Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, when you find you are the last speaker on the Back-Bench side, the Whips always assure you that it is a place of honour, and they usually manage to do it with a straight face, but it does have one advantage: having listened to a large number of the speakers, if not all of them, you get what the House really believes is the key issue. The key issue is clearly that there is a need for a really substantial increase in the amount of housing, both to rent and to buy, for people of moderate means, particularly young people and particularly in the area with which we are most acutely concerned: London and other cities and towns in the south-east. That is the nub of the challenge that the Bill has to be judged by.

The need is spelled out by the Government—260,000 house units a year—and we are barely halfway there: 125,000 were produced in England in the last year for which there are official figures. The biggest provider, as we know, is the private sector, which produced 96,000 out of that 125,000 and which will be helped by some measures in the Bill, such as the changes to make planning smoother and, I hope, the starter homes. I think we all agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, that we need more detail as soon as possible on this issue as well as others. But the problem with the private sector is that in the final analysis it is producing houses for profit and I am afraid that the profits do not lie at the bottom end of the market. It is the least profitable part of the whole housing equation and therefore I am not confident that there will be a big increase in private sector provision.

That leads us on to the housing associations, which produced 27,000 houses in the last year for which there are official figures. I have no doubt that they were knocked back a bit by the right-to-buy provisions. They had not necessarily anticipated those before they appeared in the manifesto and they may well therefore produce slightly fewer houses in the immediate future than they would otherwise have done. I also have no doubt, knowing them well, that they have a strong social mission. That mission will carry on through the difficulties they may face and I am optimistic—more optimistic than the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, was—about the chance of them producing more houses. I actually think that ultimately they will produce significantly more houses than they do at the moment and they can and will do that.

That leads us on to the sleeping giant, if you like, of the housing provision scene: council housing, and the appalling figure of 1,360 houses completed in England in the last year for which there are figures. We need much more council housing, not only because of the need to bridge the gap in quantity but because historically it has been the main source of housing for social rents. As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said very clearly, whatever happens on the right-to-buy front, whatever happens with buying your own home, you will always need social housing at social rents and an adequate supply of that. It is crucial that that is maintained and much improved from where we are today. The noble Baroness, Lady Grender, made the historic point that Harold Macmillan—a Conservative leader—really did rather a good job in this area. It is not impossible to get to 300,000 but it is certainly a wake-up call to this Conservative Government to get weaving on that front.

I am sure from my discussions with local authority leaders in London, as elsewhere, that they wish to improve the amount of council housing for social rent that they are providing. The problem is financing it; they have a need to borrow and their borrowing, of course, is capped by the Government. I am afraid that we therefore come back to the familiar point made by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham: that it is about the Treasury. The fact is that the Treasury controls this. I believe that the Treasury needs to relax the borrowing cap on local authorities so that they can build more social housing. That would be right in housing terms and, putting my cap on as an economist, in economic terms at this stage of the economic cycle. It will increase the public sector borrowing requirement but we should not be concerned about that in economic terms.

The Bill is therefore a good Bill, and ingenious. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, even paid it the remarkable compliment of being in parts well written, which I have never heard before about a government Bill. But it will not succeed in dealing with this huge challenge, which we have all talked about today, unless it is complemented by a serious and sustained effort to get social housing by councils really revved up. I believe that my noble friend should take that measure to the Secretary of State and I wish him well in making that change.