Social Housing

David Drew Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and even more so to follow the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess). We might not agree on everything, but he always speaks with knowledge and passion about something that is close to him. We have a Southend theme in the Chamber, given that two of the four Government Back Benchers are from Southend.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western), who is a doughty champion of social housing, particularly council housing. It is a great honour to jointly chair the campaign with him and we have made some progress. We are pleased that the Minister is still in place, although he might have ambitions to move elsewhere. He does listen and he has acted. He has done some laudable things, in particular some of the changes to the viability assessment that are in train. I hope that he will listen to this debate and respond in due course—as he did to a number of us who spoke in Tuesday’s debate, of which this debate is part 2—on a specific aspect of the housing shortage, namely, the shortage of social housing.

I have limited time and will keep my remarks short, because other Members want to speak. I am indebted to my council in Stroud, in particular to Doina Cornell, the leader, and to Chas Townley, who chairs the housing committee, but also to the wisely named Pippa Stroud, the head of housing strategy, who deals with this problem day in, day out. I will say some things that are quite technical, and I make no apologies for that. I expect the Minister not necessarily to be able to answer them in this debate, but to take them away, to read them and then to talk to me privately or to reply in correspondence.

The biggest problem we face is that we want to build more social housing. We have a good record, for a small council. We have built 230 social units over recent years and have another 50 to 70 potentially in the planning process, some with the land already allocated. I do not want to go over the same ground as others, but as other hon. Members have said, land values are a significant problem and our biggest barrier in rural areas—I will be unapologetic in concentrating on semi-rural areas such as Stroud. The problem now is that the council has tended to max out the sites that it has available, either by reusing existing council housing that was unsuitable and therefore knocked down and replaced, or by using garage sites, which are terribly controversial. No one wants to use them for garages until someone wants to knock them down, when everyone then says that they are their most important asset. Some things become problematic when one tries to grapple with these issues.

No one has mentioned it yet, but I should advertise the Monbiot report, which Labour commissioned. People will take it to be a terribly political report, but I hope the Minister will look into it, because it contains some things that a Conservative Government could consider. We are in an era in which we are looking into how to value land properly and how to tax it and to encourage better use of it. We all have in our constituencies land that is used inappropriately that could be used for social housing.

Besides the lack of land, the biggest challenge or barrier we have is how difficult it is to bring brownfield land into use. All the subsidies have gone now, and the CPO process is so labyrinthine that most councils will avoid it or use it only as a last resort. We could do with powers to look into how to take land that is not being used appropriately into public use, not necessarily for social housing but certainly for affordable housing. Stroud is a classic case: we lose out badly where others outbid the council, and without the CPO powers we are unable to do something about that.

As I said, I wish to make some technical points about why we find it quite difficult to deliver more social housing, which I will include in the framework of affordable housing. We all know the difference between the two, but if we do not have more affordable housing, we will not get more social housing, because that is a key component.

Pippa Stroud has told me of the issue of vacant building credit. When a redevelopment is taking place, a credit is given against the floor area of the vacant building, and that element is then applied against an affordable housing element. The problem is that the way the process operates means that the affordable housing is rarely built. A good site has just come forward, but no affordable housing has been realised. That is frustrating, to put it mildly, because it should have been. If the process does not deliver affordable housing, it does not deliver social housing.

The Minister knows only too well about the viability assessment, which links in with our problem. I was pleased when in the previous debate the Minister talked about the problem we have with the local housing allowance. The Government are reviewing that issue, and I will take that at face value. It is an important issue in Stroud because it is in the same local housing area as Gloucester. Because our rents are much higher, my constituents end up having to pay more top-up. Therefore, they are often driven out of Stroud into Gloucester, or even further field.

On major sites, the current problem is that there is some incoherence in the Government’s national planning policy. This is an important issue in rural areas. Although we would call many of our sites larger sites, to my colleagues in rural areas they would be seen as relatively small sites. Nevertheless, they are important. The danger with such sites is that they can yield high value to the developer, particularly if they can say they will deliver so many affordable or, dare I say it, social units, but it does not quite work out as it should. Where we have designated rural areas and there are cash contributions towards rural housing, but not on that site, we need to make sure that this is bottomed out so that the money is used appropriately. I hope the Minister will look into how we designate a site. Even in Stroud, which is a semi-rural area, there are sites that are deemed not to be rural even though we would say they are very rural. I had an argument many years ago about post offices, because what I thought were some of our most rural post offices were designated as urban, for reasons that I never understood. There are arguments about how designation works.

Penultimately, there is an issue with the rural exception site cross-subsidy, which is a way to cross-fund affordable housing using market housing on the available rural sites. The difficulty, particularly for social housing, is that once landowners are given the notion that they could possibly provide more higher-end housing, it raises their expectations and it is much more difficult to bring them back to the reality of affordable housing, let alone social housing. Will the Minister look into the rural exception site cross-subsidy, because it is important? It is not right at the moment. There is no magic formula, although I wish I could give the Minister one. His Department will need to do some research to see how it can be altered, because there are some—I will not say abuses, but some opportunities that could be realised are not being realised.

I shall finish on the right to buy, which I hope we will suspend in semi-rural areas because we have lost so much of our good housing stock. I do not know whether the Government are rethinking this issue, with housing associations. It is galling that in a matter of time the 200-odd units that we have built could be bought and go into the marketplace. The most frustrating thing of all is when they are then fed back into the private rented sector, and there are sometimes two people next-door to one another and one is paying twice as much rent as the other. If they find out what their neighbour is paying to the council, those are some of the most difficult conversations I have, trying to justify that differential in the rent. We have to look into that, because it cannot be acceptable.

A lot could be done, but we are pleased that the cap has been removed, although it has not gone completely because there are obviously borrowing restrictions. We are keen to deliver social housing. We have a huge backlog of people waiting to be housed in Stroud. We can do our bit, but the Government have to help us. Otherwise, we will find that we are at the margins when we should be at the centre, dealing with our housing problem. As the hon. Member for Southend West said, it is a perennial problem, but it is acute at the moment.