Housing: Young People

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord for introducing this debate. I have been aware of housing challenges, particularly in London and Blackpool, for a long time, but the subject of this debate has encouraged me to look more intensely at the challenges facing the young and at the associated need for wraparound support for our most vulnerable. I work part-time for Business in the Community, focusing on regenerating forgotten places, and have served on the Peabody board.

Let me begin with the problem. There is a crisis in the provision of temporary accommodation. This adds to the financial woes of our local authorities, which are unfairly bearing the brunt of cost of living and post-Covid mental health challenges, with too little money. I have been conscious for a long time of the need to build more houses and bring costs down in London, and I am more newly aware of the shocking state of the housing available to poorer people in Blackpool. This failure to achieve both quantity and quality, as ever, hits the poorest in our societies worst. The latest data from Demos shows that 130,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, double the number in 2011. Councils in London are spending £90 million per month on temporary accommodation as a result of increased numbers and inflation, up 40% from last year. Of these London homeless people, roughly half are children—equivalent to at least one child in every classroom. A particular concern are care leavers, of whom around one-third become homeless in their first three years.

What does this mean for children living in substandard or temporary accommodation? These young people will have disrupted school lives and lower educational attainment, as around half of homeless children have to move school. Young homeless will then be significantly less likely to have a job—around half of Centrepoint users are NEET. Life expectancy will be drastically reduced, given the prevalence of mental and physical health problems. According to Shelter, over half of parents report that temporary accommodation is harming their children’s health. Research has shown that nearly half of the young homeless have mental health challenges.

In Claremont ward in Blackpool, the concentration of families in HMOs converted from old B&Bs gives rise to a subculture where, for instance, many youngsters will not leave their bedrooms post-Covid. There are shocking health statistics, partly caused by the quality of accommodation. In a ward of just 9,000 people, 2,500 have mental health problems, 1,400 have respiratory issues, 900 have diabetes and 600 have asthma. Blackpool hospital reserves 19 beds every single day for unplanned admissions from Claremont, costing £11 million a year.

At this point, I would like to call out the Department for Work and Pensions. I have a great deal of respect for much of its work; for example, I have worked jointly with the department on careers fairs. In Blackpool, however, two things are wrong. First, housing benefit is paid to landlords whose housing is slum standard, with some failing category 1 standards, which means risk of death. Secondly, the help given to jobseekers is given in person, but these youngsters will only engage online at the moment and the DWP does not offer an online interview option for them.

So where are the glimmers of hope? First, there needs to be an urgent focus on providing long-term funding to local authorities to deal with the temporary accommodation crisis in a way that is cheaper, better quality and better suited to the inhabitants. Part of this needs to be linked to wraparound services for these youngsters, who will otherwise end up costing the public purse a great deal more—quite apart from the moral case for doing so. Too often, the housing crisis and challenges in public services are spoken about as separate policy issues, but vulnerable young people and families are in such a difficult housing situation that it has a negative impact on their quality of life and increases their need for other services. We have gained a lot from specialisation of our public services; practice has become more professional and more evidence led. Bradford, in particular, has an impressive research project called Born in Bradford, which follows 13,500 families over 10 years. We know, however, that a failure to join up public services is costing the Government between £1.5 billion and £5 billion a year, according to Demos.

Right to Succeed works in left-behind communities to support the transformation of children and family services, bringing together services to focus on the most vulnerable families. In the process, it becomes clear that different services have different addresses for the same family, but Right to Succeed now has an evidence base for the success of this approach.

In this vein, I would like to mention Element, the social enterprise founded in London by my daughter, and Positive Transitions Pathway in Blackpool. Both these approaches involve focusing on the needs of the care leaver, providing life coaching and being available for support for as long as it takes. Blackpool Council also provides tailored tenancy management. The Element experience of care-leaver accommodation is that it comes in all shapes and sizes; some is public sector, some third and some private, and the quality differs between different providers across all sectors. The lack of regulation of private landlords tends to provide less good accommodation and weaker support. I am aware that some supported accommodation in Blackpool provides feeble support, despite being paid to provide support. In both places, there is an urgent need to introduce decent home standards in the private sector, especially if they are being paid by the public sector for that accommodation.

