National Policy Planning Framework: Housing

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

It is possible for builders to change the provision if they need to, but that has to be in exceptional circumstances, because the need for social housing is so acute. The Government have set up a new clearing service for those Section 106 homes via Homes England. That was launched on 12 December, and we hope that it will enable us to match up registered providers with the social homes available under Section 106.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, in endorsing the condolences expressed to Baroness Randerson’s family and friends, I remind the House that she was also a stalwart champion of Wales, with a long record of public service that should be recognised.

Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that the 2010-15 Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government spent £10 on building new homes for every £100 on housing benefit? That was virtually a reversal of 40 years ago, when every £100 we spent on building homes was matched by £20 on benefit. Is that not another reason for building many more council houses and for public investment in social housing?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I echo my noble friend’s points about Baroness Randerson’s work in Wales. He makes a valid point: a good reason for building social housing is that it saves expenditure on DWP funds. In my own area, a private rented property costs around £1,200 a month; a social rented property is about £600 a month. Even those with my maths skills can work out that that would be a saving. That is why it is so urgent that we get on with building the social homes that we need. There are social reasons for doing so, but also very good financial reasons.

Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Hain Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, who speaks with real eloquence. Her voice is important in this Chamber. I say of the right reverend Primate that whenever I have him speak in this House, he has done so with passion, conviction and authority on some of the great social inequalities and issues of our day, and he will be missed.

For far too long, Governments have left it to the market to tackle Britain’s housing crisis, and it has not worked, leaving a chronic housing shortage which has been pushing up house prices and making private rents unaffordable, creating mammoth waiting lists for social housing and driving up the annual housing benefit bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out earlier.

The 2010-15 Conservative-Lib Dem coalition Government committed to spend only £10 on building new homes for every £100 on housing benefit—virtually a reversal of 40 years ago, when, of every £100 we spent on housing, £80 was invested in bricks and mortar and £20 was spent on housing benefit.

Even Labour’s ambitious and admirable commitment to raise housebuilding to 300,000 homes a year during this Parliament still leaves a gap, with millions of families on council waiting lists and millions more adult children staying with their parents because they cannot find or afford a home of their own. The average home cost 3.5 times average earnings in 1997. By 2023, it cost more than eight times. How can young couples be expected to climb the housing ladder when it is impossibly expensive for them to find a place on its lowest rung?

Oxford University Professor John Muellbauer has found that in the UK, on average over 70% of the value of homes is in the value of the land on which they are built. He urges central government and local authorities to work together in using public funds to buy development plots, in effect to establish a national land bank, for subsequent sale with planning permission to private developers at a profit to the community. He argues that such a radical move could transform housing supply and that similar initiatives have succeeded in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong in accelerating urban development and in making housing more affordable.

It is important to recognise that the state—much derided and denigrated by right-wing think tanks—has played a major role in promoting economic growth ever since the Industrial Revolution, fulfilling basic functions such as promoting public health, housing the homeless, educating the young, supporting the old, caring for social casualties of all kinds, enforcing the law, defending the nation against threats from abroad—and periodically saving the banking system from itself and protecting the real economy from a slide into slump. Increasingly since the Second World War, and especially in capitalist economies such as the US, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, Taiwan, Germany and Brazil, the state has done more than just fix market failure by funding the basic research that leads to discovery and invention, educating young people and providing the infrastructure on which the market economy depends, including housing.

The Conservative vision of individual empowerment through private markets and private property ownership simply has not worked. It was given a strong run from 2010 to 2024, with savage public spending cuts and economic incompetence typified by Liz Truss’s disaster, provoking a massive public backlash which ejected them from power. Remember also Margaret Thatcher’s popular capitalism, which in the 1980s seemed to capture the mood and was electorally successful, especially through selling council properties—but the fatal flaw was not reinvesting the revenues in building new council homes. The result has been a chronic shortage of affordable housing for both rent and purchase.

