Housing and Planning Bill

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

I see that you are calling me to conclude, Mr Deputy Speaker, so let me finish with one final point—an extraordinary statistic—about South Suffolk. It is predicted that by 2035, there will be 4,000 more people in the starter-home age bracket in my constituency— aged 25 to 39—while there will be 84,000 more people aged 65 to 90. As I say, it is an incredible statistic. I return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan)—that the most important benefit from starter homes is that it will encourage more young people to remain in constituencies such as South Suffolk and will attract people in that age bracket so that we can make our communities more sustainable.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I congratulate their Lordships on their meticulous and effective scrutiny of the Housing and Planning Bill and on their staunch opposition to many of its most damaging provisions. Having heard the Government response, I see that what remains is an ideological commitment to the undermining of social and genuinely affordable housing, which flies in the face of evidence from across the housing sector; and a package of measures that will fail to deliver for my constituents and for people across the country the solutions to the housing crisis that they so desperately need.

There is a universal consensus that starter homes will be out of reach for people on median incomes in most areas of the country, and particularly in London, and that the very strong obligations on councils to deliver starter homes will undermine their ability both to deliver genuinely affordable homes and to meet local housing needs. Councils will see their waiting lists grow, while scarce valuable land will be used up delivering homes that very few can afford. Home ownership will not grow in the way that Members on both sides of the House would like to see it grow, while too many people are spending too high a proportion of their income on rent and letting agents fees in the private sector to be able to save for a deposit.

It is therefore extremely disappointing that the Government are refusing to accept Lords amendment 9, which would allow councils to decide how many starter homes are built, based on their own assessment of local housing need. It is astonishing that in their ideological commitment to starter homes, the Government are prepared to override the detailed local knowledge of councils and their ability to respond best to what their local communities need.

It is also disappointing that the Government are refusing to accept Lords amendment 47, which would allow councils to retain the receipts from the forced sale of higher value council homes to provide new homes of a tenure that is in demand locally. Without this amendment, there is no guarantee that homes built to replace those sold under right to buy or forced sale will be of the same tenure, or indeed in the same area, and this will have a devastating impact on the social mix and economy of London in particular, and in many other areas.

The abolition of secure tenancies is deeply concerning. I welcome the extension of the maximum length of a social tenancy from five years to 10, and the introduction of some protection for families with children, but I continue to question the principle of the abolition of secure tenancies. People on lower incomes aspire just as much to a secure home as those who can afford to raise a mortgage. I remain concerned that fixed-term tenancies of 10 years simply postpone the anxiety that will surround the ending of the tenancy.

A tenancy review for families with grown-up children presents the very real prospect that adult children may no longer be accepted as a legitimate part of the household for any new tenancy for the purposes of a housing needs assessment. Where would our young adults go then? It would be far better if the Government accepted the benefits of secure tenancies for families and communities, and removed this damaging measure from the Bill.

I remain concerned about the pay-to-stay provisions, which are a further attack on hard-working tenants—a tax on aspiration and achievement. I recently heard from a constituent who had lived with her partner and children in a council home for 14 years. She wrote:

“You see, our joint income for 2015-2016 is estimated to be £38,000. That’s with me working part time and my partner working full time. I intend to work full time from September 2016. If I do then our income will be over £40,000—the government have decided I will have to pay market value rent. I’m sickened at the idea of having to move as there is no way we can pay that level of rent. We don’t have any savings so we are in no position to even contemplate getting a mortgage.”

How can the Government justify legislation that will have such perverse and damaging consequences?

Let me turn now to the elephant in the room. The single biggest cause of homelessness is now the ending of a private tenancy, yet this Bill does absolutely nothing to improve either security of tenure or affordability for the millions of people living in the private rented sector. I have been contacted by 50 constituents since the beginning of January—more than two a week—who are facing homelessness, the vast majority of them in the private rented sector. Residents whose private tenancy comes to an end are increasingly ending up in temporary accommodation at great financial cost to the public sector and great personal cost to the residents and their children, who often end up a long way from their children’s schools, in overcrowded accommodation, too often sharing kitchens and bathrooms with strangers.

In the London Borough of Lambeth alone, there are 5,000 children living in temporary accommodation—more than in the entire city of Birmingham in a single London borough. The Housing and Planning Bill entirely ignores the plight of these families. It will make it harder for them to access a genuinely affordable home to rent; impossible for them to access a secure tenancy; and offers no hope that their family’s next private tenancy will have any more security than the last. How can the Government introduce major housing legislation that ignores the single biggest cause of homelessness?

