Residential Construction and Housing Supply

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, “sustainability” is used freely but it is not often well defined. However, I am absolutely convinced that one thing in this country is not sustainable: land. They do not make land anymore. You cannot renew it. There is only so much of it and anyone building anywhere has an awful—I choose that word carefully—responsibility to make sure that what is built is acceptable. I say that in declaring my registered interests in two housebuilding companies and an insurance company that, happily, has gone into building off-site homes.

I will address two key issues: the importance of making new houses look good and feel good in good surroundings, and encouraging new building methods if, and only if, they contribute to better building. That still has to be proved; there is a lot of enthusiasm as if this is magically going to change stuff. We must see what these houses look like first because most of them are not in place yet. Once they are, they will of course be irrevocably using the land we cannot renew. I am agnostic; I am not against these new methods. One of the best ways of boosting housing supply—I wish that more building companies would grasp this point—is to make new homes look good, be more acceptable on the landscape in communities and outlive their predicted lifespan, which many quite small houses and terraces have managed to do over hundreds of years in some cases.

The definition of sustainable is “changeless”. Well, we certainly need change in many parts of the housebuilding industry to create places as much as houses and beauty as well as bedrooms for the hard-working people who will live in them. That should be our central concern. I do not want to get involved in great debates about beauty in housebuilding and construction, which causes much anger and wrist flapping. I am perfectly happy to see modernist houses built by people who want to build them if they can afford to and statements made by architects who want to make them. I am just as happy to see people build backward-looking houses that go back into the depths of time, using styles such as neoclassical and Georgian, if they can afford to do so. I am much more concerned about decent homes that look and feel good for ordinary people.

People certainly deserve much better places than the site in southern England I have been monitoring in recent years; I will not mention where it is, let alone its name or that of the mass housebuilder building there, for fear of making its resale problems even greater. Out of sight and out of mind from our own property though it is, it has only just been finished after many years. It has taken a long time to finish the selling of these houses. Extraordinarily enough—this is a little moral tale—the very first show house it built, with many trumpets blown, developed cracks down the side shortly after it was completed and had to be repainted. People have indeed suffered.

This is the reverse of the Government’s hope that building better and beautifully will build more homes. I do not think that many people on the boards of big housing companies ever live in the mass estates that they have built; I can find no address of any director of any major housebuilding company who lives on a large housing estate that their company has constructed. They generally live elsewhere, safely in the countryside, a long way away. I wish that many board directors would spend at least a sojourn in their own product. Generally, I do not think they do and that is shaming. I am an investor in a couple of these companies; my warning is that I like to be a smart investor and get good value for money. Well-built houses mean better profitability and that the value of my shareholding will go up. That is all I want these people to do—not build the sort of houses that do not appeal to ordinary people.

That brings me to the second issue. I welcome these brand new houses that we are seeing built off-site. They are precision built and tailored to a new world where they will be put on-site. It is very good to see factories doing this. There is the TopHat factory in Derbyshire, which is being invested in by Goldman Sachs. Builders are normally lucky to have a big bank following them so that is very good. Equally, the money managers and insurance company Legal & General, in which I also have an interest, has a new housebuilding factory at Sherburn in Elmet near Leeds, which will produce 3,000 units a year. However, we have not yet seen any of these things on-site. We do not know what they will look like. The marketing stuff is full of precision engineering, sustainability, looking after heating loss and other issues, but we have not seen a unit on-site.

For a builder, rather than being outside all year round in all weathers—like today’s weather in certain parts of the country—and very difficult circumstances, it is much nicer to be inside a factory. It is a much safer environment and we might even get better productivity by producing houses in that way, which I am thoroughly in favour of. We could also build up apprenticeships in the right way. I do not believe, however, that we have yet proven that energy efficiency and sustainability—another word they love—are magic solutions.

On that point about sustainability I shall end. I do not think my noble friend the Minister used the word in his speech—he may have done and I am sure he will correct me later if I am wrong, although it is used in the Motion—but I have never seen a proper government definition of sustainability in housebuilding. I ask him to define what the Government mean by sustainability in relation to new houses being built, if not in his wind-up speech then certainly in any letter he circulates later. I see him enthusiastically nodding his head in acquiescence to my request.

