Housing and Planning Bill

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I remind the Minister that we voted against the programme motion.

Amendment 53 safeguards the replacement of like-for-like housing; homes cannot be sold if their sale value is less than the cost of replacing the original property. Amendment 55 seeks to exempt certain types of specialist housing from “high value” determination. Owing to the extremely limited time available today, I will not speak in detail on those amendments. I will focus instead on amendments 131 to 141, which leave out all the clauses in chapter 2 of part 4, effectively removing the chapter from the Bill.

Labour Members are not against local authorities making sensible decisions about their assets, but that is not what the clauses in this chapter of the Bill would enable. They will force local authorities to sell off much-needed council housing, even when they have huge waiting lists. Glyn Robbins, estate manager of Quaker Court, stated that many council homes in London in places such as Quaker Court are likely to be deemed high value, and that is where the Government’s legislation will have the most severe impact.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

Of course, this is not just about the loss of council properties in high-value areas. The impact of the policy would surely be that those properties would move into the privately rented sector, meaning that the housing benefit bill is likely to increase to enable the same properties to be rented out.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an additional point about how truly appalling and nonsensical the policy is. I hope to come to that a bit later.

Glyn Robbins said:

“This is about as high-value an area as you’re going to find. So every time we get an empty council flat, instead of that home going to the next person on a waiting list in Islington that has 18,000 people on it, it’s going to be sold into the private market.”

The Chartered Institute of Housing, among others, has also expressed concern that the Government’s expectation of the number of houses to be built as a result of forcing the selling off of so-called high-value housing is much, much too high. It says that the Government appear to have vastly overestimated the number of homes that will become vacant in the category of high value that might be defined within any local authority area, which in turn will have a negative impact on the replacement of sold-off homes by housing associations. The chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing stressed that more funding needs to be made available for affordable housing and that

“full compensation for housing associations will be absolutely vital if they are going to be able to build more affordable homes for people who can’t afford to buy”.

As far as commentators are concerned, the provisions of this chapter of the Bill are likely to lead to less council housing being available and to any replacement housing that does materialise being out of the financial reach of many people. We know that housing waiting lists will become longer and people will be forced to stay in temporary accommodation for longer, which of course will mean a greater cost to local taxpayers. Councils will have less of an incentive to invest in stock, as it might push the value above the arbitrary thresholds for forced sale. Moreover, the reduction in the number of social rented homes available will intensify competition for private rented sector homes at the bottom of the market, driving up rents.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend is right to say that we need to get Britain building again, and we are doing so, with a 25% increase in starts in the past year. We need to do this right across the country. I would have thought that all Members of the House, including Labour Members, shared in the warm welcome given across the housing sector, including by housing associations and by builders big and small, to the announcements the Chancellor made in the spending review, which double the housing budget. This is the biggest programme of affordable house building that we have seen since the 1970s.

[Andrew Gwynne]

Of course, what is affordable to the Secretary of State’s constituents might not be affordable to mine. Does he share my concerns that what we will see, as perhaps an unintended consequence of his measures, is the removal of properties from the social rented sector and their appearance in the private rented sector, costing more to the public purse in the long run?

[Greg Clark]

No, we want to see more homes of all types. We have committed to build 1 million homes over the next five years, which the previous Labour Government signally failed to do. In fact, when they were in power, the number of homes that were built in a single year fell to 88,000, which was the lowest number since the 1920s.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right. The Bill fails to get to grips with the problems of modern life and the crisis of homeownership, especially for young people and families on ordinary incomes. The so-called starter homes are simply out of reach in those areas where people most need help to buy a home of their own. Last week, Tory MPs voted against Labour proposals to make those homes more affordable. The Bill sounds the death knell for social housing, which has had support from all parties for over a century, and for the first time since the second world war, the Chancellor confirmed in the autumn statement that there is no national investment programme to build such housing.

Starter homes will be built in place of affordable council and housing association homes, both to buy and to rent. Councils will be forced to sell their best properties and housing associations will not replace many of their right-to-buy sales with like-for-like homes. That is why Shelter, like the independent Chartered Institute of Housing, predicts that this Bill will lead to the loss of at least 180,000 genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy over the next five years—an extraordinary and an extreme Bill.

We have tried to stop the worst of the plans, but Tory Ministers and Back Benchers have opposed our proposals to give local areas the flexibility to promote not just starter homes but homes of all types, depending on local housing need; to make starter homes more affordable and protect and recycle taxpayers’ investment; to stop Ministers mandating that pay-to-stay limits hit working households on modest incomes; to allow local areas to protect council and housing association homes with a proper replacement of each; to limit any automatic planning permission from Ministers for brownfield land; and to protect stable family homes for council tenants.

In truth, many of the problems are caused by Ministers who announce first and ask questions later—no consultation and little time for proper scrutiny. More than 60 pages of new legislation were tabled at the last minute after the Committee had completed its scrutiny. There is a great deal for the other place to do.

In five years of government, we have seen five years of failure on housing under Conservative Ministers. Homelessness is rising, private rents are soaring and levels of homeownership have fallen each and every year since 2010; they are now at the lowest level for a generation. Over the past five years, the Government have seen fewer new homes built than under any Government in peacetime history since the 1920s. After five years of failure, the Bill does nothing to deal with the root causes of those failures; in many areas, it will make the problems a great deal worse.

[Andrew Gwynne]

Is it not also time that the Government practised what they preach? There are measures in the Bill to tackle houses of multiple occupation, yet in my constituency, but for the tenacity of Councillor Oliver Ryan and local residents, the Home Office and its contractors would have converted a small semi-detached family home into an HMO for the dispersal programme.

[John Healey]

My hon. Friend is right; I could have extended the list. Tory Ministers and Back Benchers have voted against our proposals to reinforce councils’ hands so that they deal with such abuse from landlords and such exploitation of tenants, to require homes to meet standards that make them fit for human habitation and to mandate annual electrical safety checks. They rejected each and every one of those proposals, to which we will return in the other place.