Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, the opening assertion of the impact statement on the Bill states:

“The public need to have confidence that housing policy in our country is fair and fit for the future”.

Indeed they do. The tragedy of the Bill is that it is neither fair nor fit for the future. It is fair neither to those who are desperate for a home nor to the voluntary and public sector bodies that can and should be able to provide them. It is loaded with unintended consequences. It is silent where it should speak.

As we have heard, this year fewer than half of the 250,000 houses that we needed were built. By its own admission, the private sector cannot supply the houses we need in this country, 30% of which need to be social homes.

The Bill demolishes whatever remains of the Government’s credibility on localism. There are 34 new powers for the Secretary of State—powers to override local housing needs; to take away housing receipts; to limit the way local authorities manage their assets, tenancies and rents; and to limit their powers over planning. Vast swathes of policy are left to secondary legislation, as usual. The Royal Town Planning Institute is not an alarmist body, but it has described these powers as extraordinary. In its briefing, the Local Government Association pleads with the Government to allow councils the continuing flexibility to respond to the needs of their residents.

Most of the radical changes have hardly been debated in the other place. One example is the damaging change to the definition of affordable homes. This was introduced after Committee stage and means that developers will be able to build starter homes in place of affordable social housing as the price of planning permission under Section 106 agreements.

Decent places also depend on decent services. Can the Minister tell us whether developers will still have to provide schools and health centres, roads and community centres under Section 106, or will they be let off that as well?

A policy for starter homes, however welcome—and it is—does not add up to a housing policy for the nation. Where are the homes for growing families, or disabled families with a need for lifetime homes? Where are the homes for retired people who want to downsize? These are the families who will lose out, but we will all lose out because the whole housing system will remain resolutely stuck if we provide significantly only for starter homes. This is a quick fix, but we have a very long-term problem. We know from all the evidence that starter homes are not even affordable for most low and middle-income families, whether in rural areas or central London. However, it is not even a fair policy for future buyers. The 20% discount will apply only to the first tranche of buyers; they will be free to sell their assets after five years at market value. We will be minting a new generation of property speculators.

This Bill is full of ambiguities, not least on the future of housing associations and their social homes. The one area where it is brutally clear is in its hostility to local authorities and their tenants. These are homes; homes that people are proud of in communities that they are proud of, as the right reverend Prelate said. If the Government force local authorities to sell their highest-value vacant properties and to pass receipts on to central government, Camden Council, for example, estimates that it could lose up to half its council housing. The bony fingers of the Secretary of State will reach down to the tenants themselves by bringing an end to secure, lifetime council tenancies and forcing those with very low incomes to pay market rents. It is called “pay to stay”. It is a poisonous expression and I believe it is a poisonous policy. It will hit the very people the community depends on—low-paid key workers such as carers, bus drivers and teaching assistants. These are, says Shelter, quite simply the most significant changes in low-rent and social housing in the history of housing policy. If you put this Bill together with the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, you have a toxic mix: a reduction in the supply of social housing, a forced migration into the private sector—and worse—and a massive increase in the welfare bill.

All this will be compounded by the planning sections of this Bill. Here, what is proposed will, essentially, replace our democratic, plan-led system with its checks and balances with a system whereby, for brownfield sites, major planning applications will automatically be granted permission through what is called “permission in principle”. This will be able to be granted not just for housing but for waste disposal and fracking. At a stroke, it will reduce the right and the ability of local authorities to plan for the different needs of local areas —for those mixed communities of which the right reverend Prelate spoke so eloquently—and it will remove the ability of local people to influence local development. It is the opposite of what the noble Baroness says: it does not create certainty but rather uncertainty, and it does not create confidence.

I was very pleased that the noble Baroness said that she thought we had a planning system in this country to be proud of. She is at odds with the statement in the Explanatory Memorandum that the planning system is an obstacle. That is what the Government have always said. The real enemy of faster and better housebuilding in this country is not the planning system. If it were, we would not have the 261,000 units of housing that are consented but not built or occupied. The real enemies are the lack of finance, skills, building supplies and land, and the huge loss of planning capacity in local authorities through budget cuts.

But dealing with reality is the “too difficult” box, so the Government reach yet again for more deregulation of the planning system, and creating the means of privatising the process of planning itself, which will dislodge the balance of protections which at the moment guarantee protection for the environment, heritage and good, decent, mixed communities. The independence of the planning system is threatened. These provisions are, says the TCPA, “extremely dangerous”. Elements of the Bill will not even enable the Government to achieve their own objectives—not my words but those of the Local Government Association, led by the Conservatives.

The Bill means essentially that we no longer have any policy in this country for building decent, affordable homes, let alone to design decent places to live. Indeed, it risks replicating the worst aspects of housebuilding in the past—poor-quality housing and poor-quality estates. It is a response to five years of policy failure in housing and is a panicky response when we need a long-term decent housing and planning policy. The Bill deserves, and I am sure will get, the most intense challenge and scrutiny in this House.