Private Rented Sector

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, we welcome the publication of the Government’s White Paper and the recognition in the Statement that

“conditions in our private rented sector are simply not good enough”.

I want to consider some of the 12 points of action that it introduces.

Section 21 evictions will be abolished, meaning that landlords will have to prove grounds to evict tenants. New grounds will be created to allow landlords to sell or move close family members in, while grounds around persistent rent arrears and anti-social behaviour will be strengthened. Landlords will be able to evict tenants on sale or moving-in grounds only after the first six months of the tenancy. If the landlord chooses to sell and is unable to do so, they will not be able to re-let the property for three months. Otherwise, tenancies will be indefinite and can be ended only by the tenant or the landlord giving legitimate notice. It is welcome that these changes should stop landlords from evicting tenants simply to re-let at a higher rent or to avoid making repairs after a complaint, but it must be made clear how renters or local authorities will be made aware of a property that is being re-let.

Indefinite tenancies will mean that tenants have the option of moving out with two months’ notice without penalty if their circumstances change or if the home turns out not to be suitable, which, again, we welcome. This should provide renters with more flexibility. However, there is a risk that if it is too easy to prove intention to sell or move family into a property, unscrupulous landlords could abuse this, creating Section 21 by the back door. Penalties for abuse should be easy to enforce. Scotland has wrongful termination orders, which can see tenants evicted on false grounds compensated. One of the big challenges for local authorities is the lack of skills and resources to enforce the law, so this must be addressed if we are to see success in this area. Can the Minister outline how the Government intend to deliver enforcement?

With fixed terms gone, automatic rent increases in the contract are also gone. If landlords want to raise the rent, they will need to use Section 13 notices, a maximum of once a year, which can be challenged at tribunal. It should follow that tenants can challenge Section 13 notices or negotiate with their landlord with less of a threat of eviction hanging over them. Extra notice of rent increases will give tenants more time to challenge if they deem it necessary. As things stand, landlords in areas with high demand for homes will still be able easily to use unaffordable rent rises to force tenants out, so does the Minister agree that there needs to be a limit set on rent rises based on affordability?

Does the Minister also agree that a key element in giving greater security, transparency and power to tenants is to ensure that letting agencies, which act on a landlord’s behalf, work to the very highest standards? Will he commit to looking at a code of conduct for letting agents, as has been done in Wales?

I turn to the welcome measure to require all privately rented homes to meet the decent homes standard and the new right to claim back rent on non-decent homes through expanded rent repayment orders. Private renting has grown as social housing has been sold off and not replaced, and, as a result, more people are paying more for less-regulated homes. However, the need to build more social housing is a debate for another day. Bringing standards into line with the social sector will stop private landlords from short-changing renters and, through the benefits system, taxpayers. Expanding RROs is welcome; they need to be a huge deterrent to criminal landlords but are currently underused. Can the Minister confirm that local councils will be given the resources they need to properly enforce the decent homes standard?

The new ombudsman that all landlords must join is a positive step, as this has been a huge gap in regulation. Currently, if you rent from a letting agency, you can pursue complaints through a redress scheme, but not if renting directly from a landlord. However, to be successful, it needs to be well-resourced so it can deal with the sheer volume of complaints that tenants will likely raise. Can the Minister shed any light, at this stage, as to how it will be resourced? A single ombudsman is better than the two-scheme system that exists for agents. So it is surprising that, despite acknowledging the confusion and perverse incentives resulting from competing schemes, nothing has been proposed about making changes for letting agents. Can the Minister explain why this is the case?

A digital property portal will be set up to help landlords demonstrate their compliance with legal requirements. This is basically what a landlord register looks like, so can the Minister confirm whether it is the Government’s intention to introduce a national register of landlords? Although councils will be responsible for enforcing portal membership, the Government should give tenants an incentive to take action if their landlord is not registered. This already happens with licensing schemes, and tenants with unlicensed landlords can get back up to 12 months’ rent via rent repayment orders. Is this something that the Government will consider?

