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.