Housing: Accessibility

Lord Best Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend. It is indeed possible, and modelling is being produced for us on a range of issues. It is important, as my noble friend said, that we look at that in terms of energy conservation and ensuring that we have lifetime standard homes and improved accessibility. These things are happening.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I take this opportunity to thank the outgoing Prime Minister for a number of important reversals of unwise policies and the introduction of some much better policies, including taking the cap off local authorities’ borrowing to build new council housing and find more money for social housing. However, does the Minister agree that we have taken a step backwards in relation to accessibility and adaptability in allowing what are called permitted development rights for developers to produce incredibly small—indeed, even windowless—flats in conversions of existing buildings? Can we not get on top of that as well?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for all that he does and for his compliment to the Prime Minister on the important action on accessibility and planning in this area. I agree with him: he is absolutely right in his point about permitted development and possible loopholes. I am very happy to meet the noble Lord to discuss that further.

Homes for Social Rent

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Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, this is Rural Housing Week, as I am sure all noble Lords are well aware. Rural housing is extraordinarily important because house prices are higher in rural areas, incomes are lower and a much larger proportion of homes are being sold under right to buy. Some schools are closing and we are getting child-free villages. Will the Minister allow me, at the National Housing Federation’s rural housing conference tomorrow, to say that the Government will indeed prioritise those small village schemes that can make such an immense difference to a community, allowing people to work, live and bring up their families in villages?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I know better than to try to stop the noble Lord doing just that. I am keen to associate myself with that during what, as he rightly says, is Rural Housing Week. We do this already, although I recognise the challenges, having represented a deeply rural area. We do already have rural exceptions and provide weighting for housing developments because of the small and medium-sized enterprises prevalent in rural areas. The noble Lord is absolutely right: we need to do more.

Future of Seaside Towns

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Monday 1st July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, and the whole of the Select Committee on their excellent report. It is a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the issues affecting our seaside towns and a road map for the positive changes that could transform these places.

I will say something about housing in coastal towns, which is covered by chapter 5 in the report, which notes:

“Issues relating to housing emerged as one of the most prominent concerns voiced by coastal towns”.


Many of the housing concerns in the seaside towns are the same as those elsewhere. Their problems are national ones; most prominent is the need for many more homes that are decent, secure and affordable for those who need them. As elsewhere, what is needed will not be met by reliance on the oligopoly of volume housebuilders providing their standardised homes so profitably on out-of-town greenfield sites. Coastal towns, just like other places, require investment in regenerating what is already there, utilising brownfield sites and bringing existing homes up to decent standards.

Many of the Select Committee’s recommendations call for central government to eschew national, one-size-fits-all policies and give local authorities greater flexibility to prioritise what councils see to be the best approaches locally. This definitely goes for housing, and I strongly support all the committee’s housing recommendations. I will pick up just one aspect of these tonight and target it under the broad heading of devolving decision-making. My chosen single issue is the subject of the Select Committee’s recommendation that,

“the Government implements changes to the system for the calculation of local housing allowance rates in areas with high densities of HMOs”—

houses in multiple occupation—

“to ensure it more accurately reflects local market rents”.

Dull and technical this certainly sounds, but herein lies an enormously important matter that the Government’s response to the committee has not covered.

I had the real pleasure of visiting Blackpool in March and was greatly impressed by the commitment, energy and determination of the council’s staff handling housing matters. I was equally impressed by the team from the council’s subsidiary body, the Blackpool Housing Company, which is doing fantastic work acquiring and upgrading truly awful redundant tourist accommodation. However, I discovered that, like many other seaside towns, Blackpool’s efforts are being hopelessly undermined by the way the housing benefit system is operating there. The system, based on local housing allowance which sets the figure that the DWP will pay in housing benefit to cover rent, has incentivised the worst kind of landlord to buy up and let out really appalling slums while simultaneously making it impossible for the council and its partners to upgrade the quality of the housing in central Blackpool. How has this situation come about?

The local housing allowance, LHA, fixes the level for housing benefit payments at the rent being charged for properties in the cheapest one-third of all rented properties that are located in that broad rental market area. Because Blackpool lies within a broad rental market area that covers a number of more upmarket locations, a high proportion of all Blackpool’s rented housing falls easily within the 30% cheapest of the whole area. Moreover, this very unsophisticated local housing allowance does not distinguish on the basis of space standards or the condition of the property, so a tiny flat in dismal condition in a dilapidated terrace has the same local housing allowance—which housing benefit will cover—as a decent apartment in a restored avenue.

