Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest which is in the register. At this stage, there is not much more to say on the Bill because we have had some marvellous contributions. I congratulate the two maiden speakers.

As was said at the beginning, housing is the basis of home and family life and perhaps one of the most important influences on the future of the next generation as well as on the present one. Help to buy, as was said earlier, enables the dream of home ownership. It is natural for people to have that. But we need to learn from past mistakes. In my involvement with housing on the GLC, I visited estates which were almost unusable because they were built out of a sort of concrete and no ventilation was provided. People’s clothes were ruined by ceilings that dripped mould—I recall that happening to one wedding dress. There were so many mistakes made in what was meant to be the solution of building those marvellous blocks. So many of them are now having to be removed or modified completely.

My noble friend Lord Selsdon had some interesting things to say. My expert on party walls, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, made the point that I do not feel anyone else went into in the same detail—about the shortage of builders. I can recall years ago, when I was a vice-president of the National House Building Council, that the moment you tried to build a certain amount of structure in a certain amount of time, you just did not have enough builders. All the bricklayers used to go off on an eight-week training course and give up after four weeks because they could move straight on to a job, whether they were qualified or not. The Government are going to have to work out how to deal with this issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, talked about housing land banks. Sure enough, people do have land banks, but you cannot develop all those in five minutes. Certainly, small builders have a very limited rate of production. In large cities, large blocks are the answer because the only extra space we can find is by going up. I had a dental practice near the Barbican and know that people used to have to take their children down to the playground below and watch them from the 17th floor above to see whether they were playing safely. That does not answer any of the community ideas we have. It is important to think these things through and come up with answers that make it possible for people to bring up their families properly.

I welcome the point about enforcement against rogue landlords. But I do not agree that they should be banned as they will go underground and become worse than ever. Those desperate for housing will then be dealing with people against whom they have no comeback as the whole thing will have gone underground. Instead, there should be powers of enforcement and rogue landlords should be put on a blacklist if they are that bad. They should not just be wiped out because that will not get rid of them but will help them to develop a horrible subculture, which will be worse for people than the present situation.

Those who buy a flat in a block become leaseholders. Many of them have no idea at all what responsibilities they are taking on or what will happen. I have spoken to a number of people who bought houses in Margaret Thatcher’s day. They now find that they have an income of £10,000 a year but face a roof bill of £12,000 a year and have no money with which to pay it. Therefore, anything that is sold on a leasehold basis should have to have a sinking fund so that people put away a little bit of something all the time and do not suddenly find themselves completely impoverished and unable to do anything because of that.

I should like to touch on many more things but time is moving on and I must not go on. But an estate should be safe for the community that benefits from it. I was touched to hear the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, describe his childhood. Many people would now regard that hardship as an almost idyllic situation because at least there was love, safety and care.

I agreed with many points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, which require a great deal of thought and need to be gone into. My time is almost up and I must not go on. However, we must, above all, have the regulations before Committee, as others have said. I have found such a situation very unsatisfactory, particularly on the part of this department. It always finds some reason why it cannot produce the regulations in draft form until the Bill is over. Then, all we can do is look at them as a statutory instrument and say either yes or no. We cannot amend them, make sense of them or deal with the questions that come up. So, as I said, above all I support noble Lords in pressing for the regulations to reach us in time for them to play a part in our proceedings in Committee.