Local Authorities: Essential Services

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I did not have the long and distinguished career in local government that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, obviously had, but I did spend a period in the chamber of Oxford City Council. I learned a lot from those experiences, such as the excellence of many local government executives. When cutting my teeth as a local councillor, I also learned a lot from those who are now in your Lordships’ House, such as the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Liddle; I am pleased to see the latter in his place. Indeed, they cut their teeth on me with some inspired heckling over the years—all forgiven, but never forgotten, I assure them.

I should also make a declaration of interest: not in the conventional sense but rather, a declaration of residence or work—and as a consumer of local authority experiences—in three different places. First, I work in the City of London, which is an extraordinary place. You would not invent the governance of the City in a month of Sundays, but in an amazing and largely non-partisan way, it works. There are the streets that you could almost eat the apocryphal breakfast or lunch off, and it delivers very good services both within the City and to its outliers in a broadly non-partisan way, which is good.

Secondly, I award a mark, with some temerity, to the City of Westminster down the road, where I first moved when I went to another place and have lived ever since with my wife, who also works in London. It is clear that the City of Westminster behaved pretty disgracefully in the past, mucking about with the sale of council houses, which was a shaming event. But it has served its time, worked its way out of the situation and now, extraordinarily—it is hard to work out quite how—manages to deliver level council tax demands with a very high level of services, including the street cleaning that I mentioned. It is funny how you judge local authorities by the things that first hit you in the face, and street cleaning is obviously one.

Thirdly and lastly, we have long lived in the West Country, in the area of that Liberal bastion, South Somerset District Council, which was turned into a Lib Dem stronghold thanks to the magic political touch of the late and highly respected Paddy Ashdown. It still is, despite our best attempts. A non-partisan evaluation of the South Somerset area would include the worry locally about scary suggestions that we will have our wheelie bins collected only every three weeks. I think that is probably a wheelie bin too far for many of us. Although the council is building more in the local area, which I support and have supported publicly—no nimby here; we must build more houses—it has sometimes lacked understanding of the need to provide new housing estates built for sale with shops and all the rest. It has not really attempted to soften the edges of housing estates with better landscaping that reduces complaints from local people and makes high-quality building more acceptable and welcome in their area.

None of those issues will be solved just by more money. We need imaginative leadership from high-quality men and women in local authorities—such as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, I am sure, in his day, in Sheffield. Sometimes they are there; sometimes they are not. There are problems with the quality of some who work in local authorities, despite the reasonable remuneration and pensions on offer. How adequate is their training? I do not know the answer to that; perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and other noble Lords can help us by explaining what the training is really like.

One way forward may be to do what many charities do: hire people leaving professions and businesses who have the high energy levels for one more big job, particularly given that people are being expected to work into their late 60s and 70s. There is no magic in good management; it is pretty transferable from one place to another. Perhaps such a transfer to the world of local government would add to efficiency. It is not all about money; ability capital is just as important.

Please do not think it unnecessarily combative of me to say how surprised I was when, in his largely non-partisan speech, the noble Lord, Lord Scriven—and perhaps other noble Lords—seemed to airbrush from history the fact that back in 2010, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives were in what I thought was a very welcome coalition. We did some good, between us. This cannot be airbrushed: I must take responsibility for what we have and have not done, as must the Liberal party—particularly Mr Nick Clegg, who has now fled to the west coast of the United States of America.

There is a linguistic problem in that, as I understand it, “essential” does not exist in the local authority dictionary: something is either “mandatory” or “discretionary”. Using those words leads to a conceptual cop-out. Anything can be represented as an essential service if local people and councillors say that it is, and that they should have this, that and the other. We must be very careful in our use of language.