Nor does the allowance pay any regard to the quality of the management and maintenance service: the absentee slum landlord is treated in the same way as the most conscientious local landlord. As an example, a minute one-bedroom flat in Blackpool in a property divided into eight such units commands a local housing allowance of £85 a week; £680 per week from the DWP for the whole house, with no improvements and no maintenance. Conversion by the Blackpool Housing Company into four decent one-bedroom flats let at market rents would produce half the income for infinitely better appointed and managed accommodation. Because rogue landlords—I was told that a number of those coming into town pay for their properties in cash—can get such a high return, they will always pay more for those properties than responsible, decent providers. The Government’s housing benefit is fuelling the business of disreputable operators and preventing real solutions.

In other parts of the UK, the LHA figure for housing benefit causes quite different problems, greatly compounded by a freeze since 2015: in so many places the LHA level is lower than actual market rents for virtually any available property, so there is a gap or shortfall between the payment obtainable from the DWP for rent and the actual rent that must be paid. The tenants reliant on the state in these places must cover this shortfall from their other benefits, which were meant to be for food and heating, et cetera. But this shortfall is not the problem in many seaside towns, with their legacy of cheap, run-down guesthouses and B&B properties. Rather, in Blackpool and similar towns, your rent will be fully covered, making these places magnets for DWP claimants and a place for other councils to send their vulnerable claimants. Every year, around 5,000 households eligible for housing benefit move into Blackpool, many of them with personal problems—of physical and mental health, drug abuse or alcoholism. Blackpool’s suicide rate is the highest in the country. A system that concentrates the most vulnerable in one place and incentivises this trend into the future is a disaster for that place’s health and well-being.

Of course, I greatly encourage councils to use all their powers to enforce proper standards; government has recently introduced some tough extra measures to enable local authorities to tackle rogue landlords. However, this is attacking the problem after the event, not preventing it, and reductions in funding for local authorities and the priority that must go to social care and other essentials has meant cuts in personnel, including environmental health officers and trading standards officers. Enforcement against bad landlords will not be enough while the housing benefits system continues to undermine all the council’s efforts.

The solution for Blackpool and other seaside towns is to make this local housing allowance truly local by engaging with councils such as Blackpool to set the LHA level dependent on the market within the specific locality, and the property’s condition, space standards, management and maintenance. The intention must be to remove the current incentives for the very worst kinds of landlords who concentrate as many vulnerable people as possible into appalling conditions, and instead to create a level playing field for the vital work done by social landlords and other not-for-profit and genuinely responsible operators so that they can transform these seaside towns.

Housing: Social Rent

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Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I certainly agree with the noble Lord that there is a challenge. We have just had the best year of housing delivery for 30 years, bar one year, but that is not to be complacent. There is certainly a challenge; I accept that we need to build more social homes. The raising of the £2 billion budget will certainly help in that regard, as will the elimination of the HRA borrowing caps.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, the Affordable Housing Commission, which I have the honour of chairing, has been looking at issues around affordability. Our evidence clearly demonstrates that rents, not just in the private sector but increasingly in the social sector, are leading people into all kinds of serious difficulties, such as debt, arrears, personal problems and indeed homelessness. Does the Minister agree—with the CSJ, the housing commission, Shelter and so many others—that we need more social housing but at genuinely affordable rents, which are less than the rents that housing associations are required to charge today, otherwise this will cost the Government greatly in housing benefit, homelessness, temporary accommodation and, indeed, the misery of the people affected?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, as always, the noble Lord makes a powerful point and speaks from great experience. He is right that the current welfare budget, excluding pensions, is £119 billion per annum—a large amount. We have to be conscious of the link between housing and welfare, so I take the point. However, I am sure he will appreciate that the affordability measure enables us to provide more housing. It is about getting that balance right.

Housing: No-fault Evictions

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Wednesday 15th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her welcome for the proposal. There is certainly no intention to hang about with this: we want to consult, particularly on Section 8 and what the ground should be for ending tenancies. That is an important part of this. It has been widely welcomed, including by many landlord groups, in all fairness. Responsible landlords have nothing to fear from this; it is essentially about being fair to landlords and tenants.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my various housing interests in the register. I congratulate the Government on this important measure, giving much greater security of tenure to tenants and promising that landlords will have swifter processes when a tenant really is at fault. Does the Minister agree that one of the big gains from this will be that tenants will not be afeared to make complaints against landlords who are behaving badly? At the moment, people fear retaliatory evictions and are very often silent when they should stand up for their rights.

