Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)
Emma Reynolds
I do not accept that because the figures speak for themselves. We are not building even half the number of homes that we need to keep up with demand. That is an appalling record, and not one the Government should be proud of.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
We have one of the oldest district plans in the country partly because there was huge resistance to Labour’s over-heavy housing targets. Is the hon. Lady suggesting that we will be going back to much higher levels? What impact will that have on the district plans that have emerged in areas that have finalised them?
Emma Reynolds
No, I am not suggesting that we go back to regional spatial strategies. We will not do what this Government did and throw all the pieces in the air and see where they land. We will largely keep the national planning policy framework in place. Where local plans come forward and are voted on, they can be successful. There are problems in areas where local plans have not been passed, and there is also a problem with not using common methodology in some of the local plans.
Mr Raynsford
I am very grateful for that intervention, and I suspect I shall be in deep trouble tonight for my failure to give way earlier. My hon. Friend makes a very valid point about the absence of the Minister. I hope he is away for only a short time, because I am sure he will benefit from hearing some of the comments I am going to make in the latter part of my speech.
Mr Raynsford
I agree very much with that and I will cover it in the latter part of my speech. My thesis is that we need to have a range of differing types of housing, and only by delivering that will we ensure that we meet the ambitious target of 200,000 homes in the next Parliament.
The price of this Government’s failure to build the number of homes necessary is very much reflected in the second crisis of theirs on housing, which is on affordability. The shortage of sufficient homes has been driving prices up in both the owner-occupied sector and the rented sector. Curiously, the Government have been compounding the problem by driving up rent levels themselves in the social rented sector, because in place of social housing at target rents, which was very much the objective of the previous Government, we are now seeing the Orwellian concept of “affordable rent tenancies” where rent is set as a percentage of the market rents. A level of 80% of market rents in London is simply not affordable. How can anyone suggest that 80% of a market rent of perhaps £400 a week is an affordable rent for a family on low income? That is simply not credible. We need a programme that delivers truly affordable homes, and not just for social rent; in addition to social rented housing, we need low-cost home ownership options, and intermediate rented options for people who can afford to pay more than the social rent and are looking for suitable housing in that category.
A mix of tenures is required—a point I stressed when I was pleased to welcome Sir Michael Lyons to Greenwich earlier this year. He came as part of his inquiry, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) alluded in her excellent introductory speech. I stressed to Sir Michael that we need a range of different tenures in order to expand output. It is well known that house builders—
Mrs Main
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is a very pertinent point. I would like to tease out something about the intermediate option that the right hon. Gentleman is talking about. Would he like to have means-testing of current social housing tenants? As we know, some of them earn lots of money.
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I am going to have to help. The hon. Lady was going to speak next. She will not mind going down the list a little bit, because it is unfair to keep intervening. The right hon. Gentleman has already taken nine minutes. I want to get everybody in and these interventions are not going to help when someone knows they are going to speak next.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Suitably admonished, I shall keep my remarks brief to allow other colleagues to get in, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I wished to pick up on the comments made by the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) about what is “affordable”, because in an area such as St Albans house values and land values are so high that it is genuinely difficult for any local authority and any house builder to deliver social housing and affordable housing. That is why I wanted to ask him whether he supported considering some form of means-testing for those currently occupying social housing. I just wanted to throw that into the mix.
My council in St Albans has the second oldest district plan in the country. I brought my council leader, Councillor Julian Daly, to meet the Secretary of State because I wanted my right hon. Friend to have a sense of the pressures on a place such as St Albans. There is high demand to live in our beautiful area. It is very commutable to London. It suffers similar housing pressures to London and has similar prices. The average house price in St Albans is £401,811. That is a massive sum for any young family to afford. The average mortgage repayment in St Albans is £738 or 16.1% of average income.
Another part of the mix, which has not been mentioned today, and about which I put in a plea to the Chancellor, is stamp duty. That has not been considered by the Opposition. In high-price areas such as mine, we have the Help to Buy scheme through which the Government are helping young families and young people to get on the housing ladder. Those people are saving hard for deposits, yet they have to give over a large whack in tax. Stamp duty has not been considered by the House since 2003 and I make no bones about the fact that I am trying to lead a charge on the matter.
Stamp duty means that some people are unable to trade down and free up homes for other couples because their house values have risen so much that they would pay a large amount of tax. It also makes it difficult for expanding families to move up. It is a barrier to fluidity in the housing market and to young people moving. It seems rather odd that we as a Parliament want to get young people on the housing ladder, yet we are happy to take large sums of money off them in areas such as mine. The cost of an entry-level property in St Albans is probably more than the national average house price, so for the many people trying to get such a property in our area, stamp duty is a big deal.
The reason for our having the most out-of-date district plan is not that we have a slovenly and lazy council—far from it. Our planning department is the busiest in the country. A huge number of people want to build in our area, and we have loads of challenges from developers. My council regularly spends large amounts of money fighting off predatory developers. The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), smiles at me—I will be making my rail freight point—but it has cost my council millions of pounds to fight off inappropriate development applications.
The reason we have such an out-of-date district plan is that my council, along with other councils in Hertfordshire, was desperately trying to resist the high housing targets that were imposed top-down by Labour. If the Opposition go back to imposing top-down targets, there will be sclerosis in planning departments again. I welcome the fact that the Government have taken by the horns the point that local areas should decide. Local areas know their housing need best.
Mrs Main
I am not giving way because I listened to Mr Deputy Speaker’s guidance and I am keeping my remarks brief.
The previous policy guidance, which set a housing density of more than 50 houses to the hectare, resulted in places such as St Albans being swamped with one-bedroom flat units, and large five-bedroom houses to pay for them. This skews the market. What we want in areas such as St Albans is to be able to decide whether we need two-bedroom flats or three-bedroom small family houses to suit the needs of the local population.
The Government have gone a long way to implementing localism. It is not perfect, or I would not keep referring—my hon. Friend the Minister is listening to me—to my rail freight point, but I would like to think that we have started listening to what residents want locally. Housing numbers should not be dictated centrally. St Albans was furious with the previous Government’s decision to lump us in with the north London arc, making us vulnerable to inappropriate development, which we have resisted. We are ringed by green belt but we do not have a nimby attitude in St Albans. We wish to deliver affordable local housing for young families, but we also realise that we are part of people’s investment portfolios.
The Opposition should be clearer about what they mean by “affordable” in areas such as mine. If they do not like the 80% calculation, how would they deliver affordable housing in an area where the average house price is more than £400,000? Nobody in St Albans is going to give their land away and a local authority has a duty of care to its residents, so it will not give away its assets and it has very little as a land bank of its own and very few buildings. Labour’s plans sound great, but how would it deliver affordable housing? That is very hard to deliver and the Government are going a long way to try to do so.