Affordable Housing

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Beecham]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the announcement in the Autumn Statement that they will invest £1.4 billion to deliver 40,000 affordable homes, how many affordable houses to rent they expect local authorities to build by 2020.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)]

My Lords, our expanded affordable homes programme, with a total capital budget of £7.1 billion between 2016 and 2021, including the additional investment of £1.4 billion announced last week, will now fund a wider range of affordable housing, including affordable rent, rent to buy and shared ownership. Local authorities will be able to bid into this.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a Newcastle city councillor and an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association. Could the Minister please explain the arithmetic underlying the Government’s claim that the £1.4 billion announced in the Statement will build 40,000 affordable homes, given that this appears to represent a cost of only £35,000 a home? Will he confirm the estimate of the chair of the Local Government Association, his noble friend Lord Porter, that the enforced reduction of council rents by 1% yearly until 2020 will cost councils £2.6 billion, which could have built, according to its estimate, 19,000 homes, while housing associations will suffer a loss of income of £2.7 billion, with a similar impact on their capacity to build affordable homes?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said, this is,

“the largest sum of money ever secured by City Hall to deliver affordable housing”,

and no doubt he would have been more effusive if it had not been for political considerations. This is the largest affordable housing programme for 40 years, and social housing can bid into it too, as the noble Lord appreciates. This is all part of the programme of ensuring that we have 400,000 affordable homes in this Parliament.