Like talented people, money helps local authorities a lot, but once one has beaten a path through the dense thickets of local authority finance, which I have heard gloriously described with masterful understatement as a “somewhat complex subject”, money must be found from somewhere—but where? We know that in Europe at the moment, we are in low-growth mode: this week, the IMF told us that Germany and France are unlikely to grow faster than the UK in the next two years. Indeed, just as the City of London accelerates despite the current political shot and shell, official labour market data published on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics shows the highest employment rate ever, with more people in work. That means more tax for the Treasury to spend in local areas.

Of course money is vital, but where should it come from? Out of whose pockets and how? Through extra taxation or a higher amount? If so, how much? The Liberal party needs to be open about both its chequered past in this area during the coalition, and what it proposes to spend and where it will come from in future. We need to be efficient and realistic in the use of both our money and our language. After all, there is no universal declaration of local authority rights, of which we must be well aware.

Religious Intolerance and Prejudice

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, any objective observer in the Public Gallery, looking down and listening to this debate, will sense that our tight little Chamber has worked itself up into a fine old consensus. It is not a consensus I dissent from at all—I agree with it all—but I will disappoint your Lordships by not going round the same arguments that I think we all agree on. Indeed, I will go off-piste a bit to say that sometimes I think that it is okay, with restraint, to be disobliging and attack religions—I think in particular of my own, Roman Catholic religion in this country—and to be a bit intolerant sometimes. I think a bit of intolerance is sometimes richly deserved, even by the cassocked ones.

I also think we must be very wary of thinking that the situation here is terrible, that there are terrible problems facing the Jews and terrible problems facing the Muslims—which I abhor. My noble friend under the skin, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, knows my feelings and my strong support for the Jews, and I have close Muslim friends who know of my support, so I shall not reiterate it. However, knowing of someone in the Indian subcontinent who has been waiting a long time for trial for blasphemy on the grounds that they drank water from a particular well, they would think they were in a heaven of tolerance in the United Kingdom by comparison to what they face. We also have to be careful not to endlessly extend the margins of victimhood in this era of identity politics. I do not mean party politics, but everyone forming into little groups—me too here, me too there. There is a danger that we may well, by seeking to be tolerant, become intolerant. That is something I would abhor and I warn against.

I think it is terrible that certain groups in this country do not feel safe and want to leave this country. That said, we have to be robust and not push the frontiers of victimhood too far. My noble friend Lady Warsi talked about casual dinner party conversations: I am now very fearful of the dinner party police perhaps recording what I say and what I think, as I am very cautious in the financial services world, where I work, and, indeed, in the political world, where I talk to that most dangerous group of people, the political journalists, from time to time. I very much agree with my right honourable friend the Prime Minister’s words in her Easter message last year, when she spoke about the importance of the shared values of compassion, community and a sense of mutual obligation.

It is not easy to condemn nor lecture, for example, a Pakistani, or a Minister in Pakistan, for their lack of tolerance to words about non-Muslims, so it will certainly be a challenge for my noble friend Lord Ahmad. I too, like other noble Lords, welcome his appointment on 4 July this year to be a special envoy to the rest of the globe promoting interfaith respect. It is very interesting: a few years ago, under a previous Administration, he would have been called a tsar, but he is now called a special envoy, doubtless to deal with sensibilities in the Russian direction. Whatever his title, no one will do this better than my noble friend Lord Ahmad, despite the difficult situation he will find himself in when he goes round trying to promote interfaith respect. For example, in Pakistan when he asks, “Why do you imprison those people who allegedly blaspheme?” the likely response, very quickly, from his Pakistani vis-à-vis will be, “Well, your Excellency, before I answer that, please tell me why the recent unfettered surging anti-Semitism and what about the most recent figures showing a soaring number of attacks on Muslims in the United Kingdom?” He has a difficult road to travel.

Whatever the answer, it is clear to me that Christians of all branches in the United Kingdom need to keep on their sense-of-humour armour about the attacks that Christianity sometimes gets, particularly from jokers and stand-up comics. The mass media rather stopped that sort of comic remark about Jews or Muslims, and certainly about Hindus—I have never heard a good joke against or for a Hindu in that respect. We have to recognise that a lot of unfortunate remarks are still made about the Christian church at large, but my response to that is, “Hey-ho. I am going to shrug this off and not worry about it: I am not going to be a victim”. Not being a victim is extremely important. I am slightly worried about the sense of spreading victimhood in some of the speeches I listened to this afternoon.