One in three private renters lives with children, and nearly 40% of private renters rely on benefits, yet landlords are still able to deny both those groups a tenancy. So it is good to see this addressed with a proposal to outlaw blanket bans on children and benefit claimants. However, discrimination on these grounds often happens because many landlords do not trust the welfare system to cover their tenants’ rent, so the underlying problems still need to be addressed: universal credit delays and sanctions, the benefit cap and local housing allowance rates. Further, despite rapidly rising inflation, the Government are cutting funding available to local councils to support struggling renters through discretionary housing payments by £40 million. Can the Minister explain how he thinks this is going help the thousands of renters who are struggling with the cost of living crisis?

The White Paper also pledges to monitor private sector solutions to problems with deposits between tenancies and to keep the deposit protection system under review. Disappointingly, this is a retreat from the Government’s manifesto commitment to a lifetime deposit which would allow passporting of deposits between tenancies. Problems with deposits are probably the most common negative experience for private renters, so it is frustrating to see that it is only being kept under review. Can the Minister explain why this is the case?

I will say a few words on court reform. The Government are looking to digitalise the court process, but renters who are digitally excluded must still be supported. In addition, a digital approach will not always be suitable in some cases. Does the Minister agree that more funding could be provided to the courts so that they can deal with backlogs and more legal support could be provided to the renters who need it most?

I end by thanking the organisation, Generation Rent, for all its hard work on this issue. I look forward to this short debate and to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I say to the Minister that there is general support across all sectors for these reforms in the White Paper, which we too broadly agree with. In fact, I agree with so much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has said that I could just say, “#MeToo” and sit down—but I am not going to. I will not go through the proposals and rationales for each point in the White Paper, because I believe that there will be opportunities to do that later. I want to stress our key points that we would seek a chance to influence and explore.

First, we are disappointed by the speed at which this has gone. We are now only going into consultations and pilots, not legislation—at a time when homelessness and evictions are set to rise. Does the Minister have any timelines or milestones for us?

Our greatest area of support for these reforms—and, paradoxically, of concern—is around evictions. We totally applaud the ban on no-fault evictions, but ask whether any lessons have been learned from Scotland about the application in reality of the new grounds for eviction. How tightly are they drawn, and how have they measured success? Let us take one example which the noble Baroness mentioned: eviction because the landlord wishes to sell the home. How will that be proved and dealt with, or are the Government considering recourse, as happens in Ireland?

We know that revenge evictions are more common than we might like and hope that the decent homes standard and the annual rent rise will discourage such evictions, as do the Government. But even after a year, a tenant can still be priced out of a flat by an unreasonable, excessive rise in rent that they can ill afford. Have the Government considered encouraging rent rises only in between tenancies—a practice that many good landlords already do? Given that the cost of living crisis will not be short lived, what, if anything, will the Government do to curb excessive rent rises, or will it all be left to the market? Why have the Government yet again decided to freeze the local housing allowance?

The Government’s commitment to extending a legally binding decent homes standard to the sector is a potential game-changer, but only if there is enough capacity in the system to monitor and enforce it. Local authorities are definitely down on capacity and funding. What reassurances can the Minister give us that there will be capacity and resources within the system to enforce this standard—a vital part of the reforms?

Regarding capacity, the proposal for a private sector ombudsman is a good one. After all, there is one for the social housing sector. But we know that the social housing ombudsman is under pressure due to capacity issues already, so how will this one be any different? After years of stressed budgets and the demands of the pandemic, will the Government use one of the pilot schemes to review the available capacity of all the partners whom they will need on board to make sure these reforms work, and look at how their roles effectively all knit together?

