Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Main Page: Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Labour - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Well, we are all fairly frustrated about this, I think it is fair to say. I have to keep telling noble Lords that I am not ready to give the details. But as your Lordships know, I will do so as soon as I can.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
I am sorry. We have been hammering away about SIs and all the rows we have had on this, but will we have this information before the Bill completes its passage through this House?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
As I have just said, I anticipate that it will be after Royal Assent.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
We have spent a long time on starter homes, where we are not going to get the detail until after Royal Assent because the Government have only just started the consultation process and that will inform the regs, so outside bodies—discussion groups—will inform the regs, not this House. Now we are being told the same thing about all the detail on right to buy and the apportionment of how much money will go into replacing local authority housing and how much will go into housing association discounts.
We cannot make legislation on this basis, where all the detail is in the ether, awaiting consultations that should have started last September but which the Government have got round to only in the past few weeks—too late to inform discussions, but the Government are unwilling to delay parliamentary scrutiny until we have that information. Then, as and when we get the statutory instruments, we will not be able to amend them as we should if we feel we need to. This is a travesty of House of Lords scrutiny.
Lord Shipley (LD)
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham. It is a travesty of the House’s processes. I think I am right in saying that we have just heard for the first time that we will get further information only after Royal Assent. Prior to that, we have had a different form of words from the Minister, to the effect of “best endeavours”, “as soon as possible”, “hopefully by Report, maybe not everything”, “consultations are being undertaken”, and so on. Now we are talking about getting the information only after Royal Assent. The Minister owes a duty to the House to explain in detail—now—why, on the fifth day of Committee, we are told that we cannot have the information that we need to undertake a proper examination of the Bill until after the Bill has proceeded and has secured Royal Assent. It is a travesty, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, said.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Perhaps I might add one further point. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Young, would agree with my description, but certainly when I was taking Bills through, including the Bills I was responsible for within the department, I had to go to something called “LegCo”—the legislative sub-committee of the Cabinet—where 40 Bills were queuing up for, say, 25 slots in the programme. I would not have been allowed to bring a Bill before this House if I did not know the timetable for the regs and what the import of those regs was, so that I could take the Bill reasonably and appropriately through the stages of this House and my colleagues could do the same down the other end.
Who is failing here? Is it the fact that the Government are so anxious, having won an election, to proceed with legislation when it is not ready? In a previous Government, the Minister would not have been allowed to bring this Bill to either House, and now we are in a position where we cannot scrutinise it as a result of bad management and the failure, in my view, of LegCo, Bill teams and all the rest to do proper scrutiny.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I endorse the comments of my noble friend Lady Hollis and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about the inadequate position we find ourselves in. I know that the Minister is frustrated as well but it would be useful if she could tell the House what discussions are going on in the department. This is absolutely ridiculous now. I am no expert in procedure but this is definitely a Bill that should be paused. It is ridiculous. To be told that we will get stuff months and months in the future is just not good enough.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I did say that—the noble Lord is absolutely right—and I will. One of the important things to be aware of at this stage, as I said at the beginning of today’s debates, is that much of what is being debated in your Lordships’ House will inform a lot of the thinking on how the regulations are shaped. In that sense, noble Lords are helping to inform government thinking on this.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, nobody, genuinely, is criticising the Minister. I would not want to be in her position at all and, frankly, I would not have been allowed to be in her position. What we have is the brazenness, if you like, of a manifesto commitment being used to wing a Bill through both Houses without adequate information. I know the Minister is absolutely doing her best, but with all respect she cannot answer the questions being put. We understood when we were doing the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill that that was a framework Bill because it was bottom-up and everything was going to be tailored in response to what local authorities themselves wanted. We accepted that then, but there is no justification at all for the same process to be applied to this Bill. Frankly, it should not be happening, and it did not happen in previous times. The Cabinet should not have permitted the Bill to go forward until it was ready. It is not ready.