Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I am sure my noble friend has noted during our debates that there is an undercurrent of concern about the question of secondary legislation and regulation, and the difficulty that this House has in carrying out its constitutional responsibility to be, in detail, the House that seeks to ensure that legislation is as it ought to be and performs the purpose for which it is designed. In considering this particular occasion, would my noble friend accept that we need, one way or another, to allay that concern and fear? My noble friend Lady Gardner was careful in her choice of words, but we should all recognise that unhappiness and that perhaps this is one occasion on which it might be allayed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, first, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, to his first outing on the Housing and Planning Bill and pay tribute to his constitutional expertise in the other place, which he now brings to this House. It may help him if I say that I have listened very carefully to what he and other noble Lords have said on whether regulations on the definition of “high value” should be made under affirmative resolution. I also pay tribute to him for his work on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. As a direct result of the committee’s work, I have considered further its point about delegated powers in this chapter. I shall go into a bit more detail in a few moments, but I believe that the House should have the opportunity to scrutinise the detail before the regulations come into force, so I shall return to this at Third Reading.

On the specific amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Lisvane, Lord Kerslake and Lord Beecham, I understand that Amendments 53 and 132 reflect the recommendations made by the DPRRC in its report on Parts 1 to 5 of the Bill, published on 5 February. As I have announced, we will bring forward an amendment to make the high-value regulations affirmative. I shall focus on Amendment 53 and the corresponding part of Amendment 132, which would require determinations to be made through regulations and, under certain circumstances, subject to the affirmative procedure. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, is a member of the DPRRC and will have seen my letter of 23 March to my noble friend Lady Fookes, the chairman of that committee, where I set out the reasons why we considered that we should not accept the recommendation to put the determination into regulations. If the noble Lord will forgive me, for the benefit of your Lordships’ House, I shall now repeat some of my reasoning here.

Our view is that the determination is the most appropriate way of setting out the information of what payment a local authority will make to the Secretary of State. The key elements of the calculation are set out in the Bill, including the housing to be taken into account and the definition of vacancy. Other elements, such as the definition of high value and the types of properties which are to be excluded will be set out in regulations and therefore subject to further parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, my announcement that the definition of high value is to be made through an affirmative procedure has, I hope, demonstrated my willingness to listen to the House. As I explained in my response to the committee, we also think that the nature and amount of information contained in the determination means that it is appropriate to use a determination rather than a statutory instrument. The determination will contain the formula, the underlying assumptions and the payment for each authority, as the noble Lord pointed out, but it will also include the figures to determine the payments for each of the 165 local authorities, including, among other things, each authority’s vacancy rate, the number of its high-value properties and the level of its attributable debt.

Such a large and complex set of data creates the potential for errors to creep in, which will be noticed only by the relevant local authority. We therefore want to ensure that there is flexibility to amend the determination very quickly to correct any such errors. We of course welcome scrutiny of the formula and other elements of the determination. That is why Clause 69(2) requires the Government to consult all affected authorities, the LGA and relevant professional bodies before making a determination. On this basis, and with the amendment that I have announced on high-value regulations, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 54 and the other amendments that would add those two letters, “er”, to the word “high” in the clause. Noble Lords will already appreciate my lack of a grasp of the English language, but even I could see how dangerous those two small letters would have been in the wrong hands. I thank my noble friend the Minister for clarifying the Government’s intent to add those and where they will be applied. I ask her to confirm in her closing remarks that this will be used not as an attempt to raise additional income, but as purely a means to spread the burden across more authorities.

Had my noble friend not agreed in the letter she sent earlier and in her remarks on the manifesto commitment that councils would be allowed to retain sufficient receipts to build one-for-one replacement of the same tenure, I would probably have been speaking against these amendments. I should explain to noble Lords why I am prepared to move purely on that basis, and properly in response to the noble Lord, Lord Foster.

In councils such as mine, where we are able to retain sufficient receipts to build a council house out of the sale of a high or higher value, I would probably volunteer to sell all my council houses to anybody who would buy them on the open market, on the basis that the cost of building a replacement unit would probably be about 30% cheaper than the value received on the sale of that unit. I would be quite happy to replace my beautifully maintained 1,600 homes for 1,600 brand new homes in the immediate future, thus doubling the number of affordable homes in my district. On that basis, I earnestly thank the Minister and the Secretary of State in the other place for listening to our proper arguments and the case we made, and for responding appropriately.

