Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Main Page: Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Labour - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon Excerpts
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 56 and 57A. In doing so, I add my support to the other amendments in this group. I associate myself with all that my noble friend Lord Beecham has said.
Many of the amendments in this group share the same definition of “rural area”; that is to say,
“(a) any settlement with a population of fewer than 3,000 people at the most recent national census, or
(b) any settlement with a population of between 3,000 and 10,000 people at the most recent national census, and designated as a rural area by the Secretary of State following representations from the relevant local authority”.
Does the Minister agree that that is the definition the Government will use in respect of this Bill, and in all legislation in which such a definition is required? To have differing definitions is both confusing and open to contest.
Rural communities are not just a smaller version of urban communities. They have different strengths and different challenges. The lack of affordable housing is one of the greatest challenges and the extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants in rural communities will exacerbate the already chronic shortage of affordable properties. Indeed, without affordable homes, villages become unsustainable. The only people able to live there are incomers, who often do long-distance commutes; second-home owners and those who rent out properties for holiday lets, when what is needed are homes for those who have grown up in the area and who wish to stay or return, and for those who work in the local area, including teachers, tractor drivers and community nurses. At the moment, the homes provided by housing associations enable communities to thrive, with a school, a shop and a pub. There is great anxiety that, with the extension of the right to buy in these areas, villages will no longer be sustainable. That is not merely a personal concern, as we have heard from my noble friend, but is shared by a wide-ranging coalition from housing associations such as Hastoe to the CPRE, the CLA, the LGA and many more, all of which have a real understanding of the needs of rural communities. Indeed, a representative of the CLA said at a recent meeting that the right to buy could be a further barrier to what is already a very difficult situation, and could lead to community breakdown.
In 2011, already only 8% of the housing stock in rural areas was owned by housing associations and local authorities. The Minister has told us of the Government’s support for social housing, which I have to say, judging from this Bill, looks dubious. However, I would be grateful if she would say what percentage increase in social housing in rural areas they envisage over the next five years as a consequence of the Bill. Does she agree that an increase is absolutely necessary for the sustainability of our rural areas, where wages are low and house prices, even at a discount, are out of reach for most local people?
There is compelling evidence from previous incarnations of the right-to-buy policy to show that, when stock is lost from the social rented sector, it is not replaced in the same quantity or in the same geographical area. This is particularly true in rural areas, where development is constrained and where it is often significantly more expensive to build due to the cost of land and the lack of main services. It can also take longer to bring forward through planning applications. Between 2012-13 and 2013-14, the ratio of sales to replacement was eight to one. That is nowhere near the one-to-one figure vaunted by the Government. With the current Bill, there is no robust and fully modelled funding mechanism in place to pay for replacement. In addition, there is currently no requirement for replacement stock for homes to be sited locally, which means that housing association properties sold in small villages will undoubtedly be replaced on larger windfall sites elsewhere.
The NHF has reached its understandable—but, I believe, very regrettable—agreement with the Government to make the right to buy voluntary; and, furthermore, that tenants should have a right to a portable discount. We do not yet have any further details, which is frustrating, especially for those working in the sector. However, I know that the noble Baroness is aware of the frustrations and I will not press her further on this at this stage. However, I believe that both concepts pose more problems than solutions to the housing crisis. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the portable discount makes absolutely no sense at all.
In relation to the voluntary agreement, what would happen in an area where at least two housing associations have homes but only one decides that its tenants can exercise their right to buy? Apart from the understandable anger, what would happen? I wonder how long the voluntary concept will remain voluntary. Amendments 57A and 57B are identical and rather similar to Amendments 57C and 57D, with all of which I agree. However, for me, as well as for Sir Andrew Motion and the rural housing group, they are very much second best.
Lord Horam
Indeed, the right to buy is at the behest of the housing association. It can decide whether a house is up for sale or not. If that particular house is not appropriate for sale it can of course offer the tenant another house, and there is the question of a portable right to buy somewhere inside or outside the public sector. Therefore all of that is possible, and I am sure that a sensitive housing association, after having a proper consultation with its tenants and so forth, will do the right thing in the end. It may make mistakes along the line but it has the full power and flexibility to do that, and long may it be so.
