Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Lord Lansley
We are debating the extent to which the Government allow local authorities to retain money that would otherwise be payable to support the right to buy for housing association tenants, in recognition of building houses, and that is under Chapter 2 of this part. If at the same time under this legislation separately under Chapter 3 they are returning money to the Government as a result of the rents for high-income social tenants, that is not about the business of funding right to buy for housing association tenants under this part; it is separate. Anyway, it is a digression.
I was not a party to the procedural discussions on Amendment 6 to which the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, refers. As a participant in the debates in this House, it was always clear to me that the Government were viewing sympathetically and would bring back proposals on Third Reading for one-for-one replacement. I never understood my noble friends on the Front Bench to say that they would do so on a like-for-like basis. There is a distinction.
Leaving aside the processes concerned, the Government are quite right not to have brought back an amendment to mandate like-for-like replacement. They should not do so. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, seems to me to be thoroughly defective, because it places in the hands of local authorities the decision whether or not there is an agreement with the Government. It does not give the Government any discretion in that matter—it says the Government “shall enter” into such an agreement. Placing a rigidity on the Government in this respect is wholly undesirable. It would remove the flexibility to replace one kind of tenure with another and the flexibility to respond to the demand for new affordable housing in an area in a way that matches the needs of that area. It would also remove from the Government the flexibility of whether to enter into an agreement with a local authority at all, which is a central part of the Bill.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, could help me. He makes the point that the Secretary of State would have no flexibility, but the amendment says:
“If a local housing authority so wishes, and that authority can demonstrate, whether by reference to its local housing plan or otherwise, that there is a need in its area for social housing of the kind that it proposes to build”.
That demonstration is presumably to the Secretary of State, so I do not see that the noble Lord’s point has any substance.
Lord Lansley
I am sorry but I do not agree with that at all. The amendment says, in so far as an authority,
“can demonstrate … that there is a need in its area for social housing of the kind that it proposes to build”.
I know from my experience in local authorities that there are many places across the country where there is a need for new affordable housing and a need for social housing. Many local authorities will be able to demonstrate that they could build social housing and that there is a need for it. I do not doubt that, but it does not necessarily mean that it would be right for the Government to enter into an agreement, at the instigation of the local authority and with no discretion on their part, to support it in building social housing for its purposes, as distinct from supporting the provision of other new affordable housing on a more flexible basis. That is what the legislation is designed to achieve.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I am grateful to the noble Lord. Is he therefore saying that the Government know better than the local authority what the local housing need is in its area, when the local authority has demonstrated a continuing need for social housing to replace that which is being sold?
Lord Lansley
No, I am saying that in many places there is a need for affordable housing. Local authorities may well be able to demonstrate a need for affordable housing with a range of tenures, including starter homes, which are included within the Bill’s provisions, but the local authority itself may choose in some circumstances to prioritise its own building of social housing over the needs of the community for other forms of affordable housing. I would not accept that: it is the responsibility of the Government to respond to the need for affordable housing in these areas.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I am still worried about the effect of redistribution, given that the levy will not apply to all local authorities evenly. We established on the last Committee day that we are getting redistribution from poorer council tenants to more prosperous housing association tenants. We are also getting, as we learned today, redistribution from local authorities with retained stock to those local authorities which do not have to pay a levy because they sloughed off their stock to set up housing associations in the past. That also means, in practice, that we are getting redistribution from city authorities to rural councils. Some of those may be in beautiful, high-demand areas. An awful lot of them are not; they are just rural district councils in Norfolk and other parts of the country.
At no point have we had any reference to waiting lists, or the degree of local need, or the anxiety of young people to move, largely to city areas where there are jobs, which is key when, particularly in rural areas, there is no public transport to get you there if you live outside.
So how will the priority order work? Let us say that my city, Norwich, is required to sell one, two or three high-value houses at £300,000—if we have such; I am not sure that we do. Let us say that we come up to about £1 million. Okay. The local housing associations within the city have 10 people wanting, on average, £50,000 discounts. That is £500,000 gone. Then the other local authorities in Norfolk, which are stock-transfer associations, have built-up demand for a further 50 people, for £2.5 million-worth of discounts. So the sale of five or 10 local authority homes in my city will be funding 10 or 12 discounts, in my city, for housing associations and possibly a further 50 outside my city but in the bounds of Norfolk, by virtue of the way this is going to work.
