Care Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Beecham
My Lords, I hope to be of some utility, but I would not claim to be utilitarian.
Lord Best
I deeply apologise, and not for the first time, to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, one of the most distinguished of the vice-chairs and past chair of the LGA.
The noble Earl, Lord Howe, agreed with everybody that we need fully to fund the new measures and to ensure that the funding for existing care services is there. He expressed to us the belief that the new measures will do just that and they herald a sustainable funding arrangement for the future. He noted that the settlement for local authorities is extremely challenging this time round, but that, in terms of social care, the settlement that we are now pointing towards, with jointly commissioned services, the pooling of the £3.8 billion and NHS and local authorities working together, will in his view prove enough to fund a sustainable care service. Only time will tell whether those calculations prove to be accurate rather than too optimistic. In the hope that the noble Earl’s predictions are correct, and recognising that government really are attempting to make serious change in this Bill to the funding system as well as in so many important ways to the care services, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, I am provoked to give a short preview of the amendments tabled in my name that are to follow—but not tonight. However, I thought I might briefly whet appetites because they relate so closely to what we are talking about. I see that noble Lords are all agog.
These amendments are about more localism. They are about removing some of the inhibitions on councils deciding precisely how they want to raise the funds that will pay the £400 million the Treasury is waiting for. They are about whether pensioners are included or not included as a vulnerable group being decided locally. This is the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. In my full and unamended speech I will say that there are many grounds on which pensioners might already be treated slightly more favourably than some of the other vulnerable groups. I will contend that in respect of the groups that are considered to be vulnerable, local authorities should have greater discretion, and suggest that local authorities should also have greater flexibility in how they raise council tax, not only in respect of the current discounts for empty and second homes, but in respect of single person discounts. I will explain that if local authorities were allowed to vary the single person discount, currently fixed at 25% and set centrally by diktat from Whitehall, some might choose to reduce that discount across the board to 20%, meaning that all those who currently receive it would have to pay another 46 pence a week. It is not a vast sum, but it would raise more than the £400 million across the piece and make it unnecessary for us to define vulnerable groups and get ourselves into all kinds of tangles in reducing support for the very poorest in our communities. In advance of moving those amendments and in the context of this debate, I thought that noble Lords might like to hear the preview.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, we have had a longer and more entertaining debate than many of us thought we would have. We had the Browning versions, two of them, and we have had an interesting conflict between Norfolk and Suffolk. I hesitate to arbitrate between those two counties. In relation to the remarks by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, from time to time, I have been tempted to form a society for the preservation of the postcode lottery. In some areas of policy, it is absolutely the right line to take. We have had too much regimentation and prescription nationally about what should and should not be done.
However, we are not talking about policies here but about the people’s basic right to a minimum income. To take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, to its logical conclusion, we would have differential benefits across the piece. We would have different benefits for disabled people, pensions, child benefit and whatever up and down the country, determined locally. The noble Lord shakes his head, but where is the difference? The difference that he advances is that council tax is raised locally, but that is an irrelevance to the person looking at his disposable income that he has to deploy in support of his family. Where the localism part should come in—not the faux localism of the Poor Law—is that you would have a national basic minimum entitlement which, if the local authority thought it right, you could increase and enhance benefits. That would seem to be a reasonable application of localism because everybody is guaranteed a national minimum and locally the community may decide to augment it but, in our view, it should not be in a position to reduce it.
One of my noble friends, or perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, referred to Localising Support for Council Tax Vulnerable People. Paragraph 3.4, about equality information and engagement, states in connection with child poverty that:
“authorities will be required to take into account their local child poverty needs assessment”.
That is fine.
“Local authorities should be able to design localised council tax reduction schemes in a way that best suits local circumstances, tailored to what child poverty looks like”—
looks like—
“in the local area”.
