Building Homes

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for both his questions. We are very aware of the point he raises about the affordability of housing, which is why, in spite of a very difficult Budget round, we have put a great deal of money into enhancing the ability to deliver affordable housing and social housing—a total of around £1.3 billion, with £500 million announced in the Budget. Some of the changes we have made to the planning process—for example, to require local authorities to determine not just how many homes they need but the tenure of those homes—will help with that as well.

To identify the obstacles to housebuilding, the housing accelerator programme has, with the industry, local authorities and other stakeholders, looked at what the key barriers have been to delivering the homes we need. It is working with specific sites where building has stalled and more generally to look at the barriers and how we overcome them. We have identified capacity in the planning system as one of those barriers, which is why we have put in additional funding this year to improve the capability and capacity of planning departments. We will be working further with our colleagues in the Department for Education to improve the number of planners coming through the training system. We have made changes to the planning fee process as part of this which will increase the quantum of funding that local authorities will have available in the planning process. The new homes accelerator has looked across all those barriers.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, you cannot live in a planning permission and you cannot wish new homes magically into existence. All the encouragement in the world will not help if builders cannot find the staff, materials and finance to put roofs over people’s heads. I have led a council, and I really want to ensure that we can put this rhetoric into reality.

In cities where Labour tells us that people want to live, the targets have been reduced. That makes the mountain to climb elsewhere even steeper. I will highlight the case of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, where the new targets are nearly three times the best housing delivery that that district borough has ever achieved. Does the Minister think that setting these unachievable targets brings the planning system into disrepute?

I want to place on record a story I read in the Financial Times this week about the best quarterly housing completions ever in the last 50 years. In 1978, 75,000 houses were completed in a single quarter. The targets mean that, for the rest of this Parliament, a sustained completion of 90,000 is needed. The Minister and I have worked closely over the years to get homes built. I have helped her in a small way with PINS; she has helped me with parishioners. My concern is that the Government are pinning the blame on councils. That is unfair, and I think she knows that.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

Question.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

What steps will the Government take to ensure that the national agencies that have single-handedly held up hundreds of thousands of homes being delivered over the last three years—such as Natural England, Highways England and National Rail, or whatever it is called nowadays—will roll up their sleeves and stop blocking building so we can get the nation building?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I gave an explanation of how we set the targets in response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. The fact is that everyone and every area has to play a part in this if we are to deliver these challenging housing targets. It is important that the new formula takes account of affordability and the demand for housing in local areas. Where they have challenging targets, it is because there is a demand in those areas, including a demand for more affordable housing.

We all know that statutory consultees play an important role in the planning system, providing advice on technical matters to ensure that new development is good quality, safe and situated in the right place. It is important that statutory consultees play their role too, to ensure that the planning system supports the housing and infrastructure development that we need. We will work with them over the next year to achieve that. Part of our work on the new homes accelerator will be to look at the statutory consultees to try to understand why the delays have come into the system, in relation to the responses of statutory consultees, and to see how we can work with them to alleviate some of those blockages and barriers.

Housing (Right to Buy) (Limits on Discount) (England) Order 2024

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, until May, I was the leader of a council for 17 years. Under my leadership, every single home lost to right to buy was replaced, and then some. We delivered 1% of the entire national affordable housing stock each year through the 2010s. That needs an authority that is organised and ambitious, and a clear idea of what the state is for. Did we sit there moaning about right to buy? No, we did not; we just got on with it. We struck hard bargains with landowners and developers. We recycled capital receipts. We built new homes for rent, of different tenures and different types, in both towns and villages, but mainly for social rent. That income kept council tax down for everyone. It can be done.

Throughout the 2010s, it helped that there was a 25% new homes bonus kicker for the delivery of new homes under social rent. It certainly helped when the last Government changed the rules so that we got to keep all the money to reinvest in new homes rather than see it go to the Treasury, particularly for temporary and short-term accommodation, where the need has become suddenly greater following Covid.

I can tolerate restrictions on right to buy on brand new homes, but I cannot abide those who stand in the way of a family cherishing an older property that could be brought into their ownership, the money for which would allow a new, much more modern and cheaper to run home to be built. For too long, blaming right to buy has been an excuse for inaction on house- building by councils. It has been a case of blaming the Government rather than rolling up your sleeves.

I am disappointed that the Government are diluting the incentive for families to take the plunge to seek more security and a stake in society. I particularly regret that the statutory instruments committee had to drag the full extent of these regressive proposals out of the Government, who did not want to show how many families would be disadvantaged by this proposal.