Through heavily discounted council home sales and cut-price share offers in privatised utilities, Conservative rhetoric promised each individual a stake in capitalism. Despite the fact that home ownership was more widespread for a time, it has since declined to a modern low. Official statistics showed that the proportion of homes lived in by owner occupiers in the year 2023–24, last year, had dropped to 65%, down from 71% under Labour in 2003 and its lowest level for 35 years. New social housebuilding has also plummeted, leaving calamitous shortages of affordable housing for rent or sale.

The neoliberal mantra has not worked. As a mechanism for delivering adequate housing, the free market has failed abysmally, which is why public investment is now more vital than ever before to clear up this appalling housing mess.

Shared Prosperity Fund: Wales

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. As I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, we are having discussions with all counterparts. However, it is important to recognise that people in Wales will have a huge say on how that money will be invested in terms of local growth, businesses and working together in partnership.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I associate myself with my noble friend Lady Wilcox’s question, including her congratulations for our magnificent Welsh women footballers. Does the Minister agree that the previous Conservative Government penalised Wales massively, including by pretending that the shared prosperity fund could somehow substitute for European Union economic funding? Taken together, the £243 million loss of rural EU funding and the £772 million shortfall in EU structural funds add up to more than £1 billion. So much for making Brexit work; for Wales, it has been absolutely disastrous.

Capital Projects: Spending Decisions

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I think my noble friend is speaking about the significant failures in Thurrock, Croydon and Slough. These authorities have asked the Government for flexibility to increase their council tax by an additional amount. Given the exceptional financial difficulties which, I have to say, were driven by poor decision-making in the past, the Government felt that we should not oppose their request. It is important that the councils remain working to deliver services, but I assure the House that we are working with them, challenging them, and have people in there to make sure that they improve and recover.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, is not the levelling-up money—whatever pots the noble Baroness mentions that there might be—pitiful compared with the £180 billion of austerity cuts taken mostly out of those local communities that need levelling up? Surely what is needed, rather than prettifying town centres and projects like that, is investment in local skills in the local economy to build the new economies of the future, to make these communities have some hope instead of despair.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, if you look at the missions in the levelling-up Bill, you can see that all those things are important. It is up to local authorities, though, together with the private sector and the voluntary sector, to put forward their ideas in their places, as to how they feel that they can deliver those improvements, such as economic investment in their area. It is up to local authorities—but I agree with the noble Lord that there are many more things that we can do in order to encourage, in those particular areas, a true economic development.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, on their excellent maiden speeches.

Levelling up may be a Tory pledge but it is sadly not a Tory priority. It is a commitment but sadly without any conviction. Last year, for example, the richest fifth of households paid only 9% of their disposable income on indirect taxes while the poorest fifth paid 23%.

It is state-funded cash benefits, such as the state pension, pension credit and child benefit, together with imputed income from benefits in kind provided by public services, such as the NHS, decent social care, education, free childcare and free school meals that really help to reduce inequality and level up. Last year, the contribution to reducing income inequality made by cash benefits and benefits in kind was 20 times as great as that made by taxes of all kinds.

Yet the Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed that 82% of the decade of Tory austerity under Chancellors Osborne and Hammond involved cuts in public spending amounting to over 7% of GDP, equivalent in today’s terms to £180 billion—more than the entire NHS budget for England. State-funded cash benefits are the biggest single factor in helping to cut income inequality in Britain, so cuts here are especially damaging.

Tory public sector pay freezes and pay caps have also hit public services hard. They have led to critical staff shortages on a massive scale, which in turn have generated enormously long waiting lists, missed performance targets and delivery failures, as well as forcing workers to go on strike. Yet the Resolution Foundation reckons that three-quarters of the fiscal tightening announced since spring 2022 is once again focused on public spending cuts. The familiar Tory pattern is repeating itself. Rishi Sunak’s vision for his premiership is turning into the same old Tory cuts story.

As Labour’s Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy says of the unequal distribution of income and wealth in Britain in her brilliant recent book:

“The winners continue to win, the losers continue to lose”.


