Select Committee on Communities and Local Government

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

When a home is bought under the right to buy and the Government then continue with their policy of selling a council home to pay for it, if both those homes could be replaced with properties that meet the needs of those communities, I think everyone would feel a lot more comfortable about the direction of travel. As I understand it, the two-for-one replacement is a London-only commitment at this stage, and it is not precisely clear what the tenure of the two-homes replacement would be. That is one of the unanswered questions. Another is that we do not yet know how the levy raised on councils would be distributed around the country. Presumably the specific requirement for London means that some sort of regional ring-fencing will be in place, but we do not know precisely what that will be until the Government say so.

Yes, there is a concern about homes being bought under the right to buy and then becoming homes in the private rented sector. We can all see why that is. When people have bought their council homes, we see the front doors and front windows appearing in those newly bought homes, and a few years later we go back and probably see the roofs that have not been repaired, indicating that those homes have been passed on to the private rented sector. That is a challenge the Committee identified, and I hope that the Government will work with the National Housing Federation to explore how it might be dealt with.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I, too, thank the Chair of the Select Committee for bringing forward this report. I have always supported the right to buy. This is a devolved matter in Northern Ireland, but I still want to ask a question. In Northern Ireland, we have changed the tenancy arrangements such that a tenant has to stay for an extra five years before they can have a right to purchase. Another change is that tenants have no right to buy a bungalow or adapted disabled accommodation because of constituents’ insatiable demand for such housing. Has the Chair given any consideration to those two conditions in Northern Ireland? Did any discussions take place with the Northern Ireland Assembly or with other devolved regional Administrations to gauge their opinion on what they do? That would perhaps allow us to have a uniform set of rules or criteria across the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

[Mr Betts]

We had witnesses from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so we did look across the board. We did not look specifically at extending the qualifying period for the right to buy, but we did look in some detail at supported housing. We thought that the discount should not be eligible in relation to the right to buy. The problem is that in some cases where a property cannot be sold, a portable discount can be given to another property, but if a person needs supported housing, then saying to them, “You can’t buy that house but you can have a portable discount to another supported housing unit somewhere else” does not really add up. We need clarification on that because we were very concerned about the prospect of losing supported housing in this way.