Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Main Page: Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, before I speak briefly on Amendment 39A, I want to touch on the point that both the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and the noble Lord, Lord Best, raised about the issue of dead weight. This is something that has dogged housing policy for a very long time. There is dead weight in the right to buy in that many local authority tenants might have purchased without the discount. There is dead weight in transferable, portable discounts. In both these cases, Administrations of all colours have taken the view that the overall benefits of the policy of promoting home ownership and diversity of tenure have justified a bit of dead weight. In the earlier debate a number of suggestions were put forward to minimise the risk of dead weight in that, in so far as this product is oversubscribed, there is a way of prioritising. In his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned a number of ways of doing this. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, mentioned one. There was one in an amendment and I mentioned others. If there is an excess of demand, one can tackle the issue of dead weight by prioritising it to those for whom the dead weight issue is not there because they would not be able to afford it without it. Or they are moving out of social housing and therefore freeing up a tenancy. I take the point about dead weight but there may be ways through. It is something that has been there for a long time.
I turn to Amendment 39A, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lansley, who is in Brussels today. During the debate on Chapter 1 on Tuesday, a number of noble Lords suggested that we should have had this debate on definition first before we had the debate on Clause 1. I note with some satisfaction that we have now moved from line 11 on page 1 to line 12—so progress is being made. My noble friend Lord Lansley was seeking to stretch the definition of starter homes to include Rent to Buy. In her winding-up speech, my noble friend the Minister referred to the definition of the starter home. She said that Clause 2 talks about the criterion for a starter home and then went on to define it. When pressed for a slightly tighter definition, she said:
“That is fine. I just thought I would set that out now. I know we will be talking about it later”—[Official Report, 1/3/16; col. 766]—
in response to what my noble friend Lord Lansley said about Clause 2.
At the moment we have a product—Rent to Buy—which is a hybrid, in that it sits between affordable renting and affordable home ownership. It is a product aimed at those who are renting but who cannot afford a deposit. In return for paying a lower rent, they are allowed to purchase their home after a set number of years. Under the current definition of a starter home, the insertion of the word “purchase” means that they would be excluded in that they have not—
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Young, said that in return for paying a slightly lower rent, they would effectively acquire an equity stake. Does he not mean a slightly higher rent as part of the Rent to Buy process?
Lord Young of Cookham
I am reading from the briefing from Rentplus:
“The affordable rent to buy tenure addresses this, enabling tenants to save more through paying lower rents and allowing them to purchase their home after a set number of years”.
In other words, the money is put on one side to enable them to buy the product at a later date. That is from Rentplus, and I am very happy to let the noble Baroness have the briefing. It was debated in another place and, in response to a question, the Minister replied:
“Higher income tenants in a Rent to Buy scheme will not face increased rent under proposals for pay to stay. This is because the rent they pay is an intermediate rent”—
this may answer the noble Baroness’s question—
“which is excluded from social rent policy”.
The purpose of the amendment is to see whether this product—and there may be other products, such as shared ownership—will qualify as starter homes under the definition. Or, if it does not qualify under the current definition, whether the definition could be looked at so that products that promote home ownership will be included in the starter homes definition. We had a bit of this debate on Clause 1. I hope it will not be so narrowly drawn that a number of worthwhile products, such a Rent to Buy, will be able to score as starter homes. Again, just looking at the brief from Rentplus:
“Affordable rent to buy is a new ‘hybrid’ housing tenure, sitting between affordable rent and intermediate housing. The tenure enables working households to save for a deposit whilst renting at an affordable rate (80% of market rent …) allowing tenants to purchase their home after a set number of years”.
I hope that explains to the noble Baroness what the product is. I am surprised that, given her interest in housing, she may not have come across this particular product.
I very much hope that, in her response, my noble friend can give some comfort to those aspiring home owners who cannot access a deposit which is necessary for starter homes but who are seeking to enter home ownership through a different route.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
I do apologise; I meant Amendment 41A.
