Sustainability and Transformation Plans

Debate between Lord Greaves and Lord O'Shaughnessy

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress is being made with the Sustainability and Transformation Plans for England.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord O'Shaughnessy) (Con)]

My Lords, proposals have been published for all 42 sustainability and transformation plans—also known as STPs—covering every part of England, with a goal of making the NHS five-year forward view a reality. NHS organisations have now submitted their operational plans for 2017-19. These are the next steps in turning STPs from proposals into practical action.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, with 42 areas, a huge number of meetings, a huge amount of report-writing and research and all kinds of things are taking place, diverting a large amount of time and resources. The Government see the operation as a way of slashing spending, but the professionals involved on the ground see it as a way of providing better services. Do the Government realise that they cannot carry out another huge wave of reorganisations in these 42 areas without extra resources, rather than less resources? Can they tell us how many staff are engaged on the STP process and at what cost, and how much is being spent on consultants and other outside support to carry out this operation? How much is it all costing?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

My Lords, the sustainability and transformation plans are operational plans for putting the NHS’s own five-year forward view into practice. They are about the community and clinically led redesign of services to do things such as make it easier to see a GP, improve cancer diagnosis and give faster mental health support. Noble Lords might be interested to know some of the big opportunities for service improvement identified by the Lancashire and South Cumbria STP, which is local to the noble Lord: 27% of people seeing their GP could have had their issue resolved another way; 25% to 50% of hospital beds were used by people who did not need to be there; and 30% of A&E attendances could have been avoided. It has said that about £176 million of efficiencies could be found in the acute providers within that STP area alone. There are huge opportunities for change. It is clear that any changes cannot be approved without public consultation or without delivering clinical improvements. The Government are backing these plans in two ways. First, with the £1.8 billion—

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Greaves and Lord O'Shaughnessy

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy (Con)]

My Lords, I register my concern about Amendments 18, 27 and 33A because of the unintended impact of the regulation that I believe they would introduce.

It is worth reflecting once again on the reasons behind the Bill: we have too little housing in this country, it is too expensive and is not of a high enough quality. To address this crisis we need to generate radically greater investment in housing. I think everyone in the Committee agrees with that. That investment must come from government and the private sector. Several noble Lords have already commented on the growing role of the private rental sector. For better or worse, we now have 4.4 million households in private rented accommodation—the second highest tenancy after ownership. Earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, talked about an explosion of private rental housing. I welcome this in its own terms because we will simply not get the housing we need without the billions—indeed, trillions—of pounds of investable money that is sitting in pension funds and other investment funds.

It is also worth remembering that we have a public debt of 80% of GDP and a budget deficit, so private sector funding is essential to meeting our housing need. Whenever you talk to private pension fund and investment fund managers about investing in housing, you find that it is the complexity of the product that puts them off. We must be very wary about increasing that complexity.

What are the conditions needed to encourage this investment? Clearly, any investment needs to look for an economic return. I think we all agree that that is available in the housing sector. We need a quick and simplified planning system—we are not dealing with that part of the Bill today but will do so—and a low regulatory burden for the non-rogue landlords. It is on this last item that these amendments are problematic. I totally understand their intention but believe that they will provide another barrier to entry for potentially good landlords.

My noble friends Lord Flight and Lord Cathcart talked about the fact that licensing schemes will tend to attract good landlords and not capture the bad ones. For that reason, a mandatory licensing and accreditation scheme—let alone the charging of fees, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves—would potentially discourage investors and raise the costs of housing while also increasing the burden on local authorities. Surely this is not the way forward to generate the housing that we need.

What we need, of course, are greater powers to crack down on rogue landlords—exactly what we discussed earlier today—a proportionate response to the problem rather than a blanket response. As we discussed—and will continue to discuss—these are well provided for in the Bill, with great agreement across the House. So the discussion of voluntary arrangements—

[Lord Greaves]

I do not understand how a simple act of telling the council that you are the owner of a property is a huge regulatory burden. But putting that on one side, how is a council supposed to crack down on a rogue landlord if it does not know who owns the property?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

That is a perfectly good question. I was going to end by talking about the voluntary arrangements that have been discussed in both this area of registration and with the Housing Ombudsman. However, the amendment of my noble friend Lord Flight points to a simpler, lower-impact and more elegant way of gaining the information that we are after. Every time there is a change of tenancy or of ownership is precisely the point at which a new registration would have to be made. I do not believe you would need to send out forms every year; you would just need them when the occupancy or the ownership changed. That would provide a rolling database of the information that local authorities need.