Housing: Modern Methods of Construction

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, we have paid a very heavy price indeed as a country for the combination of the 2008 economic shock, the pandemic and the monumental distraction of Brexit. Thus preoccupied, we have failed to grip many areas of national policy, but housing has been our most grievous and pernicious failure. We now need a holistic framework, an action plan covering every aspect of housing policy, involving all relevant departments.

First and foremost, we need once again to make a substantial investment in social housing, publicly procured. We obviously need a new building standards framework, inter alia embracing 360-degree insulation as well as fire safety. We need to embrace modern construction methods: as in other industries, modularisation and off-site construction has to be more efficient and cost effective. In 2015, China built a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 days. In under 20 years, embracing streamlined processes, China has built 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail. A modern methods of construction taskforce was announced in the 2021 Budget; can the Minister confirm that it has never met?

We need a national plan to build homes where they are needed, with social and other infrastructure as part of the plan, but there are some don’ts. We must not in any way sacrifice the UK’s precious areas of natural beauty—and please let there be no more featureless box-houses, a hallmark of the most recent past and devoid of any aesthetic. Let us act quickly but with care.

Affordable Housing: Supply

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, for initiating this important debate and applaud the maiden address from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes. I assure her that the House will welcome now and into the future her spirited advocacy, not least for Wales.

I think the inadequacy of the UK’s housing provision, adversely affecting most in our society—the middle classes as well as the poor—is our most pressing national problem. It is a problem many decades in the making and I do not think that we will resolve any specific aspect of housing difficulty without addressing the totality of housing provision in the round, right across the United Kingdom.

Around 300,000 people—there are some slight differences in the figures that noble Lords have cited, but I am sure we all have good sources—including 200,000 children, are without a home and live in temporary accommodation, in shelters or with friends. One million households are on council waiting lists. According to the English Housing Survey, 4 million live in substandard homes, in the oldest housing stock in Europe. One-third of under-34s still live with their parents and struggle to buy a home. Home ownership overall is in decline. At the same time, our population is growing rapidly. In addition, more of us live longer and young people form single-person households and marry later. For these many reasons and others, overall demand for housing is increasing rapidly. Yet housing provision—as pretty much everybody has said—has manifestly not kept pace with growing demand.

As I think the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, was the first to remind us, just over 100 years ago, just after the First World War, the then Government began building “homes fit for heroes”. I do not think anybody has mentioned that in 1953, under a Conservative Government, social housing build peaked at 200,000 units per year. I think this is the most remarkable statistic. Today, there are 2 million fewer units of social housing than there were 40 years ago. You do not have to look very far to see at least one of the root causes of our housing malaise.

What are we doing to close that awesome deficit? Not much—local authority and housing association build in recent years has been around a modest 20,000 units per year. A huge increase in private renting, which has doubled over two decades, has taken the strain, often with poor quality, underinvested housing.

Many factors, most of which have been mentioned, stand in the way of increased homebuilding, including planning restraints, land hoarding and shortages of skilled labour. Estimates vary on the scale of the overall housing gap—the gap between demand and supply—but all are in the range of 1 million and 2 million homes. That is a measure of just how far behind we are from where we need to be. Despite the recent improvements in housebuilding, it is a very long journey to get anywhere near to filling that gap. The noble Lord, Lord Barwell, put the issue simply and bluntly, and I think everybody here would agree, when he said that building more of every level of housing is what is needed.

I echo what a number of others have said in this excellent debate so far. We need to take out a clean sheet of paper and build a new housing strategy from scratch. What we have been doing in recent decades has simply not been working. We need to create a plan developed from a national, not regional or local, perspective. This is not for housing in our precious green belt, of course, but near where people work. We need a strategy for housing close to services, which is well-insulated, with decarbonised heating, and of beauty—something which the UK has achieved brilliantly again and again in our history and must do again.

We will not solve our housing crisis overnight. It will take 10 to 15 years of systematic hard work to do that. However, we will not resolve it at all without, as others have said, speedily framing a comprehensive national plan that addresses and deals with the many causes of our most pernicious national problem.

Housebuilding

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Haselhurst (Con)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

It is the turn of the Cross Benches.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, we have long had a housing crisis. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, millions are living in substandard and overcrowded accommodation, there are 2 million fewer social housing units than some decades ago and home ownership among the young has fallen dramatically. Does the Minister agree that we need to create many more than 300,000 new dwellings per year if we are to achieve a reasonable equilibrium in reasonable time in the UK’s housing market?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The Government’s view is that we need to deliver 300,000 houses per year by the middle of 2025. The noble Lord is right that we then need to look again at those numbers. The key to this is that local authorities look at the housing need in their areas and build to that housing need.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Birt Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, the challenge for any large organisation, whether in the public or private sectors or within government, is how to combine strategic direction with effective on-the-ground delivery. The Bill sets out many laudable aims, but does it add up to a strategy for regeneration and will it really deliver levelling up?

Among our greatest problems is housing; we have heard a lot about that already. Our social housing stock has shrunk by more than 2 million homes over the past 40 years. In the past decade, we have been building far fewer homes than we did in the 1950s, yet our population has grown by 9 million since 2000, and household growth is rising at an even faster rate; thus we are completely failing to match supply and demand and to meet every kind of housing need. How can we create, over the next decade or so, the many millions of homes we require, while at the same time delivering other public goods, protecting our countryside, constructing well-insulated homes and once again building houses of beauty? How can we combine national direction with local delivery? I hope the Minister can persuade us that the Bill will help us do all that.