The point that everyone has made, including the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who I did not mention just now, is that the moment you falsify a market, there will always be someone looking to make a turn. If the Government are experimenting with a new product, I am certain that financiers and traders will be very quick to find new ways of taking advantage.
To my way of thinking, starter homes do little, in the countryside at any rate, to solve the urgent housing problems of those many families in real need. The other big shortfall of starter homes, when compared with, say, shared equity, is their transiency. Unless we continue to build, let us say, 50,000 starter homes every year in their currently proposed incarnation, not only until 2020 as promised by the Government but ad infinitum, then their very small benefit to society will in each case be lost after only five years.
The lack of affordable housing in this, our very crowded island, is not a short-term problem. I cannot see it diminishing, so we need something more permanently fixed in the affordable sector than starter homes as currently planned. By way of a compromise, to assist starter homes to give a little longer-lasting benefit and to avoid, as has already been said, some of the possible abuses, I believe that Amendment 41A is worth serious consideration by the Government.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, might I ask the Minister a question following the powerful speeches from the Cross Benches today? Can she explain why the financial instruments we currently have would not address the problems that she has identified? I think we all agree that we need to increase the supply of housing and that we want more people to have the choice of which tenure they occupy given basic affordability rules. We would also wish to avoid huge discounts being a one-off gain for a select few who then pocket them, with the gain being permanently lost to subsequent generations coming behind them. As the Minister has outlined it, those three objectives are incompatible with each other.
My question is to some extent triggered by the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake: why is the equity loan system not an appropriate way forward to be expanded? Why should government not assist people with an interest-free equity loan for the 20%, the equivalent of the discount? At the time of sale, that 20% would be repaid, and could then be made available to be attached to a new home or any existing home so that there is a continuing pool of money coming back from the 20% equity loan to finance the next generation? It may well be attached to a starter home, or it may be that, in some places, there are no starter homes but, none the less, there are modest Victorian terrace houses which would attract the same potential buyer. Certainly that would be the case in Oxford and Cambridge and so on.
Can the Minister explain what is wrong with the existing instruments? Why would that not help encourage demand in a way that strengthens the supply side, extends purchase to people who are currently struggling, and recycles that money into—as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said—continuous generations of would-be purchasers? What is wrong with that? Why should we not do that? Why is that not the simplest way forward to build on what we have? I have been studying this darned impact analysis: not a single figure about cost, number of people or the ultimate effectiveness of the discounts is anywhere to be found. Can the Minister explain why we need this way of meeting objectives that most of us share?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I apologise: council duties earlier this week led me to miss the extremely interesting discussions about the relationship between starter homes and affordability. I hope that I will be able to make a contribution to that at Report, because clearly there are issues there. I also missed the early stages this morning, but I have listened with tremendous interest all day, as always, to your Lordships on these questions. Clearly, there are issues that need further discussion. What I heard from the earlier extremely extensive intervention from my noble friend on the Front Bench was that she was open to reflect on all the things that noble Lords have been saying.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, with all his authority on the Cross Benches, made the fundamental point, which we have to bear in mind, that this is a manifesto commitment. That was almost the first thing that the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, came in with. So this House has a duty, in my submission, starting from that point, to look at practicalities and ways forward here, some of which have been put before us in these interesting amendments.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I accept the point about the manifesto commitment—we came in in 1997 in the same way. But what we then did was, where possible, to go for a White Paper to flesh out the details of how it would be done and used the responses to that White Paper to shape the regulations behind the drafting of the Bills. Would the noble Lord agree that that is the most appropriate way forward in this case?
Lord True
My Lords, I respect the noble Baroness. We have heard from her many times today and if she would allow me to pursue my remarks I will try to pick up on that point among others. I have been patient. As a general principle—I have said this many times in your Lordships’ House—policy-making should be progressive. We should have Green Papers, White Papers and so on. But that practice was eliminated in the years when Mr Tony Blair was Prime Minister of this country; it disappeared. So I will not take strictures on that point. Perhaps we could form an alliance and move back, but we are dealing with the situation that we have now.
