Housebuilding: Government Targets

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister not recognise that it is not just the absolute number that is important but the type of tenure? What is crystal clear for anyone who looks at the figures is, in effect, the collapse of availability of social housing in this country. Until the Minister can show us a plan by the Government to try to restore that as a proportion of the total number of households in the country, we will not meet the acute need as required.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right, but we are investing £11.5 billion through our affordable homes programme to deliver up to 180,000 more affordable homes. A large number of these will be available for social rent. Also, the Government have provided a range of tools to help councils deliver more homes, particularly in this sector. They include the councils’ freedom on how to spend the money received from the right-to-buy sales. The Government also abolished the housing revenue account borrowing cap in 2018, allowing councils to borrow more money to build more homes.

Social Mobility Commission

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that. I will certainly take that back. I am almost sure that anybody who will be chairing this commission or serving on it will have all that information in front of them and be looking at it in detail.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

In an answer to an earlier question, the Minister referred to the remit and the scope of the work of this body on social mobility. Is there not a glaring problem in this House, where there is a clear restriction on any kind of social mobility? I am referring to the 92 places that are reserved for hereditary Peers. Is there any progress at all towards greater social mobility among this sector, and if not, why not?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I have no answer for the noble Lord on that one. The questions I am answering are on a completely different subject.

Housing (Built Environment Committee Report)

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with pretty much everything the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said, but particularly the last part. A number of things have already been said, but I make no apology for repeating my thanks to our committee secretariat, led by Dee Goddard. I also thank the person in the chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. It was the first big piece of work of a new committee, and I am very pleased to have been associated with it.

It has been some time since we reported: 10 months since the publication of our report. The main problems we identified remain the same, though some of them clearly are getting worse. This is particularly true when considering the issues raised in chapter 3 on “Housing types and tenures”. There are 24 million households in England, with 65% owner-occupied, 19% privately rented and 17% are homes for social rent. There have been significant changes in these proportions in recent years. Owner-occupation is down from 71% in 2005. Social housing is dramatically down from 30% in 1980. The only sector that has grown, and quite dramatically, is the private rented sector, which has doubled from 10% in 2003.

There is a real paradox at the heart of these figures. The sector that has been growing the fastest is the sector which, as far as householders are concerned, is the least popular. Owner-occupation has long been the most popular form of tenure and for social housing there is overwhelming evidence of unfulfilled demand. One measure of it is that in 2021 there were no fewer than 1,187,641 households on local authority waiting lists. Faced with huge waiting lists for social housing and the escalating costs of owner-occupation, people have no alternative but to turn to the private rented sector.

There are, of course, plenty of private tenants in well-maintained rentals that they can afford. However, the evidence tells us that the picture of the sector overall is not so rosy. There is lower continuity of tenure for private renters, who move on average every four years, compared with social renters, who move every 12 years, and owner-occupiers, who move every 17 years. As we say in our report:

“Those living in the private rented sector are more likely to live in poor quality, overcrowded conditions than owner–occupiers, and often have limited forms of redress.”


We also know that in terms of monthly expenditure—this is astonishing, but it is familiar to all of us—it is cheaper to be an owner-occupier on a mortgage than to be a private renter. The figures in our report are for 2020 and clearly will have changed since then with all that has happened. At the time, they showed that the average monthly cost for owner-occupiers in the north-west, for example, was £576 compared with the average monthly cost of private rent, which was £723. In nutshell, of the three main forms of housing tenure, the fastest growing is the least secure and the most expensive.

That almost defies economic logic, so here are the obvious questions to the Minister. What plans, if any, do the Government have to address the acute shortage of social housing? What are the Government’s targets for the provision of new social, local authority housing? I agreed with every word my noble friend Lord Davies said and particularly with the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham—in fact, when he finished, I very nearly said amen. What plans, if any, do the Government have to enable those people on very high rents in private accommodation to move towards home ownership, which, as we have seen, is cheaper and for which there is clearly a huge demand?