Let me end on some high points. Following what is known as a “seeing is believing” visit to Sheffield last year, led by Business in the Community, IKEA has offered to provide beds for the hundreds of local children who do not even have a bed to sleep in. Here are two quotes from the youngsters themselves. Fatima, a care leaver, says:

“Before going into Element, things were very difficult. I was struggling with idea of socialising with other people. However, from the beginning, I felt at ease and loved spending time with some amazing staff and young people. Element really helped build my confidence in speaking in front of people. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them”.


Finally, a young Blackpool homeless person said:

“My Positive Transitions officer has helped with loads of different things, and also encouraged and supported me to apply for an internship. I got the job, which has made a massive difference to my finances. I have been able to pass a training course and get a small motorbike. They really helped my transition to adulthood and made living alone a lot less overwhelming”.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to participate in this debate, and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, whom I have known for over 30 years, for his persistent and indefatigable approach to campaigning on housing.

I will talk about two specific macroeconomic societal issues, and then focus on planning and some possible solutions. I will talk first about quantitative easing—I draw noble Lords’ attention to an excellent article in the New Statesman of 1 March—and how it impacts young people. Essentially, the policy of quantitative easing, developed by the coalition Government in 2013 and euphemistically described by George Osborne as “active monetary policy”, actually created an asset price boom and had very significant distributional implications, making asset owners richer, as my noble friend Earl Attlee said, and leaving many young people locked out and relatively poorer. There is a reason, of course, why the polls show that only 8% of 18 to 24 year-olds intend to vote Conservative at the election. You cannot extol the virtues of capitalism if your target market cannot eventually own capital.

In 1979, the right-to-buy policy of the Conservative Party gave ordinary working people a real stake in their future and those of their families and communities. Over the last 10 to 14 years, we have failed to develop policies which similarly deliver for working people. We have seen a collapse in home ownership over the period of the last two or three Parliaments.

On the second issue, immigration, we absolutely have to look at demand. I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Best. Of course, I pay tribute to his expertise. If we are going to have a debate based on empirical evidence and honesty, and in good faith, we cannot ignore the implications of, and the massive changes wrought by, uncontrolled, unfettered immigration, whether it is illegal or, more likely, legal.

Last year, we built 204,000 homes against a target of 300,000. The French regularly build 400,000 to 500,000 homes. The Migration Advisory Committee says that a 1% rise in population generates a 1% rise in house prices. Uncontrolled immigration has a big effect on the rental market too. Net migration of 672,000 is something that cannot just be dismissed from the housing debate. In 15 years, that trend—

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

On the subject of migration, as far as I recall, a very large number of migrants are students. I wonder whether the noble Lord would like to comment on student housing in that context?

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am going to develop my argument in terms of numbers. We are looking at an increase to the population of 6.6 million people, to 74 million by 2036. The indicative figures are that in 15 years, we are going to have to build another 5.7 million homes, or 550,000 homes per annum.

In London, 20 people are chasing every flat. Some 40% of foreign-born individuals are in the private rented sector, as are 75% of new migrants, and 48% of all social housing in London is headed by someone who was not born in the UK. That is an issue that goes to the heart of fairness. I do not think it is defensible, and it is certainly not sustainable. It is about equity and community cohesion.

I want to talk about planning. I believe that the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, although very much lauded, was a missed opportunity. The promise contained in the consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework of 2022 did not come to fruition; it was a missed opportunity. As my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said, the Government capitulated, regrettably, to the nimby, short-termist tendency in the Conservative Party. Robert Colville of the Centre for Policy Studies was quite right when he described that decision, or the decision to reject any housing targets, as “selfish and wicked”.

