Homelessness: Rough Sleeping
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Grender
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, as I say, the reasons for rough sleeping are many and complex—they are. A number of people do actually choose to sleep rough. Without commenting on that, this Government are committed not only to tackling rough sleeping, ensuring that nobody spends a second night out, but in one local authority there is actually a no-first-night-out programme in place. That is why we have protected, both centrally and locally, homelessness prevention programmes.
Baroness Grender (LD)
Does the Minister agree that if the leading cause of homelessness now in England is a loss of private tenancy, we desperately need an increase in social housing alongside a homelessness strategy? If Richard Gere has managed to persuade the Chancellor to make this his next big cause—according to the newspapers at the weekend—does the Minister now regret the lack of policies to increase social housing in the current housing Bill?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, it is important that we provide housing of all types of tenure: houses for social rent, as the noble Baroness pointed out; affordable homes; starter homes; shared ownership; Help to Buy schemes; Build to Rent—all the different schemes in place under this Government which we have doubled the housing budget to £20 billion to provide.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Grender
Baroness Blackstone
My Lords, I am very sorry to interrupt the Minister yet again, but on various occasions during this debate she has talked about abuse. The biggest abuse of all, which will be a consequence of the Bill, is very highly paid young people in their 30s benefiting from a very large discount—in London, it could be £80,000 or £90,000. Surely the Government should be concerned about that. It will bring the legislation for starter homes into disrepute, and rightly so. I reiterate the concern around the House about this issue and ask the Minister to reconsider whether there should not be a government amendment on this issue.
Baroness Grender (LD)
My Lords, the Minister has ruled out a mortgage but, in this context, perhaps the Government could right here, right now, today rule out cash buyers. That gives us something more specific to hold on to here. Or can the Minister envisage a cash buyer in this scenario who would not have an unnecessary advantage?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I hope that I have demonstrated—I do not think anyone is disputing it—that if this market was so open to people of this age, they would be buying. The fact is that, over the past 20 years, they have not been buying; purchasing has hugely declined. Yes, we may be talking about a few people in London on a high salary, but the statistics show us that that is not the case. We should not be restricting it geographically or by income, because it is a problem facing an entire generation. That is why we do not want to restrict them from being able to buy, should they wish to.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I shall reiterate the point I made the other day. The noble Lord is absolutely right to say that the housing market is stagnant in some parts of the north-west of England and employment is not like it is in the rest of the country. I think that the interventions that the Government have made in, for example, transport and infrastructure will put some of those areas back on their feet again, playing their economic part in the country.
Coming back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, about cash buyers, I do not know a single person aged under 40 who is a cash buyer, although of course there will be some. But our overriding principle here is that we do not want to disenfranchise people who work hard from the housing market.
Baroness Grender
My noble friend Lord Shipley has tabled this amendment on mortgages for precisely that kind of reason. No, of course there are not many people aged under 40 who are cash buyers, but if someone subsidises them to become cash buyers in order to acquire a property, that is the loophole we are concerned about here.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I think I have explained that having a mortgage will not stop gaming. There are always going to be abuses of the system, but we are trying to address an age group which has been disenfranchised from the purchasing market. I hope that what I have said gives to some extent reassurance to the noble Lord and that he will feel content to withdraw his amendment.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Grender
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate and I thank all of your Lordships who have taken part. Perhaps I may start by addressing Amendments 51 and 52. Clause 5(4) already makes provision that an authority must make these reports “available to the public”. The clause also provides that the Secretary of State may make regulations “about their timing” and whether they should be combined with the local authority’s authority monitoring report. The authority monitoring report is an existing requirement, which must be published on at least an annual basis. We do not want to introduce unnecessary burdens and it would be sensible to combine starter-home reporting with this existing requirement. We will be consulting on the monitoring requirements associated with starter homes shortly. We want to understand wider views on what the reports should contain and their arrangements for publication.
Furthermore, local planning authorities are already required to report on affordable housing delivery. They must report on the extent to which their planning policies are being achieved through their authority monitoring reports. This is a statutory requirement in Regulation 34 of the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012. Measures under this amendment are already covered by the legal framework.
