Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Snape Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Warwick on tabling this debate and on her speech, which was so relevant and comprehensive that I feared there would be nothing left for anyone else to say once she had sat down. This is certainly a subject which has involved both sides of the Chamber and which plays an important role in the lives of people in this country.

I shall refer to a report published last week by the Home Builders Federation, Close Brothers Property Finance and Travis Perkins, all of which will be well known to noble Lords in this House. Under the heading “Planning Delays, a Lack of Providers to Take on Affordable Homes and NIMBYs Top Concerns for SME Home Builders”, the introduction stated:

“Delays in the planning process, the Conservative government’s anti-development approach to housing and planning policy, and difficult economic conditions have made it harder to be a small developer today than it was five years ago, say two thirds of the nation’s SME home builders”.


It went on to say:

“For the fifth consecutive year, planning continues to be the largest obstacle to delivery, with delays in the system and under-resourced local authority teams cited as the major barrier by 94% and 90% of respondents respectively. Rising to third position this year is ‘Local and/or political opposition to new development’ which is now seen as a major barrier by three-quarters (78%) of respondents, up from 69% in the last report”—


which was a year ago.

The average person stopped in the street and asked about the housing shortage is apt to agree that something must be done and that it is unfair, particularly on the younger generation, that house ownership has become so difficult. Stop the same person 10 minutes later and ask them whether they would be in favour of a development close to them, and you might get a slightly different answer. We seem to have moved in this country from nimbys, with whom we are all familiar, to people I call bananas—“build anything near anybody not allowed”. The fact that there is so much local opposition to developments in the housing field is a worry and a concern for all of us.

During my time in this House and the other place, I think I have sat on around five different committees on five different hybrid Bills, where people can come and give evidence to Members of one or both Houses about developments that directly affect them, and we have moved from that sort of person coming to give evidence to a much wider area. During my recent time on hybrid Bills, I have learned that every copse is a wildlife refuge and that, although creatures such as natterjack toads are supposedly very rarely found in this country, they are always around when a development is applied for. It is a similar story with great crested newts—over the years, I have become an expert on their mating habits. To be honest, I have never actually seen one, but I guarantee that, in every hybrid Bill committee I have served on, someone has come to say that the development cannot go ahead because of this unusual wildlife.

Here is my worry. The right to buy in the 1970s was referred to by my noble friend Lord Hain, who said the fatal flaw was that the receipts from the right to buy were not used to build social housing. Well, it was a fatal flaw indeed, but it was a matter of policy of course by the Conservative Government at the time. Mrs Thatcher believed, rightly or wrongly, that council estates were a hotbed of socialism and that the sooner people became owner-occupiers, usually by a massive discount, the sooner they would cease to vote for a political party: the party I belong to. Whether she was right or not, I will leave to posterity, but it certainly meant that not replacing those sold houses has led directly to the shortage that we have at the present time.

After the Second World War, the Attlee Government, despite all the problems facing this country, built 1.2 million largely social houses between 1946 and 1951. The policy was continued, to their credit, by the two successive Conservative Prime Ministers. Only in recent years, with the disbandment of the direct works departments of most local authorities and the policies to which I have already referred, has public housing fallen by the dramatic amounts that it has.

I conclude by saying this: two-thirds of the houses sold under the right to buy are, of course, now in the hands of private landlords. As a former council tenant myself in the 1960s, I occasionally visit the area that I represented in my local authority where I lived. The decline in the overall standard of public provision is obvious since two-thirds of those houses fell into the hands of private landlords. I conclude by asking my noble friend the Minister to give us a guarantee that we can at least try to emulate our forebears so far as the building of social housing is concerned—and, even if we cannot make it to 1.2 million, we will do our best to get it up from the pathetic figure that it is at the present time.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Snape Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate; I hope he will forgive me if I concentrate on other matters in the Queen’s Speech. Like other speakers, I welcome the prospect of the maiden speeches from my noble friend Lord Coaker and the noble Lord, Lord Morse.

I was interested at the way in which the Minister glibly waved aside the future of franchising in the railway industry. I have spent the last decade listening to Ministers at the Dispatch Box telling me how wonderful the system was, yet it is to be abolished in one sentence. What exactly is to replace it? The Williams report, which has been around for some time, is unique in that it will actually be published, unlike the 30-odd other reports into the future of the railway industry over the past few years, and I welcome that. The obvious question is when; I hope that the Minister can tell us when he comes to reply.

One thing lacking in the Queen’s Speech is any detail about the future of the eastern leg of HS2. I hope that the Minister will agree that, if we are to—in the phrase used in the Speech—“build back better” through our transport industries, HS2, particularly its eastern leg, will properly be built. However, I fear that what will happen is what we are seeing at present. The Treasury, which, I suspect, is not madly enthusiastic about the prospect of HS2, will tinker at the edges. We are seeing that tinkering at present—a platform less at Euston; rather than one Bill to take the eastern leg forward towards Leeds and beyond, two or three short Bills for short stretches of HS2. Do we never learn? When it is eventually built, as I hope it will be, it will therefore cost far more than building it in one swoop, which would be the intelligent way forward. We never seem to learn that lesson. Teams with experience in electrification and railway building are continually disbanded and reformed. We then wonder why, in the case of the Great Western electrification, the posts and masts cost more to install than previous electrification schemes in this country and certainly far more than such schemes in other parts of the world.

I also look forward to seeing the Williams report’s findings on fares. I did a random exercise this morning. An elderly gentleman, with a senior citizen’s railcard, who is not used to travelling by rail, might decide to travel from Solihull to London Marylebone. This non-regular traveller would find 15 different tickets between the two stations. If he wanted a single ticket, he would have a choice of paying between £7.90 to £100.80. He would be unlikely to pay £100.80, but it is a listed single fare between Solihull and London. If he decided to come back, he would have 16 different fares, varying from £21.80 to £124.60. I think that is crackers and I suspect that most other people who look at the railway fare structure think so too.

If he decided to travel on different trains he would pay different fares, which is why there are so many. If he decided to come back in the rush hour it would cost him more, but if he came back before 4 pm he would get a cheaper fare. That is provided he stuck to Chiltern Railways, which is the operator between Solihull and London Marylebone. If he decided to use the west coast main line and came back on an Avanti train, which has the franchise for that line, he would find that the rush hour leaving Euston starts at 3 pm, although if he got the underground to London Marylebone it does not start until 4 pm. This sort of lunacy has gone on for far too long and the Government really ought to do something about it.

It is not just the fares and HS2. There are lots of other aspects of our railway industry that the Government ought to look at, such as the electrification of the Midland main line. Are we going to get the go-ahead from Corby? Good luck to the people in Corby; it is remarkable that we are going to provide a half-hourly electric train service to London from Corby, a town that did not have any railway at all 30 years ago, because it was closed down. Yet cities such as Sheffield, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby are to be served only by diesel or bi-mode trains. It is lunacy and I hope that the Government can do something about it.

While I welcome some aspects of the Queen’s Speech, there is a long way to go.