Finally, there is a legitimate concern in the sector that these changes will force landlords out of the system at a time when we need more, not fewer. Is there a danger of unintended consequences? There is some anecdotal evidence that this is happening in areas popular with tourists, such as Cornwall, the Lake District and Edinburgh. Homes once for long-term let are now seen on more lucrative Airbnb sites. Consequently, locals are priced out of the housing market due to second home owners and they are unable to rent due to a lack of supply. Do the Government recognise this as an issue? If so, are there any possibilities of looking at ways to incentivise landlords to stick with longer-term lettings? There will be time to go into detail in the future, but hopefully not too far in the future.

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Opposition and Liberal Democrat Front Benches for a constructive critique of this important Statement. There is a recognition on all sides of the House that the private rented sector is the most expensive, least secure and lowest quality of all housing tenures. A fifth of renters are paying a third of their income to live in substandard accommodation, which is completely unacceptable. I think that is why the chief executive of Shelter described the proposals around the 12-point plan as a game-changer for the 11 million private renters in England.

This White Paper really is the biggest set of reforms in a generation. It seeks to ensure that tenants have access to safe and decent homes; to increase security and stability by abolishing Section 21, which I know is supported by the vast majority of people in this Chamber—I have not come across anyone who is against that; to improve dispute resolution but, importantly, ensure that there is better compliance and robust enforcement; and to improve the renting experience for private rented sector tenants.

I turn to some of the points raised in this short debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, raised enforcement of the decent homes standard, which is a centre point of the reform programme. We will consult on applying the decent homes standard to the private rented sector shortly and carry out a number of pilot schemes across the country to explore different ways of enforcing the standards, because it is important that we do not have the decent homes standard just defined but with an inability to enforce.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, also wanted to know why these reforms have taken so long to come forward. It is a legitimate question, but we have had a global pandemic and in the last couple of years we have been focused on supporting tenants during the pandemic with longer notice periods, a ban on bailiff evictions and unprecedented financial support. We have made the very clear commitment to bring forward this renters reform Bill in the third Session, and this White Paper is an important part of getting this right. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get these reforms right.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, quite rightly wanted to know how these new reforms would be enforced. I have talked about the pilots, but equally the property portal will make sure that local authorities have the information they need to enforce the standards so that we are not relying, as we currently are, on tenants coming forward to point out when there is an issue.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Thornhill and Lady Hayman, both raised the cost of living issue. The Government do not support rent controls. When this was introduced in the 1970s, we saw a disincentive and a private rented sector that did not get the quality of housing and investment that we needed. That is why we feel that focusing on allowing an increase in rents only once a year and ending rent review clauses are ways of ensuring that we get a more reasonable approach to rent increases.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, raised an interesting question around the burdens on landlords and whether we are going to get the unintended consequence of more Airbnbs and fewer people wanting to let. The English Housing Survey says that we are seeing some landlords leaving but an equal number coming in, so there is no evidence from the survey yet of an exodus of landlords. It is important that we think about landlords in these reforms, though, and that is why we have strengthened the repossession grounds for landlords, including in cases of serious anti-social behaviour and persistent arrears, and for landlords who wish to move back to their property.

I think there was a strong element of a briefing from Generation Rent in some of the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. Certainly, I am aware of the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, about the no-fault moving and selling grounds, wanting to extend that to 24 months and not seeing a Section 21, if you like, by the back door.

As a Government we feel that it is important to protect tenants, and that is why we are limiting the use of moving and selling grounds in the first six months of a tenancy. To mitigate any abuse, we are also restricting landlords from remarketing or reletting the property for three months when they use these grounds. It is about getting a balance between landlord and tenant.