I will tell you what child poverty looks like in any area. It is the undernourished child going to school, perhaps dependent on free school meals. These days, he may have to go to a breakfast club to get a breakfast. According to a recent survey, 50% of teachers are going into schools with food that they can distribute to the children. Child poverty is children going badly clothed, living in fuel poverty so the house is cold, and perhaps with dysfunctional families, although that is, of course, not simply a financial matter. This can occur anywhere. These children can be found in the city that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I have represented and led and in the city that the noble Lord, Lord Smith, still leads. They can be found in villages in Suffolk, I guess, and in Norfolk, and in Kensington and Chelsea for that matter. They can be found anywhere. As my noble friend said, it is not locality that determines the character of poverty. It may possibly exacerbate a basic condition of poverty, but locality is not the determining condition, and it should not be locality that determines the basic support given to children in poverty or, indeed, to any other vulnerable group. To say that this is somehow an issue of localism is to pervert the proper definition of localism. The noble Lord has advanced a weak argument—from the best of motives because, in policy generally, he has a strong point. But in this area it is entirely misconceived.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords who supported this difficult but fundamentally important amendment. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. Perhaps I might respond briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, by saying that the objections he raises—first, that some places would get a windfall and might not deserve it and, secondly, that some places will see a fall in rental values and therefore of rateable values and income—did not strike me as undermining the case here. Major infrastructure projects require people to buy into them; to accept that Crossrail will come through town, or whatever the big issue is. It helps if there is some financial return to that area for the inconvenience that can elapse, perhaps for several years, when major infrastructure projects come through. However, this amendment is not of course specifically addressing that but addressing the upgrading of a particular part of town by the efforts of the local authority. That is the principal objective.
In relation to the noble Lord’s second point, that some areas may see a fall in values—that factories may close and nothing may happen—this amendment is intended to provide local authorities with a greater incentive to prevent that and to do something about it. If the council makes the area much better for customers to come to and for offices to recruit staff to work there, and if it does some good for the area, that is surely good for the local economy and can revive and regenerate a place. However, if councils have absolutely no incentive to spend that money in times of difficult resource allocation for them, it would seem most unlikely that local authorities would put their backs into trying to drive some business improvement and growth in those places. It strikes me that this amendment still has some heart to it. The technicalities have completely escaped me along the way and I would be very grateful if I could take up the Minister’s offer to explore whether or not her response was helpful.
Lord Beecham
Perhaps the Minister would also like to consider that question. I come back to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Best, has just made. I have a fair amount of experience in this area of regeneration. When I was leader of my city council, we had two quite different propositions. The first was, initially, to start developing along the riverside in Newcastle and to take advantage of the then Conservative Government’s enterprise zone. It was developed as a business park and we helped an engineering company, Michell Bearings, to move into a new factory. That factory was modern and all the rest of it but, 20-odd years later, it has closed. There is nothing much we can do to get it reopened. It is in an enterprise zone and has that attraction, for what it is worth. It is close to a bypass, which we would like the Highways Agency to do something about but cannot.
Against that, when we were faced with another aspect of enterprise zones, the development of an out-of-town shopping centre, we worked very closely with local business to promote the existing shopping core in Newcastle, just as other authorities did when faced with similar problems. That is one case where we can and did do something by responding to a downward pressure on business. In the other case of the closure of that factory, and indeed of another which we had always supported in another part of town, there is very little we can do. That, it seems, is the dilemma: we could find by accident or design that a substantial benefit is going to areas which have contributed nothing in the way of policy at all, let alone investment, towards the creation of value which they will get not just in the form of a 50% share of the rates that accrue but as the full amount. That is the point. Subject to the tariffs and all the rest of it, there is to be a retention, is there not, of the growth in business rate and not just the core rate. That could be quite accidental, and the product of other people’s decisions to which the local authority may have made no contribution at all. The consequence in the system as a whole is that it could widen disadvantage between one area and another. That is the point that we need to explore further. I have said enough and I leave it at that.
Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Best
I shall speak to Amendment 72 and make the case for legal aid in housing cases beyond those where someone faces imminent loss of their home.
