Building Safety

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, as this is the last business, I wish all noble Lords a restful and peaceful Easter.

I thank the Government for this update, given yesterday in the House of Commons. There are more than 4 million people in the UK living in buildings over 11 metres tall, including 1.3 million in buildings over 18 metres. That is why it is of the utmost importance that this building safety issue moves forward without any further delay.

As my noble friend Lord Kennedy and other noble Lords pointed out in the debate this afternoon, we are now more than seven years on from the tragedy of the fire at Grenfell Tower and the loss of 72 lives. It seems, at last, some progress is being made to address the multitude of issues that arose from that catastrophic fire and previous dreadful fires, such as that at Lakanal House in Camberwell—which I remind noble Lords was in 2009.

I pay tribute to the determination and commitment of the survivors of Grenfell and other campaigners, such as the Manchester Cladiators, the National Leasehold Campaign, End Our Cladding Scandal and the UK Cladding Action Group. Their powerful voices and front-line witness have kept the issue right at the top of the agenda and enabled the progress of which this Statement forms the latest step. However, it is just not good enough that they have had to wait so long. Will the Minister tell us whether the Government are now going to set a deadline by which remediation work must be completed?

It is important that both Houses are updated regularly on progress to tackle the scandalous building safety crisis, and this Statement indicates some progress. However, I hope there is no complacency in moving this forward at greater pace, because the figures produced by the Government last week showed that only 21% of high-rise blocks have been fully remediated and that hundreds of thousands of families are still stuck in flats with dangerous, flammable defects, whether that is cladding, missing fire breaks or wooden balconies. We cannot underestimate the seriousness of the impact on their lives. Dreams of home ownership are shattered as they battle with freeholders to get this remediation carried out, and family finances are broken by remediation costs, exorbitant insurance and the nightmare of being trapped in flats that people are too scared to live in but cannot sell.

What progress is being made in working with lenders to ensure that properties caught up in the cladding scandal can be sold or remortgaged? Even those that have had remediation done are suffering from problems with this. Progress remains slow. What progress has been made, for example, on the registration of building control inspectors? The deadline had to be extended by an additional 13 weeks from the original deadline of 6 April. What assurances can the Minister give that that extended deadline will be met?

This building safety Statement refers only to buildings over 11 metres. I know from the discussions on the Building Safety Act and subsequent statutory instruments that your Lordships’ House remains concerned about buildings up to 11 metres in height. Indeed, it was raised again today in the debate on leasehold. I would be grateful if the Minister could reiterate to the department that we still have outstanding concerns in this regard and would appreciate a full response in due course. Although in the leasehold debate the Minister said that the Government were taking the risk to life most seriously, lenders and mortgage providers are taking a much more risk-averse approach than the Government.

The Minister will know that I have mentioned before the dreadful situation that residents of Vista Tower in Stevenage face, so I was pleased to see the Minister in the other place specifically mention in this Statement that legal action against Grey GR in that respect is imminent. We note that other legal action is pending, but can the Minister please let us know how quickly leaseholders who have been forced to use their own money for remediation, and that spent by taxpayers, will be able to receive recompense following remediation contribution orders? Will there be any accountability for the manufacturers involved in building safety defects, so that all those responsible for the building safety crisis have to face the financial consequences of their actions?

Can the Minister update us any further on the long-awaited second staircase guidance? I note the Minister in the other place said it would appear this week, but as we are right on the last sitting day before recess I thought it worth flagging up again that it is still due. Absence of this guidance is holding up the construction of thousands of safe homes across the country.

At last, we are moving to a point where the respective responsibilities for resolving the crisis between the construction and development industry, freeholders, statutory agencies and the regulator are becoming clearer. Importantly, we are moving to a point where those responsible for failure can be held accountable for their actions, although we must keep our eye on enforcement processes, as it seems they are not the strongest part of the new regime. For example, although additional funding for councils to undertake enforcement is welcome, we must not forget the backdrop of the extreme funding pressures councils are under, which continues to make the increasing regulatory and enforcement burdens an added strain. I hope the whole burden of this will not be forced on councils and that the department will continue to play an active and robust role.

Lastly, I raise the issues relating to the extraordinary burden being placed on leaseholders because of shocking increases in insurance premiums—up to 1,000% increases in some cases—even after buildings have been remediated and made safe. Can the Minister update us on what discussions the department has held with the insurance industry to set out the Government’s expectations in this regard and how they plan to mitigate this awful further burden on leaseholders?

We are grateful to the Minister for her constructive approach to working with opposition parties on this issue. It is clear that the will across your Lordships’ House is to move this on at pace and to continue to press for full remediation for all building safety defects to be completed as quickly as possible. Everybody deserves to feel safe in their own home, and it is taking too long. Those who have profited from not paying enough attention to that safety need either to put matters right or to be brought to justice without any further delay.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, in reference to the Statement, I have to say how irritating it is that statistics are selected to project a positive picture of progress made on the remediation of building defects as a result of the Building Safety Act and how refreshing it would be if the Government were able to reflect on the poor rate of progress, instead of trying to spin a success story. Spinning the progress made is not doing anybody any favours. It is certainly not helping the thousands of leaseholders who are still stuck in limbo in flats where work has not been started and where even an assessment of whether work is needed has not been made. Perhaps an honest appraisal of the situation would put some government energy into trying to resolve this issue. As the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, has just asked, what is the timetable? How long have leaseholders to wait while this scheme is making snail-like progress towards some remediation?

In Inside Housing last week, a piece by the investigative journalist, Peter Apps, provided some very different numbers from those given by the Government in the Statement. I am not accusing the Government of having inaccurate figures, but they were very selective. I have no reason to challenge the report in Inside Housing, which says:

“As it stands, of 3,839 buildings above 11 metres being monitored by the government due to the need for cladding remediation, 2,286 have not even started works yet”.


The terrible Grenfell Tower fire was nearly seven years ago, and 2,000-plus buildings have not even had work started yet. But the report in Inside Housing went on to say that

“the 3,839 figure could eventually rise by as much as 5,000”.

based on the Government’s own estimates. We really do not know how many are in desperate need of remediation.

So my question to the Government is: can we have a full and final estimate—which surely should be possible nearly seven years after Grenfell—of how many blocks of flats are in need of remediation? How many of them are over 18 metres and most at risk? How many are over 11 metres? What consideration is being given to those under 11 metres, given that many thousands of leaseholders and tenants live in such flats, which the Government regard as being relatively safe but which insurance companies and service charges and all the rest do not? They are in total limbo, waiting for some action to unlock the situation that they are in. That is my first question.

Secondly, in January, there was a fire in Petworth Court in Wembley, which is a social housing building. The social landlord knew that work needed to be done and the original builder accepted that work needed to be done, but they have been in dispute ever since about how much responsibility each should take for it. That is another issue which desperately needs to be addressed because, at the end of it, it is leaseholders who are stuck in this awful situation of going to bed every night knowing that their buildings are unsafe and vulnerable to very serious fires. So another question that I want answered, please, is about how the Government are going to resolve the disputes between what are sometimes leaseholders and sometimes social landlords and the developers and builders.

My third point is this. According to the Statement, the Government are going to drip another £6 million of public money into council enforcement action. Now, I am absolutely fed up with the answer to any problem being that the Government will spend another bit of money trying to do something about it, instead of accepting what the fundamental issue is here. If you do not fund the public services on which we all rely—such as building regulations and building enforcement—properly in the first place, when there is a problem we are forever going to have the answer, “We’re going to drip another £2 million or £3 million in to try to solve it”—and it will not. It will deal with a little bit this time, but nobody can plan with little bits of money being dripped into public services in this way. So, please, at least take this back to the Government: fund the thing properly rather than dripping in money.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 27th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her thorough introduction to the Bill and, as always, for the way she has worked with opposition parties and Cross-Benchers in the weeks prior to the Bill coming to us, so that she could understand our concerns and issues. I thank the many organisations that have sent us briefings, and particularly the Law Commission for all the work it has done. I thank the individuals who have sent us their personal accounts of the impact of leaseholds. I also thank all the individuals and organisations that have campaigned so effectively and for so long on leasehold, including, of course, my noble friend Lord Kennedy.

The Bill is certainly not the leasehold Bill that the Labour Party would have wanted. Most importantly, it is not the Bill that the beleaguered legions of leaseholders wanted. To be candid, I do not think it is even the Bill that the Secretary of State wanted. He set out the original vision last year, stating:

“I don’t believe leasehold is fair in any way. It is an outdated feudal system that needs to go. And we need to move to a better system and to liberate people from it”.


The Secretary of State also made his views on ground rent quite clear in his speech on the Second Reading of this Bill, when he said:

“I was asked by the Select Committee last week what my favoured approach would be, and I believe that it should be a peppercorn”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/12/23; col. 659.]

The Secretary of State clearly wanted to see a scrapping of the feudal leasehold system and a capping of ground rent to peppercorn rents. From this original vision for the Bill, what we have before us today is a virtually eviscerated shell of a Bill, with little to give comfort to the people and families who had hoped to realise their dream of home ownership and have found instead that being a leaseholder simply does not offer the security and control of their lives that their dream promised.

I have been receiving many letters from leaseholders since the Bill was listed in your Lordships’ House. A particularly heartbreaking one yesterday was from an older couple, who said that they have been waiting patiently for this Bill for years to relieve the misery of their experience of leasehold, but feel now that it will not do what they wanted it to. They went on to say:

“We have an apartment where the freeholders changed last year and our service charges quickly increased and now amount to £8,602 per annum. But additional to this our already high Ground Rent charge of £4,000 per annum is currently being reviewed by our Freeholders who estimate this shall increase to £28,000 plus VAT per annum. If they win this review they shall then look to backdate this increase over 6 years”.


The impact of this type of sharp practice, whether on older people on fixed incomes or younger people who are juggling enough with the cost of living crisis, can be catastrophic. This couple face losing their home. It can taint the dream of home ownership, with a raft of excessive conditions, fees and charges. For many leaseholders these charges do not bring anything in return, and the charging regimes are complex and opaque.