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, we just heard a speech from my noble friend Lord Lansley, who is not in his place. I think it is generally accepted across the House, given how many times we have heard my noble friend on the Front Bench address the House with extreme courtesy on this point, that it is quite clear that my noble friend wants to give the maximum amount of information to the House. We should not protest too much. During the 13 years I sat in the usual channels in opposition, the noble Baroness may not have been allowed to bring forward bits of legislation where the House would have chuntered, quite rightly, that it wanted to have more information before Report or whatever, but a large number of her colleagues were certainly allowed to. However, two wrongs do not make a right, so let us not target my noble friend on this point.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I have just agreed, in a sense, with the noble Lord that we want to guard against some of the problems that he outlines.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I think we are pleased that the Minister shares our concern, as we would expect her to do, about the widespread abuses, some of which apply to RTB on council housing, and which will certainly, if we do not check them, apply to RTB on housing association sales. Given the local government experience, which is not normally found in her civil servants, supportive though they may be, would she consider setting up a working party, possibly with the LGA or whatever, including some housing practitioners, fraud experts, lawyers and the rest, to see how she can build fraud out of this system before it is too late? I completely trust her, of course, about how she sets this up and who she talks to, but we share a common agenda here, and if any good is to come from this policy—I worry about it—it will be dwarfed, some of us fear, by the abuses and the screaming headlines she is going to find in the press a year or two down the line as some of these abuses come to light. I do not ask her to make a commitment now, but will she take away the proposal so that she can come back to us, perhaps on the next day in Committee, and say that she is going to set up such a working party with appropriate people—the LGA would obviously be the first point of call, and lawyers, as well, some of whom have acted for the wide boys in the past, as I know—to see how she can build out fraud in a more effective way than at the moment we believe may happen?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I will certainly undertake to engage with the different sectors because they are at the heart of where potential abuse lies. I am very happy to meet with noble Lords in that context because the Government certainly want to guard against abuse in this way. I thank the noble Baroness for making that suggestion because it makes everybody’s life easier if there is confidence in the policy. She might not like the policy, as she says, but if there is confidence in the policy working better, then I will do that and I will invite her to it. My noble friend Lord Lansley is not in his place, but he talked about wanting to work with the Government about agreements. We have been engaging with local authorities, including South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridge City Council, and we will as we continue to go forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made a very good point about preventing properties being sold to foreign buyers. It is absolutely right that we should avoid residential properties being bought up and sitting empty as an investment, as they sometimes do in London. Some of them are empty but, whether or not they are, the point is that we want housing for people on low incomes here to be able to avail themselves of.
I mentioned the point about stamp duty the other day and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, immediately picked it apart. In April 2017 we will be introducing capital gains tax for owners based overseas. We have also halved the time that a property can sit empty before capital gains tax is due. I thank noble Lords for their very constructive comments, and ask the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I am still worried about the effect of redistribution, given that the levy will not apply to all local authorities evenly. We established on the last Committee day that we are getting redistribution from poorer council tenants to more prosperous housing association tenants. We are also getting, as we learned today, redistribution from local authorities with retained stock to those local authorities which do not have to pay a levy because they sloughed off their stock to set up housing associations in the past. That also means, in practice, that we are getting redistribution from city authorities to rural councils. Some of those may be in beautiful, high-demand areas. An awful lot of them are not; they are just rural district councils in Norfolk and other parts of the country.
At no point have we had any reference to waiting lists, or the degree of local need, or the anxiety of young people to move, largely to city areas where there are jobs, which is key when, particularly in rural areas, there is no public transport to get you there if you live outside.
So how will the priority order work? Let us say that my city, Norwich, is required to sell one, two or three high-value houses at £300,000—if we have such; I am not sure that we do. Let us say that we come up to about £1 million. Okay. The local housing associations within the city have 10 people wanting, on average, £50,000 discounts. That is £500,000 gone. Then the other local authorities in Norfolk, which are stock-transfer associations, have built-up demand for a further 50 people, for £2.5 million-worth of discounts. So the sale of five or 10 local authority homes in my city will be funding 10 or 12 discounts, in my city, for housing associations and possibly a further 50 outside my city but in the bounds of Norfolk, by virtue of the way this is going to work.
As that means that the money from high-value sales in Norwich has been spent three times over, where exactly is the money going to come from for the local authority to replace its lost stock? Where exactly is the money going to come from for my local authority to tackle the derelict land around British Rail stations, or old gas sites, or old industrial, chemically polluted sites? These may need a lot of investment if, quite rightly, they are to be brought back into use. Will the Minister tell us how this is actually going to work? Because I do not understand it.