This is a moment to realise that right to buy has been one of this country’s most transformative policies and has done more to drive social mobility and give families a stake in society. That is something everyone in public life should aspire to promote, but perhaps that is asking too much from a Government who are putting limits on aspiration in so many walks of life, not driving it forward.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

I rise briefly to take part in this debate. Before doing so, I draw Members’ attention to my register of interest: I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a director of a fully privately funded affordable housing provider that actively encourages its tenants to buy their homes after five, 10, 15 or 20 years. It is called Rentplus and it does what it says on the tin: you rent at a discounted price and you buy at a discounted price. I work for somebody in the private sector who preaches the possibility that home ownership should be within everybody’s reach.

I will support my noble friend by going through the Division Lobby with him when he chooses to divide, but I will not agree on the reason. My reason is not that the Government are being unreasonable in setting the numbers they have chosen. Putting numbers on a piece of paper is a big mistake when talking about property markets; they are so varied in so many places for so many different reasons that it is better to put a percentage figure. I disagreed with what the last Government did by increasing the discounts to such a level that only really rewarded avaricious grandchildren, not the hard-working tenants who had occupied their homes for a long time. A number of elderly people were pressured into buying their houses for a capital sum that would go to their grandchildren. That should not have happened unless that grandchild had lived with those grandparents.

But, as my noble friend Lord Fuller said, right to buy is probably the single biggest piece of social mobility legislation enacted since the war. It enabled a million families to gain access to capital who never had done in the history of their families. I do not think anybody has done any work, but somebody should do, on how many businesses were set up in this country by people who could leverage capital they had not previously had access to. For a number of reasons—I think about our care sector, as people need access to capital to be able to pay to have care nowadays—this country would fall apart without it.

We should not lose sight of the fact that just over a million homes were lost to councils through right to buy, but 2 million homes were lost to councils through propositions put forward by the Tony Blair Government. Out of the 4 million homes that used to be in council ownership pre-1980, 1 million, so 25%, were lost through right to buy and 2 million—50%—were lost through LSVT. Councils such as my own were summoned to the Government Offices for the Regions to explain why they were not transferring their homes out. So this is not a tribal issue between the red team and the blue team; it is a proposition about whether we believe most people in this country aspire to be home owners. Clearly we do—I think all of us across the Chamber believe that—but do we also believe that people should be able to live in a safe, secure, decent, affordable home even if their financial circumstances mean that they are unable to do that completely unaided at the time they need it?

Right to buy is a good thing, but the right to build is the most important thing, and I agree that the Labour Government are right this time round to allow councils to keep 100% of the receipts, which would otherwise have been lost to the Treasury. Who wants to give money to the Treasury? It is much better for it to be spent locally. If the Labour Government had said that the discounts would be set at a local level by local councils to stimulate demand but not to reward avaricious grandchildren, I would not be going through the Division Lobbies tonight. But that is not what they have said; they have said, “Whitehall knows best. We’ll set an arbitrary figure that’ll have no bearing to the marketplace in a year or two’s time”.

Housing: Modern Methods of Construction

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I have been talking to a number of builders and they all say the same thing: “When we build a home, standard build is cheaper, while meeting the complexity that often comes with awkward and constrained sites”. Steel frames, precast floors and other off-site techniques can speed certain aspects. Pre-manufacture always has a role in high-rise situations, where space is constrained on inner-city sites. MMC is best introduced in institutional settings such as hotels and care homes, where identikit standardisation has value. But when all is said and done, they tell me that MMC is more expensive. Let us not kid ourselves that it is cheaper; it is not.

We must not ignore cost. To meet our national targets, we need to recognise that layering ever more well-meaning but expensive burdens on building, such as CIL, GIRAMS, SANGS, nutrient neutrality, BNG, water neutrality, MVHR and EV—all worthy things in themselves—has cumulatively added £40,000 to the cost of a new family home, before we even start to consider the proposed 50% affordable housing targets on grey belt that will push housing costs even further out of reach. We must have limits on cost.

We will make rapid progress if we prevent the mortgage, warranty and insurance companies discriminating against modern rather than traditional builds. We must make it easier for smaller, family firms to finance perhaps a dozen homes a year using materials sourced locally, and we must roll back the regulatory creep from self-serving national agencies such as Natural England, not councils, that layer ever more onerous, overlapping regulations and undermine the equality of the three levels of sustainability—economy, environment and society—in pursuance of their own judicial activism.

These are the basics to focus on before we spend disproportionate attention on the shiny MMC thing, which diverts focus from getting Britain building.