I have received many representations from young people whose dreams of home ownership have been shattered, when they finally save their deposit and buy a home, only to find that the terms of their lease leave them, at best, shackled to a regime of unreasonable cost increases and, at worst, unable to sell their home because the lease conditions are too onerous. To quote again the Secretary of State,

“freeholds have become utterly torn away from the warp and weft of the capitalist system as we understand it in this country, and have become tradeable commodities that foreign entities are using to exploit our people who have worked hard and saved to get their own home”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/12/23; col. 660.]

In addition, the Competition and Markets Authority has already stated that it continues to consider that statutory intervention may be necessary to protect consumers associated with excessive ground rents. The CMA concluded that ground rent is

“neither legally nor commercially necessary”,

stating that it saw

“no persuasive evidence that consumers receive anything in return”.

With all that in mind, you might expect a Bill that gets rid of leasehold once and for all. But this Bill, although dating back to the Conservative manifesto in 2017 and the subsequent White Paper, is a very long way from what leaseholders have been waiting and hoping for: an end to the injustice in the anachronistic leasehold system. It does not ban the sale of new leasehold flats. It does not even properly ban the sale of new leasehold houses. The Government know that the leasehold model and market is broken; they have known that at least since 2017. This Bill was the opportunity to address that, so why is that not being done more comprehensively?

We could have had a Bill that fundamentally reformed the leasehold system, making leasehold obsolete by making commonhold the default tenure for all new properties and enacting the Law Commission’s recommendations in full. There seems to be a determination on the Government’s part to miss the open goal they are presented with here—one that my team, Stevenage FC, would certainly never miss.

What we have in the Bill are baby steps toward leasehold reform. We could not oppose those, because they will at least ease a little of the pain currently experienced by leaseholders. We will therefore not oppose the Bill’s progress, even if we have to finish the job later on. Your Lordships’ House can rest assured that we will attempt to use this House’s stages of its passage to make some more of the improvements that leaseholders desperately need.

I turn to the detail of what is in the Bill, before I go into more detail about what is not. Extension to lease terms is welcome, although the devil will be in the detail of how this operates. We welcome the steps towards right to manage, although they do not go the whole way towards commonhold. We believe that the changes to the calculation of lease extension premiums and the collective buying of freeholds will make it easier and cheaper for leaseholders to buy their homes and maintain long-term housing security. These are welcome, as are the 990-year leaseholds, which will offer the same security, taking away the hassle and expense of future lease extensions.

The further provisions on building safety—for example, replacing the regime for dealing with insolvent developers and orphaned buildings—are welcome. However, it could have afforded a lot less heartache to affected leaseholders if these were included in the Building Safety Act in 2022—but better now than never.

The end of marriage value will right the injustice where leaseholders had to pay the freeholder when extending their lease or purchasing the freehold, so that is also welcome. Additional rights for freeholders on private and mixed-tenure estates will be beneficial. However, I think we still have some way to go to ease the misery for freeholders of what is known as fleecehold.

The provisions relating to ground rent, while welcome as far as they go, are still subject to the outcome of a consultation that we do not yet have. Will the Minister be offering government amendments in this respect later in the progress of the Bill? We will certainly be trying to clarify the situation on ground rent for all leaseholders, including those who currently have lower ground rents, as the Bill progresses.

We welcome the change to the inclusion of leaseholders in the management of their homes, but there remain concerns about this and how it will operate. I know my noble friend Lord Kennedy will want to question the complexity of enabling the participation and enfranchisement of leaseholders as we go through today’s debate.

We will be looking at more fundamental improvements to the Bill in Committee and on Report. I will start with the disproportionate and draconian legacy of Victorian property law that is forfeiture. This mechanism allows landlords to ensure compliance with a lease agreement by using forfeiture of the lease as a threat, even for minor breaches of leasehold or relatively small amounts of arrears. Its continued use, and the chilling effect that results from its mere existence, continues to put landlords in a nearly unassailable position of strength in disputes with leaseholders. It is routinely used by landlords as a first resort when seeking to recover alleged arrears of payments from leaseholders. Worse still, the threat is often invoked to deter leaseholders from disputing any unreasonable costs and defending claims.

With the pledges to reform leasehold stretching back over so many years, the Government have had plenty of time to consider how they would deal with forfeiture in this Bill and yet in the other place Members were told as recently as February this year that the Government were:

“working through the detail of the issue”.—[Official Report, Commons, 27/2/24; col. 197.]

I ask the Minister to set out how long this is going to take and say whether we will have a solution before we reach Third Reading. Too many of the Bills that come before this House now are subject to further work as the Bill progresses.

We will be seeking to remove deferment rates from the discretion of the Secretary of State. We believe that without having something on the face of the Bill which will deal with this issue, in future vested interests may still be able to attempt to introduce rates which are punitive to leaseholders, and that is not acceptable.

Unless the Minister is able to introduce government amendments in relation to the outcome of the ground rent consultation that restore the balance more closely to the recommendations of the Law Commission and the Competition and Markets Authority, we will want to extend the right to peppercorn ground rent to the most common leases—those under 150 years.

I know that many noble Lords are disappointed that the Bill does not go further in relation to the regulation of property agents. While new statutory rights relating to estate management companies are welcome, it is—as my honourable friend in the other place, the shadow Housing Minister pointed out—incomprehensible that the Bill does not incorporate the proposals from the Regulation of Property Agents working group in July 2019. This group, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Best, made recommendations that have widespread support in both Houses. I am sure he will want to say more about this himself, but it is hard to understand why the Government have not taken this opportunity to implement such a common-sense approach. It is a clear example of what I described earlier as missing an open goal.

Lastly, but probably most significantly, we hope to persuade the Government to rethink their decision not to extend the ban on leasehold to flats; 70% of leaseholders live in flats. To leave out new flats from the ban on leasehold justifies my description of an eviscerated Bill because it means that the Bill simply will not do what it set out to do. We will be proposing amendments to the exclusions the Government have included for the ban on new leasehold houses. We believe these are too wide and will almost certainly result in a way through for landlords who want to perpetuate the leasehold tenure for houses.

There is clearly a broad consensus in both Houses for a radical overhaul of leasehold, so the question is whether this Bill achieves that. Although it set out with worthy intentions and initiates some improvement, we do not believe it goes anything like as far as it should. With the parliamentary time left to us, and with the desperation of leaseholders to see at least some improvement in the catastrophic circumstances some of them face, it is not our intention to try to persuade Ministers to radically overhaul the Bill by means of the many hundreds of amendments that would be required to implement all the Law Commission’s recommendations on enfranchisement, right to manage and commonhold. However, it remains our position that this will need to be done.

Whether this Bill receives Royal Assent or not before this Parliament is dissolved, a Labour Government will have to finish the job of finally bringing the leasehold system to an end by overhauling it, to the lasting benefit of leaseholders, and reinvigorating commonhold to such an extent that it will ultimately become the default and render leasehold obsolete. I reassure leaseholders across the country that we are absolutely determined to do so.

Local Government Finances

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for securing this vital debate and for his excellent and thorough introduction. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken so powerfully. It clearly demonstrates the very rich nature of our sector.

Your Lordships will know that I was a local government leader for nearly 17 years. Distressingly, because of local government funding cuts, I had to cut the council’s budget every single year of those 17. In the first years, this was a very specific technical adjustment which only affected a small number of councils—unfortunately, mine was one of them. After that came a torrent of funding cuts which saw millions of pounds taken from our budget in cash terms—and that is before unfunded inflation is taken into account.

Councils across the country have had the same experience. In spite of the constant refrain from Ministers on the Government Benches that more funding is going in, the fact is that it is not meeting either the rising demand for services, the increasing demand due to failures in other public services, inflationary costs, or the costs of dealing with multiple government initiatives.

I am afraid it is just not good enough to say that this is just a few councils which have been badly managed, or to say that, if councils cut back their budgets for consultants and equalities programmes, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, referred to, the problem would go away. In fact, the Hunger Games approach to funding taken by DLUHC, which sets councils and their communities against one another in competitive bidding rounds, has driven much of this expenditure. It would be interesting to know—across all government departments, but DLUHC would do—what departments have spent on consultants and equalities training in the last three years.

LGA analysis shows that, by 2024-25, cost and demand pressures will have added £15 billion to the cost of delivering council services since 2021-22. Despite increased funding in both of the last two years, mostly from council tax, there is—as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Eaton, Lady Scott, and Lady Bull, have all said—an ongoing gap of £4 billion. There is a dreadful built-in impact here, too, that sees the poorest areas the worst affected. Many noble Lords have referred to that, as did the right reverend Prelate. The broken local government finance system means that those areas get the same cuts and are least able to fill the gap through council tax or retained business rates. As noble Lords have pointed out, the double whammy here is that these areas are likely to have the highest levels of increasing demand, too.

UK councils have fewer powers to raise revenue locally than any other G7 nation, with 95% of the UK’s tax revenue and 75% of public spending controlled centrally. So, when the Minister tells us about the increase in core spending power, as I am sure she is about to do, please remember that 44% of the additional core spending power available to councils will go solely to fund the cost increases in commissioned adult social care, due to the national living wage increase. This leaves a reduced amount of funding to address the impact of national living wage increases on other parts of the local government workforce and outsourced services that are highly exposed to the national living wage, such as waste collection and disposal, let alone the impacts of inflation, demand pressures and other cost drivers across all services.

As the right reverend Prelate mentioned, every aspect of our community life has been impacted. Every service has been affected. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out the impact on our local democracy; it is not what people become councillors to do. This is not what communities expect; they are paying more in council tax and getting less back in services. We know that people truly value the services that impact on their lives every day, as soon as they walk out of their front door—but look at what has happened to them. Net spending on cultural services has been cut by 43%, with sport and leisure facilities down by 44%. England has lost almost 400 swimming pools since 2010.

