Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I should first like to congratulate my noble friend Lady Thornhill on her maiden speech. It has been an absolute pleasure knocking on doors with her over the past two years. To knock on a door in a mixed tenure community and to understand the passion and drive she has for some of the places that she has ensured were built has been a joy. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, for his excellent and eloquent speech. I feel that chartered surveyors are like buses in this debate because three have come along—and do we need them? Only a week ago I spoke to representatives at Jones Lang LaSalle about the Bill who said that even for them, in terms of the private sector, the housebuilding sector is at only 50% capacity for delivering anywhere near the ambition that this Bill has set out. Much mention has been made of the charitable sector, but the private sector is also worried.

Every housing Bill is an opportunity to lay down a great legacy. I feel that this Bill falls very short of that aim. Not only does it fail to tackle the most chronic need we have—the provision of decent, affordable housing and, above all, social housing—but it deliberately sets out to asset-strip what little social housing is left. That it does so with a request to this place for so many blank cheques given the level of secondary legislation, to which others have already referred, is something that I know and trust the Minister will strive to overcome. I wish her luck with that but she will need it.

This evening, I would like the Minister at least to give a commitment that the details of the regulations on the formula to be applied to local authorities on high-value assets likely to be vacant, under Clauses 67 to 73, will be ready prior to us starting Committee stage. Last night, her officials confirmed in a meeting that most submissions are now in. So there is no need for further delay on the small print, which is so important. That helps this House to judge whether the Government have done the maths. Obviously, as noble Lords have heard, we have our suspicions on that.

We all need to recognise that there has been a failure over the decades to increase the supply of social housing in the wake of right to buy. I recall lobbying the Major Government and the Blair Government on behalf of the charity Shelter and the somewhat glazed look of politicians, especially those from the Treasury if they agreed to meet you at all, on the issue of housing. That was in spite of best endeavours sometimes from Housing Ministers from both Governments.

We all know the eternal truth that decent housing across all tenures needs decent levels of expenditure. Ever since the popularity of right to buy, the Benches opposite have tried different formulas to repeat this Thatcherite policy. Some of us would prefer them to look a little further back and I was interested that the Minister mentioned Churchill. Churchill got Macmillan to build 300,000 homes a year. Perhaps we could urge the Benches opposite to go back a bit further than Thatcherism.

Instead, we have a Bill which will subsidise middle-income home ownership at the expense of affordable homes for rent. I believe that the pay-to-stay policy, combined with the sale of high-value social housing, will reduce the mix of tenure, particularly for inner-city areas. As a governor of an inner-city school, the knowledge that children from all backgrounds, all races and all religions go to that school and live in that community is what I believe makes us such a tolerant and liberal society. But with this Bill I fear that social housing will be driven out of the inner city altogether. Given other current priorities for the Government—for instance, on very difficult issues to tackle such as radicalisation—I urge the Minister to look again at the likely impact of these policies on mixed tenure and therefore a decent mix in our communities.

While this Government have made it clear that social housing and homelessness itself are not seen as priorities for this Bill, the impact will still be felt by low-wage earners, those on social housing waiting lists and, therefore, at the sharp end of that, homeless people. I was so pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Adebowale, mentioned mental health. Homeless Link will say that, from the surveys that it has done, about 86% of people who are recognised as homeless say that mental health is an issue for them. That will come as no surprise given some of the circumstances they are in.

The measures on rogue landlords are welcome but the critical issue in the private rented sector remains affordability. The end of private tenancy is now the most common cause of statutory homelessness, accounting for 31% of all households accepted as homeless in England and 42% in London.

In Committee, these Benches will want to explore updating the law on fitness for human habitation, to which the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred. While discussed briefly in the other place, the debate centred around tenant rights for compensation rather than on the central issue of empowering tenants as consumers to challenge poor conditions in the courts to get the repair done rather than wait for some kind of compensation. Certainly, we will want to explore that as a possibility.

I have here an example of a lady with a son aged four months who approached Shelter. She was in a top-floor flat with no insulation in the roof. She was without a boiler for six months and had no hot water or heating. We all know that the impact of high levels of poor rented accommodation on the NHS is costed at some £2.5 billion. We definitely want to look at the issue of human habitation.

I will move on very quickly to one more thing, which is abandonment. Given that there are few cases of genuine abandonment, we want to be absolutely clear that landlords will not abuse this power. It is only around 1,570 cases a year. I am sure that the Minister understands that landlords can already apply Section 8 and Section 21. Will this be something that landlords can enforce, particularly on the most vulnerable of tenants?

To return to the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and my noble friend Lord Greaves on the wholesale use of secondary legislation, I sincerely hope that the Bill is given the due diligence it deserves by the secondary legislation committee.

Finally, back to Macmillan: he had the vision to see that dramatically increasing social housing would also drive up private housing. We could do with a bit of vision like that here.