The private rented sector has no regulator, in stark contrast to the social housing sector, nor is there an ombudsman to consider complaints against private landlords as there is for complaints against housing associations and council landlords. There is a voluntary ombudsman scheme for complaints about managing and letting agents, and I declare my interest as chair of the independent council of the Property Ombudsman. However, that redress scheme—
Lord Beecham
Is the noble Lord speaking to Amendment 72 or Amendment 72A? Amendment 72 is about debt.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, Amendments 41 and 51 are also about local authorities having greater freedom to organise their housing affairs without constant barriers being put in their way. These amendments concern the restrictions on local authorities that flow from taxing the sales of right-to-buy properties or any other sales of properties by housing authorities at 75 per cent of the money received by the local authority. Housing associations can sell properties, whether under the right to buy that they operate or on the open market where they have a vacant property. They can recycle 100 per cent of their receipts back into housing, to improving their housing stock and to building new homes.
The housing association of which I used to be chief executive, the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, had a programme of selling alternative vacant properties on our estates so that we could get a better mix of people of different incomes living in the same community. We could replace every home that we sold because we received 100 per cent of the funds from that sale to recycle into new homes elsewhere. However, local authorities have to pay 75 per cent of their proceeds back to the Treasury. Now that we are in the mode of reforming the housing revenue account, this seems to be the moment at which that restriction should be lifted and local authorities should be liberated to recycle the proceeds from sales.
I understand that the Treasury is very reluctant to forgo the receipts that it currently collects. That perhaps is understandable, because this is serious money that is coming into the Treasury. It has managed to scoop the pool here for many years, and tens of billions of pounds from right-to-buy sales have gone into the Exchequer. I understand that it does not wish to say goodbye to those arrangements. I also understand that in settling the debt in the new self-financing scheme for local authorities, account has been taken of the rental income that people will forgo once a property is sold. Nevertheless, saying goodbye to 75 per cent of the proceeds from right-to-buy sales, in stark contrast with the way housing associations are treated, seems to be an item on which reform at this time would be very significant.
Let me make it clear that it is not only right-to-buy sales that attract a 75 per cent tax—not a tax on the capital gain, but a tax on the sum received—as it is also imposed on the sale of bits of land and properties that are vacant and not subject to the right to buy. Where local authorities, like the Rowntree trust, would like to sell council houses to get a better mix of incomes across an estate, local authorities will not be able to recycle the proceeds from those sales, as they will have to pay 75 per cent to the Treasury. I think that the Treasury will argue again that it would like to see those receipts coming back to it since deficit reduction is top of the list of the Government’s priorities, but the Treasury is not going to receive anything from the sale of properties outside of the right to buy if local authorities know that it is such a bad deal to sell them in order to regenerate an area using the money they raise. No businesslike authority will proceed with these sales in order to pay money to the Treasury as a voluntary act. Local authorities simply will not do it. The Treasury is not going to forgo capital receipts if the 75 per cent tax on councils is lifted for those properties where the right to buy does not exist—in other words, where the council can make a sale voluntarily rather than being compelled to do so, as with the right to buy. I hope that the Government will be able, if deficit reduction in this spending round is so paramount that nothing can be done about the right-to-buy receipts, at least to offer to some extent a reassurance in relation to the sales of other properties that are not subject to the right to buy.
During the summer I have had discussions and correspondence with the Minister, and I hope that she will be able to tell us this afternoon that there may be some change of the Government’s mind about this very severe restriction on local authority activity, one where the ludicrous level of taxation makes it very difficult to run a business. I beg to move.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, the noble Lord referred to the 75 per cent tax levied on the proceeds of right-to-buy sales. It is interesting to note that at the moment there is a good deal of pressure on the Government to abandon the 50 per cent tax charged on those with substantial incomes and that, indeed, at least part of the coalition Government is interested in a mansion tax, which I suspect would be levied at substantially less than 75 per cent. In the context of housing, we should not be thinking in terms of taxation. The nation is paying a very heavy price in terms of housing need for the refusal of Government, initially in the 1980s, to allow any of the proceeds of the sale of council housing to be reinvested in housing and, it must be said, for the somewhat belated and modest change that was made to those rules by the previous Government. It does not seem to make any kind of economic sense.
