Lord Horam
Main Page: Lord Horam (Conservative - Life peer)
Baroness Pinnock
The noble Lord, Lord Porter, has not listened to what I said. Not one word did I say in opposition to right to buy. I did say that there was not the opportunity, once you have released that equity, necessarily to house a family. What happens, certainly under right to buy, which is the experience we have for council housing, is that councils are fearful—in fact, they would be foolish—to build houses subject to future right to buy because they will be constantly losing the equity value of it. It would be under right to buy constantly. Certainly in my experience of councils in West Yorkshire what is happening once a house is sold is those councils are either building properties that are not subject to right to buy or putting the equity into a community housing group so that they cannot be subject to right to buy. That is one of the problems that I have urged the Government to look at.
Lord Horam (Con)
Can we come back to the amendment for a moment? It is on how the housing association spends the money it gets from selling a house. With the best will in the world, I am afraid that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, presents a problem. He knows London very well, as do I. The fact is that it is more or less impossible to replace a house sold in, say, Westminster with another house—certainly two houses, but even one house—in Westminster. It is simply impossible to do that in London, and nor is it necessary, because people who have lived in Westminster do not necessarily need to live in Westminster. They can live in Kensington, Surbiton, Lewisham or Bromley for all we know. The distances are not that great.
I do not know whether the noble Lord heard—he probably did—the very interesting evidence given by Philippa Roe, the leader of Westminster Council, at the hearings in the other place. She was saying that it is absolutely impossible to have a like-for-like replacement within a similar London borough. It cannot be done, because of density and because of cost, but you do need to do something in London. Clearly, we would be in favour of something in London, but she was hoping, in her evidence, that some sort of mechanism would be established between, say, a rich central London borough such as Westminster and, I will not say a poor outer London borough such as Lewisham, but another London borough, whereby they could agree a housing policy between them which would make sense by way of some sort of replacement in a cheaper area. They could thereby get very good value for money; they could get not only one but two or three houses for the price of one sold in Westminster or Kensington. So I think the noble Lord is barking up the wrong tree, if I may say so, in this particular aspect of his amendment, though I agree with what he was saying about tenure.
Lord Beecham (Lab)
The problem with that is that you end up with a borough entirely of owner-occupied houses. In other words, you have a single tenure and it is one which effectively excludes people on modest incomes who cannot afford to buy. The suggestion that the noble Lord effectively makes is that we export those people to outer London somewhere.
Lord Horam
This is what ordinary people who do not have access to social housing have to do. If they have a job in Westminster they cannot actually afford to live in Westminster. We are putting people who have been in social housing in the same position as the ordinary person who does not have access to social housing.
Lord Beecham
That means that everybody is excluded from certain parts of the city; we lose a mix. I do not think it is a very good justification to say that because one group is unfortunately unable to do it, the rest must also be unable to do it. My daughter lives in Islington, which has been transformed now, as so many other boroughs have, with very high prices. Really, the city is being hollowed out, because people on ordinary incomes—teachers, police officers, street cleaners—cannot afford to buy or to rent these days. We are effectively creating a monoculture of better-off people in the heart of the city. That does not strike me as all that great—people will effectively have to move out, with the kids changing schools and all the rest. This is potentially a very disruptive process.
Lord Horam
It is not quite as brutal as the noble Lord says: there is already quite a mix in London. There is a much better mix in London, for example, than in, say, Paris or New York. All right, the mix may be somewhat lessened if we go down this path—I accept that. None the less, Philippa Roe was saying that she will make special allowance in her housing allocation for people who, for example, have to work in the local hospitals in Westminster. Clearly, you have to make some allowance in your housing policy for key workers and so forth, who you need in your borough. They will still keep doing that; there will still be a mix. The mix might be slightly different from what it is now, but there will still be a mix.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I will try to be brief, given the hour. Very grave concern has already been expressed about the right to buy causing a shortage of homes in certain areas. We all understand that the voluntary agreement between the Government and housing associations is for replacement dwellings to be built, but there is no certainty, as has been said, that these will be anywhere near the home that has been sold. Amendment 60 seeks assurances, as does Amendment 57 in the name of the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Beecham, that the right to buy will ensure a steady, increasing supply of homes and not a declining one. It is not going to be acceptable to promise jam tomorrow. Housing associations must identify where the replacement dwelling will be before the right-to-buy one is sold off.
It is extremely important that the tenure of the replacement property is not only in the same location as that sold off but also of the same type. This tenure can only be varied based on legitimately identified local need in that area. We debated earlier in Committee the thoroughness with which local authorities research, plot and assess the housing needs in their areas. This housing need must not go unmet. Replacement homes must fit the gap in the local community created by the right to buy.