Sport development and community recreation has been cut by 59% per person, and spending on parks and green spaces has been cut by 30%. Community centres have been cut by 39% and libraries by 50%—800 libraries have been cut. Museums and galleries have been cut by 40% and theatres and public entertainment by 38%. The noble Baronesses, Lady Bull and Lady Miller, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Lords, Lord Foster and Lord Freyberg, all spoke very powerfully about the impact of local government cuts on cultural services.

More than half of areas have made cuts of more than 50% to transport and highways. This is even worse when you look at some areas, such as North Yorkshire, Bath and North East Somerset, and Lambeth, where there have been cuts of over 90% to highways work—no wonder there are potholes. Think of the negative impact of that on local economies.

These are services that everyone uses, but what about the most vulnerable in our communities? Some of the high-demand, high-cost services that local government delivers are used by only a very small percentage of our community. With services such as adult care, children’s services and temporary and emergency accommodation, many people will not realise the extent of the funding gap until they try to use that service. A recent County Councils Network report tells us that children’s and adult care services are consuming two-thirds of their total budgets. Surely, we should judge the strength of our communities and society by the way we deliver to the most vulnerable.

There are rising costs in children’s social care, with budgets up by 13.6%, driven by huge increases in placement costs. LGA research has shown that, in 2022-23, councils paid for over 1,500 placements costing £10,000 or more per week—over 10 times as many as the 120 placements purchased by councils at that price in 2018-19. It is way past time that this private-sector racketeering was brought to an end.

Costs of home-to-school transport are escalating, with budgets up by 23.3% in the last year, equalling a 130% cash-terms increase since 2016-17. Increasing costs and demand in adult social care means that budgeted spend increased by £2.5 billion in the last financial year. Costs of homeless services are increasing, with multiple contributory cost and demand drivers pushing budgets up by nearly 20% last year. Government data shows that more than 104,000 households were in temporary accommodation at the end of March last year, the highest figures since records began. Some district councils are now spending 30% to 40% of their total budget on emergency accommodation.

In most local areas, funding to the voluntary community sector from local government has either been cut or dried up all together, with seven in 10 organisations having withdrawn from public service delivery altogether, according to the excellent briefing from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned this. When authorities issue a Section 114 notice, both the NCVO and Women’s Aid report that all their funding is cut immediately. I do not have time to go into the pressure on housing revenue accounts, but the recent decision to remove councils’ rights to retain 100% of right-to-buy receipts, at a time when we should be encouraging a surge in provision of new social housing, is incomprehensible. We need 90,000 new social homes a year, so that cut was a crazy decision.

Levelling up means nothing if we cannot support vulnerable children and adults, the homeless, the voluntary sector, domestic abuse victims and the leisure and arts sectors. Everything I have outlined will have long-term impacts. There will be pressure on acute services from not funding early intervention properly, and pressure on the NHS when our vulnerable residents cannot be looked after in their own homes. There will be an impact on the health and mental health of people and communities when their leisure and culture opportunities get closed down, and there will be significant long-term impacts of poor-quality, unaffordable and insecure housing. Young people will lose their opportunities and aspirations because their learning needs have not been met. New homes will not be delivered or will be delayed because of cuts to planning departments. There is such a simple solution: just allow local authorities full cost recovery on major planning applications. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, both mentioned that.

There will be a dramatic impact on the economy when local government cannot deliver either the infrastructure or the economic development support to meet business needs. The Government are quite simply closing down the best route—the local, devolution route—towards ensuring that we get the growth that the country needs to fund our public services properly.

I have been in local government for almost 30 years. My colleagues around the country are heroes, from those in parish and town councils—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market—to those in the larger metropolitan authorities; they deliver for their communities, even in these most devastating and toughest of times. Please give them the trust and respect they deserve, give them long-term funding settlements, and work with them to reform the broken funding system—I was pleased to hear that the new noble Lord, Lord Fuller, is working on this project. Fix the broken business rates system that fails both businesses and the communities where they operate; give authorities the strong fiscal devolution they need, not the piecemeal approach we have seen in recent years; and then leave them alone to get on with it. Local councils, in touch with their local communities, will always deliver better than any Whitehall directive, even a levelling-up mission.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for bringing forward this important debate on the current state of local government finances and the impact on local communities. I also thank all noble Lords for their considered and insightful contributions today.

The Government are clear in their support for councils—there is no decline in that support—and the vital work they do to support local residents in all corners of the country. It is important to start by recognising some of the things that are happening. In Bolton, Stoke and Wandsworth, the councils have all recently renovated or opened new library spaces to the public. In Warwick and North Yorkshire, we have seen the opening of new leisure centres in Kenilworth and Knaresborough, and in Sandwell, Knowsley and Rushmoor, levelling-up funding will deliver improved leisure centres and facilities for local residents.

The Government are committed to delivering for our towns. In October of last year, we announced the investment of £1.1 billion into 55 towns across the country, with each town receiving a £20 million endowment-style fund to invest over the next decade. This will allow our towns to develop long-term visions and to deliver change for their residents, such as the regeneration of Ashburner Street, in Bolton. Finally, in Blackpool, the central regeneration scheme is scheduled to get under way, following planning approval, with an estimated 1,000 jobs set to be created as a result.

That is only a very small sample of the achievements and developments that councils across this country have made in recent months and years, all of which have made a positive impact on their local communities. All local authorities across the country should know that we place the utmost importance on the partnership between central and local government, and recognise the crucial work they do in delivering day in and day out for our local communities.

However, as has been mentioned, the Government recognise the pressures that some places face in delivering this work. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, that we are letting it get worse. We are not letting it get worse, and I will mention more about what we have done this year to help local authorities. Many of the problems that these places face, and that we all face as a country, are driven by global economic factors and the resulting higher inflation. That is why the Prime Minister has prioritised and successfully delivered on his commitment to halving inflation. However, we are all aware that demand for key services that councils provide, and the costs of those services, continue to rise steeply as well, not least because of an ever-aging population that, quite rightly, requires increasing social care support.

In February, the Government announced the local government finance settlement for 2024-25. This settlement makes up to £64.7 billion available to local authorities next year, an increase in core spending power of £4.5 billion on last year, equivalent to 7.5% in cash terms. This above-inflation increase demonstrates that the Government are standing behind councils up and down the country and are listening to them.

We have additionally taken action to provide further support to local government to enable continued delivery while wider system reforms for social care are implemented. At the final local government finance settlement, the Secretary of State announced that we are providing £1.5 billion in additional grant for social care through the settlement for 2024-25 compared to 2023-24. Having listened to the views of local government, this includes an additional £500 million for the social care grant.

While being mindful of the level of adult care provision, where possible councils should use this uplift to invest in areas that help also place children’s social care services on a financially sustainable footing. This includes investment in expanding family help and targeting early intervention, expanding kinship care and boosting the number of foster places.

Further to this, in the Budget earlier this month the Chancellor announced £165 million to support councils to improve the quality of, and increase capacity in, residential children’s homes, so that children with the most complex needs can be cared for in a provision that meets those needs. This funding will boost local authority-run provision and, in doing so, respond to concerns that excessive profiteering—as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage—and often poor quality is threatening the sustainability and outcomes of local government children’s services.

Nevertheless, we recognise that, sometimes, private placement costs are too high, and that council tax payers are stuck footing the bill. The Government’s position is that this is an issue with profiteering rather than profit. Through reforms to children’s social care, they will continue to explore what action is needed to best support councils. The Government will be developing proposals on what more can be done to combat profiteering, bring down costs and create a more sustainable market for residential placements, which they will publish later this year.

The Government recognise the significance of special educational needs pressures on councils. This is why the Spring Statement committed £105 million towards a wave of 15 new special free schools, to create over 2,000 additional places for children with special educational needs and disabilities across England. On top of this specific funding for social care and SEND, the Government have committed to a 4% funding guarantee that will ensure that all councils receive at least a 4% increase in their core spending power before any local choices on council tax, efficiencies or reserves. We have listened to the many councils and the many things they told us. They would otherwise have experienced cash losses in funding next year, and we have stepped in to prevent that.

We are committed to supporting councils wherever they are in the country. This is in answer to the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, about Luton. The most relatively deprived areas of England will be receiving 18% more per dwelling in available resource through the 2024-25 settlement than the least deprived areas; those councils, such as Luton and others, will be getting more. We understand that those councils have faced historic challenges in tackling deprivation. It is also why we have increased the value of the rural services delivery grant—as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath—by over 15% to £110 million, to support rural authorities dealing with the unique challenges of serving very dispersed populations. That is a second successive year of above-inflation increases for this grant.

The action we have taken to support local government in this financial settlement and beyond demonstrates our commitment to the sector. We recognise and thank those in the sector for the important contribution they make in delivering local services for their communities, up and down the country. We have worked in partnership with representatives, sector leaders and local councils, to ensure that this settlement helps to meet the needs of local government. This engagement has been a vital part of the decision-making for this settlement. When local councils speak to us, we listen, and this includes those councils that face the most significant challenges.

The Government also work closely with councils to understand the specific pressures that local government is facing. They are looking at a range of data on demand for services and the costs faced by councils. As a result of the local government finance settlement, the vast majority of local authorities will be able to set balanced budgets in 2024-25. We have published details of exceptional financial support agreed with a small number of councils, but the vast majority of this support relates to six councils where there has been severe local failure. The Government have had to step in there and take the most serious action through statutory intervention.

A small number of other councils requested financial support on an exceptional basis, due to specific local pressures that they were unable to manage themselves. We stand ready to speak to any council that has concerns about its ability to manage its finances or faces pressures it has not planned for. Our door is always open to them.

Before I conclude, I will answer as many of noble Lords’ questions as I can. If I do not get through all of them, obviously I will write. First, the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Bull, brought up local government funding reform. We remain committed to updating the system in the next Parliament, and will work closely with local partners to take stock of the challenges and opportunities that they face. Of course we will consult with them before any potential funding reforms, but we talked to councils last year about any of the reforms we could make and they did not want any disruption or uncertainty at that time.

The noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Hussain, brought up council tax reform. The Government continue to protect local tax payers from excessive increases. We believe that our approach strikes a fair balance and is an additional local democratic check and balance on local authorities. We are not allowing council tax to increase in place of increased funding; it is provision for a balanced package that includes a substantial increase for this coming year, as I said.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, brought up audit issues and the backlog. Local audit is vital in supporting democratic accountability and providing assurance for local people and their elected representatives. At the time of its abolition, we believed that the Audit Commission was too centralised and that it encouraged local bodies to focus more on the views of the commissioner than on local people. The Government are working with the Financial Reporting Council to tackle a significant backlog of local audits and put the system on a sustainable footing for the future.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Does the Minister think it acceptable that 99% of local authorities did not clear their audits in time last year?

Teesworks Project: Audit

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the audit arrangements for the Teesworks project, and of whether they are effective for the scale of the work being carried out.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Swinburne) (Con)]

The public and private sector bodies engaged in the Teesworks project are responsible for ensuring that they comply with all relevant audit requirements. Additionally, the Government commissioned an independent review of the project, which we published in February. The Tees Valley Mayor is implementing its recommendations, including recommendations 27 and 28, relating to the internal and external audit functions.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Answer, but I honestly think that the people of Teesside deserve better than to be fobbed off like this. The independent review published in January said:

“Based on the evidence from the review the governance and financial management arrangements are not of themselves sufficiently robust or transparent to evidence value for money”.


We are told by Ministers that the NAO does not look at individual authorities, so we questioned on 30 January and 7 March just what the arrangements are for auditing this project, so local people can be reassured about the return their significant investment is giving them. We were promised an answer in writing, which has not appeared. In view of the parlous state of local government audit generally, and the nature of the 28 scathing recommendations set out in the review, an NAO financial investigation seems appropriate. Why are the Government still resisting that?

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her supplementary question. I assure her that the letter is on its way; I thought that it was already sent, so I apologise if she has not received it yet. As I outlined in my response to the debate on the regeneration of industrial areas on 7 March, it is not the NAO’s role to audit or examine individual local authorities, and its power would not normally be used for that purpose. I have since looked into this, and expanding its remit previously required the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to grant statutory powers. Therefore, given that we have had a thorough independent review, it is time that we learned from it and implemented those lessons rather than repeat it.

North East Mayoral Combined Authority (Establishment and Functions) Order 2024

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Grand Committee

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)]

My Lords, with the agreement of the Committee and its Chairman, I would like to say a few words in tribute to Paul Rowsell, who was head of the governance reform and democracy unit within DLUHC. He died suddenly on Thursday on his way to work at the age of 71. Paul had worked as the head of that unit since it was formed in 2011. Before that, he had dealt with all things to do with local authority governance since the 1990s.

Paul and I worked together on a weekly basis in the early 2000s on the Wiltshire unitary bid; he became a good friend of mine, and I hope I became a good friend of his. I will miss him terribly—including his not sitting behind me today. Paul was a wonderful public servant and he will be very sorely missed, not just by his colleagues in DLUHC but by the many people in local government whom he met and supported over the years. May Paul rest in peace.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

With permission, I would like to respond to that tribute. I have been in local government for nearly 30 years now, and I knew Mr Rowsell for most of that time. He was a formidable public servant, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said. He was one of the great experts on local government finance—there are not many of those. Paul probably knew more about local government finance than anybody else in the country. I remember the trepidation that you would feel—I was a deputy leader of the LGA for many years—when you went into a meeting with him because you knew, however good your arguments were and however well you had been briefed by the LGA, he would pick it apart in five minutes and decimate your argument.

In spite of his tough approach to those of us who came up against him in meetings, he was very much a trusted member of the team in DLUHC and its predecessor departments—it has had many names over the years. I first encountered him way back when we were working on some of the “best value” initiatives. He was trusted, effective, incredibly knowledgeable and a consummate professional. His public service to this country in the local government department—that is what I will call it—was exemplary. I hope that he will rest in peace and that, for those who knew him personally, his memory will be a blessing. I thank him from our side of the Committee for his wonderful service to local government.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, it is deeply sad news to learn of Paul Rowsell’s death. I think back to the advice that he gave me during the passage of the Localism Act in the period of the coalition Government from 2010 to 2015. He had the ability to listen, to explain and to stay very polite, even if I was completely wrong on the issue. He had the ability to make things clear so that the understanding of those of us who were dealing with legislation was improved. It is a sad day for local government. He will be sorely missed. I appreciated his presence as part of the Bill team so many times. You knew that if Paul was leading a team, the work had been done and was of an enormously high, professional standard. It is with deep regret that we say that we will miss Paul profoundly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I first welcome the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, whose experience as an MP in the region, and of living in Northumberland, have been extremely helpful to the cause of the north-east in economic development terms. I agree with a number of the comments of my noble friend Lord Beith. He said that the order is underpowered, which is true, but I think it can become more powered over time—that will need to be done. I have always shared his concern about the concentration of powers in one person, and I am also concerned by those major potential capital investment projects that are outside the remit of this mayoral combined authority, not least the A1 and trains.

As this is such a big geographical area—I think it is the biggest of any of our mayoral combined authorities—there are issues around the availability of skills training, particularly in further education, and of T-levels. One thing that it would be helpful for the Government to pursue is whether the availability of T-levels is as successful in the rural and coastal areas of this combined authority as it is in the urban areas.

That said, I congratulate the north-east mayoral combined authority on getting to this stage. Having been the leader of Newcastle City Council, a regular member of the Association of North East Councils and a board member of the regional development agency One North East for seven years, I think that this measure is a tribute to its vision, ability and willingness to work together over such a large geographical area. I see what is happening as a partial return to the status and powers that regional bodies had just a few years ago.

This is an important step for the north-east. It is particularly pleasing to see the successful all-party work that has gone into its delivery to this stage. Durham County Council has a Liberal Democrat leader; Northumberland County Council has a Conservative leader; and each of the five Tyne and Wear local authorities has a Labour leader. It helps drive public confidence and consent when the leadership across the region has such a common purpose, despite their political differences. That is because political consent is vital, as we know from recent debates on the West Midlands.

As the Minister said, this order generated more than 60% support across the north-east, which is very encouraging. That consent needs to be maintained; I hope that this new mayoral combined authority will reflect on the problems that have arisen further south, in Tees Valley. I hope that the north-east mayoral combined authority will review its procedures on scrutiny, audit and risk to ensure that they are sufficiently robust. That said, I strongly welcome this further step towards devolved powers in the north-east of England.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the seven authorities involved in negotiating this deal with the Government. We are all aware of the additional challenges that, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, were present in the north-east in achieving consensus across political, geographical and demographic boundaries. Not only has that been achieved but the deal has gained trailblazer status, which will hopefully enable it to attract the high levels of funding needed to tackle the many challenges faced by the north-east.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Quin for bringing her great experience in the area to this debate. As she said, having a single voice for the north-east will be helpful. We on this side are committed to devolution, so we will not put any obstacles in the way of a deal that has been subjected to such thorough and intense negotiation and collaboration at local level, but that does not mean that we do not have some questions for clarification purposes. I appreciate that, as I did not submit them to the Minister in advance, it might be necessary for some of them to be answered in writing. I would be quite happy with that.

It is good to see that, in the negotiations that took place over this deal, local government put place before party; that has always been my experience and it certainly shines out from this deal. That is the real power of devolution. We recognise the potential benefits of creating this new combined authority, which will have functions to grow the whole economy of the north-east. We are hopeful that, if our outstanding candidate for the mayoral election, Kim McGuinness, is successful, she will soon be working across the areas of her seven local authorities to grow the economy for all its people and businesses.

Housing: Young People

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for tabling this most important debate and, as always, for sharing his very considerable expertise and for all the work that he has done in the past and in your Lordships’ House to champion housing and the many issues related to housing and planning. As usual, he does not clap with one hand. He raised some important issues around downsizing incentives, incentivising to sell properties from the private rented sector and institutional finance, especially pension funds. That is something we definitely have to look at. It would resolve some of the investment issues that were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. I am not so sure about his idea on lifetime tenancies, but we need to have a look at more issues around tenancies.

I thank my noble friend Lady Donaghy for her words and for reminding us of the inspirational Lord McKenzie, who I knew very well. It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. I agree with him on the right-to-buy issues. Just this week we learned that the retention of right-to-buy receipts at 100% has been cancelled by the Secretary of State—a completely incomprehensible decision.

It is shocking to realise that this year we have over 136,000 young people aged between 16 and 25 who are approaching their councils as homeless. This represents a 5% increase on the year before. Even worse, this is the very tip of the iceberg. The median age of people presenting as homeless is just 32, with many being much younger. There is also a gender issue: for females presenting as homeless it is even younger, at just 25. With homelessness increasing dramatically across the country, as we have heard in so many recent debates in this House, it is worrying to see the evidence that those who become homeless at a young age will be far more likely to face multiple long-term challenges.

I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for starting with two anonymised stories from my casework which illustrate some of the many issues that lead to homelessness and to hidden homelessness. The first is Alison, a qualified nurse working in the NHS. She came to my surgery and asked very calmly whether we thought that it was reasonable that she had been sleeping on the sofa at a friend’s house for seven years. She patiently explained the issues that this caused in relation to her shift work. As a single working woman in her late 20s, she was very low priority for social housing, but her low salary and the scarcity of affordable private rented accommodation excluded her from those options. She was too concerned about the pressure on her finances to seek a mortgage and had little enough money left at the end of the month to save for a deposit anyway. Alison was one of the hidden homeless, which I will talk about more later. Her case illustrates just how skewed allocation policies have become, in terms of homelessness prevention, for all but the most extreme cases.

Shannon also came to see us. She had been thrown out of the family home when she told her dad that she was gay. He had attacked her with a whisky bottle and told her never to come near the house again. Shannon had a pet dog which gave her emotional support in this awful situation. Although keeping him excluded her from much of the emergency hostel-type accommodation, she could not bear to part with him. She was working full-time in a restaurant, so she slept outside the restaurant in the bushes and then washed and changed in the restaurant before starting work.