We do have an artificial market at the moment. I would not choose this particular instrument if I was selecting the first XI to bat for England in solving the housing problem. But we have an artificial market at the moment, parts of which are caused by matters we do not address—for example, the growth in population. The biggest distorter is the London market, because there has been an exceptional rise in London’s population. Currently there is no planned instrument to address or control the problem, and that will lead to continuing high pressures on housing.
Another distortion in the market, generally supported across the parties, is the artificial depression of interest rates. If you depress the cost of acquiring or holding a good, the capital value of that good will increase. At the moment we have an artificial situation in which low interest rates relate to capital costs. The problem then for young people who are trying to save for a deposit or acquire a house at a time when capital values are high is that they have had to live during a period in which, for a time, there have been, effectively, negative interest rates for savers. Now there are minimal interest rates for savers. It is extremely difficult in the exceptional and artificial market that we have now for young people to save. I do not want to follow the interesting and reasonable points that have been made about people with high capital assets, but it is not easy to save for a deposit when prices are moving away.
So it is perfectly logical and understandable that the Government wish to look at an instrument of this kind that would help people seeking to be first-time buyers. It may not be perfect. In exceptional local authority areas where capital values are high I would like to see further discussions about exceptions and so on, but it is not unreasonable that an instrument of this kind should be considered. The fact that it may be a skin graft when perhaps the market needs heart surgery is not necessarily material because skin grafts are important and useful and do help certain people.
Your Lordships have reservations of different kinds and I am interested in the arguments that have been put forward. I do not agree with those who say that we do not need this instrument. There is nothing in it which threatens the existence of other instruments that have been commended, some of which also cause distortions in the market. So we should go on in a constructive way, look at this proposal—which was put before the British people and voted for—and, for all its imperfections, see if we can make it better. Maybe some of the suggestions made today will contribute to that, maybe they will not—but that is what your Lordships’ House is here to do.
Lord Beecham
Can I remind the Minister of my request to see a comparison of newly built first-time purchases and any other housing that might be bought by a first-time buyer? I suspect that there is a difference.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I take it that the letters will be circulated to all Members taking part in the debate?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Absolutely, and they will be placed in the Library. I have the implied first-time price of new build—not the demand figures—by region, which might temporarily satisfy noble Lords. In the north-east, it is £138,000; in the north-west, it is £144,000; in Yorkshire and Humberside, it is £144,000; in the east Midlands, it is £152,000; in the West Midlands, it is £148,000; in the east of England, it is £220,000; in London it is £356,000—no surprises there; in the south-east, it is £352,000; in the south-west, it is £179,000; and in the whole of England it is £216,000. I hope that is all right as a starter for ten, but I will endeavour to get those demand figures for next week.
Within London, up to 47% of households that are currently renting privately would be able to secure a mortgage on a new-build starter home—in the lower quartile of the first-time buyer market—compared to 37% who could buy a similar property now, priced at full market value. This demonstrates that starter homes, at a 20% discount, will provide a genuine opportunity for home ownership for many more households and help them to get a lasting foothold on the property ladder. The noble Lord, Lord Best, talked about the equity loan scheme as being a discount; the very nature of its name implies that it is a loan—it has been extended to 40% in London. But the whole of the debate so far has talked about the inaccessibility of the housing market, particularly for first-time buyers, and London is a really hot case in point. Either we want Londoners to access the London market or we do not—I think that all noble Lords do want Londoners, particularly the young ones, to access the London housing market.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, also said that Help to Buy distorts prices and drives down supply. A government research report that came out last week stated that, actually, Help to Buy does not distort prices but drives up supply. Government research found that 43% of additional new homes built were as a result of Help to Buy. It has, understandably, been an extremely popular product.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I thought that the noble Lord had said discounts, so I apologise if I misheard him. I think I need to reiterate that point: the 40% Help to Buy loan equity plus the 20% discount do not add up to a 60% subsidy. Effectively, 40% of that 60% is in fact a loan and has to be paid back.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
In that case, why does the Minister think she needs a 20% discount on top of a 40% equity loan—which is, frankly, an interest-free bridge, if you like—which then gets repaid and recycled on to the next, so that, as the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said, it is not just a one-off windfall for the lucky first-time accessors to that particular property?
