Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)Housing and Planning Bill
Anne Main Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)
I shall not detain the House for long, as I am not sure that anyone would hear me. However, my constituents would expect me to raise the exceptional challenges of the central Oxfordshire housing market. Many of the Bill’s measures will be welcomed locally: more stringent measures to tackle rogue landlords, the brownfield register and measures such as Help to Buy, starter homes and the Prime Minister’s commitment to commission thousands more affordable homes directly.
Although commendable, the raft of policies to build more affordable houses is not in itself enough. Houses need to be built in areas that need them most. High-cost areas are either where growth is the highest or where markets are sclerotic because sites are hard to come by, infrastructure is at capacity and planning authorities are weak. In some areas such as Oxford, both those factors apply. High growth is becoming constrained by failing local housing markets. Many colleagues have local difficulties with housing, and I wish to explain briefly what our challenges are.
Median full-time earnings in Oxford are now £26,500; median house prices are £427,210. That means that house prices are 16 times the earnings of the average worker. The Centre for Cities analysis has found Oxford to be the least affordable city in England when prices are set against local incomes. The number of people owning their own home in the city is well below the national average, and median private rent for a three-bedroom house is £300 a week, more than half of median earnings. Some 30% of residents rent compared with 25% in London. The House of Commons Library has found that Oxford City Council delivered zero affordable homes in 2013-14 and only 20 in 2014-15; it is ranked as the fourth worst in the country for delivering housing of any tenure. Yet Oxford requires 1,400 homes to be delivered each year until 2031.
There are lots of specific local problems. To give the council its due, I should say that we have relatively few brownfield sites and all sorts of challenges, given that two thirds of land is in private ownership. That complicates active public management. The city has a relatively low density and development is highly restricted due to the amount of protected and listed buildings. It also has 400 hectares of green-belt land within its local authority. Nevertheless, if we compare Oxford with Cambridge—a reasonable comparison—we see that Cambridge provided 550 affordable homes in 2013-14 and 320 in 2014-15.
It is reasonable for us to call for more to be done because the issue is obviously causing significant problems for our local private and public sectors. One in two senior academic appointments fails because of house prices. Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spends more than £100,000 a week on agency staff: it cannot recruit permanent staff because of local housing affordability. Some 30% of local businesses cite housing costs as their top barrier to recruitment. The failure to build homes where they are needed in cities constrains growth. The issue matters to the national economy as well, as such cities are the most productive and have the most jobs. If people cannot afford to live in these cities, they cannot access those jobs and businesses cannot sell to them. The economy suffers.
We are not yet getting this issue right. Between 2008 and 2013, in respect of local incomes, relatively more homes were built in Barnsley—the second most affordable city in Great Britain—than were built in London or Oxford, which are the least affordable cities. More of these homes need to be built in our most successful cities, where affordability is lowest and demand is highest.
In justifying Government amendment 112, and acknowledging the exceptionalism of the London housing market, the Minister has accepted that housing in Britain’s most economically successful cities is the least affordable and that we need policies that target our affordable house building efforts towards our least affordable areas. That is little more than common sense, but we have all known too many occasions when common sense has fallen by the wayside in our legislative process.
Amendment 112 will ensure that enough receipts from the sale of high-value homes go to the Greater London Authority for it to build two affordable homes for every one sold. Obviously, the receipts left with the GLA would have to be sufficiently high to allow that. I am of course very pleased for Londoners that this important measure has been secured for them, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) on the efforts that he has gone through to do so. This is possible for Londoners largely because house prices are so high that huge amounts of money are generated from sales, so it is reasonably easy to fund two for one without putting too big a dent in the revenue stream going to central Government.
In my view, unsurprisingly given my bias towards Oxford, this should also apply to other high-value areas such as Oxford, Bath and St Albans. I will set out how it might work in practice in our case. About 12% of council homes in Oxford would be deemed to be of high value and so the council would be under a duty to consider selling them when they become vacant. Given vacancy rates, this works out at 29 homes a year being sold rather than going to the next person on the waiting list. Our estimates suggest that 29 council homes sold on the open market in Oxford each year would generate about £8.6 million in receipts, so a similar two-for-one provision would ensure that £8.6 million stays with the council for it to provide two extra units of affordable homes for every one sold. If, say, each high-value council home sold for £293,385 each—£8.9 million divided by 29—that would ensure that enough was still going to central Government for them to do as they plan, but we would be able to provide two for one for Oxford.