This illustrates one of the many types of family breakdown that can lead to young people becoming homeless. We all know that there are multiple potential causes of homelessness among our young people and that the chronic undersupply of housing—of all tenures but particularly affordable rented and social rented homes —makes matters far worse for them. For some of our young people, it is simply the lack of support networks from family or community that would help them navigate the complexities of securing housing in this country. Family breakdown because of parental conflict, as in Shannon’s case, divorce, abuse or neglect, domestic abuse or bereavement, can all lead to homelessness, as can their own or a carer’s mental health issues.

We had a powerful debate in your Lordships’ House recently on poverty, led by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. We all know that poverty is the major driver of homelessness. For young people, this can mean their parents can no longer afford to have them living at home, and with over 1.2 million families now living in poverty, this brings an enormous impact. Financial deprivation stays with those young people. While for some, the bank of Mum and Dad will help with housing or rental deposits, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for others whose early life may also have been marked by housing insecurity, no such facility exists.

There are other groups more at risk too, including those from black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups, young people from the LGBT+ community and young asylum seekers and refugees. There are also regional disparities: the north-east has the highest level of youth homelessness in the UK. The noble Lord, Lord Best, often refers, rightly, to the disparities of housing availability in rural areas. Every year, as the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, mentioned, 100,000 young people leave local authority care, and this group are particularly at risk of homelessness. Some 14% of them will have slept rough and 26% will be sofa surfing. It is vital that the corporate parenting role undertaken with looked-after children does not hit a cliff edge when they reach 18. Most parents will know that young people making the transition into adult life is the point at which they need more support, not for it to come to an end. Can the Minister tell us whether the Government have given thought to how this transition may be better managed and housing policy designed to support young care leavers?

We saw the considerable efforts made to tackle rough sleeping during the pandemic, and more can be done to learn the lessons from this, including considering the “invest to save” impact of schemes such as Housing First, where emergency accommodation is provided alongside a package of support for complex needs. Are the Government looking at schemes like this around the country to help prioritise funding decisions and what comparative assessment has been done with some of the initiatives being developed in Wales and Scotland?

Rough sleeping is the tip of the iceberg: many people will be living the precarious life of sofa surfing, hostels and temporary accommodation. That can be entirely unsuitable for vulnerable young people: just imagine a vulnerable young female care leaver in a shared house with violent ex-offenders. This hidden homeless issue continues to get worse as there are few statistics collected, either on the numbers or on the impact this has on the lives of young people. Can the Minister tell us whether any work is going on in government to address this?

As usual, many local authorities—including my own, through Herts Young Homeless—have stepped up, despite the financial situation, with a range of interventions to tackle homelessness among young people. These include: prevention and early intervention to provide mediation to resolve family conflict; talking to young people in schools about housing and homelessness; crisis support which ensures that young people at risk of homelessness can access advice and guidance quickly and that, where necessary, they can access other support such as for emergency mental health needs; independent living support for young adults who do not have that support from friends or family; and advice on funding the housing, setting up bill payments, managing money, cooking, jobseeking and how to manage independent living.

The best local areas have Future Roots programmes, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, that provide tailored transition for vulnerable young people with supported living accommodation until they are ready to live independently. Although these approaches are best practice, they are not universal. Are the Government taking more steps to promote and share this best practice, preferably incentivised with some funding, and has any analysis been carried out of the long-term benefits of such preventive steps?

At the heart of this problem is the wider problem of the crisis in housing supply of all tenures. Noble Lords have referred to many of the interventions that will be needed to address that. The record on housing is simply not good enough. If the situation continues as it is, we will see further generations of young people whose life opportunities are limited by poor housing, with consequential impacts on their education, health and employment. That is why my party’s plan to build 1.5 million homes over the course of the next Parliament is at the heart of the surge we need to kickstart a housing recovery plan. We must restore the targets removed by the Secretary of State last year, as other noble Lords have mentioned. If we do not have targets locally, how will we ever achieve a national target? For young people it is social homes that often provide the start in adult life that they need. Last week, the outstanding report by Cebr for Shelter and the National Housing Federation showed conclusively that building 90,000 social homes each year would have a combined socioeconomic value of around £50 billion—last year, we built just 9,000.

Young people are disproportionately affected by practices in the private rented sector and leasehold markets. Some of them move very frequently, at a cost estimated by the Renters Reform Coalition of around £1,700 each time they move. We hoped that the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill and the Renters (Reform) Bill would scrap the tenure of leasehold and end the injustice of Section 21, but we now find that both those Bills have been watered down. I hope we will get the chance to reinstate some of those promises in your Lordships’ House.

My parents were given the start they needed for their married and family life by opportunities presented in Britain’s first post-war new town, Stevenage. That is why I was so delighted to hear my party’s pledge of a new generation of new towns, based on sustainable principles and with communities enjoying a quality of life that balances economy, environment and social aspects with high-quality housing, including a new social housing renaissance. We need a long-term housing strategy that gets the houses built that we know we need, through a planning system designed for the builders, not the bureaucrats. Labour will undertake a complete reform of planning to unblock it and get Britain building. I do not have time to go into the detail today, but I think we should have another debate on that. For our young people, what we need within that housing strategy is a national plan to tackle young homelessness, before we undermine the potential and opportunities of another generation of young people by failing them on housing.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, is right to point out that there have 16 Housing Ministers since 2010; that does not help. This Government have had 14 years to address the chronic housing problems this country faces, which are still getting worse. Is it not time we had a general election, to give these young people their future back?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham for bringing forward this important debate, and also for the continued passion and knowledge that he gives to this House about the sector. I appreciate his challenge, as I am sure many others in the Chamber do. This is an important debate about the needs of young people within the overall housing market and I thank all other noble Lords who have spoken today for their considered and insightful contributions.

Throughout the debate, we have heard about the challenges the younger generation of this country face in achieving home ownership, and in accessing affordable housing to rent. Securing affordable, decent and stable homes is critical to ensuring young people can meet major life milestones, move for career opportunities, and start a family. The Government are committed to delivering the warm, safe, decent and affordable housing needed to support them through their life journeys.

Young people are part of a housing market significantly different from the one experienced by previous generations. Children of home owners are over twice as likely to be home owners than children of renters—an issue raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Donaghy and Lady Thornhill. The dependence on the bank of mum and dad, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Attlee, to afford a home shows the difficulties in accessing the housing ladder. This is reflected in how the historic home ownership rate for those aged 25 to 34 has fallen from 51% in 1989 to 28% in 2019.

The Government have worked hard to reverse these historic trends with our long-term housing strategy. We have made huge strides since 2010 to increase home ownership, provide stability and security for those renting, and improve the quality of houses young adults own and rent. This will ultimately improve their life outcomes and quality of life. The hundreds of thousands of new homes we are delivering will create the homes young people need now and in the future. I am proud of the progress this Government have made to deliver on these priorities, but we cannot stop. We will therefore continue to press ahead in meeting these challenges.

First, almost all noble Lords brought up the planning system. We have built more homes in places young people want to live, and at prices that they can afford. Since 2010, over 2.5 million additional homes have been delivered, and the four highest rates of additional housing supply in over 30 years have all come since 2018. Increasing housing supply is at the heart of solving our housing challenges; crucial to that is reforming our planning system. Not only must we have enough homes in the right places, we must also have homes suitable for those with a range of needs, including those with disabilities and special care needs, and the vulnerable.

My noble friends Lord Young of Cookham, Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Attlee raised important questions about how we are unblocking the planning system to deliver the houses that we need in the places where we need them. Building on our work since 2010, in December 2023 the Government revised the National Planning Policy Framework in response to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. The framework sets out the Government’s planning policies for England and how we expect them to be applied. While the Government’s standard method for assessing local housing need is used to assess the total number of homes needed in a local area, the framework makes it clear that local authorities should assess the size, type and tenure of housing needed for different groups, including young people, young people with disabilities, care leavers and students.

Government housing targets have not changed. We remain committed to our ambition to deliver 300,000 homes a year. The Secretary of State’s Written Ministerial Statement of 6 December 2022 confirmed that the standard method for assessing local housing need will be retained. The Government have made it clear that every local authority is expected to progress their local plans. If sufficient progress is not made, the Secretary of State will consider using his powers of intervention to ensure that plans are put in place. We also recently consulted on proposals to implement reforms to plan-making processes to ensure that plans are prepared in 30 months. The reason for that is that we know that local authorities that have up-to-date local plans deliver more houses.

The Government have in place a strong programme of support to upskill the capacity and capability of local planning authorities, as raised by my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough. This includes a £13.5 million “planning super-squad” of leading planners and other experts that will deploy teams of specialists into planning authorities to accelerate development and a £29 million planning skills development delivery fund to help planning authorities deal with the backlog of planning applications ahead of the forthcoming changes to the planning system through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. To ensure that local authorities are doing everything they can to build the homes that are needed, in February this year the Secretary of State set out clear expectations for every council in England to prioritise building on brownfield developments —a key point raised by my noble friend Lord Jackson.

However, it is not enough just to build more houses. The Government are committed to ensuring that the planning system creates more beautiful and sustainable buildings and places everywhere, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Best. The duty introduced through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act for all local councils to produce a design code at the spatial scale of their authority area will give design codes significant weight when planning applications are determined, and the establishment of the Office for Place will support the creation of healthy, beautiful places. This Government will not compromise on quality and beauty.

Turning to housing supply, an area raised by the noble Lord, Lord Best, with regard to the 300,000 target, I recognise the significant challenges faced by the housebuilding sector in the current economic climate. The Government continue to prioritise support to the industry and local areas as part of our commitment to deliver 1 million new homes over the lifetime of this Parliament, which we are on track to deliver. This is critical in ensuring that housing across that the market is affordable—a crucial topic raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. We are investing billions to support housebuilding and achieve that commitment, including through our £1 billion brownfield, infrastructure and land fund, and to manage different drivers of demand, such as migration—an important area raised by my noble friend Lord Lilley. Our £1.2 billion local authority housing fund is providing capital funding directly to councils. It will provide capital funding to local authorities to obtain better-quality temporary accommodation for those owed homelessness duty and to provide safe and suitable homes for those on the Afghan resettlement schemes—an extremely important point noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine.

