Grant Shapps
Main Page: Grant Shapps (Conservative - Welwyn Hatfield)
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
13. What assessment he has made of the potential effect on regions in England of the new homes bonus.
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
Today, I have announced the final allocations to local authorities under the new homes bonus for 2011-12. All parts of England will receive significant funding from the scheme. Kirklees will receive £1.3 million, Rugby £435,000 and Gloucester £782,000. The funding is completely un-ring-fenced and councils will be able to use it according to the wishes of their local communities.
Jason McCartney
I thank the Minister for that reply. Will he confirm the protection of the green belt and will he consider the suggestion from the Campaign to Protect Rural England perhaps to have an enhanced rate of new homes bonus for brownfield sites to encourage regeneration?
Grant Shapps
I looked carefully at the new homes bonus and at where there should be an uplift and I came to the conclusion that the only uplift we would give would be to those who built additional affordable homes, and that is a block grant of £350 per home. The green belt is entirely protected; that is in the coalition agreement and we stand by that position.
Mark Pawsey
The local authority in my constituency of Rugby has been quick to recognise the benefits that come with the new homes bonus and it has ambitious proposals for new housing development. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that planning authorities across England recognise the lead of authorities such as Rugby and allocate land for the new homes that are so badly needed?
Grant Shapps
In many ways, authorities such as Rugby have led the way by being so keen to produce housing. The difference is that now every single one of our constituents gets to benefit from new homes being built. There is £200 million on the table that is being distributed today. I note that the Opposition seem to be against their own authorities receiving the money.
Richard Graham
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney), may I ask my right hon. Friend whether more could be done, perhaps on the paperwork, in order to attract developers into constituencies such as mine, which are entirely urban and therefore have only brownfield sites to offer?
Grant Shapps
One of the changes that we have made is to enable local authorities to set their own targets for brownfield sites. I have been to my hon. Friend’s constituency and I know that there are many good sites available. Rather than housing being built on sites where the regional spatial strategy seemed to insist that it went, housing can now go where it is required. Much of that will be on the brownfield land that I went to see. That is one of the features of the Government’s policy, and of the new homes bonus in particular.
Heidi Alexander
Last week the Minister for Housing and Local Government wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) and claimed that the new homes bonus will not penalise deprived areas to favour more affluent ones. Can he explain to me why his figures differ so widely from those of the National Housing Federation, which estimates that the four northern regions of England will lose £104 million, whereas the five southern regions will gain £342 million?
Grant Shapps
It may have escaped the attention of Opposition Members that the new homes bonus rewards the authorities that build homes. That is why it is called the new homes bonus. Of the five areas that are building the most homes—the five top councils to receive the new homes bonus—three of them are in the midlands and the north.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
The Government’s stated objective is to ensure that more new homes are built than were being built before the recession. I am sure that it is an objective with which we can all agree. However, if the new homes bonus does not incentivise individual authorities sufficiently so that the sum total of all the individual parts does not meet the Government’s objective, what is plan B?
Grant Shapps
The point about the new homes bonus is that it is just one element in a series of steps that we are taking to ensure that house building goes ahead. The hon. Gentleman is right to mention that it slumped to the lowest level since 1924 under the old top-down targets. The new homes bonus will ensure that £200 million is distributed today, but it does not stop there. We are also proposing build now, pay later. We are slimming down some of the many regulations that prevent house builders from getting homes built faster, and we are encouraging them to renegotiate section 106.
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady says that it is not working, but we have already seen an increase in the number of homes planned and starting to be built.
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)
The Ansty technology park is in Rugby and the Government announced on Friday that they would sell it off. That was an important job-creation opportunity brought into existence by the old regional development agency which was scrapped by the Government. Would it not be preposterous if Rugby gained from the new homes bonus through developing such a site for housing?
Grant Shapps
The new homes bonus is entirely flexible to allow local authorities to decide how the cash that comes in is spent—those hundreds of millions of pounds being distributed today—so that they can take it and use it for their own objectives. There is a conversation to be held locally rather than nationally about how that money is used in Rugby.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
4. What assessment he has made of the likely effect on the community and voluntary sectors of reductions in the level of Government funding for local authorities.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
15. What steps his Department is taking to support home ownership and first-time buyers.
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
At the Budget, we announced the Firstbuy scheme, which will be co-funded by the Government and house builders, bring £500 million of investment into the sector and build about 15,000 homes throughout the UK. In England, those figures are £200 million and 10,000. In addition, the Government’s commitment to reducing debt is perhaps the most important thing that we can do to create stability, and recently I held a first-time buyers summit to pull together the sector and ensure that progress is made.