What we cannot do is shrug off increasing intolerance towards us. Here, the us I am talking about is the Roman Catholic Church, not any other Christian church in this country. I am entirely talking about intolerance, although I think that a certain amount of intolerance at the moment in our direction is deserved. Let me illustrate this with the story of a few weeks ago when someone I greatly admire, Monsignor Rod Strange, one-time head of the seminary for mature would-be priests in Rome, the Beda College, and now a distinguished professor of theology at Saint Mary’s, Twickenham, told of a fellow clergy coming out to start his day, walking through the door of his presbytery with a bounce in his feet and his clerical collar on to be met by a direct spit hit by a woman, exploding with, “Here comes another paedo priest”. That is the damage that has been done, sometimes, by the Roman Catholic faith to itself. This sort of lamentable but understandable intolerance is made manifest in the sometimes slow response by the hierarchy of my Church to decades of institutional abuse of little boys in Roman Catholic schools.

One of the great things about the Roman Catholic Church, embedded in the Vatican, is that it is an ancient outfit, embodying splendid durability and long-term vision, not responding to every tweet or critical remark with some instant reaction to what the 24-hour media says. This is generally a good thing, but there is no excuse for the sometimes tardy grasping by the hierarchy that there is a problem. Just weeks ago, it was announced with a slight roll of Vatican drums that there to be a great, global inquiry into child abuse. It was an urgent matter, so urgent that it will come in the first quarter of 2019, so we have a long time to wait for this.

In the UK Church, we have been listening to the outpouring of well-meant, holy apologies, sometimes expressed in somewhat clericalist language, for what has happened to children in this country at the hands of Roman Catholic priests. There have been lots of calls for prayer and fasting—all good stuff—but, of stable-clearing action and prevention plans there has not been very much. No wonder that we Roman Catholics in this country have lost a bit of respect. This may be one of the reasons why so very few young men now go into our seminaries. That twitch on the thread of a possible vocation from the Almighty is counterbalanced by the self-searching of whether this is—or perhaps is not anymore—a respectable profession or calling to go into. It must explain why, where we live in the West Country, there are less than a handful of likely-to-be-ordained priests during the next five years. It is why where people go to Mass, they are closing down. Times are changing.

Yet, in many abbeys, there are good, holy, ordained monks. Not every monk—such as the unfortunate priest who was spat on by the lady—is remotely a paedophile. These abbeys were the epicentres of some terrible admitted abuse, so much so that monks are kept away from the schools that they once set up, which are now entirely in the hands of laity. It might be a good public and practical act of penance to decide to mothball their own buildings; to realise that the intolerance being shown towards the Catholic faith is reasonable, and to go out into the parishes, many of which no longer have the priests they used to—some are in their 80s—to keep Mass going of a Sunday.

The Roman Catholic Church in the UK cannot preach tolerance for others, or about itself, when some see it as inactive in demonstrating practical intolerance of what they have unknowingly presided over. No more can we politically preach about what goes on in the Muslim bits of Pakistan, when some of their brethren are having such a rough time today in the United Kingdom.

Rating (Property in Common Occupation) and Council Tax (Empty Dwellings) Bill

Lord Patten Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, following what the noble Baroness said, I do not think that this is a missed opportunity; rather, it is a pretty big incremental step in dealing with the issue. That is why, during debates in another place, the Bill received all-party assent and agreement—and I congratulate my noble friend and his colleagues on getting that. Having said that, I do not want to alarm the noble Baroness but I agreed with much of what she said—but that is business for another time. This sort of cross-party agreement is not without precedent. It is reasonably rare, but I hope it will be followed by your Lordships, because this is a good, if short, Bill that addresses two exceptional issues. I will concentrate on the second: empty dwellings.

