Housing and Planning Bill

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

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

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who made some good points about the flaws in this Bill. The two boroughs that I represent parts of have 20,000 people each on the waiting list for a council home. My surgery is full every week of people seeking help with their housing needs. They come with harrowing accounts of homelessness and private sector evictions, overcrowding and damp. My local councils, Lambeth and Southwark, are each playing their part in delivering new homes at social rent. I would love to be able to say to my constituents, “I know things are really bad, but the Government are bringing in a new law that will help to deliver more genuinely affordable homes and although it will take some time, things will get better.” I cannot tell them that, because the consequence of this Bill is that the new definition of an affordable home in London will be a home to buy at £450,000.

There is nothing in this Bill for people who are on a council waiting list, for those who are sleeping on their friend’s sofa or for those who are bringing up their children in a one-bedroom flat when they desperately need three bedrooms. I agree that we should be building new homes to buy, but we cannot be meeting the housing aspirations of one part of our community while deliberately ignoring the needs of another part entirely—that is what this Bill does. Instead of providing for a mixed housing economy—more homes at social rent, intermediate rent and market rent, and more homes for shared ownership and homes to buy—this Bill will result in much-needed council homes being sold off to pay for housing association tenants to exercise the right to buy. Life for those in the most serious housing need and for many others, including junior doctors, teachers and many other vital public sector workers, will just get harder.

I find it astonishing that this Bill defines a household comprising two adults earning £20,000 each a year as “high earners”. Bus drivers, bricklayers, carpenters, nurses and midwives will all be required to pay market rent under the “pay to stay” clause, but that is as much as double what they will be paying as social tenants and it is certainly not affordable in London. The solution to meeting our housing needs is to build more homes across a wide range of different tenures, not to price some of our most committed and hard-working tenants out of their homes by penalising them for getting a pay rise.

On the private rented sector, I welcome the measures to tackle irresponsible landlords, but they will not help my constituents Jason and Helen, who live with their two teenage daughters in a privately rented flat in Dorchester Court in Herne Hill. Jason is employed by his landlord as the gardener of the estate, and Helen is a teacher. They are facing eviction from their home because the landlord has put up the rent, without warning, to a level they cannot afford. Despite the fact that they have no rent arrears and they have been good tenants for 21 years, they have been served with a section 21 notice, under which the landlord does not have to give any reason for requiring them to move out. Until we have more secure forms of tenancy and checks on unreasonable rent increases, many residents will continue to live with the day-to-day insecurity of unpredictable rents and the threat of a no-fault eviction.

Finally, I am very concerned indeed about the planning aspects of this Bill. I am proud to have spent 18 years working as a town planner. What I loved most about the profession was the vital role that planning plays in brokering the space between individual interests and collective community need. The planning system allows communities to be involved in plan-making, in scrutinising and commenting on the detail of individual applications, and in ensuring good design quality and that good open spaces, school places and health centres are provided to support an expanding population. Good planning ensures that we meet our need for new homes and jobs in the short to medium term, while delivering really successful, sustainable places for the long term.

This Bill lacks any vision for planning, regarding it as simply a constraint to development. Through a multitude of different measures, including “in-principle” planning consent, the removal of the need for section 106 contributions from starter home developments and the provision for Secretary of State call-in of planning decisions, this Bill will take power away from our local communities, while also removing vital checks on the quality and sustainability of development. Local authorities will be denied the opportunity to ensure that new development meets local need and to negotiate for community facilities and affordable housing. Most importantly, communities will be denied the opportunity to shape their neighbourhoods. I am a supporter of neighbourhood planning, but what will be the point of a neighbourhood plan if the council has to grant in-principle consent and the Secretary of State will take many decisions personally in any event? I am clear that this centralisation of planning will prove to be profoundly difficult for many communities across the country and will ultimately lead to more not less delay in the planning system, as local residents protest, petition and judicially review.

In meeting our housing needs, we should regard planning as the essential toolkit to deliver high-quality, successful, diverse and attractive communities. The planning system should be where we hold, collectively, our aspirations for our communities in the future, and how we make sure that those aspirations are delivered. This Bill, as drafted, will do the opposite.