Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

That is absolutely spot on. Local authorities and people in local areas know the local housing needs of their communities and, as others have said, one size simply does not fit all. The report is very new, and I am sure that the Minister will say, “Well, of course I have not had a chance to respond to it yet”. Undoubtedly there will not be a chance to respond to it before the Bill is finished—but I very much hope that the Government will do everything that they can to respond to it, because many parts of the report are salient to the debates that we are having.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

I support this group of amendments, particularly Amendment 48A, so well spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Best, and supported by my noble friend Lord Beecham, and the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake and Lord Stunell.

A few months back, the Minister took the House very skilfully through the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill. She was extremely responsive to our concerns about the role of prescription in localism and the degree of powers that should be decentralised. We spoke a common language on this around the House on the need to devolve decision-making to the most local body that was competent to do so. That is what localism means—that is why the anti-Europeans in the Brexit group sign up to quite a lot of that position, I suspect. This amendment emphasises that point. The Minister is saying that the government, Westminster and Whitehall prescription of starter homes should be at the exclusion and displacement of any local understanding, knowledge and experience of the community. That is what the Government are saying.

Take, for example, my county of Norfolk. It is 60 miles across. Norwich has kept its own stock—then there is King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth, as well as dozens and dozens of relatively small villages, going up to small market towns. I am time-expired as chair of a housing association that uniquely built across the whole of Norfolk. If I could have, I needed to build between six and a dozen bungalows in every rural village in Norfolk. I would have had every elderly person queuing around the block to downsize into a bungalow in their village. That would have freed up their family home, their rented housing association home or, possibly in some cases, their rented local authority home, for a young family in Norfolk, in a place that has low wages and is low-skilled, with incomes often well under £20,000 a year, often dependent on benefits to top them up. They would have been able to move into those homes and stay in their locality.

The result would have been twofold. First, those young families would have sustained the schools, which are declining in numbers, and the public transport, because those families cannot afford a car, or certainly not a second car, if he goes off to work in the old banger. It would have sustained GP surgeries, local shops and post offices. We would have kept rural Norfolk going. Secondly, those young families would have been living close to their elderly relatives. It would have allowed mums to help with the childcare and it would have allowed daughters and sons in turn to keep ageing parents out of long-term residential care by being close to them, neighbourly and supportive. That is the sort of community we have been talking about. What is going to happen? The Government are going to make that impossible.

Starter homes at these prices are irrelevant to all except immigrés, possibly coming into my former university or to a few very well-paid jobs at Norwich Union. The rest have low incomes, low skills and depend on social housing. Yet the housing that could have produced the chain that the noble Lord, Lord Best, talked about with two or three moves is not happening and the result is that villages will dwindle. This will mean young people having to move away from their homes and come into Norwich or move on further still to find jobs and homes. It will remove the support that enables elderly retired people to remain in those communities. As GP surgeries, pharmacies and post offices go into decline and close, they, too, will have to move because there will be no services.

That is what the Government are doing in this Bill and it is the extreme opposite of what the Minister skilfully, rightfully and generously argued on behalf of DCLG during the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill just a few months ago. Back then she would have been horrified at the notion that local authorities’ assessment of the needs for their areas for the elderly, for disabled people, for people on low incomes or for people to whom they owe a statutory duty, and their local knowledge of villages and small market towns across a county that is 60 miles long, should be overridden by people in Westminster and Whitehall, many of whom have not even visited the place. She would have been appalled in the name of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill that the next Bill she handled would run completely at odds and rip it up. She has had some brave but fairly futile defence from the noble Lord, Lord Young, but he has been about the only person since 3 pm today to speak in defence of the Government’s policy. I hope she takes this back to her department and says that if we are saying one thing about economic development and local determination, we cannot say exactly the opposite for the major part of economic development that is housing development. I hope that, as a result, she will understand just how angry so many of us feel that our communities are likely to be ripped apart by a housing policy which will make it impossible to build and stabilise them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

What I said earlier, and I am sorry if I did not articulate it terribly well, was that the average wage in this country is £26,000. For a couple on £26,000 each—

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

Each? First, the Minister emphasised “mean” rather than “median”. “Mean” means that three billionaires at the top end pull the figure up, whereas “median” has 50% below that figure. The median is the figure that we use in such debates. The median figure is considerably less than £26,000; it is probably nearer £24,000 for men, and for women it is under £21,000 a year, if they work full-time. The Minister is not offering us a representative figure.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, if I take both noble Lords’ figures, a median wage of £21,000 and £24,000 respectively, and add them together, that is £50,000 on a combined wage. Sorry—the hour is late—it is £45,000. On a combined salary of £45,000 and quoting £145,000 for a starter home, that would not be out of the median couple’s reach.