English Devolution
Lord Berkeley Excerpts(1 week ago)
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Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on a really interesting document. I wish her well, because the pressure has come from the mayors for devolution—rightly, in my opinion—and what they have come up with is a laudable solution to this. My noble friend’s challenge is how to deal with the other parts of England that are not subject to the current mayors. A variety of solutions are in the White Paper, which we all have to look at, but she is still trying to get more devolution to the other parts of the UK, which they all want. I have one question. The smallest area with a council currently is probably the City of London. How will she fit that into this new structure? Clearly, it does a good job, but it needs some kind of structure within this overall requirement. I congratulate my noble friend.
Housing Supply and Homelessness
Lord Berkeley Excerpts(3 weeks ago)
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Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to take part in this debate and I congratulate my noble friend on securing it. There have been so many really interesting proposals and ideas to come out of this long debate.
I come to this from a building and engineering background. I am stuck on that figure, which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also told us, that one in 20 houses in this country are empty. Where are they, who owns them, and should they be empty? Of course, the reasons are very varied. Spending a lot of time in Cornwall, I see all of the second homes and wonder, well, people like second homes, and some of them may be unsuitable for owner-occupiers, some of them may be totally unsuitable for being what we like to call affordable, but on the other hand, they could be rented out for half the year when the owners are not there, so people who live in these villages—of whom I know many—would have somewhere to live. There needs to be some financial incentive to achieve that.
There is another issue that worries me. My next-door neighbour when I live in London had a flat but, sadly, died two or three years ago. The flat is owned by the council and has been empty ever since. It is damp and it could do with a refurb, but it is a flat, and it could be made affordable but is not because the council is doing nothing about it.
My worst example is from spending a lot of time in the Isles of Scilly, where I see a number of people who do not have proper accommodation. They are there because they are working; they have jobs to keep the economy going. They quite often try and rent their accommodation from the Duchy of Cornwall, and I pay tribute to Prince William—or the Duke of Cornwall—for what he is trying to do to improve housing, particularly in Cornwall. However, he is not doing so well in Scilly, because there are, I think, seven empty houses on one island which are waiting for builders to come in. Unsurprisingly, you cannot get builders on islands. You can get a few of them on the mainland, but you have to accommodate them, because they cannot commute by sea every day. The obvious thing is for some of these empty houses to be allocated for builders to come there, certainly in winter. But it is not done, so these houses remain empty, and you cannot even get builders in there to do whatever has to be done. I do not know what the answer to that is. The Duchy of Cornwall makes a profit of £22 million every year, and you would think that they could invest some of that into the houses that the workers there need.
The other problem which one comes across is the lack of tradespeople to do this work. It is very easy to say that we have not got any carpenters, bricklayers or anything else, but unless we train them—through our education system, particularly in the countryside, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans—we cannot use them. It is really important that we have a good stock of tradespeople in all parts of the country, so they can do this work and hopefully improve the stock of housing.
To conclude, I congratulate my noble friend on her wonderful introduction to this debate. With all the ideas we have heard, let us hope that the Government, in the next year or two, can develop some of them, so that we can deliver affordable housing to those who want it. You meet many of them and they are all on the council list, but we need to do something for them.