As my noble friend Lord Jackson mentioned, ensuring that we are facilitating institutional investment in housebuilding in this country is of paramount importance. The £1.5 billion Levelling Up Home Building Fund leverages institutional investment from both private capital and pensions to achieve our ambitions.

My noble friend Lord Jackson and the noble Lord, Lord Best, raised the recent Competition and Markets Authority report on housebuilding. I welcome the report. The Government will carefully consider the findings and the recommendation to formally respond to it within 90 days of publication.

I want to note where we have made substantial progress through our delivery of affordable homes, an issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Best, in particular. Since 2010 we have delivered almost 700,000 new affordable homes, making it easier for young people to access the housing ladder. We have scaled up the delivery of affordable housing by investing £11.5 billion through the affordable homes programme, working ambitiously towards meeting our target of a quarter of a million new affordable homes.

At the same time, we have taken steps to reduce demand competition. Although the expansion of the short-term lets market has brought a range of benefits, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, we want to ensure that housing continues to be affordable. That is why the Government have announced a mandatory national short-term lets registration scheme to provide valuable information to local authorities in supporting the application and enforcement of planning changes. The Government also introduced higher rates of stamp duty land tax in April 2016 for those purchasing additional properties.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, raised the issue of the Church of England’s report Coming Home, which argued that an ambitious approach is needed to solve the housing challenges facing this country. As he said, it was debated in detail on 24 February, when the Government set out the comprehensive long-term housing strategy in responding to those challenges.

Turning to home ownership, the Government have a robust programme of interventions. My noble friend Lord Young, the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, raised the important question of how we are making it easier for young people to buy their own home. One key programme to note, shared ownership, is a unique scheme targeted at first-time buyers. It allows young people to purchase a share of a home through a mortgage while paying rent at below-market value on the rest of the home. Over time, young people can buy more shares, until they have bought the home in its entirety. I have seen many schemes like this and how pleased young people, particularly young families, are when they feel they are getting towards owning that home of their own.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Many young people who have gone into those schemes are now having incredibly high service charges imposed on them, and we need to come back to that issue when we look at the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill. In a case I saw today, the charge had gone up from £94 a month to over £600, and as a result that young couple cannot sell the property or afford to live in it. The colloquial term for this is “fleecehold”. We need to think very carefully about those schemes.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right, and I have heard similar stories. That is why we have the leaseholder Bill coming through, which we will be debating in just a few weeks’ time.

In 2022-23, of those reported to my department, an estimated 77% of shared ownership purchases were made by first-time buyers and 33% of those purchases were made by buyers under the age of 30—a testament to the effectiveness of the action of this Government. Furthermore, our First Homes scheme offers first-time buyers under the age of 40 a minimum 30% discount on the price of an eligible new home, helping the younger generation get a foothold on the property ladder. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, asked for further detail on what the programme has delivered. I have only the top line, which is that there were 1,250 completions through the First Homes early delivery programme to the end of September 2023. If the noble Baroness wants more detail, she is welcome to come and ask me.

Through our lifetime ISA scheme, we have helped more than 56,000 account holders to become first-time buyers. More recently, we have recognised and responded to the challenging market conditions for lenders and buyers alike through the introduction of the mortgage guarantee scheme. This supports participating lenders to continue providing 5% deposit mortgages. We have extended this until June 2025 so that we can continue providing this vital support.

My noble friend Lord Young raised the question of stamp duty, land tax and cutting capital gains tax when landlords sell to sitting tenants. The Government have already taken action by cutting stamp duty during the pandemic, up to March 2025. This is reducing the financial burden on first-time buyers across the country, but particularly in and around London and the south-east, where these pressures are felt most acutely. On cutting capital gains tax for landlords’ sales to sitting tenants, this is not a policy the Government are currently considering. Taxation is a matter for the Chancellor and any decisions he takes on tax are considered, obviously, in the context of the wider public finances.

On the work of government on preventing homelessness and rough sleeping, as raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornhill and Lady Valentine, I want to set out the measures we have prioritised to prevent vulnerable people—young people particularly—such as care leavers ending up homeless. In 2022 we published our cross-government strategy Ending Rough Sleeping for Good, which recognised that young people face particular challenges accessing and maintaining accommodation.

For young people with disabilities, my department, alongside the Department for Health and Social Care and the NHS, provides capital grant funding to subsidise the delivery of a new supply of supported housing, including for disabled people. Young people with disabilities who satisfy needs-assessment eligibility criteria and a means test benefit from a wider statutory duty to provide home adaptions. There are powers to provide adaptions for those who do not qualify under that duty. Under this Government, the disabled facilities grant has risen from £220 million in 2015-16 to £625 million in 2024-25—a more than doubling of the grant. This has been well received by disabled people.

When young people do find themselves homeless or at risk of homelessness, within the next 56 days they are owed a homelessness duty by their local authority. Our single homelessness accommodation programme will deliver over 650 homes and support services for young people in this situation. This is in addition to other support, including the £109 million top-up to the homelessness prevention grant for councils and an initial £6 million for rough sleeping winter pressures.

Many of our young people want to be free to move to places where they can connect their talents with economic opportunities before choosing to settle down. This is where the private sector steps in. Increasing security and quality in the private rented sector requires ambitious reforms and the Government have stepped up to deliver. We have introduced the Renters (Reform) Bill, which will support tenants with a raft of measures, including applying the decent homes standard to the private rented sector for the first time and abolishing Section 21 evictions. The Bill is awaiting Report in the other place, which is subject to parliamentary scheduling, and it will be announced in the usual course of business management. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, that the proportion of private rented sector households has remained relatively stable for nearly a decade, and the number of renters has doubled since 2004.

For those in the social rented sector, we have enshrined in law, through the Social Housing (Regulation) Act, a rebalancing of the relationship between landlord and tenant. We are ensuring that landlords are held to account for their performance—an important step in improving the quality of houses across the market, which was an issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine. We are creating a housing market fit for the future.

The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill will reform the outdated leasehold system in this country. From 2025, the future homes standard will future-proof our homes, ensuring that new homes produce at least 75% less CO emissions than those built to previous standards. We know that making long-term changes takes time to deliver, and the Government are doing all they can against a challenging economic background to ensure that the younger generation can access affordable, safe and high-quality housing.

Following the £188 million allocation to the housing projects in Sheffield, Blackpool and Liverpool at the Convention of the North on 1 March, last week’s Spring Budget allocated over £240 million to housing projects in London, an area where affordability is challenging, particularly for young people, as we have heard today.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham and others brought up intergenerational housing. I totally agree with them that we need better older people’s housing and more choice for older people because, if we give them better housing and more choice, we can start to move the housing stock around. Some local authorities are doing that really well, but more can be done. The Government’s independent older people’s housing task force is looking at housing for older people, and it will make its final recommendations to Ministers this summer.

I hope I have answered as much as I can—

Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 (Consequential and Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2024

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her introduction to this instrument. I refer to my interests as recorded in the register.

We have been pleased to support the implementation of the regulation of social housing, including the revised consumer standards which will be required of landlords from April. The introduction of Awaab’s law is particularly important, as evidence of the harms of damp and mould continues to accumulate; as is the building safety work since Grenfell, although I think we all agree that it could be going more quickly, and we will continue to raise the issue that buildings under 11 metres are still not addressed. We look forward to further consideration of some of the key ownership issues when we debate the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill later this month. We totally support the principle that social tenants should receive and deserve the very highest quality in the homes they live in and the service they receive from their housing provider.

I am sure the Minister will be pleased to know that we recognise that these technical amendments are entirely uncontentious and will therefore not object to or raise lots of issues on them. However, it would be wrong in any discussion related to social housing not to highlight the ongoing funding issues facing councils, with their housing stock, and housing associations. For councils, the increasing burden of regulation—important as we all understand it to be—places an increased financial burden on them. With the capping of rent increases and the fact that in the current cost of living crisis any significant increase in rents would place an unmanageable burden on our tenants, the cost of meeting these additional regulatory burdens is a significant pressure. This is in addition to the costs of decarbonisation and retrofitting. While government contributions to this are welcome, at the current rate of funding it would take many decades to complete the work, well beyond the target for net zero.

Lastly, I take this opportunity to mention, as there has not been a chance anywhere else, the unfathomable decision that emerged from the small print of last week’s Budget—that the Secretary of State has terminated the ability of local authorities to retain 100% of right-to-buy receipts. This returns us to the awful travesty around right-to-buy sales. I take the example of my authority, which had a council stock of around 30,000 social homes, and now has only around 8,000. Some years ago, we were offered the opportunity to buy out our stock from the Government, which you could argue we already owned, but I will leave that argument for another day. We borrowed £240 million to do so, and that loan is being paid off through the housing revenue account. Not only does the removal of the 100% retention of receipts remove the resources we would have had to replace the homes sold under right to buy, but it also eats into the income stream we had to pay off the loan we had to take out to buy back our own homes.

Local Regeneration: Industrial Areas

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Armstrong on securing this important debate. I first met her back in 1997, after the general election; she was incredibly kind to me then and has inspired me ever since, so I thank her for that. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for the memory of a sweet-shop; my great-great-grandparents had a sweet-shop in the East End of London, which is also a happy memory.

This afternoon, we have heard about Teesside, Barnsley, Newcastle, Bradford, Dumfries, the East End of London, Sheffield, and seaside towns, and I am going to talk about new towns. The debate has demonstrated yet again, as did yesterday’s sticking-plaster Budget, a Government who have no clear plan for the economy or a cogent and comprehensive industrial strategy, or effective national devolution, and will simply fail in their vital task of ensuring that our country achieves its full and very considerable potential. Meanwhile, the so-called levelling-up mission runs into the sand, with cancelled projects, piecemeal funding bids, Ministers who cave in too easily to their Back-Benchers, failure to deliver the skills that business needs, and a devastating failure to deliver infrastructure, which means, for example, developers waiting longer to get a grid connection for one development—in some cases, eight years—than it took to build the whole core of our motorway network in the 1950s and 1960s.