I sit on the board of a company which is national in reach but is based in the heart of the north. Like any modern business, it draws on myriad different specialist skills, thus many staff travel long distances daily to work—some have homes hundreds of miles away from their place of work and find weekday lodging. Accordingly, any modern economy needs, nationally, an effective strategic road and rail system and, regionally, metropolitan transportation systems in areas of high population density. Around 6 million people live in the adjoining metropolitan areas of Merseyside, Manchester and West Yorkshire. How will the measures in the Bill enable a concentrated focus on creating an appropriate transport infrastructure to unlock the full potential of that vast population?

There is work to be done. Currently, we are missing a plan to link HS2 to Leeds or Liverpool—and to speed the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds home. The woefully misnamed TransPennine Express takes, plus or minus, one and a half hours to traverse the 72 miles between two great northern cities. Moreover, the M62 is routinely gridlocked, and many small roads between northern towns are overloaded. Just before Christmas, it took me a miserable three hours to travel the 16 miles by road from Leeds station to my destination near Halifax.

Finally, I turn to skills. Despite being on the verge of recession, we have vast skills shortages in every part of the economy—data scientists, financial analysts, digital marketeers, construction workers and every kind of engineer, to name but a very few. I am unpersuaded that the Government have yet analysed the UK’s precise skills needs, now and in the future, or yet identified the means of their delivery. How will the framework outlined in the Bill address this vital issue? My fear is that, absent a clear delineation of responsibility, power and accountability at every level, we will fail coherently and expeditiously to address these critical and urgent issues, and thus continue to fail to achieve the levels of equality and prosperity that, as a nation, we all fervently desire.

Housing Strategy

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Birt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am unaware of any area of our national life more in need of our attention than housing. I strongly commend the initiative of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in prompting this valuable and informed debate.

More than 4 million households in England are living in non-decent homes, as defined by the English Housing Survey. One million are living in homes unfit for human habitation, as defined by Shelter. Almost a million now live in overcrowded accommodation. Moreover, 300,000 people in the UK, including 200,000 children, are homeless. They are living in temporary accommodation, crashing with friends or family or camping on the street. Rough sleeping has doubled in 10 years. If noble Lords want to experience the appalling conditions under which many Britons live, I strongly recommend Channel 5’s “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay”, where noble Lords can witness real deprivation for themselves through the eyes of the bailiffs.

Housing issues affect not just the poor but every level of society. For instance, a quarter of 20 to 34 year-olds still live at home with their parents—up 1 million in the past 20 years. The reasons for the sorry state of our housing are all too easy to see. On the one hand, as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, rightly reminded us, demand has grown, most significantly because our population has expanded by 10 million over the past 20 years. Over the same period, demographic change has increased the number of households by 3 million, in part because we are living longer and in part because we are living alone more often.

At the same time, the young are struggling to buy. House prices relative to income have doubled over the past 40 years. Post 2008, mortgages became harder to obtain. As a result, overall home ownership in the UK has declined, reversing the trend of a century. Those most in need have seen spend on housing benefit flatten then fall, adding to their pressure to find a home.

Against this mix of factors affecting demand there are corresponding issues of supply. We have the oldest housing stock in Europe—much of it substandard—and a low rate of demolition and replenishment. We have not built new towns. Small builders and local development are in decline. Large developers, on the one hand, are hoarding land, and on the other, are experiencing prolonged planning delays. It is therefore no surprise that, in the past 10 years, we have built on average fewer than 200,000 units per year.

Even more strikingly, there has been a vast decline in the availability of social housing. Local authority provision has declined by two-thirds in 50 years. The stock of housing association homes has increased but, overall, social housing provision has dropped by 2 million homes since its peak. In 2018-19, councils in England built only 5,000 units of social housing. Set against our need, what a shocking figure that is. This massive drop in housing provision for the most needy is the most critical factor in our housing crisis. Of course, the unmet demand for social housing has been taken up by the private rental sector, which has doubled in 20 years to more than 4 million units—more or less the same level now as the whole of the social housing sector.

Academic and other estimates put the present shortfall between demand and supply for housing as of the order of 1 million homes. This position will worsen, for our population continues to grow and will soon reach 70 million. If current demographic trends also continue, we will need of the order of 3 million to 4 million additional units over the next 10 to 20 years to bring demand and supply back into some balance.

As many of your Lordships have identified, we need not just numbers but the right mix of homes—of mainstream, affordable and social housing. We are a crowded island, so we should not and must not trespass any further on to our precious green spaces. One organisation guilty of trying to do that is the Church of England itself, with its willingness to sell glebe farmland for commercial development.

We need what we manifestly do not now have—almost all who have spoken have said this: a coherent, holistic, long-term framework of real ambition which grapples with the difficult, stubborn mix of factors affecting both demand and supply. My mother’s and my father’s generation rose to the challenge in the post-war years, when build rose to 400,000 units per year. I ask the Minister: can this generation rise to the challenge?