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
We all want people who work hard to move up the housing ladder, but the problem here is that this is such a small group of people.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Can the Minister explain something? I think most of us would sympathise with trying to find the best way to help people into owner-occupation, particularly given the pressure of house prices. We could argue whether it should be equity loans, starter home discounts of 20% or anything else, but why this sudden fixation with mobility for people who are no longer first-time buyers but second-time buyers and maybe, subsequently, third-time buyers to be free of any discount so that they can enter the market without having had to save, as my noble friend said, in the way that everybody else has? Why do the Government consider it to be part of their responsibility to help people become second-time buyers?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, housing is an issue for government and there is a huge demand on housing in this country. This scheme is not to the exclusion of other products—I must stress that it is not as though we have switched off the tap to all other products. Sitting on these Benches, one might think that there were no other products on the market, but there are. This is one way of helping that demographic for whom home ownership has been so out of reach.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
For all the reasons I have outlined, because of the gap in the market. However, if people find it more difficult to move on, I would question whether long-term restrictions would benefit future occupiers. Allowing first-time buyers to benefit from a genuine discount will increase the vibrancy of the housing market, while the next generation of first-time buyers will benefit from new starter homes coming through the planning system in years to come.
Those homes will provide first-time buyers with the opportunity to move up as their family grows—as the noble Baroness said—or their circumstances change. We are consulting on the five-year restriction for affirmative regulations shortly, and will consider all responses carefully.
Our proposals would prevent starter homes being sold on the open market at full market value for a period of five years after they were first purchased by a first-time buyer. We believe this is important to ensure that starter homes are sold to those who are genuinely committed to living in an area and not to those who would simply wish to sell to secure financial uplift. We want to be clear that a starter home could be sold during the first five years of occupation—that point relates to the question of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie—but it could be sold on only at 80% of market value to a qualifying first-time buyer. Therefore no money moves anywhere during this period. After that time, the property may be sold at full market value. This proposal will be set out in affirmative regulations following consultation.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I do not disagree. We would not want to introduce a system that was fraught with potential fraud.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
But the easy way around that is that you pay £20,000 or £25,000 for the white goods and the carpets. There is no problem in doing that; it is easy.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I turn to Amendment 39A, which would enable Rent to Buy products to be considered as starter homes. We know that there is an appetite among housing providers and developers to deliver more home ownership in new and innovative ways. We know that we need a wider range of products to assist young first-time buyers to access home ownership when a generation is increasingly being priced out. The Government are supporting people who cannot afford a discounted purchase outright through the separate schemes that I have mentioned, such as Rent to Buy, Help to Buy and shared ownership.
Our commitments through this spending review will provide households that cannot yet afford a home on the market but aspire to home ownership in the medium term the opportunity to save for a deposit. It is a good product and, like other valuable products that support access to home ownership, affordable Rent to Buy can be considered by councils as part of their wider affordable housing requirements for their area. The clause will not prevent those developments from coming forward.
This is a new product. Our manifesto was clear that we would build 200,000 starter homes and this is central to our housing ambitions. The electorate will expect us to deliver on our commitment. The starter homes policy is a product for outright purchase that gives people the benefit of home ownership and, importantly, helps them to achieve a step up the ladder. I have tried to answer all noble Lords’ questions.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I am fully in support of both these amendments. I agree with virtually all the contributions that have been made by noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, very eloquently—certainly more eloquently than I could—set out why the Government should accept these amendments, or at least reflect on them carefully and possibly bring back their own amendments on Report. We on these Benches are very supportive of the point that he made about localism. Obviously the exception sites policy is very important, and to lose this opportunity would be very regrettable for the rural areas. That is why in perpetuity is so important.