For a long time in England it has seemed that having at least 300,000-plus empty houses was accepted as being structurally the natural figure needed to balance the housing market. I do not agree with that. It should not have been so and it is good that, since 2010, a concerted effort has resulted in the figure of empty homes being greatly reduced to a bit above 200,000, as the noble Baroness has just said. However, I do not think that that should suddenly be accepted as the new normal, and with these new powers there is absolutely no reason to accept any figure much above 100,000 as the likely structurally reasonable figure at any one time to take into account the needs of people moving in and out, service men and women, the settlement of inheritances, delays in selling due to market conditions and regional differences in those conditions, and all the rest. I wonder whether my noble friend has some such end target clearly in mind or whether the Government accept that 200,000 is about as far as we should go—I must say, I hope not.

Even so, eternal vigilance will be necessary to stop the problem re-emerging. After all, it seems that, as my noble friend said in his excellent introductory speech, about 10% of councils in England today have yet to shake their local stumps and even take up the powers to use the existing premium on empty homes of just 50%, let alone go any further. I say to my noble friend that I trust that they will not be allowed to carry on like this for much longer or be dilatory with the new higher figure of 100%, as proposed in the Bill, which in effect would allow a maximum council tax charge of 200%.

Equally, too few councils—perhaps as low as one in 10—are making use of the empty dwelling management orders that I am told can be used in respect of properties that have been empty for a long period. I am not quite sure why this is: I believe that experts are useful sometimes and I am sure experts will come up with reasons as to why this is. Perhaps it has something to do with the typical English reserve about using powers that may be thought of as confiscatory of property—I do not know. It seems that there may also be striking differences between location to location in the publicly owned stock of councils and housing associations and the percentages of empties in their ownership. Again, I do not understand the reasons for this.

Nor do I understand the surprising spike in the number of empties in areas of very great pressure in the London commuter belt, in council areas such as Harrow, Brentford or Three Rivers—these being exactly where, at the same time, the green belt is under the greatest pressure. It may be a case of that buy-to-leave phenomena, with owners waiting for land values to increase, again promoting redevelopment.

So I conclude that greater, more effective and uniform pressure on all local authority areas would be brought about by the regular six-monthly publication of centrally collected data on these critical aspects of public information, without the need for campaigning bodies to resort to freedom of information requests, the media, me or whoever else to get the facts in front of them. I do not believe that that is right. Facts are of great value and, once published and regularly available, speak for themselves. That is when councillors might shake their stumps in this area. It is not a matter of naming or shaming but rather of naming to inform.

Others would argue that it is a pity that the Bill does not contain provisions for what might be thought of as a later escalator of the maximum council tax charge, pushing it up by another 50% or 100% in areas of extreme pressure. I would have liked to have seen that order-making power in this Bill. But I shall not seek to disturb the smooth surface, for the reasons that the other place concluded. We must always be on guard. Just when public policy seems to be incrementally dealing with an issue such as this, other unforeseen problems may pop up to disturb the surface and increase the number of empties. Let us look at the huge structural changes in retail that are currently overwhelming shops and shopping, devastating high and side streets alike in cities large and market towns small. This may well lead to a new increase in empties suddenly hitting us among the often interconnected residential properties when it is least expected, because of redevelopment in areas where shopping has collapsed. I have seen this myself in a small Somerset town near where I live, where there are many empty shops and many empty residential properties among them.

So eternal policy vigilance is imperative in the never-ending problem of vacant and residential homes. I have thought this for a long time, from when I was first on the old Oxford City Council, as it was then called. Across that chamber, the then yet-to-be-ennobled Lords, Lord Hunt, Lord Liddle and Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, were busy cutting their ruthless interrupting and barracking teeth on me. It was a problem then and so it remains.