Amendment 112 gives the Secretary of State the power to create exceptions to subsection (4) for other local authorities along the lines of the two-for-one provision that my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park has so valiantly provided for London, so that is written explicitly into the Bill. Such an exception would be essential for Oxford to ensure that we have sufficient social and affordable housing. However, I remain to be convinced that the power will be sufficient to ensure that this is delivered, following the challenges that we have faced.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a valiant charge on behalf of all of us who have very expensive houses in our constituencies. The median house price in St Albans is £392,000, and we are ringed by green belt. I share her concern about how deliverable this is, but we are right to push for it in areas that suffer similarly with high prices, such as London. I hope that the Minister takes that into account.
Nicola Blackwood
I thank my hon. Friend, and I agree with her.
The Minister has been very generous in the time that he has taken to discuss this with us. I am grateful to him for offering to have meetings with us about how we can implement the measures in amendment 112 to deliver for Oxford and other high-cost areas. We need to ensure that this commitment will be implemented as a matter of urgency and works in practice for areas such as mine where residents face a genuine housing crisis and genuine hardship on a daily basis. My colleagues from high-cost areas such as Bath, Cambridge and St Albans and I will, if necessary, look to the Lords to ensure that these measures deliver for our constituents, because affordable housing needs to be targeted towards high-cost areas where we face the biggest challenges in the country.
Teresa Pearce
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and that is exactly right. Across the private rented sector, many good landlords do all the things we would wish of them. It is for the minority that we need to legislate. As I mentioned, the Minister said in Committee that the Government were considering this and I know that there have been conversations with the sector, so I would be pleased to hear how far they have gone and whether something will be introduced in future.
New clause 54 would remove the three-storey condition for HMOs. That would require mandatory HMO licences for all buildings that meet all the other requirements of an HMO but are not three storeys high. HMOs come in a variety of forms and the current definition does not fit the actuality on the ground.
I know that the Government are consulting on extending mandatory licensing of HMOs and I shall be interested to hear where the Minister thinks that consultation might go. HMOs make up one of the main forms of private sector housing for students, young professionals and single people on low incomes and the three-storey threshold means that many actual HMOs do not require a licence. Indeed, down my road there is a bungalow—it clearly does not have three storeys—that has over the previous year had as many as 10 unrelated people living in it. Clearly, it would be classed as an HMO in any other regard apart from the fact that it is not three storeys high.
Private rented housing is an important part of the housing sector and with the reduction of housing benefit for the under-35s allowing only shared occupancy, more and more properties are in effect HMOs apart from the fact that they do not meet the three-storey provision. The new clause and wider Government consultation provide an opportunity to evaluate the purpose of HMO licensing simply to provide for a more robust, secure and safe private rented sector through the licensing of houses in multiple occupancy that operate with shared facilities.
Amendment 154 would lead to the retention of sections 225 and 226 of the Housing Act 2004, under which every local authority must, when carrying out a review under section 8 of the Housing Act 1985, carry out an assessment of the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers who reside in the area, and provide for the Secretary of State to issue guidance on how local housing authorities can meet those needs. Clearly there has been and continues to be a need to recognise the differing housing needs of Gypsies and Travellers. Anyone with an understanding of the community will appreciate that they have different housing needs and the Government’s impact assessment for the Bill recognises a perception of differential treatment of Gypsies and Travellers. In Committee there was a great deal of written and oral evidence of the devastating impact that the withdrawal of sections 225 and 226 could have on Gypsy and Traveller communities. This amendment would retain those sections.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation noted that the former Commission for Racial Equality concluded in 2006 that Gypsies and Irish Travellers were the most excluded groups in Britain. Concern was expressed that the existing provisions weakened the understanding of those groups’ specific accommodation needs. As the Department for Communities and Local Government’s “Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs assessments: guidance” of 2007 states:
“In the past, the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers . . . have not routinely formed part of the process by which local authorities assess people’s housing needs. The consequences of this have been that the current and projected accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers have often not been well understood.”
If the requirement specifically to assess their accommodation needs is removed, there will be an even higher rate of homelessness, even fewer sites to meet their assessed need will be delivered, and even less land will be allocated in local plans to meet their need.