We have all heard about keeping rural communities alive and thriving, with people of different ages and occupations, or none, all coming together to build a community. What we do not want to see, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, explained, is a group of 60-plus people living there, with no other services. That is the route to that community dying and not being sustainable at all.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I also support these amendments. As a child and as a teenager, I was brought up in a village in south Devon of what we used to call “150 souls”. For some time in the 1970s and 1980s I was a parliamentary candidate in a constituency with a large number of rural villages. As we went round from village to village, there were half a dozen council houses here and half a dozen there—hopefully and usually, but not always, having Labour stickers in their windows. Every one of them has gone. What is left are housing association villages. Obviously housing associations are on a voluntary basis but, as the noble Baroness will know, we are going to have a somewhat similar debate over the problems of rural exception sites with right to buy. There will then be the question of whether there is a portable discount, as opposed to the sale of those particular houses, because government recognises that stripping out affordable rented housing from villages or ensuring that new housing is not of that sort will kill those villages.
It is worth reminding ourselves of how poor, how low and how modest some incomes are in such areas. In much of the parts of rural Norfolk that are not occupied by retirees from Essex, by second home owners from Islington or by reasonably new purchasers on the outskirts of Norwich, incomes are exceedingly low. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, many of the people connected to the agricultural and food processing industries, some manual public sector and building and construction workers—and they are mostly men here—will be lucky if they are taking home £20,000 a year before tax. What about their wives and partners? I was checking when we were doing amendments on previous Bills and found that women in those situations, because they did not have a car, were dependent on their locality and were lucky to piece together an income of £5,000 a year. From what? They cleaned caravans, boats and houses. They picked mushrooms and, occasionally, in summer, they might pick fruit. They amplified that with bar work in the local pub on a weekend. If they could take home £5,000 or £6,000 in total in the course of the year, they regarded themselves as fortunate.
Such people will never buy. What they would like to do is to enjoy an attractive home in which they can keep their roots; where the children can go to the local schools and all of the community virtues, values and emphases that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron and the noble Lord, Deben, have expressed so well are continued. The Government seem to have a conflict of issues here. I am sure that they respect and support the need for communities—particularly viable communities—in more rural areas. The Government also support the philanthropy of landowners, as we all do. At the same time, the Government are also calling for social mobility—for people who actually want to stay, put down roots and make their community thrive. This is inconsistent with the philosophy of starter homes, where you keep your discounts, sell on and make those houses unaffordable to the local community, but you are none the less allowed to buy your next home up the ladder.
I think the Government have to accept that small rural communities are different from the cities, where you have a choice of housing, a choice of occupation and can, to some extent, construct your income. If the Minister does not understand—which I am sure she does—the physical and social immobility and, to some extent, the mental immobility by virtue of family connection, then those villages will die. Certainly, in Norfolk, they are already dying. If all new developments are increasingly monopolised by starter homes and we find, as a result, landowners drying up their donations, particularly to housing associations, then this Government will have the honour of seeing the death of so many of our villages.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I wonder if I might intervene again. In some ways I find myself at odds with much of this debate. I do not think that people understand what happens with Section 52 agreements. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, understands them, but I think he was in the department when they were brought in. The effect of a Section 52 agreement is that the smaller the locality that applies to a particular planning permission, the lower the demand for the property, which affects the price. Therefore you can have a house in a village which is free of any restriction that is identical to a house which is covered by a Section 52 agreement, where the locals-only agreement is so containing that it might cover only a few hundred yards, depending on the parish, and one house might be half the price of the other.
I thought that the objective of the people behind this amendment was to ensure that local people were provided for long term in property within their community. I would be a little concerned if we concentrated on development in villages which was simply about rental. I have no problem at all with people buying in villages as long as they do not come in as outsiders and inflate the market, driving up the price. However, if you can create an arrangement whereby, because of Section 52-type agreements, the price is contained within very restricted localities, you can then contain the price and stop huge price inflation bringing in the very people to which some Members of the Committee have taken exception during this debate.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Does the Minister have any idea yet whether she is talking about sites accommodating 12 or 20 homes?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I do not know but, as I said either earlier today or on Tuesday—the days are rolling together—I expect that the size of the sites will be roughly what we see now in terms of affordable housing. However, that is my guess rather than something that I have been informed about.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Perhaps I may make another point about covenants, which many philanthropic landlords attach to their sites. We appreciate their benefits. Sometimes sites are donated to the local community and, if the donor wants to put a covenant on the land prohibiting its use for starter homes, that is within their gift. Although, again, we stress the benefits of starter homes in communities that are looking to create homes, we also appreciate the other factors that are in play.