[Lord Deben]

I had not intended to speak in this debate until the noble Lord, Lord Foster, spoke. The House ought to remember that the idea that we cannot do anything here and should leave it to the local authorities to make all these decisions runs up against the problem that we have not built the houses we have needed to build over a long period. The people who have had all these opportunities to do so and who know their localities and their needs so well do not seem to have noticed that the big need in most localities is to build some houses. I am a bit suspicious of the Foster doctrine. The truth is that many local authorities need a kick up the backside on housing. That is obvious and real.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

I cannot let that remark go unchallenged. The problem of the housing shortage in this country is not the fault of any local authority; it is the fault of successive Governments of all colours. They have gone out of their way to stifle the ability of local councils to build houses. I am pleased that the current Government and, to some extent, the coalition Government moved towards that. I am pleased that the current Government are fully encouraging local councils to build houses. It is not the councils’ fault.

[Lord Deben]

If my noble friend had let me finish what I had to say he might have found that we rather agreed. I was going on to say that the second lot of people who have not done what they ought to have done in building houses are successive Governments. When I hear some of the speeches from the Front Bench over there, and realise the appalling history of Labour Governments and housing—

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords—

[Lord Deben]

I will give way to the noble Lord but I want to tell him a personal fact. When I was the Secretary of State responsible and worked out the lowest number of houses we needed, what did the Labour Party do? It denied that that was the number needed. Indeed, when the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, came in, he reorganised the figures to cover up the fact that I was right; we did need those houses. I do not think that the Labour Party, the Conservative Party or indeed the Liberal Democrats had anything to trumpet about in the past. We now have a Government who are actually trying to do something about it.

[Lord Beecham]

I do not for a moment disagree that insufficient numbers of houses were built, in particular council houses, under the Labour Government, but the massive investment in the condition of the housing stock under that Government should not be forgotten.

[Lord Deben]

I do not think that I was entering into a discussion on how it was spent and where it went—although I could, I do not want to get into that. I just want to say that we should all be ashamed of the fact that, over many years, we have not delivered what we ought to in housing—not council housing: housing. In one of the earliest moments of my political life, I remember listening to Harold Macmillan say that he was going to build houses, and that it did not matter where you built them in terms of the levels, because there were so few that people would move into one and up to another. What you really needed was numbers of houses, and that is what the figure of 300,000 houses a year was about.

Every time anybody produces a way of doing something better, there is always somebody who gets up and sounds like one of my civil servants, saying, “Better not, Minister. It might go wrong, something might be wrong”. It is about time we said, “Let’s try to make this work”. There are lots of things about this Bill that I am not happy about, particularly not knowing the regulations in advance. That is a constitutional issue, not a housing issue, but we have to give the Government the chance to do something, given that no one has a good argument to say that they have come up with anything much better than the radical proposals before us.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister can help me understand a little more what she proposes with this swap from “high” to “higher”. I quite understand that going for “higher” rather than “high” will protect some authorities—largely London, but maybe Oxford, Cambridge, Winchester and so on—from seeing most of their stock disappear because, on the national level, they have a “disproportionate” number of high-value properties. We all understand what “higher” means: possibly the top decile or the top 20% of house prices in this country. Obviously, they would then respond to a redistribution across the country, which the Minister, if she wished, could control by having local, district, regional or county controls on that redistribution.

I have a worry, which I hope the Minister can allay, that “higher” will be anything above the median, which effectively means that every local authority in the country will have some high-value stock above the median and some lower-value stock below the median, even though that area may be very poor. Does this mean that the Minister and her officials will determine for each local authority what proportion of housing it must be expected to sell because it is higher than the median? We can tell her now that that will be some 49% in Oldham or Great Yarmouth.

I can see why the Minister is trying to move away from a situation where she redistributes from a few very high-value authorities across the country, but she can address that issue by containing the area within which that redistribution occurs. Instead, by going for “higher”, at the moment, based on my understanding of the English language, she opens up the potential for every local authority to lose up to 49% of its stock because it is “higher”—not “high”, but “higher”—and therefore above the median. That would be utterly perverse.