There was a drive in this direction by the Chancellor in his excellent Budget last November to increase the empties premium, which will be combined with whatever action he may take following the conclusions of the review currently being conducted by Sir Oliver Letwin from another place on how to bring forward homebuilding on lands with valid planning permission that are vacant and being hoarded. Indeed, land being hoarded and vacant is the exact mirror image of the empty homes that have already been built. They are part of the same problem that the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has just referred to. If we get those two streams of public policy action in tandem, there will be a clear twin-track more-homes approach by the Government that should be widely welcomed—just like, to me, this Bill should be welcomed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Like colleagues on these Benches, I welcome the Bill and the steps it takes, both the business rates element and the increased powers proposed for local authorities on the amount of council tax that they can levy on an empty dwelling. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who reminded us that the House of Commons did not propose any amendments to the Bill and that there was all-party agreement. Indeed, the Bill has benefited from the pre-legislative scrutiny that took place at that stage. It raised a number of issues, for example the potential financial loss for local billing authorities and whether rarely occupied second homes should be treated in the same way as empty homes. Given the role of this House as the scrutiny Chamber, I hope that it may be possible in Committee to look at a number of these issues. My noble friend Lady Thornhill talked about whether two years should be the limit or whether another figure might be appropriate, and whether the figure of 200%—that is, 100% plus 100%—is the maximum that a local authority could apply. There is a case for looking at whether the total might well be 300%. I look forward to that discussion in Committee. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made a very interesting point about the legal definition of a second home, should someone seek to transfer their primary home to become a second home. That is something that I would like to think about further.

As the Minister has explained, the basic aim of the Bill is to discourage home owners from leaving properties empty for long periods without penalising those who are unable to sell as a result of market conditions or who face genuine delays in probate. For that reason, it is welcome. As several noble Lords, including my noble friend Lady Pinnock and the noble Earls, Lord Lytton and Lord Listowel, have pointed out, the context is the state of local government finance, the future organisation of business rates, and funding local services. There are now clear difficulties in the retail sector over business rates. There is a fair funding review, and inevitably the Government are now reviewing the future of business rates. However, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, pointed out that the system is not fleet of foot, and indeed it is not.

Clause 1 relates to the rating of property in common occupation. It rightly corrects the problems caused by the 2015 judgment, which has cost some businesses not only a backdated increase in their bills but, in some cases, the loss of their small business rate relief. The Bill is the correct response to that judgment. Put simply, contiguous hereditaments should be counted as a single hereditament.

I join the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, in saying that it is a trifle unreasonable—I think those were his words—for the Government to assume that building authorities have put away shedloads of money, given the 2015 judgment. He is right; I am sure they have not been putting away shedloads of money. However, there is a discussion to have about this issue, and it was raised several times during the passage of the Bill in the other place, not least at Third Reading. I hope very much that the Government will be able to come forward, perhaps in Committee, with a greater clarification that local building authorities are not going to suffer from the Bill becoming law.

I have four very brief points towards the conclusion on the council tax issue. First, I think it is right to raise the maximum premium on council tax that can be levied by a local authority to 100%, making 200% in total, where a property has been empty for two years or more. I want to associate myself at least with the definition of “long-term” as two years or more. If we get agreed definitions like that, it makes our discussions much easier.

My noble friends Lady Pinnock and Lady Thornhill both said the Bill would probably not make a great deal of difference in terms of council tax. I want to agree with them but I also want to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who was right when he said that this is a big incremental step. The sense of direction is the right one and a clear message is being sent. In future, therefore, there may need to be further fine-tuning of the law. However, the principle that the Government are trying to get across is important. It is not just that empty properties need services—they do; they need policing and they may need fire services if they are empty—but they can also cause a nuisance to neighbouring properties, so the steps taken since 2013, in the days of the coalition Government and after, to introduce both the 100% charge and the principle of a premium on properties that are unoccupied and substantially unfurnished, have been the correct ones.

