Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lord Lansley
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I will briefly contribute to the debate on this group of amendments. I am pleased that the Government have brought forward Amendment 2. As many of your Lordships will recognise, we have always felt strongly that it was likely in many places across the country that the need for additional housing was such that the desire of local authorities, the local development community and local people for that housing would mean that we would very much be looking for an agreement of this kind with the Government. I declare again my interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. Cambridge and the surrounding area is one of those places. So Amendment 2 seems to be very welcome.
Amendment 3, the amendment to Amendment 2, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, would be very unwelcome. In Cambridgeshire we have a number of local plans, for East Cambridgeshire, South Cambridgeshire, Cambridge City, and many of these development sites cross the boundaries of two local authorities. The local authorities work closely together, but it would be very unwelcome for them to feel that the decisions that they were making and the agreements reached with the Government led directly to rigid and potentially distorting requirements about where the new homes could be built. At Trumpington Meadows, to the south of Cambridge, there is a new development with considerable demand. It would be great to have more affordable housing as the development is extended and we would want the City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council to be able to support the new affordable housing through these kinds of agreements.
I simply did not understand the noble Baroness’s references to the revenue that is to be returned to the Government under Chapter 3 of this part, which is not relevant to the determinations and agreements under Chapter 2. That part of her speech was irrelevant to the question we are considering. This part is about liberating value in vacant high-value local authority housing, both to build more houses and to support the extension of right to buy to housing association tenants. It is not about funding the deficit.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville
My comments about the money being retained for local authority replacement homes was entirely related to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and not to Amendment 3.
Lord Lansley
We are debating the extent to which the Government allow local authorities to retain money that would otherwise be payable to support the right to buy for housing association tenants, in recognition of building houses, and that is under Chapter 2 of this part. If at the same time under this legislation separately under Chapter 3 they are returning money to the Government as a result of the rents for high-income social tenants, that is not about the business of funding right to buy for housing association tenants under this part; it is separate. Anyway, it is a digression.
I was not a party to the procedural discussions on Amendment 6 to which the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, refers. As a participant in the debates in this House, it was always clear to me that the Government were viewing sympathetically and would bring back proposals on Third Reading for one-for-one replacement. I never understood my noble friends on the Front Bench to say that they would do so on a like-for-like basis. There is a distinction.
Leaving aside the processes concerned, the Government are quite right not to have brought back an amendment to mandate like-for-like replacement. They should not do so. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, seems to me to be thoroughly defective, because it places in the hands of local authorities the decision whether or not there is an agreement with the Government. It does not give the Government any discretion in that matter—it says the Government “shall enter” into such an agreement. Placing a rigidity on the Government in this respect is wholly undesirable. It would remove the flexibility to replace one kind of tenure with another and the flexibility to respond to the demand for new affordable housing in an area in a way that matches the needs of that area. It would also remove from the Government the flexibility of whether to enter into an agreement with a local authority at all, which is a central part of the Bill.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lord Lansley
Lord Lansley
I do not dispute that that is the reason it is in the amendment; I just think that it is wrong. We are not in the business of giving additional borrowing powers to local authorities but of releasing value from high-value assets and determining to what extent that is used to fund the discounts for housing association tenants buying their homes—or, on the other hand, to provide for replacement housing. The first point is very straightforward: if one wants to do this, Amendment 66B would include it in the wrong place; it is too inflexible and would introduce too many rigid criteria.
When the Government begin to create agreements with local housing authorities for replacement properties, I think that many of us would share the wish that, in the right places, where agreements are entered into—which will, of course, not be everywhere—those agreements should look for at least one for one; otherwise, why is the local authority being given that reduction in its payment if it is not in recognition that there is a greater need for housing there than for that money to be made available to housing associations through purchase of the properties by their tenants? It seems to me that the theory is: do you take this into Clause 72 and do you make it a minimum requirement of a one-for-one replacement? That is an issue to look at. I certainly do not think you need a new clause to do it.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, there is not much more I can add to the contributions that have already been made. I support those comments and I oppose the Question that Clause 72 stand part of the Bill.
I agree with the comments the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, made at the beginning of his speech about the danger of raising the expectations of housing association tenants that they have the right to buy, which they will think has been enshrined in law—and it has not. This is a voluntary agreement in which housing associations may have very good reasons for excluding certain properties. Similar legislation was brought in to allow parental choice over school places. Parents believed that they had choice but they did not. What they had was the right to express a preference about the school they wanted for their child, and that is a very different thing. Great care is needed with the wording on this issue.