Overall, it is fair to say that there is a fair wind behind these reforms. It is important, as they say, to get things done and better late than never.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I am sure the Government are happy to look at ideas. We have had ideas from Wales, Scotland and Ireland that I am sure the policy officials can look at and advise Ministers on. We have to recognise that there are often unintended consequences on supply if you tinker too much in the private rented market and try to control rent levels. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, that you might find it more lucrative to use Airbnb than to have longer term rents. I think that what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is really saying is that to tackle the affordability crisis we need a fair amount of taxpayer subsidised housing, whether that is affordable rent or social rent. We recognise that as a Government. Not every person can own their own home or afford market rents. That is why we need a steady supply of affordable housing available around the country. We need communities of mixed tenure to allow households with different incomes to live cheek by jowl. That is good social policy and something that the Government certainly support.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

In that case, may I ask why the Government have frozen the local housing allowance, which was the question I asked, if they have what sounds like a very sincere commitment to social housing? Following what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans said, I was thinking that the people we are really concerned about, with the grottiest landlords and flats and the worst deals, in the past would have been in the social housing sector being looked after by good councils and housing associations. We are really trying to play catch up but let us not kid ourselves; it is a huge task that we have.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

It is fair to say that we raised the local housing allowance and maintained that raise. What the noble Baroness is saying is that we have not increased it further. Let us give the Government credit for having raised it in the first place and having maintained it. The reality is that it goes back to getting the balance of tenures right. We have far too many people who cannot afford to live in market-rate accommodation and therefore they need taxpayer support. The housing benefit bill has effectively ballooned from when I was first a council leader from around £7 billion to around £30 billion, I think—or at least, that is what the projections are. That is completely unsustainable. We need more affordable housing and social housing to mitigate the unintended consequences of getting the taxpayer to fund these very high-cost homes for people who cannot afford to live in them. That is why there is a need to look at other ways of answering that point.

Leasehold Reform: Forfeiture Provisions

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I always thank my noble friend for his interventions. We want to move forward with the second stage of leasehold reform. It will not be part of the third Session but there is a commitment to this Parliament. My noble friend is right that we can use this time to get a Bill drafted. We will take time so that we can get it through Parliament as soon as possible at the beginning of the fourth Session.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I look forward to the leasehold reform.

Two weeks ago, I attended a meeting of leaseholder residents in a block of retirement flats. It will be no surprise to the Minister that their main complaint was the exorbitant increases in management fees, with no transparency of cost or answers as to why the increase had in one year gone from 5% to nearly 16%. When will the Government finally put a stop to this obfuscation and general bad practice by regulating management companies, as advised by the Government’s own expert working group, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Best, back in 2019?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Once again, the noble Baroness is right that we need to sort out some of the practices that we see among managing agents. We are still considering how to take forward the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Best, but as noble Lords know, there is also a move to introduce voluntary codes, which I hope will elevate this. Overall, we need to see professionalisation of managing agents.

Social Homes for Rent

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

The noble Lord is right that we have seen a spiralling increase in housing benefit costs—staggering increases over the past decade or so. Of course, taking poor-quality private rented accommodation and turning it into high-quality affordable housing is a good thing and provides value for money for the taxpayer.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

The Government’s recent announcement that right to buy is being extended to housing association properties will even further deplete the stock of homes for social rent. Is it now time to allow councils to keep 100% of their receipts from right to buy in order to rebuild and to give them the ability to set the discounts locally that their particular circumstances dictate?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I have some sympathy with the point that the noble Baroness makes, but we should point out that there are now greater flexibilities around right-to-buy receipts—not necessarily 100%, but they are greater. We have also removed the cap on borrowing for the housing revenue account, and that is why we are seeing councils building far more homes than they previously did.

Levelling-up Report

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Local government has a critical part to play in levelling up the country. I would point out the commitment through both the UK shared prosperity fund and the levelling-up funds to turbocharge the 12 missions outlined in the Bill.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I am particularly interested in the aspirations around housing that are implicit throughout the levelling-up agenda. Given the northern consortium’s recent report on the fact that it is actually the quality of existing homes in the north that is a key factor in poverty and other indicators, what plans do the Government have, besides building brand new houses, to look after the existing stock that is in poor condition?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

It is important that we think about our existing stock. As Building Safety Minister, I think that the quality of housing is incredibly important. One of the key headline metrics is the proportion of non-decent rented homes and ensuring that we continue to drive this down and increase the number of homes that have achieved the decent homes standard, which will be adopted within the private rented sector as well.