The Minister reminded us about the total number of homes empty for over six months, which is not long-term. Six months is a comparatively short period in reality. I associate myself again with the comments of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, when he said that we need to be a bit clearer about what the problem is that we are trying to solve with regard to empty properties. The figure of 205,000 is a comparatively low percentage, at around 1% of the 20 million-odd properties in the country. It is the case that since 2010 the total number of homes—

[Lord Patten]

I am so sorry to interrupt, particularly as the noble Lord has just been so charming about me. It may be a very small percentage of houses that are vacant but the number of 205,000 or so is what we are struggling to build in England in any one year, so it is a year’s worth of new homes.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I would like to agree with the noble Lord: it is. However, that is still only 1% and the figure is for six months, not two years. In my view, the real problem is not the six months, which can often be the consequence of genuine delays of probate. The important thing is that the sense of direction is right. We need to end the scandal of empty homes deliberately left empty when they could be occupied by someone. Often, that relates to the buy-to-leave-empty market.

Does the Minister have figures—if not now, perhaps later in writing—for the breakdown of the reduction by 90,000 or so empty homes from 300,000 in 2010 to 205,000 in 2017? How many of those are in social housing, where empty homes are often referred to as voids; how many of them are owner occupied; how many are in the private rented sector; and how many are in the buy-to-leave-empty sector? That is important because when we consider whether there should be a rate of 300%, not just 200%, I would be thinking of those who have bought to leave empty as an investment to attract a higher level of taxation. I hope that we can discuss that in Committee.

Finally, I hope that we shall have a discussion on second homes in Committee. We have been reminded of the difficulty of identifying what is an empty home and what is a second home. If people do not tell you which they are, it is hard to find out. We need to explore in greater detail how the Government might manage to do that. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, pointed out, this is a resource-intensive exercise and we need to know better why the empty dwelling management orders do not work as well as we thought they would when they were introduced.

Despite these caveats, which I hope that we can discuss in Committee, the Bill should command the support of your Lordships’ House, and I hope that it gets a fair wind, and quickly.

Grenfell Tower and Building Safety

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for her question and for her attendance at the meeting. It was a very moving meeting indeed. As she said, there were understandably some raw feelings about the way residents had been dealt with. Looking to the future, in the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy we have established there a victim support unit. Ministers are there on a regular basis—to be fair, so is the royal borough. We have responded very positively by ensuring the NHS is there to look to the health needs, not least the mental health needs, of the people there. On her wider point about ensuring that lessons are learned, they will be learned. We are looking to the future for a Green Paper on the social housing sector. We can expect some of these points on the obvious questions raised by the Grenfell tragedy to be taken up in it and some of the answers we have learned.

[Lord Patten (Con)]

On lessons learned and building safety, is the policy of Her Majesty’s Government now that all refurbished, repaired or newly built high-rise buildings in the royal borough and elsewhere should always contain properly integrated sprinkling systems?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My noble friend raises an issue that obviously will be considered by the public inquiry. It is being considered by Dame Judith Hackitt, who has made some point about it in the interim report, although she stops short of recommending that they should be compulsory. The Government will look at this in the light of recommendations made and the wider question of the safety of high-rise buildings following the reports and reviews that are under way.

Housing

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

I would add “acceptability” to the key words “quality” and “affordability” in the title of the noble Baroness’s important Question—I listened with particular care because I live not so far away from her in Somerset and understand exactly the issues to which she referred, strongly supporting as I do the Government’s housing policies—because, at a time of unparalleled demand for both homes to rent, whether in the public or private sector, and to buy, an equally key inhibitor to the pace of new building is local resistance to plans for new build, much less generally on brownfield sites than on greenfield land, from those who live nearby.

I do not believe that such feelings can be dismissed as mere nimbyism—that is to be arrogant towards those people who care about their local neighbourhoods and landscapes, even though I strongly believe that we must build more—for, too often, the design of many new homes in privately built areas is poor, if not sometimes downright crummy and ugly. The homes are tiny—the smallest in Europe. Try putting a broom in a cupboard in some newly constructed homes in both the public and private sector and you will find you need the skills of a contortionist to make this possible.