Regeneration is needed across our country, a case clearly set out by my noble friend Lady Donaghy. Many areas are plagued by the sort of inequalities that the right reverend Prelate referred to so powerfully.

Although I do not come from one of the former industrial parts of the country, I can speak about regeneration from first-hand experience. Our new towns—a marvellous innovation of the post-war Labour Government—designed to provide the right conditions for the technological revolution that was taking place, and to provide good-quality, affordable housing for the skilled workforce that would be needed, were delivered over a relatively short timespan. Of course, if you build an entire city or town over a period of little more than a decade, some 50 years later it will need extensive renewal and regeneration all at the same time. I always think of it like putting new light bulbs in your house when you move in; then they all go at the same time.

We also had to create the right conditions to allow the town’s industrial base to move from the heavy manufacturing and engineering in the defence industry, which had provided the employment of the early decades, to developing the life sciences cluster—now the largest in the world outside the USA—and an established space, defence and communications cluster. In case noble Lords did not know, one in three of the satellites up in space, processing our phone and data signals and guiding our GPS and satnavs, is made in Stevenage in Hertfordshire.

We have not dragged our heels on housebuilding either, because we understand the co-dependency between housing and the economy which is deep in our new-town roots. That co-dependency was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. Our new-town pioneers got their homes and their jobs together, enabling them to truly have a vision of a good life for them and their families.

We have also seen the decline and hollowing out of our town centre. This is the same problem faced across so many of our towns and cities in the UK, but exacerbated for us by the fact that when the development corporation was wound up in the 1980s—and in spite of determined local action to try and prevent it happening—all the property in our town centre was handed over to investment houses and pension funds. We ended up with a complex web of over 60 large landholders, with the council retaining only the expense of the public realm maintenance.

Nevertheless, in spite of one false start which crashed with the rest of the economy in 2008, we put our minds and very considerable efforts to the task of comprehensive regeneration. Helped by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, our community, our local enterprise partnership and an amazing collaboration between local leaders across public, private and community sectors, as well as party-political boundaries—there was no one-party state here, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, talked about—we are now in the midst of a successful £1 billion regeneration which is transforming the heart of our town.

We are using town centre development to build a considerable number of the homes we need, which helps us with the constraints of tight town boundaries. We have optimised the opportunities that our east coast fast rail links bring by co-locating a new bus station, and both benefit from being linked into our 45 kilometres of cycleways. We are bringing the success of our cell and gene therapy cluster into the heart of the town, with lab space above the retail area. We set the conditions which enabled us to secure the £65 million European headquarters for Autolus, an American cell and gene research and development company. That scheme was taken from concept, through planning and a land deal, and on to site in eight months, so do not tell me that councils cannot move fast enough when they need to.

However, in the last 14 years it has felt too often that keeping the pace of this regeneration going from local government has been a battle and has been in spite of the conditions set by government, not because of them. The Centre for Cities has identified some of the barriers that areas face, and I recognise many of these. First, on risk, the private sector will lead where it is certain of a clear financial return, but often in the areas in most need of regeneration the risk for the private sector is too great on its own, so some level of public intervention will be needed. Too many government pump-priming funding pots—even where they are available—require sums of local match funding that are just unrealistic, and we do not have a system of local/regional investment funding in this country, as there is elsewhere in Europe, that could help.

Secondly, it must be recognised that social return—jobs, skills, local infrastructure and affordable housing—will need to be realised as well as private return, and that this is likely to need support. Andy Haldane, commenting on yesterday’s Budget, said that until we resolve the issues around millions of our workforce in this country not having the skills needed in our economy, we will not resolve our productivity and growth issues.

Planning and policy uncertainty are a real barrier for the private sector, as is access to essential infrastructure such as grid connections, water and high-speed data. The lack of a proper industrial strategy means that these are a real barrier to growth, and they are a barrier now. I have spoken before in this Chamber of my personal pain at having our local growth plans stalled, as our local plan was held for over a year on a holding direction by the Secretary of State. These kind of interventions really have to stop.

The Centre for Cities put it very clearly when it said that

“public-private cooperation can best maximise the private and social returns from a project”.

This is vital so that the people of the local area benefit, as well as those who have invested for profit. My noble friends Lady Armstrong and Lady Chapman, and the right reverend Prelate, have already mentioned, when they spoke about Teesworks, what happens when this balance gets tilted the wrong way. At the heart of that issue are the people of Teesside and the public assets formerly owned by them that should have been regenerated for their benefit to generate jobs, employment and industry. They should also be receiving sufficient return for their investment of land and the other value of the site. The governance of the project should have ensured an appropriate sharing of the risk taken by private sector partners to justify the returns that they have already accrued, as mentioned in the recent review.

The report’s scathing assessment and its 28 recommendations highlight the need for reviews of financial regulations and the make-up of the board, better oversight and scrutiny, reporting to the board, and for the public interest test being foremost in terms of transparency. The report also highlighted that not enough attention is paid to conflicts of interest, including those of the mayor. Seriously, the report highlights procurement issues, including the decision mentioned by my noble friend Lady Armstrong to change the balance of ownership in favour of the private owners to a 90/10 split, and the balance of risk between the public and the private sector, when to date the public sector seems to have taken the bulk of the risk and been responsible for the costs invested while the private sector has had the benefit of the profits.

There are very serious questions to answer about whether it has all been in the best interests of the people of Teesside. Have they had value for money for their public investment? As my noble friend Lady Armstrong indicated, the report asks more questions than it answers, questions that the people of the north-east deserve and have a right to have answered. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, why will the Government not accept the offer of the National Audit Office for a forensic financial assessment of what went on?

It is time for a reset on regeneration to ensure that it delivers for people in so many areas across our country who genuinely feel that they have been left behind—because they have been left behind. I hope that the Minister agrees with me on what is needed, a programme that the Labour Party have set out very clearly. We need a stable industrial strategy to create the conditions that businesses need in order to invest. We need to move away from insecure, low-paid jobs and strengthen our programme of apprenticeships, skills and training, and employment rights, to make sure that work pays. We need a national wealth fund to generate the private investment that we need. We need to get to work on building the affordable housing that we know we need as a matter of urgency. We need to speed up our critical infrastructure projects to get Britain moving again. There needs to be a complete reform of the planning system, so that it works for the builders not the bureaucrats, and investment in clean British power for cheaper bills and energy security.

We are all hoping on this side that the general election will come soon so that the British people can decide whether they want more of the decline of the last 14 years or a Britain where growth comes from the grass roots, where growth serves both people and businesses—a Britain with its future back.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Swinburne) (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, for tabling this important debate on local regeneration of former industrial areas across the whole of the United Kingdom. We have visited a very large swathe of the United Kingdom in today’s debate, also talking about the challenges constraining such regeneration. I thank all noble Lords for their considered and insightful contributions today, some of which I agree with—not all, but I am sure that we can work our way through them.

I too grew up in a former industrial area, in south-west Wales. I went to school during the miners’ strike as the granddaughter of a miner. I spent a large number of my years as an MEP supporting Welsh economic developments through the EU’s convergence funds, looking at how you regenerate some of those industrial areas. Therefore, I have some first-hand experience, share your Lordships’ aspirations for these areas and support their redevelopment.

However, as we all know, over the last 50 years the UK has seen fast and extensive deindustrialisation, with a lasting impact in many areas, including, as we have heard, the north, Yorkshire and the Humber, my own country of Wales and certainly the Midlands. That is to name but a few. We have heard today even more examples of where this has happened.

Although London and much of the UK have flourished under the new economic trends, former industrial centres that were once the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution have struggled, and continue to do so. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and all sorts of other noble Lords here, that this is not right. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, average wages in London in 2019 were 60% higher than those in Scarborough and Grimsby, with the top 10% of earners in London earning nearly twice as much per hour. Half of working-age adults in London and Brighton have university degrees, compared with less than one-fifth in places such as Doncaster or Mansfield. We are under no illusions about the scale of the challenge to regenerate these former industrial areas, and that is precisely why we have made it central to this Government’s levelling-up agenda.

I know that the noble Lords will have heard this before, but it bears repeating: for this Government, levelling up means ensuring that your life chances are not determined by where you grow up. It means addressing entrenched regional disparities to unlock economic growth everywhere and ensuring that people benefit from these rises in living standards and well-being. Nowhere is this more important than in our post-industrial heartlands—places where once, a location meant a life path. Now, while celebrating the cultural history and heritage of these places, we are committed to unlocking their full and wide-ranging potential.

Before turning to specific issues that noble Lords have raised in the debate, I will talk through some of what the Government are doing to try to make this happen. We are rolling out gigabit broadband across the UK; introducing education investment areas; opening freeports; increasing the national living wage; launching the long-term plan for towns and the anti-social behaviour action plan, while recruiting more police officers; and, importantly, delivering through our extensive local growth funds, including the levelling up fund and the UK shared prosperity fund. Through the third round of the levelling up fund, we are investing a further £1 billion in 55 projects across the length and breadth of the UK.

As many noble Lords have mentioned, we are using the levelling-up needs metrics to target funding at the places that need it the most, ensuring that every part of the country benefits. Multiple projects in former industrial areas are benefiting, such as the £20 million South Shields riverside transformation project, the £19.5 million River Tyne regeneration infrastructure project and, as the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, will appreciate, the £19.8 million project in Bradford to support and enhance Keighley’s engineering, manufacturing and economic role in the region, to name but a few. We have granted town deals exceeding £20 million to a number of other former industrial areas. As well as Barnsley, Doncaster and Wakefield, we are including 12 more that were announced yesterday by the Chancellor. They will receive £20 million each to invest in community regeneration over the next decade; it will be led by local people in order to be determined by local need.