I recognise a pattern of redistribution which, as far as I can see, takes no account of housing waiting lists, no account of pent-up housing need and will just circulate money around in different ways. Either the levy will have to be in addition to sales, so that my local authority will be hit twice over, with both the forced sales of high-value properties and a levy in addition, or the local housing associations in my city and beyond, the housing association tenancies in Norfolk as a whole, will just have to queue, or be rationed, or have to wait, in order to buy a housing association home. At the end of the day, none of those houses in Norwich will be replaced.
I cannot even begin to see how these figures are going to add up. It is completely impossible unless the Government come in with funding. The Government want this policy so the Government should fund it.
Lord Lansley
My Lords, in response to the noble Baroness, it seems to me that there is precisely a place where housing need can be taken into account in this process. It is under Clause 72, where Ministers enter an agreement with a local housing authority for a reduction in the payment that would otherwise be payable under the determination. That will specifically include, no doubt, an assessment of housing need and the extent to which that housing need can be met by the provision of replacement housing by the local housing authority under the agreement.
Amendment 66B in particular suffers from objections of both principle and practice—in principle because it seeks to introduce inflexibility when clearly the structure is designed to give local authorities and government the opportunity to arrive at flexible agreements related precisely to issues such as the level of payment that would otherwise be payable and the extent to which that can be reduced, recognising local housing need, and, indeed, the shape of that need in terms of tenure.
A second objection in principle, which I imagine is well understood by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is that the amendment would introduce the idea of local housing authorities being given a statutory right to sufficient borrowing capacity and flexibility to provide replacement housing, which is entirely outwith the process that the Bill otherwise contemplates of establishing a payment to the Secretary of State which can be rebated under the agreement. At no point does this structure contemplate creating a statutory right to a borrowing capacity, which I am sure the Treasury would find difficult to provide.
It seems to me that the proposed new clause in Amendment 66B is wrong because it seeks to create, under the terminology of a determination, something which is not contemplated in a determination at all. A determination is about a payment to the Secretary of State. The issue of replacement housing falls under Clause 72 and is about an agreement between the Government and a local housing authority which is funded by a reduction in the payment.
As it happens, the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and others seek, with Amendment 68B—but not with the same detail as in Amendment 66B—to introduce some of the same purposes into Clause 72. If you wish to do that, that is the logical place to do it. I object to it on grounds of inflexibility but if you wish to include it in the Bill, that is where you would do it. However, I say to my noble friend the Minister that there is an amendment in this group which, on the face of it, has merit—Amendment 68C—since it provides that exactly the same principle which is applied to the relationship between the Greater London Authority and local housing authorities in London should be applied in the same way to combined authorities and local housing authorities in other places across the country. It would certainly be sensible to look at that with a view to determining whether it is a suitable amendment.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. In responding to Amendment 66B, I assure noble Lords that we are committed to using a portion of receipts from the sale of vacant council housing to fund the delivery of more homes. We have chosen a way that will not require all local authorities to deliver that housing, as we know that in some cases they do not want to be responsible for it. Instead, authorities can choose to enter into an agreement with the Secretary of State to retain part of the payment in order to use it to deliver more homes. This is the same process as currently happens with the sale of properties under right to buy.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I want to ask the Minister this as I genuinely do not know what the answer is. If the local authority wishes to retain some share of the proceeds, but the demand for discounts, even within its own city area, surpasses the amount that it wishes to retain to replace its stock, how will the decision be made?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, in that sort of situation, I would imagine that the local authority has a number of options available to it, including the use of capital reserves, or indeed borrowing if it wished to. Alternatively, of course, private sector developers could build housing. A number of options are open to councils in bringing forward more houses within the local authority area, including the retention of a portion of the receipts in order to deliver new homes.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the vacant high-value asset may not necessarily be a big property; it could be a small property, but the point is that it is of high value and vacant. The sale of these high-value vacant properties will add to the number of homes for a variety of reasons for people all over the country.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Does that mean that housing need in a particular local authority will be discarded to fund discounts?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, no, it does not mean that for housing in a particular local authority because housing need is determined in a number of different ways. We are talking simply about the selling of high-value assets to provide new homes, which are in high demand, in a national context.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I thank the noble Lord for that.
