Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Redfern (Con)]

My Lords, in speaking to this group of amendments, particularly in reference to home ownership and starter homes, I think it goes without saying that the need to provide enough homes to meet demand is one of today’s defining challenges. I therefore welcome initiatives such as the provision of starter homes, the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants and the continuation of reforms to the planning system undertaken in the previous Parliament. Such measures will enable low-income families to own their own homes and provide stability for their families.

As noble Lords know, the rate of home ownership has been falling since its peak in 2003, despite the aspiration to home ownership remaining very strong. Since spring 2010 nearly 270,000 households have been helped to purchase a home through government-backed schemes, including Help to Buy and the right to buy. However, younger households in particular are now less likely to own their homes than a decade ago. We must therefore ensure that more young people are able to aspire to home ownership. I support the Government’s manifesto commitment to build 200,000 starter homes over the course of the Parliament.

Starter homes are essential to increase housing supply and will encourage younger couples who wish to start a family to get on the property ladder and provide security for their future families. To this end, the Bill includes a general duty on English planning authorities and embeds starter homes in the planning system. This will make it easier and faster for planning permission for houses to be granted and make interventions in the local planning process smarter.

However, on this point I hope that the Minister will say how the Government will assist councils in meeting these important duties. The introduction of a much-needed database, and the Government’s amendment to have it maintained by the Secretary of State rather than by local authorities—for reasons of clarity and simplicity—will allow greater co-operation between local authorities in tracking banning orders and make monitoring of ongoing trends more centrally focused. This national co-operation will prevent serious or repeat offenders from causing harm and misery to renters and placing them at serious risk from letting properties. There should be no room for such operators in the sector.

This Bill provides extensive scope for the role of local government and new duties that they must act on.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friend Lord Tope on these amendments, particularly the provisions that the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Kerslake, spoke to. I also have some sympathy for what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said about the need to widen the definition of these starter homes so that we look at alternative models of affordable homes that can be approved by the Secretary of State. We will debate later in Committee whether the starter homes initiative will lead to balanced and mixed communities, and the implications of that, about which I have severe doubts. We are also going to discuss the wider issue of the impact on social housing provision, and I declare an interest as chair of Housing & Care 21.

This model of starter homes will not apply to huge areas of the country; people there will not be able to benefit, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, explained. Although the main aim should be to build more homes, if we genuinely want to increase ownership we must look at more than one size fits all. The Government may find, if they concentrate overly on starter homes—I understand that they are doing that because it is a convenient target to get people moving—that the type of houses we are building in the long term become unsuitable.

There are two aspects of this that are quite an issue. Frankly, too many starter homes in one local market could cause market distortions, both initially, when they are trying to sell these homes, and at the end of the five years, when the purchaser can effectively take advantage of the discount. This concentration of building of starter homes will both put off lenders from lending on those houses in those areas and may well deter developers from developing sufficiently fast, as they would where they were developing more mixed tenures and different forms of owner-occupation. The communities themselves will be very unbalanced.

The amendment is an attempt to achieve greater diversity of products, which may make homes more affordable and achievable, and, by varying the nature of the home ownership, deter what could otherwise lead to quite severe distortions of the market. If we distort the market, we will put off developers and lenders, and end up not building as many homes as we need.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Tope, who introduced the lead amendment, I believe that there is enormously wide concern about this aspect of the Bill, and I certainly support this group of amendments.

As we have heard, Chapter 1 refers only to starter homes. The Bill’s demand that starter homes should carry the whole focus of housing provision means that localism and local decision-making is absolutely fettered. The fact that absolute priority is given to home ownership and starter homes is wrong. Of course, there is a place for home ownership, and I want everybody who aspires to own their own home to do so, but, whether we like it or not, many people will never be able to own their own home, and some do not wish to.

The noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, who is not in her place, spoke of the need for people to own their own homes to provide their families with stability. Most families would like a roof over their heads to provide them with stability, and that may well mean affordable rents and affordable homes. They do not necessarily have to own them. Like the rural housing group, I believe that the proposals, with their emphasis on starter homes, will undermine future provision of affordable housing in rural communities.

As we have heard, in many areas, including Cambridgeshire, even starter homes will not be affordable for many people. Shelter tells us that people in only 2% of local authority areas will be able to buy their own homes, even starter homes. In Gloucestershire, where I live, the median income for residents in 2014 was £20,935 per annum. Even with a substantial £20,000 deposit, that would be insufficient to buy a property in most villages, with or without a 20% discount. I understand what median means: for many people who I know, that income is a king’s ransom. The living wage is about £14,000 per annum. There are so many people who will simply not be affected by the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, mentioned that, at Report in the other place, the Minister talked about other forms of home ownership, which is encouraging, because other forms of home ownership can help people who cannot afford to buy their homes outright. Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether the Government intend to make it explicit in the Bill that they are in favour of other forms of home ownership, not just starter homes, because they cannot be the be-all and end-all.

The noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Kerslake, mentioned the history of starter homes, which were a glorious idea devised by people thinking up innovative policies. That is great, we need innovative policies—but as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, they must be tried out first. A policy which looks good on paper cannot suddenly become the main focus of a Bill; that is entirely wrong. I hope the Government will recognise that more thought needs to be put into the policy.

The concentration of starter homes could indeed distort the market, as others have said, and provide an imbalance in our communities. I simply do not think that the focus on starter homes in the Bill provides the solution that we need to the housing crisis in this country. We will come on to many other things in that area later, but starter homes cannot be the be-all and end-all. They can be one part of the recipe to provide a solution to the current crisis, but they cannot be the only answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have three questions for the Minister. They are not particularly related, but they are all part of the starter homes thing. First, I shall pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Horam, said. He caused my eyebrows to rise a little bit when he said that it is all about quantity of housing and not about tenure. I basically disagree with that, but perhaps I am a more ideological politician than the noble Lord.

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford]

That would not be very difficult.

[Lord Greaves]

Well, yes, it would not be difficult. Perhaps that is why he was never in the same party as me.