Residential Construction and Housing Supply

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Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his helpful introduction to this debate. I will forfeit my opportunity to offer him 10 ways for government to ensure 300,000 affordable, high-quality, well-designed homes a year. However, I recommend that he and all interested parties look out for the forthcoming reports from the Centre for Social Justice’s housing commission and from the Affordable Housing Commission organised by the Smith Institute and the Nationwide Foundation—I declare my interests as chair of these two commissions. I also declare interests as a vice-president of the LGA and the TCPA.

I want to use my few minutes to draw attention to the quite dramatically changed policy context in which we are now debating the construction of the new homes the nation needs. Over recent years there have been some quite fundamental, but largely unremarked, shifts in government housing policy, and I want to highlight and commend these important U-turns.

I have now counted over 20 significant reversals of housing policy over just the last three years or so. In essence, I detect the abandonment of a range of earlier policies which would diminish the social housing sector—the council and housing association sector—and would rely on a handful of volume housebuilders. Now, instead of that agenda—so familiar to those of us in your Lordships’ House who argued over the fateful Housing and Planning Act 2016—there are positive new measures to encourage, grow and expand social housing, while curbing the endlessly disappointing performance of the big housebuilders. In passing, I note equally the measures to redress the balance of power in the private rented sector from landlords to tenants, not least with last week’s very welcome announcement from the Secretary of State of greater security of tenure for renters.

Of particular relevance for today’s debate, the items from my long list of 20-plus policy reversals are these: first, the freedom for councils to borrow to build, in place of a tight cap that has prevented most local authorities building new homes; secondly, new grant funding for social rent—low-cost rentals—ending a virtual ban and the substitution of so-called affordable rents, which are not affordable to those on lower incomes; thirdly, dropping the flagship scheme to require councils to accept “starter homes” for sale in place of the previous planning obligations on housebuilders to ensure provision of low-cost rental homes; fourthly, pledging to close the “viability loophole” which has allowed housebuilders to renege on Section 106 planning obligations to provide affordable homes; fifthly, revival of the Government’s multibillion-pound loan guarantee scheme for housing association borrowing, which had been scrapped earlier; sixthly, dropping a controversial plan to put rents for specialist, supported housing on to a new basis that had stalled many developments for older people and others; seventhly, a full reversal of the imposition of a compulsory annual 1% real reduction in social housing rents—which has reduced the capacity of social landlords to develop new homes—and instead the substitution from next year of CPI-linked rent increases; eighthly, batting the idea of extending the right to buy to housing association tenants into the long grass and, more significantly, dropping the dreadful plan to make councils sell their best properties on the open market, when they fell vacant, to pay for the new right to buy discounts for those housing association tenants; ninthly, scrapping policies that make life tougher for social housing tenants, forcing social landlords to end long-term security of tenure and to raise rents for those who achieve improved earnings—“pay to stay”—and, in contrast, following the Grenfell Tower tragedy, promising measures to strengthen the regulation of social housing landlords and enhance the status of social housing tenants; and, finally, rather than putting increased faith in the major housebuilders, instead coming forward with at least four new constraints on them: deciding to create a new homes ombudsman to handle the numerous complaints from house buyers; outlawing appalling practices by housebuilders in selling leases with rip-off ground rents; requiring higher standards from housebuilders, not least to improve energy efficiency; and starting the phasing out of the multibillion-pound Help to Buy subsidies that have been so lucrative for the big housebuilders.

I see each of these turnarounds as a triumph of good sense and a credit to the relevant Secretaries of State and their Ministers. All of us can now build on the near-universal recognition that housing shortages and deficiencies will not be cured by volume housebuilders and “the market”. More, not less, government intervention —through both investment and regulation—is sensible, positive and necessary. I am not saying that the reorientation I have described means that everything is now sorted—sadly not. But what has changed is that so much housing policy is now facing in the right direction; what is needed now is for it to move forward further and faster in the direction now set. Government now has the opportunity to embrace further shifts in the same direction and accelerate progress—for example, with greater funding for social rent, with the adoption of Oliver Letwin’s recommendations for capturing land value, with more progress on garden towns, with changes to standards of accessibility and energy efficiency through Building Regulations and, yes, by promoting and incentivising modern methods of construction. If government sustains its significant shift in emphasis to more proactive governmental input, there will be new hope for the tens of thousands who need a better housing solution.