The landscaping at the edges of so much new housing is equally sketchy if not non-existent—the kind of hard edges to a building development which do not help the landscape at all. The pollution of the night sky by over-lighting is often damaging in the extreme, both to the people who live around and those who move into those housing estates. These are not just the despairing cries of architectural or landscape aesthetes. If local authorities and mass housebuilders deal with these issues, they will not necessarily make such new building, particularly on greenfield or edge-of-village sites, welcomed with open arms, but they will make it much more easily accepted in the long term, mitigating in the interim years of protest and probably delay in construction, which neither the Government nor those who want new homes wish.

Local authorities have fewer resources, so they have fewer architects, whether for the built environment or for landscapes. Some big housebuilders seem to have no architects at all. They are staffed mostly by people who turn over the concepts for the houses or flats they wish to build to simple so-called designers, whose job is to cram as much as possible on as little as possible, rather than using architects to raise the quality of the built environment and design and thus to improve not only the acceptability of those new homes I wish to see, but their speed of construction and, in the end, their profitability for companies and shareholders alike. Good design is not expensive; it is just thoughtful design and it is vital in our housing drive. I hope that that is a totally bipartisan or tripartisan—or indeed involving the Bishops—point of view, or whatever other link we have in the Chamber this evening. There is nothing party political about this.

The laying of roads and building of homes is an irreversible step. There is no turning back—land built on is never returned to the plough or woodland—so it is the bounden duty of housebuilders in the public and private sectors to do all they can to improve the sometimes shoddy and gimcrack designs of what they run up, and of the architectural profession to help break down the sometimes iron curtain between them and the mass housebuilders and fulfil the Government’s excellent plans. However, if these issues are not dealt with—I do not wish to see some government gauleiter or design overlord coming in to say that something has to be designed this way or that way—I am fearful that, in the hundreds of thousands of new houses and flats we need to see built in the next five years or so, we may be presiding over the kind of poor and destructive blots on the landscape that none of us wishes to see. I hope that the Government will take these concerns seriously.

Northern Ireland: Haass Talks

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, if incremental terrorism was the root of the problems that we now discuss, then only incremental reconciliation will slowly lay them to rest as both past and pain diminish with time. That is not to say that the recommendations by Dr Haass and that distinguished woman Professor O’Sullivan, his colleague, rightly highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, are not worth while in themselves. They make some interesting proposals on commissions for information retrieval and all the rest.

Alas, however, that these proposals could not be generated from within Northern Ireland itself by the Northern Irish. There are only so many steps that our Government can take without them being firmly founded on the engaged consent of the population as a whole rather than the partisan responses to the well meant proposals of fly-by highly talented neutral diplomats, however skilled in peace processes—and however self-effacing—they may be.

Truly it is a sad reflection that there seem to be no home-bred great women or great men in Northern Ireland who can be accepted across the piece to undertake that reconciliation task, gaining that indigenous consent. In that fact is found the real measure of the problem and its likely longevity.

It seems that even the most anodyne suggestions from people without simply act as a lightning conductor to reignite ancient discontents, as we have seen in the reaction to the Haass and O’Sullivan reports—even prompting some again to reach for that pike hidden in the thatch. As with the fiscal, so with the peace process; people in the Province have to get a grip on it themselves and make it work. Just as the resolve will rapidly have to be found within the Province to run itself properly before it runs out of money very shortly by dealing with overspending in Northern Ireland, so reconciliation must come via resolve from within and with time. All that can be done in the mean time is to keep on trying; keep on keeping going until the pace of incremental reconciliation really gathers pace one day, when.

Assisted Dying

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 13th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, for a quick background to my views, some, including me, sense that we are drifting more and more into an ever more eugenic society in this country and that there are those who wish to give encouragement to that direction of travel at every opportunity. While I am concerned about this drift, I am equally convinced in the matter of assisted suicide that the present prosecution policy, making it clear that it does not in any way change the law and that encouraging and assisting a suicide remains unlawful, is clear and good. This is sound principle, and the DPP is on record as stating that the law on assisted suicide “works well in practice”. Good again. This is reinforced not just by the Royal College of Surgeons, as we have heard from my noble friend, but by the Royal College of Physicians, in explaining that their duty of care does not include in any way being part of a suicide. Good yet again, my Lords.