Housing and Social Security

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

It is Government policy that people should have the right to buy their home, whether it is a council house or a housing association property. The hon. Gentleman will know that we are piloting how the housing association right to buy programme works. We will then work on how we can take it forward.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

On that point, the housing associations in London have made it very clear collectively that they are willing and able to massively ramp up the number of homes they are building. The one thing they ask from the Government is to accelerate the release of publicly owned land so that they can do so. Is that still very much part of the agenda?

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend touches on a very important point. The public sector land programme is designed to do just that. In the past seven years, it has released record amounts of land for hundreds of thousands of new homes. There is always more to do. That is why we set out plans in the housing White Paper to achieve even more from that programme.

I can tell Labour Members one more thing that has happened since 2010: more council housing has been built in the past seven years than was built in the previous 13 years. Going back to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), enough public sector land has been released to deliver at least 130,000 new homes, which is equivalent to a city the size of Nottingham.

More than 300,000 new homes were granted planning permission in the year up to March, which was up 15% on the previous 12 months. New build dwelling starts rose by 15% compared with the previous period. Once people are in their homes, they are staying in them because mortgage repossessions are at their lowest level for 35 years. This Government can offer an ambitious, far-reaching plans for the future of house building, built on solid foundations of real success.

I want to contrast that with what is on offer from the Labour party. Let us look at what happened last time Labour was in charge of housing. When Labour came to power in 1997, the average house cost 3.5 times the average salary. When it left office 13 years later, the average house cost seven times the average salary—a massive collapse in affordability and the biggest the country has ever seen. That hit ordinary working people the hardest.

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[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) who made a brilliant maiden speech. I am grateful for having been here for most of the maiden speeches today. I wondered whether I qualified to make one, but apparently not. I see Mr Speaker shaking his head—this is therefore not a maiden speech. [Interruption.] Absolutely right—you can’t be a maiden twice.

Before I say a few words about housing, today’s main topic, I want to join hon. Members in sending my condolences to the families who have been torn apart in the disaster that affected London only a couple of weeks ago.

Housing shortage is undoubtedly acute. The word “crisis” is often overused in politics, but it is a crisis, particularly in London, where the demand is highest. We have reached a point where someone could be earning double the average London salary and still have no prospect of owning a home. The average home here costs around £500,000, which is 12 times the average income in this city. Young people in particular have been locked out. The fact that they have to pay exorbitant rents means that they are even less likely to realise their dream. Without urgent action now, the problem will get even worse—the population of London is likely to hit 10 million in around 15 years.

I was therefore pleased by the emphasis in the manifesto on tackling the problem: the commitment to deliver a million homes by 2021 and to double the housing budget to £20 billion. However, we need to get on and do it, and there are some clear priorities. We need to deal with the fact that there are so many empty homes. It is true that, as we heard from the Prime Minister earlier, the number is at its lowest for many years, but it is still too high. The Empty Homes Agency puts the figure in London alone at 60,000, and it may be higher.

We need to get more competition into the sector, which has become effectively an oligopoly—a tiny number of giant developers accounting for the vast bulk of the development and demanding huge returns based on often spurious viability tests. We need to accelerate the release of publicly owned land. Developers always press Governments to relax protections of our green spaces, but we do not need to do that, and we should not. In London, where the need is greatest, we have huge tracts of publicly owned brownfield land that could be developed. Transport for London alone has the equivalent of 16 Hyde Parks. As we build on publicly owned land—land that we own—we can and must ensure that the new homes are not simply sold off to overseas investors and left empty. We have to solve the problem that we face in this country.

There is something else that we need to do—something that has taken on a grim new relevance. Across the capital, we have tower blocks that were rushed and poorly designed, many of which are coming to the end of their lives. There is a growing realisation that we now have an obligation to rethink our approach. I want to focus briefly on one aspect of that.

We know that a low-rise, high-density, street-based design provides more homes because it makes better use of the available space. The estate agent Savills did a detailed report a couple of years ago. It estimates that rebuilding just one fifth of London’s run-down estates could produce up to 350,000 more homes. Every survey shows that residents more often than not prefer that approach. With so many tower blocks needing serious investment, surely now is the time to look at a different way of doing things. We can avoid the mistakes of the past and build in a way that breaks down barriers, strengthens communities and provides homes that people want to live in.

One reason for the sensitivity of the issue is that the approach has been so ham-fisted in the past. Areas have been improved, but existing residents have effectively been pushed out to make way for newcomers. That is the consequence of bad policy and bad decisions. In my own constituency, we are at the very early stages of a major regeneration scheme to remove 1960s blocks and replace them with low-rise, street-based, beautiful homes—and there will be more of them, even if the design makes it appear that there are fewer. That process is underpinned by a cast-iron residents’ guarantee: no one living there today will be unable to live there tomorrow, no one living there today will have to pay more tomorrow, and no one will have to move twice, which is particularly important to elderly residents and young families with children at local schools. The provision of that guarantee made it possible, immediately, for residents to engage in the process and take ownership of it, without needless anxiety. I think it is a process that could be replicated and emulated through the capital, and beyond.

Planning is nearly always a deeply divisive issue. If we are to have any hope at all of securing people’s consent to the delivery of the sheer quantity of homes that we know we must deliver, the planning system itself must become more sensitive, more open and more consensual. It needs to work with, rather than against, people and communities, who need to feel that they own the process. People know that we need more homes; if not for them, for their children. If they feel they are in the driving seat, they will be much more open to the challenges—and that, I think, needs to be absolutely at the heart of this great enterprise.