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely spot on, of course, and the scheme will do both those things. The critical difference between it and the schemes that the previous Government ran is that the person purchasing the house has to provide a deposit. In addition, the amount of money going in from the Government will be reduced to make it much better value for money.
Simon Hughes
Will the Minister ensure that all the initiatives for first-time purchase and for shared ownership are well publicised in every local authority in England, and that the new homes bonus money can be used, where local authorities agree, for the maximum number of property builds and for the maximum number of people acquiring a property—through shared ownership or outright possession—for the first time?
Grant Shapps
I am very grateful for that question, not least because I am able to congratulate Southwark on today pulling in £2.6 million from the new homes bonus. That money certainly can be used in precisely the way it is required locally, and whatever the principal concerns are for local people. It is the way to incentivise more house building, and we will make sure that it works effectively alongside the Firstbuy scheme.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Minister referred to the new scheme as relevant to the replacement of HomeBuy Direct, which as he is aware was the much more generous scheme that he scrapped just 10 months ago. Is this not another example of the Government introducing a new policy to make up for the fact that their previous policy has gone wrong?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman has got his facts wrong. HomeBuy Direct continues until 2012, so there is no question of its having come to an end. It was a funded scheme for a specific period which will come to an end at that point, so by launching another scheme that overlaps rather than replaces it, we have, I assume, achieved precisely what he would want.
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)
I make my usual declaration of an indirect interest in the entry in the register for my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford).
HomeBuy Direct was a good scheme, and considering that the Minister called it an “expensive flop” I am delighted that the Government have seen fit, albeit somewhat late in the day, to enhance it further and, in many ways, to replicate it. Can he confirm that, as the Financial Times reported, this is nothing more than his admitting that he cannot fix the mortgage market? Has he not, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) said, just wasted a vital 10 months, leaving hundreds of thousands of first-time buyers—not tens of thousands, given the sort of scheme we are describing—with no hope under this Government of securing their own homes?[Official Report, 9 June 2011, Vol. 529, c. 5-6MC.]
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for allowing me to clear up one thing. It is worth knowing that when I said that the HomeBuy Direct scheme had been an expensive flop, it had been launched 10 months earlier and had helped just five people to secure a home. It is true that the scheme has developed over a period of time and has helped people in between, but as I said in my previous answer—I appreciate that it was given after she had written her question, but none the less it is useful to connect the two—the previous scheme does not end until 2012. We are in 2011, and we have already announced a new scheme.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
8. If he will bring forward proposals to increase the powers of local authorities to tackle unauthorised development.
Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)
9. What assessment he has made of the potential effect on levels of homelessness of the proposed changes to rules on the changes in the treatment of tenancies in under-occupied social housing.
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
The security and rights of existing social tenants, including those who are under-occupying, will be protected in the reform of social housing. I have announced a £13 million scheme to help local authorities to offer tenants greater flexibility in their choices.
Mr Leech
I thank the Minister for his reply, but does he accept that the allocations policies of some local authorities, including Manchester, result in larger, hard-to-let properties being under-occupied through no fault of the new tenants? Given the one reasonable offer rule, surely some existing tenants will no longer be able to afford to stay in their property, and some potential tenants will not be able to afford to take the one reasonable offer.
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that there are problems with the allocation policy at the moment. One thing that we plan to do through the Localism Bill is to provide much greater flexibility to allocations. For example, if somebody is seeking to move home within the sector, they should not have to join the back of the regular queue. In addition, by the end of this year we will have set up a mobility scheme, which will cover 90% of homes in this country.
Mr Speaker
David Morris is not here. The grouping therefore falls and Mr Ruffley’s question will follow later.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
22. What estimate his Department has made of the likely number of new social housing starts between May 2010 and April 2015.
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
We are investing £4.5 billion in new affordable housing over the next four years, with the hope of producing 150,000 new affordable homes.