Beyond our funds, post-industrial areas in the Midlands, such as Stoke-on-Trent and Mansfield, are being supported by bespoke and intensive levelling up partnerships. Levelling up requires a multifaceted approach, as many noble Lords have said today, from catalysing industrial clusters in the sectors that will drive the future economy to supercharging our city regions, to supporting our struggling towns and local areas.

We know that the challenge is large and recognise that it is not a simple task. It will not be achieved through quick wins. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich said, restoring pride in place across all areas of the UK, including those with a strong historic cultural identity, will take time. The current economic context makes this even harder, but even more essential, and so this is why structural and systemic change is so important, not least the empowerment of local leaders. I agree with many noble Lords who have spoken today that local decision-making is best. To this end, we have set ourselves a clear mission that, by 2030, every part of England that wants one will have a devolution deal, with powers at, or approaching, the highest level of devolution, with a simplified, long-term funding settlement.

Since 2022, we have announced nine new devolution deals, many of which are for post-industrial areas. These include, as many noble Lords know, a new mayoral combined authority deal for York and North Yorkshire, as well as Hull and East Yorkshire, the first ever mayoral combined county authority deal in the east Midlands and a second mayoral combined county authority deal announced with Greater Lincolnshire.

This May, the north-east will become the first region to be entirely covered by a mayoral devolution. A new north-east mayoral combined authority will be established, which will mean that every person in the north-east will have their own authority and elected leader, making decisions in their best interests. English devolution currently covers about 14.2 million people, taking the proportion now covered by a devolution deal to greater than 64%—up from 40% just a few years ago.

I turn to some of the other issues that were raised. We also recognise the challenges facing the local government sector and have committed to reducing the complexity of local government funding. I note the comments from many noble Lords. We have listened to local partners. In July 2023, we published our plan to simplify the funding landscape. Through this, we are delivering a more transparent, simple and accountable approach to funding and we are beginning to put this into action. For example, we have adopted a new approach to the third and final round of the levelling up fund, which has moved away from competition and made use of the large number of high-quality bids submitted in round 2. This was designed to reduce burdens on applicants and maximise efficiency.

Similarly, the UK shared prosperity fund provides local authorities more flexibility with a three-year allocation that they can choose how to spend on local priorities or projects. The most recent local government finance settlement for 2024-25 makes some £64.7 billion available to councils across the country—an increase in core spending power on 2023-24 of up to £4.5 billion or 7.5% in cash terms. We appreciate that they have more work to do and are therefore trying to fund them appropriately.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The Secretary of State made an outrageous statement this week about local authorities using consultants. They are used mostly to put together the very bids that the noble Baroness just set out. Can she please take back to the Secretary of State that it is absolutely wrong to criticise local government, which is starved of resources anyway for the reasons we all know about and is desperately trying to get hold of some of the funding to which she referred? The only way that local government can do this is by bringing in consultants to put its bids together; it does not have the resources otherwise. I ask the noble Baroness to take that back to the department and get it to think about this again.

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I give the noble Baroness that assurance: I will take that back to the department. It is my first week in the department, so I do not have an answer for her now, but I will speak to the civil servants and my Secretary of State.

I will continue. The settlement includes additional measures for local authorities in England, announced on 24 January, which will be worth an additional £600 million. We are trying to provide local authorities with as much bespoke support as possible, knowing that they have more jobs to do to deliver some of these programmes.

The work that we have done to create a climate for investment through the development of our freeports and investment zones programmes will drive up living standards and regenerate selected areas. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and some others, I think that the freeport initiative will be a source of jobs and investment. So far, we have created 12 freeports, eight of which are in former industrial areas—including in Teesside, the east Midlands, the Humber, Plymouth and the Solent—two are green freeports in Scotland and two are in Wales. All are now open for business and creating jobs.

Freeports are all about securing economic futures, and that of the UK as a whole, by reorienting regional economies towards innovative, low-carbon sectors such as renewables and advanced manufacturing. I believe that we are already seeing some movement here, with 6,000 jobs expected to be created and £2.9 billion of investment promised. They are also creating high-quality jobs across the UK, right in the communities where they are needed most.

Meanwhile, our investment zones programme recognises that the UK has underperformed in leveraging the success of key industries and certain research strengths, so they will be established in places with significant unmet productivity potential, many of which have a rich industrial history. For example, the zones in South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and the north-east of England are focusing on clusters associated with advanced manufacturing, nodding to their industrial heritage while investing further in high-potential industries of the present and the future.

The Government recognise the crucial role played by the private sector in the levelling-up agenda through schemes such as investment zones and freeports. We aim to enable and empower the private sector to increase investment, jobs and growth at a local level. Good quality, self-sustaining growth will be delivered through capitalising on the growing industries of the future. That includes manufacturing, where our funding is targeted to ensure that UK industry copes with the fundamental changes to remain at the forefront of the global transition to net zero. We are committed to growing the economy and ensuring that funding does not focus solely on the most successful sectors today but looks ahead as we keep pace internationally and build the UK’s expertise for the industries of the future.

In acknowledging many noble Lords’ close ties to the north-east region, I am delighted to draw attention to the recent announcement of a £40 million funding package to accelerate Teesside regeneration. Middlesbrough, alongside Redcar and Cleveland, will receive £20 million each—a total of £40 million—to help ramp up improvements, with targeted projects planned to revitalise high streets, healthcare, transport and education, and to create more affordable housing.

Finally, in County Durham, where I understand that the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, served as Member of Parliament, the market town of Bishop Auckland, which expanded to serve the coal industry, has been awarded £53 million from the Government’s future high streets fund and towns fund to support its development as a visitor destination of national significance. I look forward to visiting, given that my grandparents come from there. This investment will help diversify and enhance the town centre, improve transport connectivity and provide new skills and enterprise opportunities for young people. I hope noble Lords will acknowledge that that is a fitting response to celebrate the town’s proud industrial heritage.

I have a very large number of questions that I will try to zip through. My handwriting is appalling, so please forgive me if I stumble. I really empathise with the pride that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, has in her home area. It certainly made me think about my upbringing in my area. To date, approximately £1.4 billion in levelling-up funding has been allocated to projects in the north-east and Tees Valley. This funding covers a range of regeneration priorities, including addressing the local skills gap and developing emerging sectors in former industrial areas. Across all three rounds of the levelling up fund, the north-east has received more per capita than any other English region, alongside wider programmes including devolution deals, levelling-up partnerships and our long-term plan for towns. This shows our commitment to level up the region.

I turn to some of the remarks that many noble Baronesses and noble Lords made with respect to the Teesworks controversy. Following the concerns raised about Teesworks and the actions of the Tees Valley Combined Authority, we commissioned an independent external review, which was published on Monday 29 January. This found no evidence of corruption or illegality but made a series of constructive recommendations regarding the governance and transparency of the project. For the two recommendations relevant to central government, we will carefully consider how to support the continued success of the mayoral development corporation across the country and the recommendations regarding the landfill tax. The Secretary of State made a written request to the Tees Valley mayor, asking him to set out how he intends to respond to the panel’s recommendations by 8 March. This has already been done, and we hope to publish all this in a very short time.

I have been asked why the National Audit Office should not examine this. I have a note here to tell me that the NAO’s role is not to audit or examine individual local authorities, and its powers would not normally be used for that purpose. It would therefore be inappropriate to expand its role so significantly by asking it to lead this inquiry.

The panel that did this investigation was made up of individuals with significant experience in assurance and local government. The panel spent months investigating thoroughly, and found no evidence of corruption or fraud. Its report has been published; I am sure noble Lords have all read it, as they have alluded to. It was published a week after we received it. We welcome the constructive recommendations and are actively considering the way in which these relate to central government.

Domestic Violence Refuges: Charities and Local Government

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, in the last couple of months we have given £600 million extra to local authorities because we understand the pressures they are under. We are keeping an eye on those pressures, and we encourage all local authorities which have difficulties with their budgets to talk to us early on, so that we can work with them. Local authority budgets have been increased by 7.5% this year, and as my noble friend said, local authorities prioritise domestic abuse victims in their budgeting.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a founder and patron of Survivors Against Domestic Abuse. Last Thursday, my honourable friend Jess Phillips read out in the other place—as she does every year—the names of 98 women killed as a result of violence over the last year: a heartbreaking tribute to lives broken and lost to violence. After every case of domestic homicide, we are told that lessons will be learned. Does the Minister agree that providing safe spaces to live for women who flee violence—a project we started in Stevenage, and which now provides 35 homes across Hertfordshire—is vital? However, it is in serious danger of being stopped because such local authority spending is discretionary. Will she meet with me to hear more about this work?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I would be more than happy to meet the noble Baroness to learn about that, and I thank her for everything she is doing in her county. As recently as this weekend, we heard so much about violence against women. The Home Office is taking this issue extremely seriously and a large amount of money is going into extra police training, particularly on tackling domestic abuse. Some £3.3 million has been committed over the next three years to support delivery of Domestic Abuse Matters training to police officers. Let us hope that this changes things.

Housebuilding

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

As I have said previously, SMEs play a critical role in housebuilding and in the housing market in this country. Through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, we have made changes to the planning system that will support SMEs to build more homes by making the planning process easier to navigate, faster and more predictable. The Government have recently announced policies that will support SME housebuilders, including an expansion of the ENABLE Build guarantee scheme, Homes England’s pilots of SME-only land sales and updating the community infrastructure levy guidance. So we are in the same place as my noble friend and we will be working with this sector very closely in the future.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a specific recommendation in the excellent CMA report regarding targets:

“More objective and effective use of targets to ensure housing need is met”


are needed. With the Government caving in to pressure from Back-Benchers in the other place and scrapping housing targets, and the developers putting profit before people’s homes, will the Government now reinstate those housing targets and make a long-term plan to deliver the homes we need, preferably in the new “new towns” that the Labour Party is promoting?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, let me make it clear that we have delivered 2.5 million extra homes in the last 14 years. Since 2018, we have also delivered the four highest annual building numbers for 30 years, and we are on target for 1 million more homes in this Parliament. We are delivering, but we have been through an economic crisis. We are coming out of it, and we will start to build more homes in the future.