Where we have an agreement, we want local authorities to have discretion over how the new housing can meet the needs of their local communities, rather than being constrained in primary legislation to replacing the housing they sell with homes of the same tenure. We come back to the term “flexibility”. We think it is also important that local authorities are innovative and flexible in their approach to delivering more housing, so there are opportunities for them to contribute their land, make use of their HRA headroom or cross-subsidise from the development of market homes, which I mentioned to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I am just going to make a bit of progress if that is okay by the noble Baroness. Perhaps she can come back to me at the end. Is it really urgent on the point that I have just made?
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
It is simply that the people on that waiting list want that which is being sold, which is a socially rented house. They do not want to buy—they cannot afford to—they do not necessarily want to go into a different tenure of house and they do not want to work with a developer; they want what the local authority is being forced to sell with no guarantee of a replacement.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I have just been over that. I want to get to the point about the borrowing headroom.
The noble Baroness also asked how a local authority with limited stock that wants to provide more for local residents does so. I mentioned in debate on the previous group that we have made available a significant amount of additional borrowing headroom, and the allocated extra borrowing will support about 3,000 new affordable homes in 2015-16 and 2016-17. Local authorities’ ability to borrow will continue to be constrained by whether borrowing is prudential, obviously, and within borrowing limits. Consideration of the former will primarily concern the affordability of the borrowing, which should not be affected by this policy.
The Government are committed to making a deduction from payments in respect of the debt supported by those properties that are taken into account in a determination. This should provide some assistance for local authorities to borrow within their existing caps, as well as utilising other options available to them to finance the building of new homes.
Amendment 68B would ensure that any agreement with a local authority outside London would require the delivery of at least one new affordable home for each property taken into account under the authority’s determination. We want the flexibility to enter into agreements that will result in as many new homes nationally as possible, but it would be better to be able to have an agreement that resulted in slightly less than one for one in some cases, rather than have no new homes built at all. Therefore, we would not want to constrain through primary legislation the flexibility to make this choice. The amendment would limit the Secretary of State’s ability to support agreements in cases that would deliver less than one new home for each one sold, removing the chance for some local authorities to have agreements to retain receipts and lead on the delivery of new housing, and devaluing the key flexibility in the legislation that receipts can be used to fund new housing or things that facilitate its provision.
The need for services and infrastructure to support new developments has been raised in your Lordships’ House, the other place and by local authorities themselves. I understand the sentiments with which the noble Lord, Lord Best, tabled Amendment 68C. If we had specified a target for the delivery of additional homes in primary legislation, we would want to consider carefully how combined authorities could help to deliver that target. However, we do not think that a target is the right approach for local authorities outside London. Instead, the provisions enable the Secretary of State to enter into an agreement with local authorities regarding the additional homes. Local authorities will have the flexibility to work collaboratively with each other, with combined authorities—as they already are doing—or with other housing providers to deliver the agreement. The key thing is that delivery should be a local decision and that the Government will be able to hold them accountable for this delivery.
Finally, I address opposition to Clause 72. Building new homes is at the heart of these proposals. We want as much flexibility as possible in what new housing will be provided and where, in order to ensure that as many new homes can be built as possible. We believe that this will be best delivered through agreements rather than putting restrictions and exemptions in the Bill.
Clause 72 enables the Secretary of State to make an agreement with a local authority to reduce the amount that it is required to pay under the determination. The local authority will use this amount to provide more housing. To avoid accusations of good money being thrown after bad, we would consider councils’ past performance and plans for delivery in deciding whether they should be able to retain some receipts. For example, if a local authority wanted to lead on a programme to build new homes using funds from the sale of vacant high-value housing, it could seek an agreement with the Secretary of State to reduce the amount that it had to pay. If that agreement was signed, the local authority would use that retained amount to fund the provision of new housing, in accordance with any terms and conditions set out in the agreement.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 67B, moved so well by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. I want to talk about two aspects of this: proposed new subsection (2)(e), on restoration work, and paragraph (f), on transfers, about which the noble Lord, Lord Best, has just been speaking.
Unlike housing associations, local authorities retain a statutory responsibility for seeking to meet the whole housing need across their authority—whether they do it directly or indirectly, whether they are helping to place homeless people in temporary accommodation in the private rented sector, giving advice, or whatever. That is their responsibility. It belongs to them, and rightly so. Councillors are elected to deliver that legal requirement.