We want to see policies working together. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham highlighted how well-intentioned policies working together can in fact conflict with each other. We know that we need growth in rural areas to allow young people to stay in the communities in which they grew up. However, we also want neighbourhood planning to play a role in identifying the sites on which starter homes should be built so that there is collaboration between the landowners, the developers and the communities that they serve. That is an important point. One of the benefits of neighbourhood planning has been its collaborative nature, and that must be a factor in the doubling of acceptability of housebuilding that we have seen. Local people feel far more in control in terms of what is put in their community than perhaps they did 10 or 20 years ago. That is not a political point; it is something that we have all learned over the years.
However, we do not agree that starter homes on rural exception sites should be in perpetuity rather than having the five-year restriction that we are proposing. We believe that there should be a consistent model for first-time buyers. Why should rural workers not have the same opportunities as workers in towns and cities? They, too, need to move and grow.
We are currently considering all representations and will issue our formal response to the planning consultation in due course. Any changes to national planning policy will be a material consideration which a local planning authority must take into account when making planning decisions and developing planning policy. If changes are made, starter homes will be an additional, not a replacement, type of affordable housing which can be delivered on these sites following consultation with the local community.
Amendment 50C would allow local councils to ensure that the requirement for starter homes did not have to be met on rural exception sites. We will consult separately on the starter homes requirement for suitable, reasonably-sized sites for the regulations. We will also test in the consultation any exemptions from the requirement. Again, it is right that we discuss this with the housing industry and ensure that we achieve the best outcome.
I want to be clear that the consultation will include a minimum site size for the starter homes requirement. Any sites, urban or rural, below the size threshold will not, as I have said, be subject to the starter homes requirement. Starter homes can be delivered on sites below the threshold but this will not be a compulsory requirement; it will be a matter for local determination.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Forgive me for interrupting, but can the Minister tell us when we will know what the minimum size is? Will it be measured in hectares or by planning density? Can the Minister give us a feel for this? Are we talking about an acre?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I would strongly imagine that we are talking about numbers of units.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Does the Minister have any idea what sort of numbers she is talking about?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I do not. What I have said is that I strongly expect—although I do not know—that it would be very much in line with what was expected through the affordable housing duty. However, that is just a guess from me at this point.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I am conscious of the time. The amendment, tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Beecham, seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to produce an infrastructure plan to be implemented as part of the starter homes programme. This is only a probing amendment but it is particularly relevant to the larger brownfield sites where new housing developments are taking place. We cannot just build a group of houses and have no plans to address the services that are required to make the scheme viable. Those services include access to health services, doctors’ surgeries, dentists, schools, shops and transport including bus services—I am not even going to mention rail services. They are all important and need to be taken into account on these brownfield sites.
Amendment 51 in this group seeks to improve the quality of the information that is to be provided under Clause 5. I beg to move.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I support my noble friend in his Amendment 50F. If we do not do what my noble friend says and ensure that infrastructure and community support are built alongside housing, we will not be building communities, we will be building estates—and many of us know what that problem has meant. Back in the 1950s, Plymouth City Council built estates. It did not build the infrastructure to go along with the housing: community centres, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, shops and the like. As a result of things like the Essex Design Guide, steered in part I suspect by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in the 1980s, local authorities were encouraged when building developments—in the case of Norwich it was the Bowthorpe estate with something like 15,000 people on it—to build the infrastructure in with the first homes. This included not only shops, community halls, chapels and churches, and of course bus routes and so on, but also small units for industrial use to try to develop to some extent a self-sustaining community.