Our industrial heartlands, once the engine room of Britain, are performing at 10% below pre-Covid levels, after a decade of underinvestment, huge amounts of money stripped out of communities and taken out of people’s pockets.

Last year, the Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that billions of pounds had been squandered on ill-thought-out levelling-up plans, forcing areas to compete over tiny pots of levelling-up money, effectively competing for minuscule refunds of the money stripped out of those very communities by long years of Tory austerity. The chair of the committee stated bluntly that

“government are just gambling taxpayers’ money on policies and programmes that are little more than a slogan, retrofitting the criteria for success and not even bothering to evaluate if it worked.”

The shared prosperity fund, which was meant to level up, is delivering £1.1 billion less in funding to English regions than came from the European Union structural funds it was designed to replace and which the Conservatives promised to match but have not done so.

Wales is full of areas that need levelling up, yet the overall shortfall to the Welsh budget is more than £1.1 billion. Overall, Welsh capital funding falls in cash terms in each year of the current three-year spending review period and will end up 11% lower in 2024-25 than in 2021-22—so much for levelling up.

Despite recent increases, the Welsh Government budget in 2024-25 will be £3 billion lower than if it had grown in line with GDP since 2010-11. Tragically, the Tory so-called levelling-up agenda is a complete sham, and I strongly recommend Lisa Nandy’s brilliant new book All In: How We Build a Country That Works for a real levelling-up agenda.

Sewel Convention

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I always appreciate the breadth of questions you can get on a Question that concerns the Sewel convention. I am not aware that we use something similar to that EU measurement, but I note that the EU has its own approach to the funding formula.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

With respect to the Minister, there is a massive gap between his warm words on this matter and the views of Welsh Ministers in the Senedd about his Government’s stance, which is continuously undermining the Welsh Government—and I guess other Governments—over the devolution settlement by not properly consulting them and not making the term “consent” real, because they do not wish to consent to a lot of government legislation. I do not think that the inter-governmental machinery is working properly, either. It should be chaired by the Prime Minister, who should listen to Welsh Ministers and the First Minister properly instead of treating them with derision.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I do not recognise that the Sewel convention is as broken down as that, in the sense that 47 legislative consent Motions for 23 Acts in the first Session and 28 legislative consent Motions in the second Session were secured and passed by the devolved legislatures. This is new machinery that obviously takes time to bed in, but I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has met on countless occasions—there have been 440 ministerial meetings—and the Prime Minister has met four times with the First Minister of Scotland and the Welsh leader, so those meetings are taking place. I ask noble Lords to give this machinery a chance.

Shared Prosperity Fund

Lord Hain Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We are getting some mixed messages from the House. On one hand we have that desire to see that we empower regions and functional economic areas through councils, but we do recognise that it is important to have proper engagement and collaboration with the Welsh Government. Indeed, at official level and also through the Welsh Local Government Association, that continues to happen, as it does at the level of the Secretary of State, who had a meeting, in the levelling up and housing committee, with the Welsh Local Government Association and local authority leaders. I believe that Minister O’Brien also met ministerial counterparts yesterday. So, yes, we must continue to build on collaboration, and I just caution against the idea that we should model into the future and say that there is a gap. We want to make sure that we repair the public finances, post pandemic, so that every part of this great country gets the investment it needs to prosper.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, although I suppose I could thank the Minister for his warm words about Wales, the truth is, as my noble friend Lady Wilcox pointed out, that Wales is being consistently short-changed post Brexit, and we are seeing power grabs as well from Westminster, such as in the Subsidy Control Bill, which has been described as having a “pernicious effect on devolution” by the Senedd committee responsible. Surely the Government should start talking directly and understanding that devolution is going to work only if Whitehall respects it, both in funding terms and in terms of powers—and it is not doing so at the moment.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

That is essentially more of a comment than a question, but there is a real respect for both the Welsh Government and local leaders in Wales. We continue to work very productively, certainly at ministerial level and also through officials. We want to see a strong Wales—I would like to see a stronger Welsh rugby team, frankly, after the result against Italy.

