Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 42 in my name, which would exempt councils that wish to regenerate estates from the duty to provide starter homes. If councils are forced to put starter homes ahead of replacing council homes when they regenerate estates, resources will be sucked away from replacing council units and existing tenants will be priced out. This would put at risk the Prime Minister’s own stated ambition, which is to see 100 of the most run-down estates transformed, with tenants protected.

The reality is that balancing the protection of tenants and unlocking land is extremely difficult. Sometimes a local authority can convince tenants that everything from crime to damp is endemic in the estate’s design, and indeed sometimes that is correct. But even if a council manages to persuade people that regeneration is both necessary and desirable, it must then meet two further challenges.

The first is persuading tenants that there will be enough units for everybody who wants to move back to the estate once it has been rebuilt. This right of return is crucial if tenants are to be persuaded to back the regeneration proposals. The second is agreeing a scheme which releases land to build properties for private sale in order to fund the regeneration. This inevitably means an increase in density and raises real concerns that the newly built estate will give pride of place to private dwellings, relegating social housing to less desirable locations.

Councils also have to joust with developers over what is and is not viable in their battle to have social rented units reprovided. Residents are rightly suspicious, because the viability studies which underpin the assumptions about what will and will not stack up are often commercially confidential and hotly contested. Then there is the question of ensuring that leaseholders get a good deal. They should get the market value for their property and they, too, should be able to return to the estate if they wish after the regeneration is complete.

Taken together, those are immense financial, logistical and political headaches, and there is clear evidence that some councils are already having great difficulty. In Southwark, for example, the Heygate estate, which has more than 1,000 council properties, is being redeveloped at the moment. Of the 2,500-plus homes being built, only 79—less than 3%—will be social rented property. These situations can only get worse if the Bill gets on to the statute book unamended.

A recent report of the London Assembly Housing Committee showed that on regenerated estates across London, the number of social rented units has reduced from 30,000 to 22,000. By contrast, the number of private market housing units has increased from 3,000 to 36,000. These figures show the difficulties that local authorities face in the negotiations for these regeneration schemes.

Any local authority with a serious commitment to social housing will be asking the developer for what may well turn out to be a quite impossible mix: to rebuild the estate, to build enough private housing to fund the scheme, to reprovide all the social rented, shared-ownership and leasehold units, and also to provide starter homes. As we have seen from Shelter’s research, starter homes are not going to make the situation any better. In practice, the Bill will make the vital principle of a right to return almost impossible to achieve. This means that estates either will not get regenerated or, if they do, it will be done in a way that means not just decamping existing tenants but permanently evicting them from the estates concerned—and some tenants have lived on these estates for generations.

So I ask the Minister to consider how the Government’s twin priorities of the provision of starter homes and the regeneration of 100 of Britain’s most difficult estates, with existing tenants protected—that is the promise that the Prime Minister made—will sit together. My amendment aims to help the Government to ensure that both objectives are met, and I hope that the Minister will be able to give a constructive response.