I will explode another issue which has come up, which the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, mentioned—that housing associations and others are not replacing houses on a one-for-one basis. Historically, she is correct—that is undoubtedly the case. The numbers have been very low; I think the figure is that one out of every 10 has been replaced by a new home. However, since the new right-to-buy provisions came in, it is more or less one for one. That is the fact of the matter over the last two or three years. As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, pointed out, we hope to do better. We hope that this will galvanise housing associations. The truth of the matter is that in the housing association world, while there are many dynamic and quite large housing associations—
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
I am sure that the situation has got a lot better but the figures I have are from 2013 and 2014, when the figure was eight to one, so there is still a long way to go. My problem with the financing is that it is not absolutely clear yet. We are at sea. We do not know what will happen vis-à-vis the financing, and to feel secure I want to know exactly what the formulae are—where the money is coming from, how it is coming, and so on—and we do not have that information at the moment.
Lord Horam
With respect, financing is a different issue, which we are not discussing on these amendments.
Lord Kerslake (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as president of the Local Government Association and chair of Peabody. It is important to be clear that when housing associations signed up to the voluntary agreement, as Peabody did, they did so because they believed that it was the lesser of two evils. The alternative, as my noble friend Lord Best has very clearly described, was a mandatory scheme that would give much less flexibility and would, in effect, have made certain the prospect of being regulated, rather than a possibility of deregulation and being outside the public spending arrangements. The choice was difficult but was on balance rightly made to go for the voluntary agreement. However, we should not confuse that with an enthusiastic endorsement of government policy. We should be clear about that point.
This undoubtedly has created some tensions with local government. We should not beat about the bush here: local government feels that it is now picking up the bill for that voluntary agreement, and that housing associations sorted themselves out and left local authorities in a difficult position. I acknowledge that feeling, which I have had expressed to me—very directly, I should say—by a number of councillors from across London. There is work to be done by the national federation, and, indeed, by housing associations, to rebuild some of the connections they had with colleagues in local government. I applaud in particular the initiative by the g15 group and David Montague, the chief executive of London and Quadrant, to go out and talk to local authorities about the reasons why the decisions were made on the voluntary deal and where it led. That bridge-building has to happen, and it is an important part of the debate between what should be very strong partners—housing associations and local authorities.
It is in the nature of a voluntary agreement that it is very hard to build in statutory protections without taking yourself straight back to the issue of regulation. That is the problem: in a sense, we are trying to put statutory protections into a voluntary agreement. In the end, this is a voluntary agreement that is going to have to rely on a great deal of trust—first, trust that the Government will honour the spirit of the agreement and not force housing associations through the regulatory process to sell what they do not want to sell. In the case of Peabody, a critical issue for us is that 10,000 or more of our properties were built without any government subsidy touching them at all. We would not want to sell those properties, and we do not intend to do so. We must trust the Government and the regulatory body, the Homes and Communities Agency, to respect the spirit of that choice.
The second element of trust is that housing associations must deliver and honour the replacement process. It is critical that that replacement, so far as is practical, is in the same place and of the same type. It is not going to be acceptable to replace a social rented property with a starter home 20 miles away; that is not the same thing. It is particularly not the same thing in a rural area.
The third thing we are going to have to trust is that housing associations understand the fine grain of their area and work closely with their local authorities to get this right, particularly in rural areas, where the choices are very constrained—I may have left a rural area for the bright lights of the city, but I know exactly what the issues are. So we are going to need to exercise a lot of trust and if it does not work out, there may have to be future such debates. In the mean time, the amendments from my noble friends Lord Best and Lord Cameron are the best we can achieve by way of protections in the current circumstances.
I leave until last the issue I am most concerned about: the nature of the discounts and their financing. However, we will return to that in a later amendment.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, on a point of clarification, the noble Lord said that Peabody, rightly and understandably, will have thousands of homes that it does not wish to sell. What will a housing association like Peabody do in relation to portability?
Lord Kerslake
As has been said by a number of people, there are real issues about what we mean by a portable discount. In my eyes, if we are unable or unwilling to offer a property or take a policy decision not to do so, the alternative discount may be offered on another housing association property, potentially one of Peabody’s newbuild properties—we build some 1,000 properties a year. I have real difficulty with an open-ended portable discount, particularly those into the private sector, which the noble Lord, Lord Young, is very keen on. That is for one very simple reason: it will be extraordinarily expensive—I do not know whether anybody has done the maths on this. There are major issues about the financing of this policy already, which we will come on to. In my view, it should not be an open-ended offer: it should involve a reasonable effort—as per the original wording—to find a suitable alternative if the property you live in is not currently on offer.