Lease Extension Policies for Residential Properties
Lord Berkeley Excerpts(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Berkeley
To ask His Majesty’s Government, further to the remarks by Baroness Williams of Trafford on 24 May (HL Deb col 1368) where she relayed undertakings of the Crown, when they expect the Crown to publish their new lease extension policies for residential properties.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his Question. The Crown has agreed to act by analogy with the new Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, subject to the specific condition set out in the undertaking. This will improve home ownership for most Crown leaseholders, but it is a matter for the Crown to determine when it will publish its new lease extension policies. The Government anticipate that the Crown policies of the relevant Crown bodies will be published no later than when the relevant provisions in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act come into effect.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for that Answer. This was a Crown undertaking, given by the then Minister over two months ago. Hundreds of leaseholders on the Isles of Scilly and elsewhere are dying to know whether their 40-year leases can be extended in the way that the rest of the country achieved with the leasehold reform Act. Could my noble friend go back to the Crown and maybe instruct the Duke of Cornwall to publish this document, which will give comfort to these tenants? Could she also provide an opportunity for the House to debate that document, if and when we ever see it?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for his championing of Crown leaseholders and the Scilly Isles, and for this offer to visit. You do not have to be a Foreign Office Minister to go to beautiful and exotic places. The undertaking confirms that the Crown will act by analogy, but it is well established that Acts of Parliament for England and Wales do not bind the Crown unless the Act expressly states that this is the case or does so by necessary implication. Instructing the Duke of Cornwall is probably a bit beyond my ministerial powers. The undertaking for the Act delivers similar improvements to those that leaseholders would have if the Leasehold and Reform Act 2024 were to bind the Crown directly. The difference is therefore largely a matter of delivery. Binding the Crown to the Act’s provisions is therefore felt to be unnecessary.
King’s Speech
Lord Berkeley Excerpts(5 months ago)
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Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to congratulate my noble and learned friend Lord Hermer on his maiden speech, and to welcome him and my noble friend Lord Khan and his colleagues to the Front Bench. It is wonderful to see them there; long may it continue.
I will speak briefly about devolution, which has not been so much discussed in this debate. For me, devolution is vital and it must have the criteria of delivering something that is level, equal across the UK and balanced. For me, probably the worst example of that is where I live, the Isles of Scilly, so I will concentrate my remarks there.
It is a very independent community, 28 miles off the English coast and remote from the rest of the UK. It is a very strong and loyal community, which will tell you that it does not want to be linked with Cornwall. Some noble Lords may have read that the six former Conservative MPs who lost their seats in Cornwall at the last election—in favour of four Labour and two Lib Dem—think that the answer is to have a Minister for Cornwall. If we had a Minister for every county, ministerial boxes might get a bit full, so I do not think that that will work.
Scilly does not want to be part of Cornwall. I have had many discussions with the council on the Isles of Scilly and it has problems. It wants to preserve the community spirit and be a sustainable place to live, but there needs to be a financial settlement, which would probably be different from that of most local authorities.
The single biggest challenge on the islands is transport. Noble Lords may have read about the Harland & Wolff issues, which I am not going to talk about, but the reality is that these transport links are fragile, unreliable and expensive. You can travel on a bus for many miles in Cornwall for £2 a journey, when residents travelling between the islands of Scilly sometimes have to pay as much as £110 for a single fare in the winter, for just a couple of miles. It is the same if you want to go to the mainland, to hospital or for anything else. It is 28 miles, which would probably cost £10 or so on a train. Last week, I paid £110 for a three-hour journey on a ferry. It is a lot more to go by air and it is an unreliable service. Basic services are awful there.
The cost of living on Scilly is seriously high. Housing is a problem. Noble Lords may know that, in the last stages of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill, before the end of the last Government, the Duchy of Cornwall promised new tender or leasing documents for people leasing their buildings on the Isles of Scilly. No leases extend for more than 40 years at the moment so, if you spend several hundred thousand pounds doing up your house, you will still have only a 40-year lease. I am looking for Ministers to tell us when the Duchy is going to publish its guidelines.
Similarly, it is difficult to get local authority building now because the costs of freight are so high, so something needs to be done and it is not easy. The Council of the Isles of Scilly is good at trying to sort out what should happen there. There must be a devolution deal that will take Scilly outside the normal local authority funding rules. I do not know when that will happen, but the transport needs to become a public transport system rather than one with the costs I have just quoted. Otherwise, the residents will give up and the community will get lost.
The community does not want to be linked with Cornwall and I hope that my noble friends, when they come to look at the devolution of the south-west, Cornwall and Scilly, will come to discuss and consult—as they have said they will—and have a special, bespoke arrangement ready for the Isles of Scilly to talk about.