Houses in Multiple Occupation
Debate between Ashley Fox and Matthew Pennycook(1 month ago)
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Matthew Pennycook
I will give way in a second, but let me briefly mention resources, which are really important.
It is vital that councils have the capacity to take action where needed. That is why we have provided £18.2 million in 2025-26 and £41.1 million for 2026-27 to support the new enforcement responsibilities that local authorities have taken on under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. We plan to establish a more sustainable funding system for enforcement in the private rented sector over the longer term based on future database revenue fees, but, again, I want to understand the challenges that particular local authorities are facing in that respect.
Matthew Pennycook
Let me just give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields before I come to the hon. Gentleman.
Matthew Pennycook
I do not have that information to hand. I am more than happy to follow up in correspondence with my hon. Friend, as I said. I will bring that data, and any further data we have available, to any meeting that we might have on this subject.
Sir Ashley Fox
I suspect the answer to the hon. Lady’s question is “very few indeed.”
The issue in my Bridgwater constituency is that Hinkley Point C—a nuclear power station—is being constructed a few miles away. Many thousands of good workers have come to the town—their number will peak at around 12,000 in the next couple of years. The local council needs the power to restrict the number of HMOs in any particular street or district. Clearly, there is a housing need, so one understands why landlords convert those houses, but the resulting economic pressures bring a change upon the nature of certain areas. Councils need the power to restrict the concentration of HMOs.
Matthew Pennycook
Councils have that power. I do not know off the top of my head whether the hon. Gentleman’s local authority has consulted on and put in place an article 4 direction, but if it has not, I strongly encourage him to make that case so that his local authority makes full use of its powers.
This is the crucial point. Are the powers in place inadequate—in which case let us have that conversation among hon. Members—or are individual local planning authorities unable or unwilling, for whatever reason, to exercise properly the powers that they have? If that is the case, we need to understand what more they need in the way of resources, support and guidance to be able to do so.
Let me briefly touch on social and affordable housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields rightly said, the ultimate solution to ensure that we have enough housing supply in any given area is to build enough homes of all tenures, including social and affordable homes. She has welcomed our new £39 billion 10-year social and affordable homes programme, the largest long-term investment in social and affordable housing in recent memory. Our ambition is to deliver around 300,000 homes over the lifetime of that programme. As she knows, our target is for at least 60% of the homes delivered to be for social rent, to provide the genuinely affordable homes that families need in her area and others.
We are also taking decisive action to reinvigorate council house building, including a new 10-year housing rent policy, and we have reinstated rent convergence. That will strengthen councils’ capacity and confidence for building new homes. We are taking action to reform the right to buy, including returning right-to-buy cash discounts to between £16,000 and £38,000. Again, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields knows, we will go further in implementing the next phase of reforms through our Social Housing Bill, which is making good progress in the other place. Its measures include allowing councils to keep 100% of the receipts generated by right-to-buy sales, with increased flexibilities in how they can be spent.
We are already seeing many the fruits of many of the reforms that we have put in place. Data released just this morning by Homes England and the Greater London Authority in respect of affordable housing starts and completions shows that starts are up 26% and completions are up 8% on 2024-25, and we are delivering the highest number of social rent starts since 2010-11.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields mentioned the national scheme of delegation. We are modernising how planning committees function, and we have been very clear about the case for doing so. We want to ensure that in exercising their democratic oversight, planning committees are focused on the applications that require member input, not on revisiting applications and decisions that have already been taken.
We published a working paper on this in December 2024, and we carried out extensive engagement following that. We formally consulted twice on the reforms, once in May 2025, on the principle of a two-tier system with some decisions delegated to planning officers, and once in March 2026, on the draft regulations and guidance. We are to debate those guidelines next week.
I will gently push back on my hon. Friend’s contention that local voices and objections are cut out. Nothing in those regulations will stop local residents objecting to applications or registering their discontent, but we do think that on a certain set of applications, it is right that expert planning officers make the decisions.
I also just make the point that schemes of delegation are in place across most local authorities in the country. The problem is that there is huge variation, which is creating issues in the planning system. We want to streamline that with a simple set of rules across the country and a national scheme.
Matthew Pennycook
I am happy to sit down and run my hon. Friend through the instrument in lots more detail than I can give from the Dispatch Box, but it is the case that the national scheme of delegation does not specify HMOs in particular. However, development not covered by the HMO permitted development right will fall into schedule 1 of the regulations relating to the national scheme of delegation, where those decisions will be delegated to expert planning officers. As I said, we want to ensure with these reforms that planning committees, and their valuable time, are focused on the most controversial applications where their democratic oversight is best placed.
Sir Ashley Fox
I am grateful to the Minister for being so generous with his time. One reason why so many HMOs are required is the lack of social housing, certainly around Bridgwater. I have had developers approach me who have completed a private scheme, and they want housing associations or a charity to take those social houses off their hands, but they have not got the funds to do it. I have raised this with the Minister before, and he told me that he set up a register to match housing associations with developers who have social housing to effectively dispose of the units. Could he update us on how successful that register has been?
Matthew Pennycook
The register was successful in its aims in terms of providing operators with a chance to submit uncontracted, unsold section 106 units. Roughly over 4,000 units were put into that clearing service, which closed on 1 June. Through the policy intervention we made, we encouraged local authorities to consider how best to get those units moved, cascading to market sale in instances where they felt that they needed to do that. But that small number, which is far below the estimates we heard from some quarters, is a sign that some of the problem is working itself out. We are providing registered providers of affordable housing with greater financial capacity through our rent settlement, rent convergence and all the interventions we are making. Those measures are allowing them to buy more section 106 units and get those stalled schemes moving.
To conclude, local planning authorities already have powers to restrict the proliferation of HMOs. They already benefit from or can deploy licensing powers to ensure that HMOs are safe and well managed, and they do have, we believe, robust powers to ensure that landlords of HMOs comply with all relevant regulations.
As I said, I am very interested to hear from hon. Members about particular cases where they think that their local authority is not able to enforce the regulations that already exist, and of instances of actors circumventing that system—I was very interested in the example that my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford gave. Those are the types of things we want to work through. If it transpires through those examples that the regulations are lacking in some way, we will take that into account. I have made it very clear that we keep the regulation of HMOs under review to ensure that the system works in the way that we want to see it work.
Question put and agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Ashley Fox and Matthew Pennycook(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook
The Government certainly recognise the ongoing challenge posed by the reduced appetite of registered providers of social housing to buy affordable homes delivered under section 106 agreements. As I hope my hon. Friend is aware, the Homes England section 106 affordable housing clearing service was launched back in December alongside the revised national planning policy framework, with the aim of supporting buyers and sellers of section 106 homes to find each other more effectively. We are calling on all developers with uncontracted section 106 affordable homes, as well as providers and local planning authorities, to engage proactively with that new service. We will consider what further measures may be necessary to address the problem, informed by data from that service.
Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)
Private developers in my constituency have obligations to build social homes under section 106, and they are ready to do so. The difficulty they face is that there is no social landlord available to take those units. When I raised this issue with the Deputy Prime Minister in October, she said that she was aware of the problem and was working to tackle it. Will the Minister update the House on the progress made?
Matthew Pennycook
I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman heard my previous answer, but I have just made it clear that we acted on 12 December to establish a matching service. I would advise him to ask the developers whether they have taken advantage of that service. We want to learn lessons from the data that comes out of it to see whether we need to take further steps. We think that the matching service will allow registered providers and developers trying to offload section 106 units to come together to see if agreements can be reached.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Ashley Fox and Matthew Pennycook(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook
Full details of the provisional settlement will be set out in the coming weeks.
Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)