The money raised by the right to buy would be ploughed back into housing provision. That would have two effects, the first of which would be that it would create assets on the balance sheet; it would not disappear into thin air. Secondly, it would give a much needed boost to the construction industry and therefore to the economy at a time when, as the Chancellor has belatedly conceded, things are not looking good in terms of the projected growth rate. Thirdly, it would lead to employment being taken up and thus a reduction in the cost of paying benefits. Most particularly, I suspect that the result would be that houses would be built rather more quickly than through the hoped-for gains to be made by the proposals in the national policy planning framework, which seem to assume that planning is the reason for the low number of houses being built, whereas of course the key issues are in fact finance and people’s capacity to buy.
Looking at it purely in housing terms, the noble Lord’s amendment makes a great deal of sense. I hope that the Government will rethink their position because it would make an immediate and much more significant contribution to dealing with the housing problem, as well as helping with economic growth without damaging the balance sheet. Indeed, in some respects it would strengthen the balance sheet with assets that are likely to appreciate.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham
Lord Best
My Lords, my name is against this amendment, in support of the sunset clause coupled with a report on the position of homelessness three years from now. The Minister said earlier that one of a local authority’s most important duties is towards the homeless. A pretty fundamental change in the way that that duty is to be discharged means that it must be a good idea to pause for thought three years down the line and see whether these quite important and significant changes have made a big difference.
At the moment, the local authority must find the family or householder a secure and affordable place in the social housing sector. In the future, they will be able to fulfil the requirement placed upon them by seeing that family into a place in the private rented sector. That, by definition, is not going to be secure in the long term. Understandably, landlords may wish to have the property back and security of tenure over the long term cannot be offered. It may be that that property, after the reforms to housing benefit and the local housing allowance, will prove to be unaffordable. There is a gap between what the tenant pays in rent and the amount that they receive in benefit, and the private rented sector option may not work out.
It may be that the dire warnings that we have heard from Shelter, Crisis, Homeless Link and others do not work out in practice, but there is a danger that those warnings prove to be entirely timely. We had a lot of discussion on these provisions earlier in the House. The noble Lords, Lord Shipley, Lord Rix, Lord McKenzie and Lord Kennedy, the noble Baronesses, Lady Doocey and Lady Greengross, and others all spoke on this matter in Committee. There is a great deal of concern about the fundamental changes to the duties upon local authorities.
I hope that noble Lords had a chance to look at Hansard over the summer. As I have said, noble Lords should regard reading the last debate as a bit of a teach-in on all the aspects of homelessness that we ought to think about. We were not able to secure all those different aspects as a whole series of amendments to the Bill but the Government have, in trying to ensure that accommodation is suitable in the private rented sector, come up with a code of guidance. That has some very good things in it. It does not go all the way down the line, but perhaps that will lead to a successful outcome for those who are placed in the private rented sector. This sunset clause would ensure that after a period of three years a thoroughgoing report is placed before Parliament, and that unless the Secretary of State revives these measures by order, those measures will fall.
Earlier this year I moved a Motion on the housing benefit regulations asking the noble Lord, Lord Freud, the Minister responsible, whether he would over the months and years ahead put in hand a fundamental reform along the lines of the housing benefit reforms in order to see what impact they had on homelessness, families, poverty, people’s incomes and the local authorities themselves. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, not only agreed to do that and to have a review, which is now under way and which will report in three stages over the next 18 months, but did it in a way that, I am pleased to report back to the House, met entirely with my approval and indeed that of others interested in these matters. He has brought together Professor Kemp from the University of Oxford and Professor Cole from Sheffield Hallam University; he has Ipsos MORI doing surveys and the IFS looking at the macroeconomics. It is a real, thoroughgoing review of the impact of these changes, which is just what we asked for and just what this House required. A comparable exercise to look down the line at how things are going would again be a triumph for the Government and a thoroughly commendable and useful exercise, which would provide the evidence and inform a decision on a sunset clause three years from now. Let us do it again. I strongly support the amendment.
