Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 61A seeks to leave out Clause 67. However, before I speak to it, I thank the Minister for demonstrating once again her willingness to listen to the views of noble Lords on all sides of the House. I thank her for the amendments she has just brought forward. As she acknowledged, they are small amendments but will have a profound effect. However, I have continued grave concerns about many aspects of Clause 67, which is why I have brought forward this amendment.

As noble Lords are aware, under the clause councils that have high-value—or, now, higher-value—properties will be required to sell them and hand over at least some of the receipts. If they choose not to sell them, they will still have to hand over a formula-based sum of money to the Secretary of State. The money accrued from this mechanism will be used to fund replacement council homes, the right-to-buy discount for housing association properties and the brownfield regeneration fund.

This will have a huge impact on councils that did not choose to transfer their council houses to housing associations through the large-scale voluntary transfer procedure. The 165 affected councils are the ones that believe that they are best placed to manage their housing stock for the benefit of their local residents, and although in later groupings we will discuss a variety of proposals to mitigate the impact of Clause 67, we on these Benches believe that it is entirely wrong for government policy to be funded by imposing such a huge burden on a limited number of councils, and we are not alone in that view. In its report published just two months ago, the all-party CLG Committee in another place states that,

“we believe in the principle that public policy should usually be funded by central government rather than through a levy on local authorities, especially as the impact of this levy will fall only on some local authorities, yet will be applied nationally”.

That last point is important. The Minister, Brandon Lewis, made it clear when he was giving evidence to the committee that this would be a national scheme and that the income from council house sales would not be ring-fenced locally. To quote the noble Lord, Lord Best, in a different context, it is a further example of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

There are many reasons why I believe that your Lordships’ House should be extremely wary about allowing Clause 67 to remain in the Bill, and I have no doubt that they will be discussed in great detail later when we discuss amendments in other groupings. There are issues around, for example, the Government’s complete failure—a little has been given today, and I welcome that—or their significant failure to provide any detail of how the proposals will work. We do not yet have a definition of “high or higher value”, and it is interesting to note that the indicative figures that appeared before the general election have now been removed from the Conservative Party’s website. Again, that is a little bit of progress, which I welcome.

We do not know which circumstances will determine whether a high-value property is deemed vacant. We have not seen the draft regulations in relation to the method of calculating the payment that councils must make to the Secretary of State. We do not know if the calculation will take into account regional and area variations in property prices. We do not know what deductions will be permitted and what exceptions will be made. We do not know how councils in areas where suitable land is scarce are expected to build replacement homes. The Government cannot even provide any estimate of the likely income from the scheme or the amount they need to receive to fund their policies. When asked by the Commons CLG Committee how much income it was anticipated would be needed to cover right-to-buy discounts, building replacement homes and brownfield regeneration funds, the Minister, Brandon Lewis, replied:

“I am not at the moment in a position to give you those kinds of figures”.

Perhaps the noble Baroness the Minister, two months further down the track, is in a better position than her colleague to tell us how much the Government expect is needed to fulfil their policies. Further, perhaps she can explain to us something that Brandon Lewis was unable to do: how right-to-buy discounts will be funded if and when the funding source, which is the sale of high-value or higher-value local authority homes, dries up. Are we to be in a situation where the replacement houses for those which councils are forced to sell are themselves required to be put up for sale immediately after the first tenants move out?

Many questions are unanswered and will remain so before the Bill leaves your Lordships’ House. They should have been answered at a much earlier stage in our deliberations. My central contention is that there may well be a case for the sale of high-value and higher-value council homes to meet our housing shortfall, but in the words of the CLG Committee:

“Local authorities are best placed to understand their communities and know where specific pressures exist, and they must have the ability to act in the interests of their residents”.

Earlier today the Minister sent a letter, to which she has referred. It came out at 2.54 this afternoon. In it, she writes, very encouragingly:

“Reflecting this diversity and respecting the views of local people and local leaders is at the heart of Government’s drive for localism”.

Surely the best way to support the drive for localism is to drop the imposition and restrictions on local councils in Clause 67. That clause would hinder local authorities from being able to proactively manage their assets. For that reason, I believe that it should be left out of the Bill.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 54 and the other amendments that would add those two letters, “er”, to the word “high” in the clause. Noble Lords will already appreciate my lack of a grasp of the English language, but even I could see how dangerous those two small letters would have been in the wrong hands. I thank my noble friend the Minister for clarifying the Government’s intent to add those and where they will be applied. I ask her to confirm in her closing remarks that this will be used not as an attempt to raise additional income, but as purely a means to spread the burden across more authorities.

Had my noble friend not agreed in the letter she sent earlier and in her remarks on the manifesto commitment that councils would be allowed to retain sufficient receipts to build one-for-one replacement of the same tenure, I would probably have been speaking against these amendments. I should explain to noble Lords why I am prepared to move purely on that basis, and properly in response to the noble Lord, Lord Foster.

In councils such as mine, where we are able to retain sufficient receipts to build a council house out of the sale of a high or higher value, I would probably volunteer to sell all my council houses to anybody who would buy them on the open market, on the basis that the cost of building a replacement unit would probably be about 30% cheaper than the value received on the sale of that unit. I would be quite happy to replace my beautifully maintained 1,600 homes for 1,600 brand new homes in the immediate future, thus doubling the number of affordable homes in my district. On that basis, I earnestly thank the Minister and the Secretary of State in the other place for listening to our proper arguments and the case we made, and for responding appropriately.

[Lord Deben]

I had not intended to speak in this debate until the noble Lord, Lord Foster, spoke. The House ought to remember that the idea that we cannot do anything here and should leave it to the local authorities to make all these decisions runs up against the problem that we have not built the houses we have needed to build over a long period. The people who have had all these opportunities to do so and who know their localities and their needs so well do not seem to have noticed that the big need in most localities is to build some houses. I am a bit suspicious of the Foster doctrine. The truth is that many local authorities need a kick up the backside on housing. That is obvious and real.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

I cannot let that remark go unchallenged. The problem of the housing shortage in this country is not the fault of any local authority; it is the fault of successive Governments of all colours. They have gone out of their way to stifle the ability of local councils to build houses. I am pleased that the current Government and, to some extent, the coalition Government moved towards that. I am pleased that the current Government are fully encouraging local councils to build houses. It is not the councils’ fault.

[Lord Deben]

If my noble friend had let me finish what I had to say he might have found that we rather agreed. I was going on to say that the second lot of people who have not done what they ought to have done in building houses are successive Governments. When I hear some of the speeches from the Front Bench over there, and realise the appalling history of Labour Governments and housing—