We have a situation in which scores of local planning authorities have paused, reviewed or abandoned their local plans. That has rendered obsolete previous commitments to local housing targets. It has given a green light to planning committees to block development across the country. The five-year land supply test was dumped, green-belt reviews stopped, and the housing delivery test watered down. This has exacerbated the problems of capacity: many principal authority planning departments have a shortage of well-qualified, experienced and commercially savvy planners in particular, and of properly resourced planning departments.

Reference has been made to the CMA report into the state of the housebuilding industry, published on 28 February. I am glad to say that it put to rest the persistent accusation that major housebuilders are land banking; there was no empirical evidence to support that. But even if they were, surely the broken planning system is logically inherently to blame. The CMA actually said that

“the planning system is exerting a significant downward pressure on the overall number of planning permissions being granted across Great Britain … insufficient to support housebuilding at the level required to meet government targets and … assessed need”.

It made particular reference to the impact on small and medium-sized builders.

I share with the House the observations of the former Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, James Palmer, who was also formerly the leader of East Cambridgeshire District Council. He says, quite rightly:

“Over the past 50 years the Local Plan system (or derivations of it) has failed to deliver the number of homes needed in England, yet we steadfastly refuse to change the way we plan for growth. Local Plans can create the illusion of promoting growth while simultaneously restricting housing development. A carefully drawn line in a town hall can turn landowners into lottery winners. Where developers don’t bring forward housing, landbanks arise. When landowners decide not to sell, new lines need to be drawn. What’s more, local authorities need only throw a cursory glance at what their neighbours are doing, which leads to disjointed and incoherent planning across wider geographies”.


That is a very important point.

The construction industry is still suffering a very difficult hangover from Covid, the Ukraine war, the rising costs of materials and energy, higher interest rates, and skills shortages. In my own area of the east of England, 17% of all business is construction-related—with £18 billion of output, according to the Construction Industry Training Board. Policy changes, especially in planning, have slowed down the construction of new houses, and this was predicted by the Home Builders Federation in March 2022. Professor Noble Francis, the economics director at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, commented:

“There was a sharp fall in house building in December 2023 as house builders continued to focus on cost minimisation and completions for the subdued level of demand rather than starting new developments after the rise in mortgage rates in 2023 that priced out many new buyers, especially first-time buyers”.


Another issue, which we have discussed in your Lordships’ House on a number of occasions, is quango overreach. As your Lordships will know, in August 2023, the Government announced that they would legislate on the impact of defective EU laws intrinsic in the nutrient neutrality regulations. Despite a promise of a £280 million investment over seven years to ameliorate these issues, protect precious habitats, tackle the issue of run-off from agriculture and upgrade wastewater works, your Lordships’ House decided to kibosh that legislation and force the Government to abandon it. We are now in a position where 120,000 homes, according to the Home Builders Federation, have been subject to a moratorium on new builds. That means an unelected and unaccountable quango, Natural England, has stopped 41,000 new houses being built in Norfolk and 18,000 in Somerset, just as an example. In what other advanced, liberal democracy would such a ridiculous and incoherent policy be tolerated?

I welcome some of the things the Government have done in the long-term plan for housing announced last month around SME builders; refocusing on repurposing public sector land and brownfield development; giving greater weight in the NPPF to the benefits of housing delivery in areas of residential housing shortages; and other areas, such as permitted development. But I am not convinced that it is radical enough.

We need to look again at residential estates’ investment trusts. We need tax breaks for supported living for older people. We need to repurpose planning fees to sufficiently resource planning departments. We need to bring back local plans that are up to date to deliver housing. We need to introduce a presumption in favour of development in small sites. We need to abolish stamp duty for all purchases of homes with an EPC rating of B or above. Housing is a national emergency. We also need a Cabinet Minister specifically focusing on housing, as well as a housing ministry. This and previous Governments have, regrettably, failed young people, but it is not too late to begin to develop a vision and an ambition to deliver both for them and for our country more widely.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 57 is about the distribution of levelling-up funding. The premise of it is, first, that levelling-up challenges are by their nature long-term and difficult and, secondly, that any attempt to address them must be locally sensitive and not hampered by different government departments approaching the issue from different perspectives.