Leaseholders: Costs

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We will move from principle into practice in a matter of months, but this problem has occurred over decades. Sadly, every decade, there has been a significant fire in a high-rise where there was a loss of life: Garnock Court in 1999, Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 and the tragedy of Grenfell in 2017. Governments knew that cladding was often the cause, as it was in Garnock Court, and the regulations were actually dampened down under a previous Labour Government, who inserted the word “adequately”. It is a mess that took decades; give us months to sort it out.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Notwithstanding the Minister’s earlier comments, housing associations and councils too face a challenging situation. Both the LGA and the National Housing Federation have evidenced the double whammy of the financial burden to remedy the fire safety issues for the tenants and, consequently, less money to invest in their existing stock—in particular, to build new social and affordable homes. In the recent rethinking, please will the Minister agree to look specifically at the situation faced by housing associations and councils and consider widening the criteria for support for any money that is available? This is their tenants’ rent money, after all, and they too should not have to pay for 20 years of industry failure.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Of course we want to protect leaseholders and ensure that social landlords can build new homes of high quality but, far too often, they as developers were in charge of building homes of poor quality, and they need to fix those homes. The figures are that, as of 31 October, £97.3 million has been approved from the building safety fund, and there is the £200 million to remove cladding of aluminium composite material. We are doing what we can to protect leaseholders, but we recognise the challenges faced by registered providers.

Levelling Up White Paper

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I agree entirely with my noble friend. We do not want anyone to have to leave somewhere they love in order to have a truly fulfilling career. That is why we are investing £3.8 billion in skills by 2024-25 and have just set up our new adult numeracy programme, Multiply, to get hundreds of thousands more adults with functional numeracy skills across the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Minister, successive Governments have grappled with this one under various names and the consensus is that they have largely failed. Do the Government recognise that the fragmented system of funding and bidding is part of this failure? Recently, the LGA found evidence that £23 billion of public funds aimed at regeneration were fragmented across 70 different funding streams and managed by 22 different departments or agencies. Are there any signs that the Government will change this scattergun approach?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, just because previous Governments have failed does not mean that this Government will not succeed. However, I take on board the importance of ensuring that there is appropriate streamlining and that we do not have a scattergun approach to funding. The point is well made.

Council Tax: Second Homes

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Thornhill]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce legislation prohibiting second homes advertised as holiday rentals from avoiding council tax by registering for business rates and thereby qualifying for small business rate relief.

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

I recognise the noble Baroness’s interest in this issue. The Government have confirmed that we will legislate to require that holiday rentals meet an actual letting threshold before being assessed for business rates. This will ensure that only genuine holiday businesses can access the rate relief for small businesses. We will set out further details shortly in the Government’s consultation response.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

Minister, this at last is a Cornish/Cumbrian Lib Dem campaign success—I can see the leaflets now. Can he explain why it has taken so long and say when we will get a timetable and conclusions of the 2018 consultation that was never actually published? Does he agree that salt has been rubbed into the wound, given that unscrupulous second-home owners have also received £104 million from Cornwall’s Covid aid pot, thus reducing the amount available to legitimate businesses?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I should have registered my residential and commercial property interests, although I have not tried to use this loophole. The Government announced in March that we will legislate, and we have been working very closely with the Treasury and the Valuation Office Agency to finalise the details of how and when this will be implemented. This of course takes time and we will publish our consultation response shortly.

Land Use Framework

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness for bringing forward this debate. If Thursday afternoon debates were a novel, they would certainly not be a bodice-ripper or an edge-of-the-seat thriller, but more a literary heavyweight: challenging, sometimes difficult to get to grips with, but always an opportunity to learn and to explore difficult issues. The noble Baroness’s subject matter today is very much in the latter category, and I have to say that I admire her staying power. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Harlech.

As a former elected mayor and a vice-president of the LGA, I will be looking at this issue through the lens of local government and from the planning perspective, while being confident that other noble Lords will be sharing their considerable expertise on the environmental and broader issues.