Property Guardians

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Tuesday 26th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord. I met the Property Guardian Providers Association, which might be the organisation to carry this forward. Some 80% of the market are members of that association. The remainder of the market is principally from Dot Dot Dot; a few others may well join that association. We are looking at that measure; it is certainly one possible way forward, similar to the Short Term Accommodation Association that applies in relation to Airbnb-type associations.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, standing between the occupiers, the property guardians in these empty properties, and the owners—local authorities or people who own an office block—are the property guardian providers, the companies that set up these operations. The Minister knows that MHCLG has a working group on the regulation of property agents, which I have the pleasure of chairing. Will he relay back to the Secretary of State that my working group would be very happy to look at the regulation of property guardian providers, just as we look at estate agents, letting agents and managers of leasehold properties?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. I will certainly relay that message to the Secretary of State. I know he will be extremely pleased; we were hoping that the noble Lord would look at those.

Housing: Future Homes Standard

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Thursday 21st March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I am very much in favour of the review, but I do not want to prejudge it; it is important that it be left to take its own course. Picking up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, it is certainly important to examine the durability of the standards with a view to not only people who are disabled but people who are ageing. We have an ageing population, and the Government are very much committed to the industrial strategy grand challenge mission on ageing. That is quite a mouthful, but it means aiming for people to live five extra years in good health by 2035, so it plays into this agenda. However, I do not think that we should prejudge the consultation.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the Sustainable Energy Association. We greatly welcome the Chancellor’s move to require housebuilders to up their standards of energy efficiency and carbon-neutral housebuilding. The technique of using building regulations to make housebuilders do things they otherwise would not must apply also to accessible housing. Exhorting housebuilders to do the right thing and produce more accessible homes does not get us anywhere. They are doing very well as it is, thank you. We need those building regulations changed in a compulsory way, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, stated, to do the great things the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, has advocated for so long.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord does much good work in this area, for which I thank him. He makes a powerful case but it is for those reasons that we had the Hackitt review, are holding a review of building regulations and will act as a consequence. Things are moving in that direction. Those are not the only things happening, of course—for example, the ECO places an obligation on energy companies so that energy bills are lower and less carbon energy is used—but they are central. Again, I speak to the importance of document M on accessible housing. The requirement to take account of the interests of people with disabilities and an ageing population is provided for in the NPPF—the planning framework—and the Neighbourhood Planning Act. It is all moving in that direction.

Help to Buy: Housebuilders’ Profits

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Wednesday 27th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I leave it to the Labour Party to have an assault on profits; there is nothing wrong with profit itself. It is inappropriate when the money is not being invested properly and providers are not taking proper account of their duties; that is unacceptable. The noble Lord will know that the lifting of the cap on local authorities will help with an issue on which he and I agree: the need for more social houses.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister is suggesting that the oligopoly of major-volume housebuilders has let us down on quantity, affordability, design, workmanship and quality of product. Could he update us on the arrival of a new homes ombudsman, who can deal with a good number of the complaints that, justifiably, people are making about the appalling quality they experience when they buy some of these properties?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, most of the suppliers of homes under the Help to Buy scheme are small and medium-sized enterprises, although I accept that the larger players are delivering the volume. I agree with the noble Lord about the need for a new homes ombudsman and he will know that, when legislative time allows, we will introduce that. In the meantime, with the Home Builders Federation we are looking at the possibility of a voluntary homes ombudsman, to make sure we have the qualities he and I are keen on and that they are enforced.

Short-term Lettings

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Tuesday 26th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I did not have the privilege of seeing that programme last night, as I had duties in the House, but I have had reports of it. Those businesses to which the noble Baroness was referring are not members of the Short Term Accommodation Association, although we would certainly encourage them to join it; the association is seeking to ensure that they do.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister knows that his department has established a working group, which I have the pleasure of chairing, to look at the regulation of property agents: those doing sales, lettings or management of property. The companies that do the short-term lettings do not have any regulation at present. Will the Minister comment on whether the new regulator of property agents—which I am sure will come to pass—should cover the short-term lets as well as the longer-term lettings that it definitely will be covering?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for all that he does, not only in relation to the regulation of property agents, but more generally in the area. The noble Lord has written to my honourable friend the Minister for Housing and Homelessness, and she will be replying. As I said, it is our intention that the Short Term Accommodation Association is the route forward, with the code of conduct that it is progressing, rather than that this coming under the ambit of the property agents group to which he referred.