this evidence was collected. We could then have had a more informed and sensible debate in the long hours of Committee and now at Report.

At Report, the Minister and the Secretary of State are beginning to respond to a lot of the arguments raised in Committee, and we are very appreciative of that. However, the Government could and should have foreseen those arguments at the Commons stages; they could and should have foreseen them at Second Reading; and they could and should have had answers in Committee. What we are now getting are promises at Report. We will come to Third Reading and, if those responses are not adequate, we will have to go into questions and the consideration of ping-pong, which will then put a question mark over the whole timetable of the Bill.

Through no fault of the Minister, the department has failed to put in the preliminary work on this Bill. There are many people in this House who have been Ministers and taken Bills through it who know how much preparation is needed to have a Bill that is informed with the proposed regulations in draft. The LegCo committee, as was, would not have allowed this Bill to go forward in my day with the regulations as vague as they now appear to be because we are still awaiting the results of the consultation exercise.

At the very least, therefore, we need a proper, evidence-based, data-collected report three years down the line on whether all these offerings, suggestions, proposals and possibilities that we all see and argue for in this Bill actually come to pass or whether, as a result of skeletal scrutiny of a very skeletal Bill, we have missed out major issues which then bear heavily on people who can ill afford to see their housing need pushed ever further back in the queue. I therefore suggest to the Minister in all gentleness that she owes us this amendment.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, think that this amendment is important and I hope that the Minister will be able to accept it. My view is that this Bill is littered with unintended consequences. However, I may be wrong about that; they may be intended consequences. The answer is that we simply do not know, because so much of the Bill has not been brought forward in a way that allows us see what exactly is intended; we do not know what will be in regulations and so on. So we do not know what the consequences will be, whether they are intended or not. That is not a sensible position to be in.

If one takes at face value the objectives the Government have enunciated—what they want to do to address the housing problems that affect many parts of this country—there has to be the opportunity to take stock of the way the changes included in the Bill will work through the system. My noble friend’s amendment would at least enable that to be done. It would of course have been much better if the Bill had been properly produced in the first place after a proper assessment of all the evidence, and if it had been made clear to Parliament what all its various components would be. But given that we are not there, if this amendment is accepted, we could before the next general election have some of that information before Parliament and before government. The Government might even decide that they want to unpick some of what they are trying to do here, or they might recognise that remedial measures are necessary; but in any event there would be a generally and publicly available report so that, near the time of that general election, there could be an understanding of the Bill’s consequences and of how we need to move forward to achieve balanced and adequate housing provision in all parts of the country. I am pretty certain that this Bill, with all its consequences, whether intended or unintended, will not provide us with that; we need the evidence and the information. Indeed, I would have thought that good government, of whatever colour, requires that such data be collected and made available.