What has surprised me in my reading for this debate is that there has been a fairly steady and consistent appeal for a land use framework over many years and, indeed, several reports with recommendations to adopt one or something similar. Indeed, such a tool exists in all the devolved Governments. Can the Minister say whether there has yet been any capture of the benefits or otherwise of the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish experiences, each of which appear to have involved slightly different approaches? I believe we should be looking to learn from them.

It was, therefore, surprising to me that the Government are resisting this and, indeed, going further and saying it is not really needed as other policies and plans, in effect, do the job of such a strategy. Hearing the responses of the noble Lords, Lord Gardiner of Kimble and Lord Goldsmith, during consideration of the Environment Bill confirmed my belief. However, to judge by the evidence presented by these various reports and inquiries, it appears it is often not happening at all, and where it is it could be better.

In its recent study, Planning for a Better Future, the Royal Town Planning Institute points out that there are already many spatial instruments and plans in places, but—the “but” is important—they treat the environment in siloes, not connecting issues such as water availability and quality, social quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity and habitats. They are often administered and financed separately, with problems of single-issue streams of finance, and managed on short decision timescales, with notable gaps. They seem distant from and unaccountable to local people. Our current situation calls for something far more radical and potentially game-changing. This proposal will seek to address some fundamental key dilemmas and challenges of land use: will it be possible to grow enough food, restore biodiversity in nature, decarbonise the economy and adapt to climate change, while building all the homes, transport and infrastructure that the Government have promised over the next decade?

While such a framework would, by necessity, be very high level, it is also important to address the concerns of ordinary citizens. When I speak to residents, usually when they are bitterly complaining about development, I ask them, “What percentage of land do you believe is built on?” They always get it massively wrong and are shocked when you say, “Less than 20%, and half of that is parks and gardens”. In tight urban areas, it certainly feels that high city densities, while highly sustainable, are built to protect someone else’s view of a field that once grew food. So a fundamental question to us all is: how is it decided whose quality of life is more important? Is it the person in the tower block or the village dweller? Another question is: is that really the best use of the land? Could it not be used for something better? How could that be determined?

It is now generally accepted that we could never again build to the densities of, say, Milton Keynes or the garden cities, yet there has been no attempt at all to take the public with us on this challenging journey. At his party conference, our Prime Minister recently declared that there should be no need for houses to be built on green-belt land, to cheers from the party faithful living in the leafy shires. But what are the implications for those living in urban settings? Must the ever-growing numbers of tower blocks increase, not only in number but in storeys, to accommodate government targets for housing need? Where is the land-use discussion here? They are popping up now in suburbia and Metroland, not just in the city smoke. Do we need new settlements? Where, what type and when? Perhaps a land-use framework could usefully flush out these difficult issues and contradictions and provide a context for these conversations.

We have a Government determined to build 300,000 homes a year to meet an obvious housing crisis. Surely that aspiration needs some big thinking about land use. The Government’s own figures show that enough brownfield sites are available to build 1 million homes. That sounds like a lot, but it is really only three years’ supply. Even local authorities have to provide a five-year land supply. The Government have their disingenuous housing delivery test—it is disingenuous because it seeks to punish local government for the lack of delivery of homes, over which it has no power, and not over the number of planning applications granted, over which it has power. Perhaps the Government should revisit their own Letwin review.

Add to the pot the fact that we have a public who sometimes seem to have gone from nimbies to BANANAs —build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody—as a glance at any local news media will prove. Yet, when knocking on doors and talking to people, once they have got their, “We don’t need any more flats, and no one can afford these homes anyway” off their chest, their heartfelt concerns are usually around the quality of the environment: “Too many cars. The traffic is a nightmare. Where will I be able to park?”, or “I can’t get my child into the local school” and, “My GP waiting times are far too long because they have so many patients on their books”. These are the soft infrastructure issues yet they are very important to the public, for obvious reasons.