Minister for Intergovernmental Relations

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for wanting that clarity. Day-to-day responsibility for constitutional integrity falls to the Minister for Intergovernmental Relations. Individual Secretaries of State also have a critical role in representing the distinctive voices and interests of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in Whitehall and the Cabinet; in representing the UK Government in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and in co-ordinating the UK Government’s work with the devolved Governments to deliver for all citizens of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that there will be a strong UK union only if each of our constituent nations, regions and Governments has a relationship of equals, which, regrettably, has not been the case under this Government? Their high-handed arrogance over the internal market Act and the shared prosperity fund are just two examples. Will the Minister guarantee parity of esteem in the Joint Ministerial Committee, through shared chairing and agenda setting, an impartial secretariat and improved dispute avoidance and resolution?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I do not recognise that characterisation; there is huge esteem for the devolved Governments. We need to recognise that our United Kingdom is the most successful political and economic union that the world has ever seen, and we continue to build on its strengths.

Wales: Replacement Funding

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, again, we need to see the publication of the investment framework but I can commit to saying that the overall envelope of funding will be at least the amount that we receive from EU structural funds of around £1.5 billion per year.

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that, far from increasing funding through the Barnett formula to devolved Governments as was promised, money is being spent on priorities set in Whitehall, not Cardiff; that official-level meetings have involved no sharing of any information about Whitehall’s plans for the pilot shared prosperity fund in Wales; and that Welsh Ministers have not had a single ministerial-level meeting on this subject since the Government took office? Is this not yet another London power grab and betrayal of devolution?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, we need to recognise the improvements of moving away from EU structural funds. This will allow for quicker delivery of funding, better targeting and better alignment with domestic priorities and will certainly be less bureaucratic and burdensome than the current EU structural funds arrangements.

Non-Domestic Rating (Designated Area) Regulations 2021

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his clear and cogent explanation. I realise that these are very technical regulations to designate, for the purposes of non-domestic rates, an area in England, including for the admirable objectives that he described, such as in Cleveland. However, I want to press him about the wider plight of our town centres, as I did last month. Their decline has been drastically accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis and the acceleration of online shopping.

It is no good leaving this to market forces. If that is the Conservative Government’s stance, we might as well say goodbye to town centres, which have for generations, if not centuries, been the centres of community and business life. Commercial and online pressures and changing lifestyles have been accelerated by the pandemic. Business rates and rents have a critical role to play here. Of course there are different exemptions, suspensions, and reliefs for business rates, but that is sticking plaster. We need a much more radical and comprehensive solution to this problem, or our town centres will simply die.

To keep town centres viable and vibrant, they must be supported with UK government non-domestic rates subsidies designated for local government and transferred through the Barnett formula to devolved Administrations as well. That support must be long term, if not permanent, to incentivise retail and hospitality outlets to locate in town centres. Currently, town centre businesses are being killed by unfair competition, high costs, high rents, and high business rates. This is not the fault of local authorities across the country. After savage Conservative government cuts during the past 10 years, of about 30% in many respects, local councils do not have the funding or the legal basis to subsidise town centre enterprises in the necessary way.

Crown post offices have closed, some backed into local branches of WHSmith, but how long will those WHSmith branches survive in our town centres? Local bank branches have also been rapidly disappearing. The Government need a completely new agenda. Business rates should be completely scrapped for microbusinesses in town centres, along with rents. Instead of Government Ministers passing the buck to local authorities, the Treasury should step in and take responsibility. Rejuvenating town centres would also reduce our carbon footprint and end the throwaway culture. The Government should promote a regeneration of repair skills and facilities in town centres through skills support packages.

That means ending our society’s obsession with low personal tax. If we want a decent quality of life in town centres, which everyone says they do, we have to be prepared to pay for it. It is not going to happen on its own: market forces and commercial pressures will not resolve this problem. Treasury funding, provided through local councils, is necessary to regenerate and revive our town centres, and I hope that the Minister will seriously take up this option and encourage the Government to act before our town centres die. In that context, I support this order, but I think that a wider, more fundamental strategy is needed.