The powerful arguments made on the previous group are now on the record and do not need repeating, but they should be taken on board and acted on. However, I will just read the comments made in November 2015 by the beautifully named Yetminster and Ryme Intrinseca Parish Council, which is just over the Dorset border and about six miles from where I live. This relates to both starter homes and right to buy. The council says:
“The Bill gives housing associations with properties in a community of less than 3,000 the right to opt out of the Right to Buy scheme as it may be difficult for them to replace the houses in a rural community. The implication for our rural community needs further exploration.
The principle behind the starter homes idea is good, but after 5 years all the houses could be sold on and we will be back to a situation where young people cannot afford to buy. Surely homes identified as starter homes should remain so when they are sold on with the next purchaser able to apply for the same government-subsidy.
For Y&RI, we agree there is a need to provide low cost affordable housing for young people within the village but the Bill needs to address how our youngsters can afford to buy a house costing up to 200k (the amount may be wrong—but whatever it is—it is too much).
In summary, the policy implications for rural housing in this Bill are very worrying. There is an inherent danger that land owners will cease to provide land at charitable prices for the Hastoes of this world and the only land which will become available will be at commercial value which will reflect in the unit price of the houses. It is hard to see how this Bill will enhance the provision of affordable homes for our young people in rural areas.
We really hope this Bill will come in for serious scrutiny before it comes into force”.
I think we are doing that this evening.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, I have some difficulty with all these amendments. I was not going to speak because it exposes my difficulty; however, I will do so briefly. When the then Conservative Government decided to introduce the right-to-buy policy in the early 1980s, I was one of a very few Labour MPs who had reservations about opposing it. That was because my constituency at the time was in quite a deprived area with a lot of property in very bad condition, and the only way round that problem that I could see was to incentivise people on estates to buy their homes and thereby spread a culture of prettifying those estates and making them look pleasanter and nicer to live in. Under that scheme, gardens were done up, windows and doors were changed, roofs were redone—all sorts of changes took place. When I look back over the years, I see that that scheme worked. However, the problem was that while I was living up there I was also living in London and I could never understand the justification for selling local authority housing in London. That has been an absolute disaster.
When I checked this morning, I found that 43% of all the local authority property in Westminster has been sold off. A lot of it is now in the hands of private landlords—we are trying to get the statistics for that in Westminster—who very often charge four times the rent levied by the local authority. This Bill will denude London of most of its public housing stock. That will be the product of the Bill. I consider the estimate that 76% of this housing in Westminster will be sold to be an underestimate. I think that a lot more housing will go from the public sector than anyone ever imagined. Therefore, I have a dilemma: in parts of the country I can see the justification for this measure, but in other parts it will be an absolute disaster.
The Government say that we should leave this issue to the housing associations to decide. However, as cuts are imposed and as housing associations find that they have reduced resources, they will feel under pressure to sell. Therefore, what may appear to be a voluntary arrangement now will become a de facto mandatory measure because the housing associations will need to draw in this money to enable them to invest further.
My noble friend has moved an amendment which is particularly important in many ways. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Horam: I think it is possible to replace stock in the same borough—you just build high rise. If you compare high-rise and low-rise property, the figures stack up. I think I read somewhere that Boris Johnson—or was it Goldsmith?—had extracted an agreement from the Government whereby they were going to have to replace two for one in London. That is what we are talking about. Obviously, the Government have calculated that it is possible to do it, so my noble friend’s amendment must surely be in order. The reasoning of my former noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Horam, must be wrong. The Government believe it is possible.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I see. If that is the case, and they are not in the same borough, it does not comply with the spirit of my noble friend’s amendment.
If you get up at 6.30 or 7 am and get on a Tube train or a bus, it is full of people going to work. They are the people who service London and they cannot be coming in from Watford or outer London. They have got to have homes in central London because they service it. There is a whole world, which many noble Lords do not even know exists, of people getting up at unearthly hours of the morning to go to work. I wonder where they are going to live if 43% of Westminster is already sold off. Camden expects to sell off a huge amount of its property portfolio. Where are these people going to live? They are going to have to come in from the outskirts on Tube trains and buses. They will be exhausted. The whole arrangement is wrong.
Although people like me can see the case for the right to buy and believe it does work in certain areas, there are some parts of the country where it should not be allowed. If it is allowed, it must be on the basis of replacement by like property in the area where the property is being sold off. Otherwise, we totally disrupt the demography of central London in a way which is contrary to the public interest.