My contention is that short-term funding which fails on the above counts is counterproductive, causing local people to be pulled in different directions, chasing money which does not properly address their local needs. A report by the Business in the Community’s place task force, Partnerships in Place, on intervention in forgotten places, says:

“Levelling up funding needs to be flexible, long-term, localised and aligned with the levelling up missions to maximise”


the chances of “transformative change”. It praises, for instance, the Welsh Government’s Communities First programme, which operated for 16 years from 2001 to 2017 and helped 52 of the most deprived places in Wales. The report also makes the point that capital funding should have significant revenue streams aligned with it to ensure that the relevant agencies have the capacity to deliver well.

I will give some examples of good and bad practice related to funds for levelling up, to illustrate my argument. In some ways, literacy improvement is one of the more straightforward missions. It is measurable, and after 18 years of appropriate education, most children could expect to be literate. Let me give some colour to how the funding works in Blackpool and Bradford. Both were opportunity areas and under that banner were addressing literacy. These are sensible, multi-year interventions on social mobility and education, grounded in understanding of local needs. However, the programme finished in September 2022. The 12 areas across the country became “priority education investment areas”, with less money.

Blackpool’s aim is to provide targeted literacy intervention, but it still awaits its current year allocation. What the Government think is happening with those children during this academic year, I cannot imagine. If you delve further into the funding, there are some larger pots available. There is something called a safety valve bid of about £6 million for school buildings for children with special educational needs, and another safety valve bid of £3.8 million, reflecting the support needed for the huge proportion of high-needs young people in the community, but right now, Blackpool does not know whether it is getting any of this money.

In Bradford, again, the opportunity area had been focusing on literacy. At Business in the Community, we now have a newly created group to focus specifically on literacy in Keighley. This involves working with the Bradford Literature Festival, the Asian Women’s and Children’s Centre, the local mosques, local business and the Keighley Schools Together group, among others. We hope to devise a long-term approach to make a measurable difference, which can be a legacy of Bradford being City of Culture 2025. The government opportunity area funding, however, has ceased.

The recent community renewal fund epitomised several aspects of bad practice. Locality said that the short-term timescales—where bids had to be submitted by mid-June and money spent by the following March—coupled with the competitive bidding process, have seriously hampered the CRF’s ability to make an impact. In Norwich, a colleague of mine ran workshops funded by the CRF in the most deprived part of the city, based on local needs such as financial skills. However, given that they had only three months to deliver, there was not time to build the necessary trust and rapport with some of the individual members of the community who most needed the training, let alone provide ongoing support. My sense of CRF was that the policy was broadly fine, but that when it came to implementation, there were unrealistic and un-joined-up requests for outcomes from multiple government departments, which, combined with short timescales, made it dysfunctional.

However, let me congratulate the Government on a few levelling-up interventions which have worked well. First, the town deal programme, providing substantial capital funding to forgotten places, seems to me to be heading in the right direction. It satisfies a few criteria: it supports local ambitions led by a local partnership; the partnership is business-led, with a cross-section of stakeholders providing a degree of market reality and financial and business nous; it is multiyear; and it addresses issues across government departments. What I notice is that where these town deals are governed by a genuine partnership with a credible, non-vested business lead, they are largely effective. Unfortunately, with the desire to get the money out the door, it is possible that the majority do not quite pass this test. The town deals are playing into a tough economic environment. These weaker town deals will struggle and even the strong ones are likely to cost more, but the Government need to stick with them.

Secondly, the department is now undertaking some deep dives into a few places to see whether a strategic alignment between a place and national government can help to shift the dial. This approach is working well in Blackpool and, in particular, is sorting out some of the cross-Whitehall barriers, which include moving the courts off a £300 million regeneration site and focusing different departments on a Civil Service hub. There are further cross-departmental challenges to come. For instance, the DWP pays housing benefit to people living in illegally squalid housing, or there is the money granted to supported housing providers, who anecdotally dissuade youngsters from taking employment opportunities because they then lose the funding.