Within those developments half of the properties went to social housing and half went for sale. In Norwich we could not get builders to build or building societies to lend, so I went to Companies House and got a company from the books in order to make sure that we had a balanced community. To my delight, once when I was in one of the leading stores in Norwich, I heard someone say to someone else, “I see you’ve bought one of those new houses up at Bowthorpe. What’s it like?”. She said, “Oh, it’s very nice with lots of support and amenities. There’s only one thing wrong with it. You can’t tell the difference between my home and a council house”. That was exactly the compliment I wanted to hear.
What we learned from that development and from the Essex Design Guide, which stressed respect for the local environment, was that if you do not put in the infrastructure along with the housing, what you get are soulless estates that are empty during the day and problematic at night. It is deeply important that any developer or local authority which is seeking to develop extensive sites for starter homes should take this into account. I am sure that the Minister knows very well indeed, given her local authority background, that if you do not, you will be building a problem estate from the day you begin.
Baroness Grender
My Lords, Amendment 53, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Shipley, calls for an annual report by the Secretary of State containing information on the construction and sale of starter homes in the area, and a report on the composition and incomes of people who have purchased starter homes in each area during the relevant period. The amendment has two purposes. The first is to assess progress and the second is to understand who is benefiting from it. I also take this opportunity to say that we support the other amendments in the group. In particular, 50 years on from Shelter being started, the fact that children are still in temporary accommodation reflects a failure for all of us.
Shelter calculates that the starter homes scheme is a significant public subsidy of £8.4 billion, working on the assumption that starter homes sell at 20% less than the average price paid by first-time buyers in England, and that the subsidy per home will be worth about £42,200. Other noble Lords have raised concerns about starter homes being in place of social housing. The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, set out in some detail how inaccessible this product may be, particularly to families on low wages currently in the private rented sector. But it is worth reminding ourselves that Shelter calculates that the average starter home will be unaffordable even to families on average earnings in some 58% of the country.
Given that starter homes will be sold at a discount from the market price and that this discount will be paid for through a reduction in the usual obligations, and with such a large amount of public subsidy going to the buyers of starter homes, it is vital that the Government and regulators such as the National Audit Office have good evidence as to who is benefiting from such subsidy. This will help them and others to assess whether public money is being well spent in the context of the wider housing crisis.
We have already explored possible abuses of the scheme in some detail. It is critical that the Government take steps to know who is living in them—that is the second part of the amendment—what their incomes are and whether we are reaching the all-important gap in the market that the Minister described today. Given that we already know that 40% of right-to-buy sales are now buy-to-lets, we do not want the same thing to happen with starter homes. I welcome the Minister’s reassurance earlier this afternoon that there will be some kind of mechanism to ensure that that does not happen: I am glad that we have learned that lesson.
I shall talk very briefly—I know it is getting late—about the market confidence among developers in this area. I promise I shall be brief. We have already heard Jones Lang LaSalle referenced a few times as part of the development sector. It says that the UK housebuilding sector will need to see a near 50% increase in capacity if it is to meet the ambitions of the Government’s 200,000-plus homes per annum. The jury is very much still out for the Council of Mortgage Lenders: while it is working with the Government to try to make this happen, it worries terribly about this being such a distortion of the market.
There was a very interesting report by Pocket, which is exactly the kind of innovative, private-sector thing that we should be encouraging in London and which produces the kind of homes that starter homes actually look and feel like. It is a highly innovative company, but it says that there is a real danger that this could put off developers such as itself. Its report states:
“For lenders, it is virtually impossible to value a product that only has a five-year shelf life. Lenders will, as a result, limit their exposure to developments with Starter Homes, which, without sufficient credit, will fail to grow in number”.
I am sure we will explore issues of market distortion and how developers are feeling—whether they have full confidence in starter homes—over the next few days, but I felt it important to raise it now because it is one reason we believe in this amendment: there should be some mechanism for annually looking at how this is progressing.