Kerry McCarthy
I thank the Minister for his reply, although I note that he referred just to affordable housing, not to affordable social housing. Given the imminent publication of the Government’s child poverty strategy, what conversations has he had with colleagues in other Departments about the impact of the lack of affordable social housing on achieving our child poverty targets?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady is right to draw the subject to the House’s attention. It is sadly true that there were 45,000 fewer affordable social homes in this country following 13 years of her party’s being in power. I have had extensive conversations with colleagues across Government to ensure that, in the next 13 years—or at least in the next four—a significantly greater number of social, affordable and all types of homes will be built across the social and regular housing sectors because this country needs homes, for which the new homes bonus will provide a significant boost.[Official Report, 8 June 2011, Vol. 529, c. 3MC.]
Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)
Does the Minister agree that special measures are likely to be required in areas such as Bradford, which has low market rents, because raising our rents up to the 80% level will yield no additional funds for new social housing starts?
Grant Shapps
Let us be clear that the existing social housing programme continues—£2.2 billion goes into that. An additional amount will go into affordable rent. Affordable rent does not mean 80% of market rent. The key words are “up to” 80% of the local market rent, meaning that in some areas, the figures will be somewhere in between social rent and the market rent, but not necessarily 80%.
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
May I draw attention to my entry in the register?
Will the Minister admit that he will not build any social rented homes at all, and that the ones that will be built are all inherited from the previous Government? His policy of so-called affordable rented homes—at 80% of market rents—will not produce any social rent properties, and even worse, it will require the conversion of former social rent properties to so-called affordable rent properties when they become available for re-let. That means no new affordable social rented homes, and more people waiting for a home that they can afford.
Grant Shapps
It seems obvious to me that if homes are not built today or at least at the time of the election, and we subsequently build them, they will be counted in the homes that we build. The fact that we have decided to continue to put £2.2 billion into the build programme in addition to the affordable rent programme means that we will out-build the previous Labour Government not just over four years, but in comparison to their 13 years, in every single year.
Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)
23. What steps his Department is taking to increase the flexibility of access to shared ownership schemes for first-time buyers.
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
The Government are committed to supporting those who aspire to own their own homes. As announced in the Budget, we are introducing the Firstbuy equity loan scheme, and the Homes and Communities Agency’s affordable housing programme in 2011 to 2015 will include affordable home ownership where appropriate in local circumstances.
Jane Ellison
I very much welcome that additional flexibility. Some of my constituents have said that they find existing schemes to be a bit over-bureaucratic, particularly as regards the relationship between where people live and where they work. I hope the Minister will look to new schemes to reduce the hurdles that face first-time buyers.
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out that the bureaucratic burdens have become a complete nightmare. When the Labour party eventually gets to the point of reflecting on why it was booted out of power, it will realise that one reason was that the level of bureaucracy—the top-down diktats and the impossible paperwork before anyone could do almost anything in this country, particularly build homes—led to fewer homes being built than at any time post-war.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
T6. Can the Minister give an update on the expected timing of a further announcement on the proposed eco-town at Bordon, and does he agree that there should be a local referendum before any large-scale development there takes place?
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
Just to be clear, my hon. Friend raises an important subject, because eco-towns were being pushed on to areas without local communities having any say about them. Indeed, there was even a separate planning policy statement about eco-homes under the previous Government. We are not in the game of pushing communities into building homes in ways that are not compatible or sustainable locally. I am absolutely certain that my hon. Friend’s local authority will want to take notice of all local opinions and balance that against things such as the new homes bonus benefits, which it will get from building new homes.
Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State still believe that abolishing the Audit Commission will provide savings of £50 million a year, or has that figure been revised?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman raises a point about the abolition of the Audit Commission, which I see is still going out to promote its cause in the weekend newspapers. The reality is that we need local audit that is efficient and brings competition into the marketplace. We see no reason whatever to have the country’s fifth biggest auditor owned by this Government.
Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)
T7. I was shocked to hear in the media that disabled people under-occupying homes will have their housing benefit cut. Can the Minister either dispel that rumour, or at least tell the House what estimate he has made of the cost of rehousing those disabled people and then carrying out the necessary adaptations in their new homes?
Grant Shapps
Of the changes that we are making in affordable housing and social housing allocations, the most important thing is protecting the most vulnerable people. The whole House will agree that when resources are tight, paying for spare rooms—rather than paying for people to live in the homes that are available—does not make sense. In those changes, however, we will ensure that disabled people are protected in the best possible way.