Amendment 52 would require all local planning authorities to demonstrate that these sites were not otherwise needed for employment, retail, leisure, industrial or distribution use. Our planning policies look to encourage the productive use of brownfield land. Our starter homes exception site policy has a crucial role in delivering starter homes by providing new and cheaper land to be used for housing—and, because the land tends to have a lower value, this helps to improve the viability of starter home developments. This is why we have consulted on extending and strengthening this policy as part of our national planning policy consultation. Let me be clear: this is not about building houses at the expense of all other types of use but about releasing land where there is no reasonable prospect of it being used for its original purpose.
As part of the consultation, we invited comments on evidence to be used to justify the retention of land for commercial or similar uses and on whether there should be a fixed time limit on land retained for commercial uses. We expect local authorities to be proactive in identifying and publicising these exception sites and, where applications for starter homes come forward, in being prepared to give planning permission. The intention behind the new duty to promote starter homes in Clause 3 is to encourage local authorities to do this. Before they grant that permission, of course, local authorities will need to assure themselves that this brownfield land is an exception site and, in particular, that it is underused and unviable in its current land use. I believe that local authorities are capable of taking this decision using our guidance without the Government monitoring them. For this reason, Amendment 52, which would require all local planning authorities to report in detail about the appropriateness of sites, is unnecessary and bureaucratic.
Amendment 53 would require the Secretary of State to prepare a report on an annual basis containing information on the construction and sale of starter homes in the area of each local authority. As part of this, the report should contain information about the household composition and incomes of persons who have purchased a starter home in each area. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, put it rather articulately, this would not be a particularly proportionate approach to reporting on the operation of the policy. Any monitoring requirements should not be overly onerous or waste precious resources. I believe that reports should be published at local level, to ensure that first-time buyers can access them easily and that local councils can be accountable.
Baroness Grender
My noble friend Lord Greaves was actually talking about the main Labour amendment and not Amendment 53, just to be clear.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I do apologise—I was trying to give him credit because I disagree with him on quite a lot of things. But he knows what I mean.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Grender
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Lord is absolutely right. We talked about shared ownership earlier on. It may well be the case when one person works and they are on the average or median wage—and by the way, I will write to clarify what might be the art of the possible borough by borough if necessary, which it sounds like I am on the way to doing. Of course, if you look at my borough, it is split down the middle as regards the demographic. I have completely lost my train of thought. It may be that other products such as a shared ownership scheme might be the most appropriate to somebody where the whole household earns the median wage. I was simply trying to illustrate this by an example and I am slightly regretting it now—but I will write to clarify this.
We need a radical shift in the way the housing market supports the young first-time buyer, otherwise we condemn a whole generation to uncertainty and insecurity. As I said earlier, over the last 20 years the proportion of 40 year-olds who own their own home has gone from 61% to 38%.
In specific response to Amendment 37, Clause 1 sets out our position clearly. This consistency of approach is important to ensure our reforms are widely understood, particularly by lenders and developers, and that delivery is maximised. Starter homes are a national priority and all local authorities must play their part in delivery. But as I made clear at Second Reading, and earlier this evening, they are just one part of the package of affordable housing options, and they will increase the choices available to those who wish to own their own home. There is a range of products available, and starter homes will be, rightly, part of that mix. We support the delivery of other tenures. We have funded the delivery of other tenures over this spending review period. But we do not believe that the amendment presented here will serve any useful purpose.
The noble Lords, Lord Shipley, Lord Best and Lord Beecham, talked about the Savills and Shelter reports. We expect starter homes to be an entry-level property valued at below the average first-time buyer price for that local area by its very nature. But Savills and Shelter based their work on average house prices. We have examined the affordability of homes to those currently in the private rented sector. Assuming that those households sought to buy in the lower quartile of the first-time buyer market for new-build housing and moved within regions to areas where they can afford to buy, we found that outside London up to 64% of households currently renting privately would be able to secure a mortgage on a starter home, compared to only 50% who could now buy a similar property priced at full market value. Within London, up to 55% of households currently renting privately will be able to secure a mortgage on a starter home, while only 43% could now buy a similar property priced at full market value. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, does not believe me.
