Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hollis of Heigham

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[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.