Housing

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Stoneham, not only on securing this important debate but on his powerful and overarching introduction.

I am a little sad that one of the contributions that we would have had during the past 10 years of debate would have been from the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, on the small but important sector of park homes; but time passes. A lot of people live in them and a lot are still purchasing them; if you drive down any motorway, you will see a number of them on lorries. It is an expanding sector that, in spite of the lack of the noble Lord reminding us of it and asking questions about it today, the Government need to keep their eye on.

Before I pass to the topic that I want to address, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, that we will have the opportunity to debate the issue of squatting in the forthcoming Clause 130 of the legal aid Bill. I am sure that she will be aware of the briefing that went around from the Law Association saying that the law as it stands is quite adequate, and the issue is actually its enforcement. Before we leap to yet more legislation, which Governments often see as a panacea for everything, we should make proper use of the law that there is. As I say, we will have a chance to debate that when we get to that clause.

Today I want to talk about the issue of self-build homes. I am glad to say that when the Government came in, one of the first meetings that Grant Shapps had as Housing Minister was with the National Self Build Association, which has been going since about 2009, although self-build as a form of housing has obviously been going for much longer than that. Grant Shapps was very positive and keen to help the association to promote its growth. They met again in January 2011, when he announced that he was setting up a government self-build industry working group with the association to look at what could be done to boost the level of self-build in the UK. I am glad that the Government recognise the importance of the sector.

It is very good that the Government have the National Self Build Association to work with. This will not be a plea for funding but, to date, the association has not received even the smallest pump-priming grant. Its members are all volunteers. An extremely small grant to help with such things as the portal that it is creating for self-builders—I am talking about just a few thousand pounds—would be incredibly helpful.

I want to talk about why we should think about this sector in particular. What does it bring to the communities where self-build happens? To answer that, it is helpful to look at some of the examples that have already happened. I got involved in this sector when I was still a councillor in Somerset and I learnt a lot from the self-builders who came forward for planning permission in a small village called South Petherton. It had a site that was very difficult to develop. It was on a hillside, not that accessible and surrounded by other housing. The private sector was not interested in developing it but the self-builders were interested because it was a very affordable plot. They developed it using a Walter Segal method, which adapts itself very well to steep and difficult-to-develop hillsides. Since then I have seen many other West Country examples. Ashley Vale in Bristol is very much an example of an inner-city scheme, while there is a small-town scheme in Stroud. We are not talking about a small-scale thing. Self-build can lead to 20,000 homes a year, so it is a major part of the housing sector.

I want to concentrate on community self-help schemes, rather than the sort of thing your Lordships may occasionally see on “Grand Designs”—a quite wealthy person building a state-of-the-art palace. That is easy to do if you have all that money. However, I am interested in the community schemes for people with very limited funds and, very often, for young people who have some skills but not all those they need. The sort of model that is productive is one in which a group comes together—perhaps 20 different individuals or households with skills that vary across plumbers, carpenters, electricians and bricklayers and people who have no skills to date but develop them. Such schemes take an awful lot of time in the planning—perhaps as long as five or eight years—because they have to find a site, which is the hardest bit and something that I shall come back to in a minute. They also have to go through planning permission. It is my hope that the Localism Act will enable and promote this very strong form of community self-help in housing. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said that local people often put up objections to any housing being built. I certainly agree with him on that, but if it is the sons and daughters of the community who will build their own homes, it has a much more than even fighting chance of getting community support in the first place.

Self-building is also a very economical way of gaining your own home. The plot of land will be the most expensive aspect, but after that it just depends on how much time the self-builders put in and whether they have to buy in any help. The costs can be driven down. Many people on the site I visited do their self-building in the evenings between April and October and at weekends all the year round. Working in that way, they have managed to complete their homes in 18 months to two years.

You certainly have to be tenacious to be a self-builder and not get downhearted. When one family or individual drops out of a scheme for one reason or another, it obviously puts an extra strain on it. That is something that has to be carefully built into the agreement and is part of what takes up the fairly long lead-in time.

Such homes are often much better designed, too, because people design them themselves so they suit people’s very distinctive needs. They are almost always much greener; I have not seen a case where they are not. Their carbon footprint is one of their joys. People often turn to self-build for environmental and ecological reasons as well as economic ones. They make every effort to ensure that their home has a very small carbon footprint.

One of the other organisations with which I have been involved over the years is the Ecos Trust, formerly Ecos Homes, again in Somerset. The wife of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, has also played a leading role with it. It has created a number of demonstration models to show all the different environmental benefits that you can get—not only energy efficiency in the building of the homes but all the different materials that can be used. It runs workshops so that people can learn different methods of working and see different models that have been developed.

Self-build is a very exciting sector with many possibilities. One of the issues that has come across to me very strongly from having visited the same sort of thing in France—this addresses rural housing—is the ease with which local French mayors, especially in rural areas, consider this a viable form of housing. They will purchase for their community a small or middle-sized field on the edge of their village and put in the infrastructure so that it comes with gas, electricity, water and sewerage provision. The plots are then sold to individuals. I am sure a number of your Lordships will have seen the advertisement “lotissement”, showing that plots are for sale. For the young of that village, and those from elsewhere should they want to move to that village, it is a very affordable form of housing.

This is something that I hope the Housing Minister will pursue with all vigour and some imagination. Two things would make all the difference. One is definitely land availability. My suggestion to the Minister today is that when large sites are being considered for housing, perhaps for 100 houses, some of that—perhaps 20 per cent—could be set aside for self-build. It is something on which there should at least be much more consultation. Where there is a great demand for it and a community that will take it up, it would be a very affordable way for the younger generation, in particular, to develop housing.

There are also other sites that we do not often consider, such as ex-Army sites. They often have a lot of infrastructure. You can imagine a whole self-build eco-town on an ex-Army site, which would be quite a “swords into ploughshares” experience and one that would be very exciting.

As well as land availability, the other issue is the value of self-build in upskilling people. It allows people to work on NVQs and exchange skills while they are self-building. Their local college often gets involved, which is an extremely helpful development, too. It not only upskills the younger generation but provides them with an affordable home. I hope that some positive messages are about to come from the Government on further help for this sector.