Why am I picking on these two paragraphs? I could have spoken on the others and on supported housing, but that would repeat some of the debates we had earlier on rent reductions for supported housing and how that will affect housing associations. I will just say that if supported housing has to become vacant, we will end up hoping that housing associations can pick up the slack. Many years ago I purpose-built supported housing for people with severe learning disabilities. I think it was probably the first in the country. It was hugely expensive. We had to provide extra sound insulation because of head banging, different types of carpeting, insulation, all the fittings and fixtures and so on, smart appliances to reduce the risk of gas leaks, along with all the other things we were advised to provide by the admirable architects from the then DoE, such as John Goldsmith. Those individual units would now fetch quite a lot of money. It was basically a sheltered housing scheme. If they were sold off, no one else would meet the needs of those severely disabled people and their families, for whom they had been purpose built. I certainly do not think that any housing association could have afforded to take that on.
I want to talk about restoration work in particular. My city, like Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and others, is an historic city. We have a lot of older properties, including some that are medieval, which were due for demolition. The city council moved in. We saved a street of 14th-century weavers’ cottages by one vote. We turned them into homes, which people rented. We maintained the ownership of them to assure proper maintenance. The maintenance on those properties was far too high for any owner-occupier reasonably to afford.
I also remember buying five gothic houses when high Victorian gothic was deeply unfashionable. We could have sold them off. Developers wanted to buy the site, knock them down and build three-storey blocks of flats. Instead, we rehabbed them and worked with a local housing association—indeed, the housing association I went on subsequently to chair. They became a network of houses in which, again, disabled people and their carers could live, courtesy of the housing association. The housing association could not have bought them; we bought them through DOs and CPOs, as an alternative to seeing them sold in the private sector and demolished. That was partly for their streetscape value, at a time when high gothic was not yet popular—but I thought it was “coming up in the lift”—but also to meet a local need that would otherwise not have been met.
During the last 20 to 30 years, my local authority has bought one-off Victorian houses around the city for Carr Gomm, Nacro, St Mungo’s, Edmund’s and so on. They could not afford to buy the property. We rented to them at very modest rents indeed—virtually token rents. At one stage we had some 40 of these properties going directly to housing associations supporting specialist, unpopular groups in the local population, such as anorexic young women—you name it. In addition, we bought houses that would otherwise have been DOed. I rehabbed them to make them available as temporary housing so that people did not have to go into bed and breakfasts.
All that required restoration and sometimes removal from clearance programmes. Sometimes I had to use CPOs. I avoided DOs, but as long as you render a house fit at reasonable expense, you are allowed to acquire on improvement grounds. Under the Bill, unless such properties are exempt, such recycling by the local authority of whatever comes their way would not happen. For example, the county council decided that it was going to widen a road. I remember this well. As a result, it bought a lot of properties along Duke Street. It subsequently decided not to do it. Those properties came to the local authorities and we were able to recycle them, for the most part, for special needs that otherwise would not have been met. Unless we protect the capacity of local authorities to use powers that housing associations have never had—legal powers of acquisition, such as CPOs, road widening and so on—and then recycle them into best use, we will strip out the ability of communities to meet needs that, unfortunately, are not always very popular but which it is absolutely right that we as a community should seek to meet.
My second concern here—I am very grateful that the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake and Lord Best, referred to this—is about transfers and exchanges. The Minister has not had very much to do with the bedroom tax, I think. The bedroom tax affected those who were not pensioners and who had one bedroom spare. Unlike the rather more civilised DCLG definition of underoccupation, which is two spare bedrooms, DWP decided to produce a new definition of underoccupation of its own, which hitherto did not exist in English law, of one spare bedroom. Some cases are now going through the courts as to whether, for example, people with severe disabilities are entitled to a bedroom each, and so on.
DWP sought to tackle something like 500,000 families that had, in its view—though this is being tested by the courts—one spare bedroom. If such a family “wished” to stay, it would expect to see something like £14 a week removed from its housing benefit. What do those tenants do? Of those who stayed, something like 65% are now in arrears and local authorities are having to decide how best to help them—whether they have to seek eviction notices and all the rest. What mattered here was that local authorities did not have the stock or the capital resources to build the single-bedroom units that DWP thought it was cost-effective for such tenants to occupy. Why? Because local authorities and housing associations had, for the most part, been building two-bedroom flats because they are the most flexible form of accommodation whatever your need—whether for young families, older people with disabilities, or the frail elderly.