It is taken as read, throughout our report as well as by the Government, that we need more homes. Most of this demand will have to be met by new builds. However, there is another potential source of supply among existing housing networks. Sadly, we do not have much to say on this in the report; we could say only so much. In paragraph 55, we report that, in England alone, there are around 500,000 empty properties—we were given the figure of 479,000. Regrettably, as I said, our committee did not take specific evidence on this, although we know that a number of different local authorities are trying to tackle the problem in a variety of ways. Empty homes that are neglected for long periods can blight not just their streets but the wider neighbourhood. While empty and neglected homes are clearly a problem, it is also the case that 500,000 unused properties could be part of the solution to housing demand. I ask the Minister: what is the Government’s estimate of the number of empty properties and is there any best-practice advice for local authorities about how to deal with the issue? Surely, if the aim is to provide 300,000 more homes a year, reducing the number of empty properties could be a very helpful part of the solution.

Whether we are talking about existing properties being renovated or new houses being built, we must address the fundamental problem of the supply of skilled people to do the work. You can have all the planning permissions, all the environmentally friendly targets and all the town planners and architects in the world, but, at its heart, what is needed most of all are bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and all the associated building trades. We spell out in our report the existing acute skills shortage, which is destined to get worse. Some 48,000 vacancies in the construction industry were recorded between April and October last year. In the same period, 53% of SME builders said that they were struggling to recruit carpenters and 47% said the same about bricklayers. What is more,

“35% of the workforce are over 50. Only 20% … are … below 30”.

These are skilled trades requiring apprenticeships and for which vacancies cannot be filled overnight. They are also trades that, in practice, overwhelmingly recruit men. Only 8% of construction apprenticeships are undertaken by women and only 5% of construction workers identify at BAME. As we say in our report:

“Diversity remains a major issue in construction trades … It will be essential to draw on a wider talent base to meet the demand for skills.”


There are many reasons for this shortage. I simply do not have time to go into them all, but one is undoubtedly the difficulty of career progression, as well as the fact that wages do not tend to increase over a lifetime for most of the building trades. Table 5 of our report shows that the median hourly rate for a plumber in his 30s is £13.41 and in his 50s it is £13.59 —assuming he is still physically fit enough to do the job. As I said, one of the challenges in this sector is the lack of career progression. However, the blunt truth is that, unless the problem of skills shortage is addressed, there will simply not be the people to build the 300,000 houses that the Government are committed to providing. I ask the Minister for her assessment of just how serious this problem is and what measures she proposes to address it.

Amid all the challenges in our report, at least there is agreement on the objectives: we need more houses of good quality at prices and rents that people can afford. If the Government remain committed to their target of 300,000 builds, and to their levelling-up agenda, the message of our report is that they need to do better and quickly.

Housing: Private Renters

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, it is important to recognise the balance of having more tenants who cannot afford renting in the private sector having social or affordable homes. That is why we have an £11.5 billion Affordable Homes Programme, and we are seeking to double the amount of social rented homes that we build to 32,000, because clearly, the housing benefit bill has been growing astronomically and we need to contain that over time.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Agreeing as I certainly do with the thrust of the previous four questions, I ask whether the Minister can confirm that in the last 20 years, the proportion of households living in private rented accommodation has doubled, whilst the proportion of owner-occupiers has reduced and the proportion living in social rented accommodation has reduced dramatically. This is despite the fact, as the previous questioner has pointed out, that the private rented sector is often the most expensive and certainly the least popular of the various forms of tenure. Is the Minister satisfied with these trends and is he happy for them to continue, or does he not think that it would be preferable to enable more people to move into the owner-occupied sector or the social rented sector, and stop this huge rise in the private rented sector?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I am not going to glorify one type of tenure over another. The noble Lord is right, however, in the sense that we have seen a doubling of the amount of private rented, but it is approximately the same proportion of the amount of housing stock: it has broadly stayed around 19%. You can look at percentages, or at the absolute amount. One of the benefits of Governments over the last few decades is that the proportion of non-decent private rented sector homes—those with category 1 hazards—has come down dramatically. In 2006, to pick a date at random, it was 46%. It is now down to 21% of homes, which is still too high, but that is why we are bringing in these measures, to drive that down even further. For young people, who are mobile, private renting is often a very good option and I am not going to knock it, but we do recognise that we need to build more homes for sale and have more social homes. I acknowledge that, but let us not put one form of tenure ahead of another.