I finish by saying that I completely understand the difficulty for the Government in addressing all these levelling-up issues. My plea is that the Government do not make them worse with bad approaches and poor implementation from their ivory tower, nor, for that matter, unsubstantiated ministerial or politically motivated preference versus localised distribution decisions. One lesson is that a stop/start approach to funding will never help.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I rise primarily to speak to Amendment 57, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, which was very eloquently supported in detail by what she just had to say. I also want to speak in support of the other amendments in this group. They are all on essentially the same matter, which is: how have the Government transferred, and how do they plan to transfer, resources from the centre to local government, so that they can deliver the levelling-up agenda that both the Government and local government want to see delivered in those areas?

--- Later in debate ---

This Government are transparent about their use and allocation of public funds, including levelling-up funds, and these amendments are unnecessary. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

Can I clarify my involvement with the various areas I have been talking about? I work some of the time with Business in the Community to persuade businesses to get involved in levelling up in all sorts of places across the country, including Blackpool, Bradford, Rochdale, Sheffield and many other places.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that and for the work she is doing in encouraging the private sector to get involved.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

That seems to lead us precisely in the direction of an amendment such as Amendment 25, where Parliament and the statutory processes would help to institutionalise the missions and the statement that the Government have brought forward. Anything less, I fear, gives Ministers too great a freedom to move from one mission to another and from one priority to another without regard to Parliament. I hope that Amendment 25 will commend itself to my noble friends.

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

I have added my name to Amendments 32 and 38, both of which deal with the independent evaluation of progress against the levelling-up missions. I begin by apologising that I was unable to be present for Second Reading. Levelling up is a subject I care deeply about and, with Business in the Community, I spend much of my time working in or for the sorts of places the Bill seeks to address. Before commenting on the amendments, I congratulate the Government on their levelling-up missions. While one can argue about whether these are exactly the right ones, I personally value the clarity and long-term commitment that these missions convey.

It is in this vein that I support the independent evaluation of progress. The missions need to work across government departments, across political parties and across Parliaments. I would value a statutory board being created to provide independent insight in exactly the way we have the Independent Commission on Climate. It seems to me that the long-term and challenging aspiration to level up socially has a strong parallel to tackling our environmental challenges and is at least as important.

I will finish by quoting two lessons from the LSE’s report on the effectiveness of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, where the parallels are, I think, obvious. The first is this:

“An independent expert body can strengthen climate governance by introducing a long-term perspective, enhancing the credibility of climate targets and ensuring more evidence-based policymaking.”


Secondly:

“To be effective, independent advisory bodies must have an appropriate status. This means having a clear statutory mandate, strong leadership, adequate resources, and sufficient powers to hold Government to account.”

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this is an important group of amendments to tease out the Government’s intentions as to the scrutiny of the success or otherwise of their actions in levelling up. While I speak to Amendments 24, 26, 32 and 49, to which I have added my name, I also wish to speak to the other amendments in this group.

The key question is how Parliament will know that progress has genuinely been made in reducing geographical disparities. That, after all, is the question at the heart of the White Paper. The only way to judge whether progress has genuinely been made is by using evidence and independence. All the amendments in this group refer to producing independent accountability of the statement that the Government will be making towards the end of a period of time—what that period is is still to be debated.

What is really positive about the White Paper is that it is absolutely full of evidence. There are around 80 different graphs and datasets to establish the evidence base for the purpose of the White Paper: how it is going to change different parts of the country and narrow the gaps. This set of amendments attempts to say that not only do we need the evidence but we need it to be independently assessed. I agree, obviously, with my noble friend and with the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, in talking about an independent commission or board—as we have done with climate change—to assess what is going on, and whether change has been made and, if so, how much and in what areas.