The housing crisis has become all-pervading. It is already affecting London’s public services, with schools and the NHS finding it difficult to recruit suitably qualified and experienced staff, and it is affecting London’s economy, as the workforce our city needs cannot afford to live here. This Bill will make the situation worse.

We are debating this Bill during a week when Londoners will vote for our next Mayor. We need a Mayor who will stand up for Londoners who are unable to afford a secure home to rent or to buy. We need a Mayor who will make good use of publicly owned land to deliver genuinely affordable homes. We need a Mayor who will stand up for Londoners against a Government who are determined to divide our city, undermine our diversity and make it a place where only the wealthy can afford to live. I look forward to seeing my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) doing just that in two days’ time.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Opposition Members have made the point that starter homes will be built, rather than affordable homes to rent. That is, of course, true to some extent, because people want to buy homes and people on lower incomes have been excluded from the housing market for too long. We have been building an average of 50,000 affordable homes to rent for the last 20 years. Why have we not been building more affordable houses for sale, if that is what people want? Given that we have 20 years of catching up to do, it is absolutely right for the Government to set the ambitious target of building 200,000 starter homes over the next four years.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) gave the example of someone who will have earned £40,000 by the end of this year and is living in an affordable rented property. The average price of a London home for a first-time buyer is £250,000. I believe that, under this policy, a starter home in London could be built for about £200,000. The information provided by Shelter about the unaffordability of starter homes in most local authority areas is flawed, or deliberately misleading, because it is based on the median house price. First-time buyers buy at around 25% below the median house price, and in my area, the average house price is about £200,000.

--- Later in debate ---

I understand what the Minister has said about this, and I am grateful to him for the time he has taken to speak to me personally, as well as to other colleagues, about this. I welcome the fact that he is sympathetic to the idea that those groups should have a right to appeal, and I hope that he will work with all of us to see what can be done to give them the confidence that they want. Those parish councillors should be allowed to defend the neighbourhood plans that they have drawn up. Many of them are volunteers, and they have spent a considerable amount of time developing first-rate plans. They want to have confidence that the system will support what they have drawn up rather than working against them. I hope that the Minister will look into that. I hope that he will also ensure that emerging neighbourhood plans will have equal weight with those that have already been adopted.

[Helen Hayes]

I welcome the Lords amendments that introduce exemptions from permission in principle and clarify the qualifying documents under which permission in principle can be granted. I also welcome the amendments that will allow permission in principle to be overturned on the basis of new information, such as archaeological remains being discovered on a site. I argued for this in the Public Bill Committee.

I am concerned, however, that too many aspects of technical details consent are being left to be set out in regulations. Technical details could include the height or density of a development, open space provisions, design, layout and many other considerations. I maintain, as I did in Committee, that while those details can be informed by technical studies, their substance can often make a fundamental difference to how communities feel about a planning proposal. They are therefore often far closer to matters of principle than the description “technical details” implies. I had hoped that, by this stage, we might have seen some of that detail being set out in the Bill.

I am also concerned by the ability that will be introduced in this legislation to appoint third parties to assess planning applications. This will remove democratic accountability from the assessment of the applications. I welcome the fact that the Government have clarified that councils will be the final decision makers, but important judgments are made during the assessment process, which involves a substantial amount of work. Councils would effectively have to repeat that process to enable proper scrutiny or to unravel that work. A far better solution would be to allow councils to recover the full cost of the development management process from planning application fees, so that they could be properly resourced to carry out this democratic role with full democratic scrutiny and accountability.

Fundamentally, the planning aspects of the Housing and Planning Bill miss the opportunity to set out a positive vision for planning, to engage and involve communities in solving the housing crisis, to strengthen our plan-led system, which is highly valued and highly regarded across the world, and to give communities and homebuilders the certainty they need as we face an unprecedented need to build new homes in this country.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

I know that the Minister is aware of my constituents’ feelings in the light of an avalanche of applications by developers against adopted neighbourhood plans and an avalanche of objections by developers to emerging neighbourhood plans. I have seen this in Tarporley, in Moulton and in Davenham. My constituents describe themselves as being under siege. In the light of the debate that we have had today, particularly on clause 97, I urge the Minister to take this opportunity to review the planning legislation so that we can have some certainty about the interplay between neighbourhood plans and local plans and provide stronger protections for residents such as mine in Eddisbury. My constituents have put time and effort into creating robust neighbourhood plans that have been passed by inspectors, but they now feel as though they are under siege. We need a full review of the planning process if we are to strengthen local democracy and achieve the localism that everyone in Eddisbury so desperately wants.