Baroness Redfern
Main Page: Baroness Redfern (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Kerslake
My Lords, I add my support to this group of amendments, and I declare an interest as chair of Peabody and president of the Local Government Association.
It is worth recalling that the product—starter homes—had its origins in the coalition Government. It came forward as an interesting idea that would be genuinely additional to other new sources of supply. It would be applicable to what were described as brownfield exception sites—those that had not previously been identified for housing and could therefore be built on with this product. The uplift in values would cover the 20%. It was, therefore, an interesting, innovative idea with some rather ambitious numbers attached to it. In six months—between then and the election—it moved from being an interesting, innovative idea to being the main source of new supply. There is usually an in-between stage—it is called “trying something out first”. We have not yet had a property sold as a starter home; we do not yet know in detail what constitutes a starter home. Yet it becomes the centrepiece of this Bill. It makes absolute sense to think about other forms of home ownership and—we will come to this later—to let local authorities have the flexibility to think through the different sorts of tenure that they require.
On Second Reading I was clear that there is only one sustainable route to better access to home ownership: it is to build more houses. There is, ultimately, no other way to sort this problem. In the end, these access products reward a selective group of people who are able to benefit from them. In the case of Help to Buy it is an equity contribution, so people are expected to return it, as with shared ownership. In the case of starter homes—as we will discuss later—it is, in effect, a one-off gift to a select number of people. In this group of amendments, therefore, I encourage the Government to think carefully about putting every bit of their focus on starter homes at the start of this Bill, and to accept the very sensible amendments that seek to broaden this section to include other forms of home ownership. We can debate later, under other groupings, whether this product is properly formed in the first place.
Baroness Redfern (Con)
My Lords, in speaking to this group of amendments, particularly in reference to home ownership and starter homes, I think it goes without saying that the need to provide enough homes to meet demand is one of today’s defining challenges. I therefore welcome initiatives such as the provision of starter homes, the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants and the continuation of reforms to the planning system undertaken in the previous Parliament. Such measures will enable low-income families to own their own homes and provide stability for their families.
As noble Lords know, the rate of home ownership has been falling since its peak in 2003, despite the aspiration to home ownership remaining very strong. Since spring 2010 nearly 270,000 households have been helped to purchase a home through government-backed schemes, including Help to Buy and the right to buy. However, younger households in particular are now less likely to own their homes than a decade ago. We must therefore ensure that more young people are able to aspire to home ownership. I support the Government’s manifesto commitment to build 200,000 starter homes over the course of the Parliament.
Starter homes are essential to increase housing supply and will encourage younger couples who wish to start a family to get on the property ladder and provide security for their future families. To this end, the Bill includes a general duty on English planning authorities and embeds starter homes in the planning system. This will make it easier and faster for planning permission for houses to be granted and make interventions in the local planning process smarter.
However, on this point I hope that the Minister will say how the Government will assist councils in meeting these important duties. The introduction of a much-needed database, and the Government’s amendment to have it maintained by the Secretary of State rather than by local authorities—for reasons of clarity and simplicity—will allow greater co-operation between local authorities in tracking banning orders and make monitoring of ongoing trends more centrally focused. This national co-operation will prevent serious or repeat offenders from causing harm and misery to renters and placing them at serious risk from letting properties. There should be no room for such operators in the sector.
This Bill provides extensive scope for the role of local government and new duties that they must act on.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friend Lord Tope on these amendments, particularly the provisions that the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Kerslake, spoke to. I also have some sympathy for what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said about the need to widen the definition of these starter homes so that we look at alternative models of affordable homes that can be approved by the Secretary of State. We will debate later in Committee whether the starter homes initiative will lead to balanced and mixed communities, and the implications of that, about which I have severe doubts. We are also going to discuss the wider issue of the impact on social housing provision, and I declare an interest as chair of Housing & Care 21.
This model of starter homes will not apply to huge areas of the country; people there will not be able to benefit, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, explained. Although the main aim should be to build more homes, if we genuinely want to increase ownership we must look at more than one size fits all. The Government may find, if they concentrate overly on starter homes—I understand that they are doing that because it is a convenient target to get people moving—that the type of houses we are building in the long term become unsuitable.
There are two aspects of this that are quite an issue. Frankly, too many starter homes in one local market could cause market distortions, both initially, when they are trying to sell these homes, and at the end of the five years, when the purchaser can effectively take advantage of the discount. This concentration of building of starter homes will both put off lenders from lending on those houses in those areas and may well deter developers from developing sufficiently fast, as they would where they were developing more mixed tenures and different forms of owner-occupation. The communities themselves will be very unbalanced.
The amendment is an attempt to achieve greater diversity of products, which may make homes more affordable and achievable, and, by varying the nature of the home ownership, deter what could otherwise lead to quite severe distortions of the market. If we distort the market, we will put off developers and lenders, and end up not building as many homes as we need.