As a result of the shortage of authorised sites, Gypsies and Travellers will have no alternative but to camp in an unauthorised manner, which impacts not only on their community but on the settled communities around them. Without authorised sites they will have difficulty accessing running water, toilets, refuse collection, schools and employment opportunities. Local authorities already spend millions of pounds each year on unauthorised encampments in legal costs, evictions, blocking off land from encampments and clear-up costs, so this is a lose-lose situation. Where Gypsies and Travellers’ needs are not assessed or met, local communities are impacted upon as a consequence. The Community Law Partnership is concerned that as a result of the clause Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs will be buried within general housing need. CLP highlights the fact that this community consists of traditionally hard to reach groups, and calls for focused guidance for local authorities to assess their needs.
Gypsies and Travellers already experience some of the poorest social outcomes of any group in our society, and accommodation is a key determinant of those wider inequalities. We have seen written evidence from the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain, the main representative body for travelling show people, which shared extreme concern about these clauses and the impact on its work. I would be grateful if the Minister outlined the impact on travelling show people and provided reassurance to the guild and show people that the clauses will not affect them.
The policy in this area is different across the nations. The Welsh Government are taking a different approach, introducing a statutory duty on local authorities to facilitate site provision. Why does the Minister think Gypsies and Travellers should face such a postcode lottery? We believe the amendment is necessary to continue support for Traveller and Gypsy communities, which are some of the most excluded groups in Britain.
There are legal concerns, too. The public sector equality duty recognises Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers as ethnic minorities, and the European Court of Human Rights has held that the UK has an obligation to facilitate the traditional way of life of Gypsies and Travellers. Will the Minister clarify whether the removal of the clause would go against that?
Our amendment would retain sections 225 and 226 of the Housing Act 2004, which would ensure that the housing needs of Gypsies and Travellers were assessed by local authorities. This would make sure that safe sites could continue to be identified and would avoid the lose-lose situation set out in the Bill, where an under-represented group faces the prospect of its housing needs being swallowed up within the general housing need. As the clause stands, it would lead to many unintended consequences—a shortage of authorised sites for Gypsies and Travellers, a rise in unauthorised sites, worse safety standards, and greater pressure on local authorities and on local communities. I hope the Government will consider the amendment.
Amendment 99 to clause 92 would ensure that those with an entry on the database of rogue landlords and letting agents would not be granted a licence to run an HMO. Although those subject to a banning order would not be able to receive an HMO licence as they would be in breach of the banning order, there may be others on the rogue landlord and letting agents database who could still apply and receive an HMO licence. As the House is aware, a local housing authority may include other persons on the database, rather than applying for a banning order in a case where a person’s offences are slightly less serious and the local authority considers that monitoring the person is more appropriate than seeking a banning order. This amendment seeks assurance that those people would not be considered for an HMO licence. It would have the added bonus of ensuring that the local housing authority checked with the rogue landlords and letting agents database to ensure that the application was allowed and that nobody subject to a banning order could slip through. If in future the database of rogue landlords and letting agents were expanded, that would provide further protection for tenants against such landlords.
As was mentioned in earlier debates, including in Committee, we support measures to tackle rogue landlords to ensure security and safety for tenants in the sector and to penalise criminal landlords. However, we would like this further measure to be added, to ensure that in no circumstances can rogue landlords be granted an HMO licence. The amendment would help drive up standards across the sector and protect tenants in HMOs from rogue landlords.
Amendment 67 relates to clause 93, which would change the Housing Act 2004
“to allow financial penalties to be imposed as an alternative to prosecution for certain offences.”
Our amendment would ensure that financial penalties could be sought “in addition” to prosecution rather than as an alternative. Although we support the measures that tackle rogue landlords, we believe that the Bill could go further to penalise criminal landlords, to make it harder for them to get away with housing-related offences and deter them from committing the crimes and from returning to the sector, as well as providing an adequate punishment for their offence.
At present, the Bill would allow for a financial penalty to be sought instead of a criminal prosecution in cases ranging from failure to comply with improvement notices to letting an unlicensed HMO, among other offences. Clearly there will be cases in which a financial penalty is more appropriate, just as a prosecution route will be in others. However, there may well be further situations where both routes would be appropriate. Our amendment would allow that to happen.
The amendment would also help in situations where the impact of the offence was unclear. A local authority may deem a financial penalty appropriate, but for repeat offenders, or if the impact of the original offence escalates, it may also wish to use an additional prosecution route. Making provision for both routes will allow greater flexibility: local authorities could choose to fine, prosecute or do both. The amendment would increase the options available to local authorities. In that way, we hope to ensure further security and safety for tenants in the sector and to help drive up standards.
