Affordable Housing

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and agree that we need an entirely new approach and strategy. I applaud him, the noble Lord, Lord Best, and my noble friend Lady Bryan for putting the centrality of council housing at the heart of the debate.

The debate has been pretty restrained but a lot of people are angry about this issue. I am angry too. Within half an hour’s walk of this House, we can see how dysfunctional the housing market is. On the other side of the river, the biggest housing development in London has housing available for seven-figure sums, much of it empty and used as an investment by foreign investors. Within spitting distance of that, parts of social housing estates are being blocked off for two or three years, awaiting a regeneration programme that will itself reduce the number of social housing units. We see run-down estates. We see rabbit hutches, uninhabitable for any length of time, in the private rented sector. We see excessive rental rates, affordable by only the top 10% or 20% of the population. That is totally dysfunctional. It is unfair and a political time bomb.

Who do we blame? I blame the Government. In fact, I blame every Government for the past 40 years. They have neglected and, at times, exacerbated the problem. Most interventions by various Governments of every political hue, whatever the intent, have exacerbated the problem in practice by either inflating demand or constraining supply. Let us hope that we are in a new era. I see little sign of it being delivered but I do not blame only the Government. Some of the blame rests on those who are supposed to be centrally delivering housing in these areas. I blame some local authorities. Admittedly, they face appalling financial constraints, but some of them have gone in too deeply with developers and forgotten what they need to deliver social housing and affordable housing to their own people. I blame some housing associations. They have also lost the central part of their ethos and have become developers and landlords as much as the private sector.

In particular, I blame the building industry, which is now dominated by an oligopoly of half a dozen companies. In that sector, profit is delivered by either building high-end expensive housing or producing in volume what I refer to as rabbit hutches, with the worst space dimensions in Europe—only about half of what the Parker Morris standards previously provided. There is a lot of blame around, including from me but particularly from under-40s who face an inability to access decent housing. When I say decent housing, the quality dimension emphasised in particular by the noble Baronesses, Lady Thomas and Lady Brinton, is important. We are building houses that are not appropriate for young families, the disabled or our elderly population. Such houses add to the numbers but do not begin to resolve the problem.

We need a new strategy, and it has to be a pretty radical one. Over the years, I have enunciated, with no great effect on any passing Government, that we need two things. First, we need a central, effective ministry of housing that subsumes not only the supply and demand for housing but the range of housing benefits; my noble friend Lord Rooker alluded to this. Secondly, 90% of the public resources that go into housing go through the benefits system; it used to be about 10%. We could redeploy that money for a new strategic housing intervention, led by central government and delivered locally, but we need leadership. We do not need a system where we change the Housing Minister every five minutes, with all due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, who has been here a bit longer than that and, largely unlike his predecessors, is delivering some very positive outcomes from his ministry.

We need a new era. We need a new central vehicle. We need local authorities to replace the capacity they have lost in their housing, planning and architects’ departments. We need to ensure that we make a new beginning.