Because we have been unable to build, tenants have been faced with a choice. They have not been able to move within council house stock to a local authority new build, because local authorities have not had the resources to do it. They have not been able to downsize into a local authority property. So what have they done? Either they have stayed put, as I have said, and the arrears have mounted—this is now a really serious problem across local authority housing revenue accounts—or they seek to exchange. They cannot move into the private rented sector, because not only are the resources scarce but the housing benefit bill goes up and they then get caught by the local housing allowance. So their only option is to transfer.
DWP will tell the Minister—perhaps she knows these figures already—that nearly all the movement that has come from downsizing as the result of the pressure of the deeply unfair bedroom tax has come from transfers. Without that, the downsizing could not happen and the tenant would be locked into paying the bedroom tax almost in perpetuity and arrears and possible evictions would grow and grow. What the Minister will do, unless she is prepared to accept the substance of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is lock those tenants into that situation. They will not be able to exchange, because that property would then immediately be available for forced sale by the local authority, so they will be locked into making good the reduction in their housing benefit, as a result of the bedroom tax, of £14 a week.
What does the Minister suggest that they do? It is not possible to go into the private rented sector and not possible to downsize into an existing housing association or local authority new build, because they do not exist. Good housing authorities rely on trying to encourage transfers and exchanges between their tenants to make best use of their space. If we say that the moment such a transfer or exchange comes into the purview of local authorities, that property is immediately available for forced sale, what the Minister will do is freeze the sensible use of local authority housing stock. I cannot believe that this is what she wants to do. It makes no sense, but as far as I can see, all the flexibility that she is talking about is actually the flexibility of the Secretary of State, not the flexibility of local authorities, which are being stripped of it, left, right and centre.
Will the Minister please understand the decades of social policy behind some of these exclusions that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, seeks to put into the Bill? If she does not, and if she does not give those assurances, the ability of local authorities to work with housing associations to provide the homes they need for their special needs, as well as our ability as local authorities to allow our tenants to escape the problems of the bedroom tax, will come to a stop.
Lord Carrington of Fulham
My Lords, this afternoon we have heard many examples of potential housing crises and disasters caused by the way that tenants will be treated under this Bill. Most of the examples, of course, depend on the properties in consideration being high-value properties, and therefore available for sale. So a lot of the problems would be resolved if the Secretary of State determined what a high-value property was in negotiation with representatives of local authorities.
Clearly, there will need to be further negotiations in some cases to decide how you tackle particularly difficult cases. Putting all that in the Bill would indicate that we could produce a solution to these problems covering the whole of the country rather than one which reflects local circumstances, local authority by local authority. That is what we need to do, perhaps by means of the regulations which—as has been said many times, not least by my noble friend the Minister—we have not yet seen. We do not know when we will see them, but a resolution of this issue will be down to the good will between the Secretary of State and the local authority negotiators.
Some problems have not been addressed, one of which applies particularly in London. The noble Baroness, Lady Grender, touched on it slightly but I thought rather overegged the issue, if she will excuse my saying so. If a local authority sells a high-value property and uses the proceeds to build two other properties, the two other properties will probably not be high-value properties. Just the arithmetic, apart from anything else, makes that unlikely. However, London house prices are going up at a very high rate, and have done so historically. They are not going up at a high rate at the moment. In fact, in some places they are positively coming down. I am told by my friends in the property world that that trend may well continue for some years. If that is the case, the point I am about to make will not arise for some time. But I think we can expect that in due course the replacement properties that the central London local authorities build will rise in value.
It is conceivable that in a very strong domestic property market, a local authority will build a housing unit—if I can use that ghastly expression—which is currently below the high value but, because of its land value, is still quite a high-value property but not high enough to trigger the sale. But within a very short period of time, which could be as short as 12 months, or possibly two years—who knows?—it could become vacant, and at that time its value could rise just above the threshold. So there is a problem here. I think it applies particularly to London. I suspect that it will be less of a problem elsewhere. But it depends totally on the definition of high value in each area, as I said earlier. The key to making this policy work is to get the definition of high value right area by area and district by district.