If the Government do not agree to it, we will divide the House on new clause 52. Amendments 79, 76 and 77, tabled by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), among others, seek to test the House’s will on the compulsory purchase order provisions. We believe that those amendments would water down those provisions, so the Opposition will oppose them in a vote.
Mrs Main
I rise to speak in favour of new clause 42. It is a contradictory situation, but in very high-value areas such as St Albans people often want to live in mobile home parks because that is the most affordable route to securing their own home. There are many mobile home sites in my constituency, as well as some of the highest house prices and lowest affordability in the country.
I was pleased when the coalition Government sought to tackle some of the abuses of rogue site owners, but the issue of people being able to sell their own mobile home freely without being shackled with enormous costs really needs tackling. New clause 42 probes that issue and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views.
Residents at Newlands Park, a mobile home park in my constituency, have told me that when a home becomes available it is often so difficult to sell that the site owner ends up buying it. Gradually, more and more park homes are becoming the property of the site owner, who then rents them out for very high rents. On many sites in the United Kingdom not only is the cost of selling mobile homes hugely disproportionate to the value of the units, but restrictions are placed on those selling them. For example, in Newlands Park there is an insistence that the site owner should vet the potential new buyer of the mobile home. There are also restrictions on how and when advertisements for selling the mobile home can be displayed, and on the associated wording. As a result, mobile home or park home sites that are poorly run, or run by landlords imposing onerous demands, can start to become controlled by the site owner. This Bill—or, if not this one, perhaps another relating to the Mobile Homes Act 2013—could provide a tool to try to restrict the control that unscrupulous owners may choose to try to exercise over those who wish to divest themselves of a park home site.
John Stevenson
That is an interesting point. Although I have concentrated on just one aspect of mobile homes, I think that the 2017 review should consider the issue holistically, across the board, rather than focusing on one or two specific issues.
My new clause would reduce the maximum commission to 5%. I accept that there are counter-arguments. Site owners suggest that the commission forms part of their investment calculations or business models, and can make their businesses viable. They also suggest that a reduction in the commission could result in increased pitch fees or service charges. The Select Committee considered the issue during the last Parliament, and concluded that the commission should remain at 10%. I would ask, however, whether it is right for site owners to benefit from an increase in value when they have not actually done anything. I do not believe that it is.
There are a number of possible solutions. We could gradually reduce the percentage—by, say, 1% a year over five years—to allow site owners to adjust their business models. The commission could be charged only on the difference between the original purchase price and the subsequent sale price. Alternatively, there could be a straight reduction from 10% to 5%, as my new clause suggests. I accept that there could be an increase in pitch fees, but arguably that would reflect the true costs of running a site. Site owners cannot guarantee that they will receive income from any sales because they do not know when those sales will occur.
The new clause is intended to achieve three things. It is intended to highlight the issue in the House, and to remind Ministers that there are different forms of home ownership and that this is one of them. Most important of all, however, I seek confirmation from the Minister that the Government will properly and comprehensively review the issue of mobile park homes in 2017, as previously promised.
Pete Wishart
In all candour, I have to say that that is not what it feels like on this side of the House. If a Division is called, the hon. Gentleman will be able to vote and express his view as a legitimately elected Member of Parliament. My hon. Friends and I, as equally legitimate Members of Parliament recently elected at the general election, will not be allowed to vote. We will be banned. We will be barred. We will be effectively banished from that process.
Mrs Main
Does the hon. Gentleman really expect taxpayers to pay for another Parliament just because his feelings are somehow being assaulted? I do not how he could explain that extra layer of bureaucracy and cost to the British taxpayer, but maybe spending other people’s money is how they like to do things in Scotland.
Pete Wishart
I do not know whether I am grateful or not to the hon. Lady for her intervention. I think she is saying that she wants great dollops of cake so she can spend her time eating it and having a singularly English Parliament. Let us just use the House of Commons to accommodate that. The thing that has been created here is a quasi-English Parliament, but this Parliament belongs to me as much as to her. It belongs to the Scottish people as much as to the English people. What has happened today with the Legislative Grand Committee is that she will be able to represent her constituents in all Divisions, but my hon. Friends and I will not.