The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, made a point about starter homes and increasing housing supply. We are designing our starter-home reforms to increase housing supply and not just to change tenures. We want the planning system to release more lands specifically for starter homes, for instance on underused brownfield land not allocated for housing. This is being supported by our £1.2 billion new starter homes land fund, which seeks to propose more brownfield sites for starter homes.
On Amendment 47, the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Greaves, argued—in fact, the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, did not speak; I am giving her credit when she is not here. The other noble Lords argued that the duty to support starter homes should extend to other types of affordable housing. Clause 3 expects councils to actively support starter homes as a new product in their housing mix. It does not remove the ability to deliver other affordable housing alongside starter homes. Nor does it remove their local planning policy. I expect that most councils will continue to support delivery of a range of affordable housing and have planned policies to help achieve this.
Councils are very aware of their commitments to meet local housing needs, and they will strive to meet these needs. That plays into the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, about support for localism other than the duty to provide for starter homes. The Government completely recognise that local councils will be very keen to support delivery of the range of housing products available according to their local needs.
The Government’s record on affordable housing delivery is strong. There were 193,000 affordable homes delivered in England between 2011 and 2015, exceeding the Government’s target by 23,000. In addition, councils are in a position to bring forward more land for affordable housing. More council housing has been built since 2010, as I said, than was built in the previous 13 years, and 2014 saw the highest number of council housing starts for 23 years.
Baroness Grender (LD)
Does the Minister dispute the figures that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, gave, that in 2018 this will dramatically drop? The reason is that these were decisions of the coalition Government, and therefore there is a question mark over the continued commitment to these building levels under this Government.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, given that some of the figures I have quoted are over the last year, it is possibly slightly stretching the point to say that it was coalition delivery rather than ours, but I am not going to argue at this hour of the night about who can take the credit for what. We have doubled investment in housing.
Baroness Grender
It is not about credit, but about the drop-off point in 2018 and whether there is a continued commitment to building affordable social housing.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the money is in the Budget. Affordable homes for rent are grant funded. Contrary to what one might think, they will be the first, not the last, to be built out because they are grant funded. They effectively act as pump-priming money for developers to build. I do not agree with that point.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Grender
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I thank the noble Lord, not for letting me off the hook but for deferring the hook. I will write to him about that. I request that the noble Baroness withdraws the amendment at this stage.
Baroness Grender
I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this discussion and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for his support for continuing to examine this area. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, who raised property transfer and the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves, for commenting on where the resource goes, about which we have already had much discussion. The Minister said that we would find some answers and reassurance for tenants in Schedule 3. We will continue to scrutinise this issue to make sure that there is absolutely no threat of a tenant being made homeless as a result of the activities of a dreadful rogue landlord. That is the main aim of this amendment and we will continue to review that as the Bill progresses. However, at this point, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Rough Sleeping
Debate between Baroness Williams of Trafford and Baroness Grender
Baroness Grender
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to reduce the number of people who are sleeping rough.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, the Government remain committed to protecting the most vulnerable in society. That is why we are maintaining homelessness funding over this spending review period, building on our significant investment since 2010. But even one person without a home is too many, so we have committed to work with homelessness organisations and across departments to consider options, including legislation, to prevent more people from becoming homeless in the first place.
Baroness Grender (LD)
Can the Minister explain how a Prime Minister who believes that affordable property in London is £450,000, and a Housing and Planning Bill which sells off social housing but with no legal guarantee of replacement, can be interpreted as anything other than the abandonment of a homelessness strategy and a return to the 1980s when kids out of care and troops returning home had no choice but to sleep rough?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the Prime Minister has not said that £450,000 is the price for an affordable home in London: it is the cap at which an affordable house can be provided in London. I apologise but I did not hear the second part of the noble Baroness’s question because there was a slight disturbance. Perhaps she would like to repeat it.
Baroness Grender
I will repeat the second part. With the Housing and Planning Bill, which sells off social housing but has currently no legal guarantee of replacement, how is it possible to interpret it as anything other than an abandonment of homelessness strategy by this Government and a return to the 1980s when kids coming out of care and troops returning home had no choice but to sleep rough?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the Government are committed to building 1 million new homes by 2020 which will include affordable houses and homes for rent with a mix of different tenures. I must repeat that we will maintain and protect funding for local authorities, which by 2019-20 will be £315 million.