Social Homes for Rent

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for raising that issue. Of course, we went through an era of liberalisation around change of use from office to residential, and that is a factor that local authorities should look at as they develop their local plans: to get the right balance between economic development and providing housing for their communities.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware of the Select Committee’s unanimous report Meeting Housing Demand, which said:

“Those living in the private rented sector are more likely to live in poor quality, overcrowded conditions than owner-occupiers, and often have limited forms of redress”?


Does the Minister agree and, if he does, what is he doing to assist people to move out of very highly priced and often poor private rented accommodation into more affordable housing?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

The Government do recognise the issue that the noble Lord describes. That is why in this Session we are bringing forward a private renters’ Bill and applying the decent homes standard to the private rented sector so we can raise the quality of the stock. However, we also recognise that we need to bring in more affordable housing, including more social housing.

Shared Prosperity Fund

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Cornwall is incredibly important—with its own language, even—and we want to make sure that we level up within regions and all parts of the country. We recognise the need to deal with some of the real rural deprivation that exists in Cornwall.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Can the Minister confirm that Staffordshire and Shropshire are also important?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

Staffordshire and Shropshire are in the plan as well—I can confirm that to noble Lords.

Inclusive Society

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Grocott (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this debate, not least because although it talks specifically about the post-pandemic world, in truth the issues it raises would apply to almost any time in our lifetime. The Motion refers to “building an inclusive society” and a more inclusive society means a more equal society. We know that there are large inequalities in so many parts of our national life—referred to by many previous speakers—in housing, education and health. However, in the short time available I will focus on one area where we need to build more equality and that is in respect of our political system, in access to power, to government and to politics.

2021 marks the 300th anniversary of the office of Prime Minister. During that time, we have had 55 Prime Ministers. Of these, 20—yes, 20—went to one expensive public school: Eton. What is more, seven more went to Harrow, so just two public schools have provided 27 out of Britain’s 55 Prime Ministers. That is almost exactly half. To put it into context, there are 3,500 secondary schools in England alone. What a colossal waste of talent this represents: to recruit to the top job in politics from such a tiny, unrepresentative source. That is just one example of gross inequality in access to power.

Greater equality is needed right across the political system—in the Executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Achieving greater inclusivity in the operation of our democracy is not just right in itself—it is an essential building block towards achieving greater inclusivity in society as a whole.

In the post-war House of Commons in the second half of the 20th century, a rich variety of occupations was represented—most obviously the miners, but also steelworkers, people in manufacturing and people directly from the shop floor. Now, of course, there are no pits and no miners, but where are the 21st-century equivalents in our legislature?

In a piece of research after the 2010 election, the Smith Institute said that

“our Parliament is becoming less representative in terms of education and occupation, and continues to attract similar types of people from a rather narrow professional base.”

Political parties should do far more to remove the barriers that exist to people from lower incomes, for example, to meet the cost of running for a seat in Parliament. As for this House, in the Lords we should do more to make our membership more representative, in terms of both occupation and social class. Whether it is the law, education, the police, the Civil Service, retailing, the Church or the military, we tend to have people who have reached the top of their various professions. They make a huge and valuable contribution, but would we not be enriched and more inclusive if there were more people currently working on the front line, in our schools, police forces, public services and factories—from the coal face, if you like?

If our society is to be more inclusive, we must avoid a situation where the people who attain positions of political power are disproportionately those who are already in powerful positions. I do not intend to reopen old divisions, but if the Commons and the Lords had been more socially representative, perhaps there would not have been such a mismatch between the balance of opinion in the country and the balance of opinion in Parliament in our interminable debates on the European Union.

There are huge inequalities in access to power in our country, and a consequent huge waste of talent. If power were distributed more equitably, other inequalities —in health, education and housing—would surely be much more likely to be addressed, as more and more people with direct, current living experience would be able to speak to them. That would be for the benefit of us all.