Leaseholders: Service Charges
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
My noble friend makes a very good point. Tenants who purchase their gas and electricity from their landlords, including when it is bundled with other service charges, are protected from excessive charges by the maximum resale price provisions from the regulator Ofgem. The provisions prevent landlords reselling energy to tenants at a higher price than they paid to the licensed energy supplier. Tenants are entitled to receive a breakdown of the landlord’s costs, on request. That should include details of the cost of electricity and/or gas, standing charges and the VAT paid.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, exorbitant and disproportionate fees, charges and commissions were a key reason why the Government’s Regulation of Property Agents Working Group, which I had the pleasure of chairing and which reported three years ago almost to the day, wanted there to be a regulator for property agents, including the managing agents of leasehold property. The Government have specifically promised this on many occasions. Is somebody within the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities specifically working on the creation of a regulator for property agents? If someone is, I live in hope. If not, I go away very frustrated.
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
The noble Lord asks a very good question. I am not sure whether somebody is working on that specific point, but there is a large group within that department that works on all ways of raising professionalism. We are looking at the report of the noble Lord and his working group on the regulation of property agents and are continuing to work with industry to improve best practice. I will take his plea for a regulator back to the department.
Housing for Older People
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
As I said, the complete membership of the task force, which is to be led by Stuart Andrew, is still being put together. All I have managed to push the department to say is that it will be meeting for the first time shortly after the Recess.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, the task force, which was first announced on 25 May last year, is indeed very welcome. Will the Minister confirm that it will consider all the options here, including shared ownership housing for older people, which is the subject of an inquiry I am currently chairing by the APPG on Housing and Care for Older People? Could shared ownership be the answer for those in the squeezed middle who cannot afford to buy somewhere more suitable but for whom there is no social rented housing available?
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Best, in this space. As I said, the task force will be looking at all these issues. The noble Lord will be aware that, in April last year, the Government launched a new model of shared ownership, specifically targeted at older people—it is in fact called older people’s shared ownership. The parameters it set reduced the minimum share required for ownership from 25% to 10% of a home’s market value, so lowering the cost of the deposit required. It introduced new staircasing arrangements to make it easier for a homeowner to purchase more of their home, and implemented a new tenure initial repair period, during which the housing provider is required to support homeowners in new-build homes with the cost of maintenance and repairs. We also extended the minimum lease term from 99 years to 990 years, which will prevent homeowners having to pay to extend their lease.
Heat and Building Strategy
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
This is a key policy of the Government. We will publish a heat and building strategy in early 2021 that will set out the immediate actions we will take for reducing emissions from buildings, including deploying energy-efficient measures and transitioning to low-carbon heating. This ambitious programme of work will enable the mass transition to low-carbon heat and set us on a path to meet our net-zero 2050 emissions targets.
Lord Best (CB) [V]
I thank the Minister for her reply —it is good to hear that the heating and building strategy is on its way. Since this directly affects every household in the country, it certainly deserves priority in the follow-through to the PM’s 10-point plan. Bearing in mind that heating by gas has to end, but its alternatives —clean electricity and hydrogen—are at least twice as expensive, will the strategy ensure that decarbonising our heating does not lead to a massive increase in fuel poverty?
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
The noble Lord is absolutely correct in the points that he makes. A number of options have the potential to play an important role in decarbonising heat and we are exploring many of them simultaneously. Improving the energy efficiency of people’s homes is the best long- term solution to tackling fuel poverty. The Government have already introduced a statutory fuel poverty target to get as many fuel-poor homes to a minimum energy-efficiency rating. Furthermore, the energy company obligation scheme is focused entirely on low-income and vulnerable households.
Housing: New Homes
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
The Government are taking many measures to tackle the skills crisis in this sector. For example, the Department for Education’s £24 million construction skills fund is supporting 26 on- site hubs focusing on housing. The EU exit does create opportunities to grow our own workforce, but the industry is best placed to step up and train the workforce that it knows it will need. The Government are doing their part by improving skills provision, supporting modernisation to increase productivity and creating a fair migration system.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, to rescue the country from the small number of volume housebuilders who do 70% of all our housebuilding, have the Government made any progress with Sir Oliver Letwin’s radical and important proposals for local authorities to set up corporations that would acquire sites and capture the value for the public good, instead of leaving it to those volume housebuilders who, I am afraid, let us down every time?
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
The Government fully recognise the importance of increasing the number of small and medium-sized housebuilders in providing the housing in this country. He is absolutely right to point out the dominance of the large housebuilders. We have done quite a lot to encourage SMEs in this space, and at the last Budget we announced up to £1 billion of new guarantee support schemes for SMEs, to be implemented by the British Business Bank. To go further into Sir Oliver Letwin’s report, I would rather write to the noble Lord with a fuller reply.