From my local government perspective, the Motion calls for land-use planning to be integrated with other land-use activities. At the moment, we have no regional or sub-regional land-use planning, so there is nothing to integrate anything with. That might seem like a statement of the obvious, but the scaffolding that might support such a proposal has been lost to us over the last decade or longer, to the detriment of wider place shaping and planning across a much larger economic region. In short, we have become too parochial, which can work against changes for the greater good. There are too few opportunities for too few councillors to engage with these bigger and broader issues in their area.

It seems that many of the problems associated with planning have arisen because strategies have not been based on a wide enough area. This is most apparent in two-tier areas, where each council has its own local plan, yet the reality of issues and problems to be addressed can cover three or four, or even a whole county or wider economic region.

I still have the scars from trying, while I was mayor of Watford, to work across borders with several authorities around a wide range of issues, where the provision of new infrastructure needed to be built in one area to serve, as they saw it, the needs of another—I would say of the wider area. The recent emphasis on making efficient use of brownfield sites has pushed the level of housing growth in Watford upwards to the sky, so a new secondary school is needed, which cannot be met within the town’s narrow boundaries. We already have a primary school where there is no play space for the children, except on the roof. But when it is proposed in the neighbouring districts, there is opposition on the grounds that, “It’s Watford’s problem. It’s their children.”

There are ways to resolve this, and sometimes it works better than I have portrayed, which is why I am particularly interested in the outcome of the powers and freedoms given to regional mayors and city regions in this regard. I wonder whether there is any possibility of expansion and further development.

“What about the duty to co-operate with each other?”, you might ask. It is well documented that the duty to co-operate does not operate as effectively as it needs to in practice—or indeed at all. However, there is a pressing need for it to be replaced with a new mechanism to deliver joined-up thinking and action for climate change, transport, infrastructure, housing provision and nature recovery. Does the Minister yet have any idea whether that duty will be changed, strengthened or weakened in the new reforms? Finally, why not have a national spatial framework?

Building Safety Defects: Costs

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My noble friend is right that we need more detail. Details of the residential property developer tax will be announced at the Autumn Budget on 27 October, so we will have to wait till then. However, I want to make it clear that the figure of £2 billion over 10 years is an absolute minimum and I hope that we will go far further than that when the rates are finalised.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

As has already been stated, social housing providers are having to pick up the bill for all of their properties. These sums are having a significant impact on their budgets and are detrimental to their ability to provide more, and better-quality, social housing going forward. Are the Government monitoring the impact of this on providers’ budgets, in particular the opportunity cost that is lost to the sector, and looking at how this will affect their ability to do the jobs that they want to do to improve their social, affordable and supported housing properties in the future?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we are working very closely with the sector. I point out that there was a £400,000 fund specifically for providers in the social sector to remove aluminium composite material, the most serious form of unsafe cladding. In addition, where social landlords are thinking of passing costs on to leaseholders, there is an opportunity for them to apply to the building safety fund, which many of them have indeed done.

Supported Housing: Funding

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, as I set out in my original Answer, the focus has been away from ring-fencing of funding, but of the £12 billion that has been provided during this pandemic for local councils to deal with the pressures, £6 billion was non-ring-fenced, and a lot of that money can be prioritised for the issues around housing-related support services to ensure that the quality of the services can be continued.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, there is genuine concern among councils that there is abuse of the exempt accommodation status, which grants housing run by a supported housing provider additional housing benefit. Does the Minister agree that, to do right by the majority of good providers, more must be done to increase the transparency of such accommodation costs and to give councils greater flexibilities and powers to act against those who are failing their most vulnerable tenants? Does he have any feedback from the supported housing pilots that were working on this important issue?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right: we are concerned about quality issues, and that is why we carried out some pilots in Birmingham, Blackburn, Darwen, Hull, Bristol and Blackpool. We do not have the results from those pilots, but that is why we invested £5.4 million—to ensure that there is no drop in quality.