As that means that the money from high-value sales in Norwich has been spent three times over, where exactly is the money going to come from for the local authority to replace its lost stock? Where exactly is the money going to come from for my local authority to tackle the derelict land around British Rail stations, or old gas sites, or old industrial, chemically polluted sites? These may need a lot of investment if, quite rightly, they are to be brought back into use. Will the Minister tell us how this is actually going to work? Because I do not understand it.
I recognise a pattern of redistribution which, as far as I can see, takes no account of housing waiting lists, no account of pent-up housing need and will just circulate money around in different ways. Either the levy will have to be in addition to sales, so that my local authority will be hit twice over, with both the forced sales of high-value properties and a levy in addition, or the local housing associations in my city and beyond, the housing association tenancies in Norfolk as a whole, will just have to queue, or be rationed, or have to wait, in order to buy a housing association home. At the end of the day, none of those houses in Norwich will be replaced.
I cannot even begin to see how these figures are going to add up. It is completely impossible unless the Government come in with funding. The Government want this policy so the Government should fund it.
Lord Lansley
My Lords, in response to the noble Baroness, it seems to me that there is precisely a place where housing need can be taken into account in this process. It is under Clause 72, where Ministers enter an agreement with a local housing authority for a reduction in the payment that would otherwise be payable under the determination. That will specifically include, no doubt, an assessment of housing need and the extent to which that housing need can be met by the provision of replacement housing by the local housing authority under the agreement.
Amendment 66B in particular suffers from objections of both principle and practice—in principle because it seeks to introduce inflexibility when clearly the structure is designed to give local authorities and government the opportunity to arrive at flexible agreements related precisely to issues such as the level of payment that would otherwise be payable and the extent to which that can be reduced, recognising local housing need, and, indeed, the shape of that need in terms of tenure.
A second objection in principle, which I imagine is well understood by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is that the amendment would introduce the idea of local housing authorities being given a statutory right to sufficient borrowing capacity and flexibility to provide replacement housing, which is entirely outwith the process that the Bill otherwise contemplates of establishing a payment to the Secretary of State which can be rebated under the agreement. At no point does this structure contemplate creating a statutory right to a borrowing capacity, which I am sure the Treasury would find difficult to provide.
It seems to me that the proposed new clause in Amendment 66B is wrong because it seeks to create, under the terminology of a determination, something which is not contemplated in a determination at all. A determination is about a payment to the Secretary of State. The issue of replacement housing falls under Clause 72 and is about an agreement between the Government and a local housing authority which is funded by a reduction in the payment.
As it happens, the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and others seek, with Amendment 68B—but not with the same detail as in Amendment 66B—to introduce some of the same purposes into Clause 72. If you wish to do that, that is the logical place to do it. I object to it on grounds of inflexibility but if you wish to include it in the Bill, that is where you would do it. However, I say to my noble friend the Minister that there is an amendment in this group which, on the face of it, has merit—Amendment 68C—since it provides that exactly the same principle which is applied to the relationship between the Greater London Authority and local housing authorities in London should be applied in the same way to combined authorities and local housing authorities in other places across the country. It would certainly be sensible to look at that with a view to determining whether it is a suitable amendment.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Would the noble Lord agree that the Department for Work and Pensions has always understood that dilemma and therefore, particularly for disabled people, has sought to reduce the risk of going into work, in terms of both the claimant’s health and the viability of the job, by having extensive linking rules? The linking rule that if you cannot sustain a job, you can go back on to your previous level of benefit allowed a lot of disabled people, under the New Deal for Disabled People, to springboard into work.
Lord Lansley
The noble Baroness is drawing me into a debate that I was not intending to enter into. My point was not about whether having a structure in which those who are currently on ESA WRAG and then go into employment and come off it should lose the benefit after 2017. My point is that within the terms of the review, contrary to the argument that is being presented that there is no incentive effect of the level of benefits relative to work, people are arguing that that is not true and that there is a disincentive effect in going into work if the level of benefits is higher.
I shall conclude on that point. It seems to me that we need to be operating on each of these areas. As a Government and a country, we are doing well in providing opportunities for employment. If we do the right thing in terms of support, we can give people with disabilities greater access to those employment opportunities that are increasingly available and, most importantly, give people access to the support. The review gives very good material for the Government to continue the process of thinking towards what that structure of support should be to be of the greatest possible benefit for people with disabilities.