Lord Beecham
I congratulate my noble friend Lord Kennedy and the noble Lord, Lord Best, on moving this amendment. Having paid that compliment, I hope that they will not mind if I claim paternity of the amendment itself.
There are two issues that really need addressing. One is affordability and the other is the quality of the accommodation that will be offered to people. They give rise to the need to review the situation, as noble Lords who have moved and spoken to the amendment have made clear. Nearly half those who are housing allowance claimants find that their housing benefit now falls short of what is required by an average of £24 a week, which is a considerable shortfall. That is before the impending changes. A significant proportion, a quarter of tenants, find themselves spending half their income on rent, which is a very high proportion.
The condition of properties in the private rented sector in particular also gives rise to concern, as 40 per cent of them fall short of the decent homes standard, which is twice as high as the percentage in the social rented sector and well in excess of the figure in the owner-occupied sector. A high proportion of cases dealt with by Shelter come from the private rented sector—twice the proportion of claimants that you would expect from the proportion of households in the sector. Again, a high proportion of environmental health officers are reported by Shelter as encountering landlords who refuse to carry out even the necessary repairs to maintain properties in a safe condition; 36 per cent of environmental health officers say regularly that they find private landlords in breach. Yet this is the sector to which many people will be directed under the provisions of this Bill.
It may be that things will improve, which is obviously the Government’s hope and intention, but it is surely necessary to take a check on this after a reasonable period. These amendments give that opportunity to rethink the situation if necessary. If things are going well, it is a simple enough matter to carry the legislation forward; if not, there will be an opportunity to address what might well be a very difficult situation for a great many people.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Lord Beecham(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, I give qualified support to Amendment 148 in the name of my noble friend Lady Greengross and to Amendments 148ZZZA and 148ZZZBA tabled by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. My support is qualified because the words,
“the local planning authority must”,
are not popular in local government circles. I would find it hard to be entirely supportive of extra obligations being placed by central government on local authorities, but I am supportive because noble Lords are absolutely right that collecting local data on housing markets and making them available, not least to any neighbourhood preparing a neighbourhood plan, as well as to the local authority preparing its local development plan, is more than just good practice; it is essential if housing providers are to meet local needs and demands.
To take the example of the area of interest to the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, if the local authority’s assessment shows that many thousands of family houses are occupied by one older person or an elderly couple, with the certainty that all those occupiers will grow older in years to come, clear signals can be given to private house builders and housing associations that there is a big market for attractive, manageable, economical apartments that are tailor-made for older people to buy or rent.
I give full backing to the intention behind these amendments and hope that their objective of getting local authorities to do what they should can be fulfilled, not least through the national planning policy framework, even if that objective is not accomplished by a new obligation on local authorities.
Lord Beecham
I hesitate to express a slightly different point of view as a vice-president of the Local Government Association from our esteemed president, but I am not quite as reluctant as he is to see this kind of duty, as proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and my noble friend Lord McKenzie, incorporated into the law, particularly given the state of the housing market in general and the huge unmet demand for housing, particularly affordable housing. It is important that all authorities recognise that there is a need to promote the provision of more accommodation. It is noticeable that since the disappearance of the regional spatial strategy, something like 200,000 houses it is estimated will no longer be built that would have been built had those plans been progressed.
I add one further dimension to the prescription from the noble Lord, Lord Best, for encouraging new building. I entirely agree with him that it is very desirable for private builders and housing associations to help to cater for the needs of an increasingly ageing population and indeed others. To that I would add local authorities themselves. That might be something that they would appreciate. Perhaps as a quid pro quo for having the extra responsibility of drawing up plans for affordable housing, the fact that they might actually be able to provide some themselves might be an additional incentive. I hope that sweetener will persuade the noble Lord, Lord Best, that his qualification might safely be abandoned.