I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about the missions not being in the Bill, because otherwise, the levelling-up Bill is whatever the Executive define it to be. The Government have set out in a lengthy White Paper what the Bill attempts to do: narrow the gaps, reduce geographical inequalities and disparities, and make a big difference not only to the people who live in certain areas but to the country as a whole. If we do not change the country as it is at the moment, the people who live in those areas will be the ones who are low paid, have poor health and low skills—as a generality, of course. If we can change that, we will change their lives and change the country as well; there would not be such a call on the health service and the benefits system if we had people with better paid jobs, higher skills and better health outcomes. It is in the interests of us all, not just those of some areas of the country.

I fundamentally disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about research and development. I draw his attention to what the White Paper says—and it is a government White Paper, not mine. It says that the Government need to ensure that there is government investment of a significant degree in these geographical areas of disparity—the spatial disparities it talks about—in order to attract matching private sector investment and create better paid jobs, and deal with all the concomitant issues related to low pay, poor health, poor skills and all the rest of it. That is what it says in the White Paper.

Inequalities of Region and Place

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

Before I start, I should say that I support the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on HS2. I have sat on the boards of Crossrail and HS2, but I cannot say it as passionately as the noble Lord just said it. I will talk about some of the issues associated with transport access to the east in my speech.

I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has introduced this important debate. For the last four years, under the aegis of Business in the Community, I have been working in the so-called forgotten places. In that capacity, I bring business leaders to the table to discuss with local council and voluntary sector leaders what matters for their town. We start by discussing what the place stands for, what they are proud of and what an ambitious but deliverable long-term plan might look like. Importantly, this discussion has no money attached but is about facilitating a genuine conversation. Key is the neutral facilitator we employ who is full time in the place, building the trust which enables us to bring everyone together around a common vision.

We then start on a few actions. Bringing about lasting, transformative change takes time but it is crucial for motivation and learning to work together that the participants start working on delivering some early wins. This may sound straightforward but in places which feel left behind, the early days are tough: building credibility and a belief in change, while getting used to working across sectors where people have different outlooks and skills. None the less, it is the foundation for real, sustainable change. In Wisbech, residents can now be confident of being trained for local jobs because Anglian Water and its supply chain have for many years worked with local educational institutions to provide apprenticeships and improve standards in schools. From working in this way, Blackpool has the largest town deal in England, £39.5 million, and is showing real progress in education, housing and inward investment. So, what are the barriers?

First, a narrative of failure is often essential to attracting government or charitable funding but when you start to talk about the positives, you find that Blackpool is still a place of fresh air and fun, with 18 million tourists a year while Bradford, as the youngest city in the UK, is a melting pot of raw talent and has award-winning curries. Secondly, while creating local partnerships is tough, achieving joined-up national government is nigh on impossible. Blackpool has £300 million of committed investment from a company called Nikal, but needs the Treasury to fund moving the law courts off the site. Bradford, which is bigger than Liverpool or Bristol, has the worst rail connectivity of any major British city and needs a new railway station. I think Bradford would be a worthy winner of the DCMS “City of Culture” competition, for which it has just been longlisted. Wisbech needs the Government to pool funds to invest in the future Fens proposal, a strategic rather than piecemeal approach to climate adaptation.

What does this tell us about a proposed national strategy? First, any strategy needs to be long term and capable of surviving changes of political leadership, and implemented in a way which facilitates local leadership rather than providing one-size-fits-all Whitehall solutions. But even then, the old adage applies: no plan survives first contact with the enemy, so alongside the plan we need the Secretary of State for Levelling Up to champion these areas and bring all government departments, including the Treasury, to the table. We need a hit squad of motivated, caring, listening senior civil servants who are prepared to go out on a limb to achieve success for our deprived communities—people who can persuade across government and who will join local partnerships as full partners, alongside local government, business and the voluntary sector. If the new Department for Levelling Up can deliver all this, then perhaps we can reduce the UK’s regional inequalities.