Kevin Hollinrake
Main Page: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)Housing and Planning Bill
Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
I shall begin with the aspects of the Bill with which I agree. There are some measures on the private rented sector that I can support, not least because the proposals on fixed penalty notices are an easier way to deal with landlords who are misbehaving in certain circumstances, and the rent repayment orders were recommendations of the Select Committee, as set out in its report during the last Parliament.
I am sorry that the Government have not gone further in dealing with the continuing problem of the very short tenures that most people in the private rented sector have or with the problem of the lack of resources of local authorities. The Government ought to consider allowing local authorities to keep fines that are levied on landlords, so as to help pay the cost of prosecuting those landlords who behave badly and bring the whole sector into disrepute. I hope that the Government will consider placing in the Bill a measure to ensure five-yearly checks on electrical safety in homes. The Government could achieve that very easily and it would help greatly.
On affordable housing, my great worry about the Bill is that if we are to achieve the 200,000 homes a year that the Government aspire to building—or the 250,000-plus homes that we really need—it can be done only through a serious long-term plan to build social housing for rent in this country. There has been a long-term decline in house building because that whole sector has diminished. What concerns me is that measures in the Bill will lead to the building of fewer houses at rents that people can afford, and that by the end of the current Parliament in 2020 there will be fewer homes to rent than there were in 2015.
Let us consider some of those measures. First, let us consider the right to buy. It is possible that some housing associations, if they chose—and it will be a choice—could replace properties on a like-for-like basis in their localities, although that would depend very much on their circumstances, but no information that I have seen, from Ministers or from anyone else, has persuaded me that local authorities have any chance of replacing the properties that they will have to sell off on a like-for-like basis in their localities. I am sure that the Select Committee will explore that issue further. It will be very interesting if Ministers are able to provide the Committee with evidence.
The starter home measures also present problems and challenges, because they do not propose the building of a single new home. Every starter home will be built in place of the affordable home that would otherwise be built under the current section 106 arrangements. In the last 10 years, nearly a quarter of a million homes have been built for housing associations as a result of section 106 agreements, but no more will be built during this Parliament. There will be starter homes costing up to £450,000, but a whole range of homes for affordable rents will not now be built.
Kevin Hollinrake
What does the hon. Gentleman make of the comments of the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, who has said that
“our offer to the government will see an increase in the number of new homes built”
and will
“ease pressure in all parts of the market”?
Mr Betts
David Orr, who gave evidence to the Select Committee the other day, said that he believed that more homes would be built as a result of the right-to-buy proposals, but also said that the federation did not support the proposals to force a sell-off of council homes to pay for them. He made that very clear. The federation also came out very strongly against the changes in rent levels which the Chancellor introduced in his Budget, and which will cause significant reductions in the number of homes that can be built by both local authorities and housing associations. As a result of these measures, Sheffield county council will lose £27 million of revenue from its housing account and South Yorkshire housing association will lose £7 million over the current Parliament.
The other day, in the Chamber, I congratulated the Secretary of State on his decentralisation proposals, but another key problem with the Bill is that it is very centralist. The starter homes programme involves micromanaged section 106 agreements. Local authorities currently do a deal on each individual site, but decisions on what homes should be built on each site will now be imposed from the centre. Moreover, planning permissions for building on brownfield sites will be given automatically, and local authorities will not have the right to negotiate infrastructure deals as part of those permissions. In the case of major infrastructure projects, it will be possible for housing to be approved with no local consent whatsoever. The Royal Town Planning Institute has said that
“the increase in the powers of Whitehall through these measures is extraordinary.”
Control of total rents, control of the rents paid by so-called high-income families, and controls forcing local authorities to sell off properties will mean that the housing revenue account—a stand-alone account that was introduced by the Secretary of State when he was a junior Minister a few years ago—is now very firmly in the Chancellor’s pocket.
Let me make two final points. Can anyone seriously believe that homes costing £450,000 are affordable, or that the income of a family in which two members are working hard and earning the living wage can be described as high, as it is in the Bill? Those two points alone show how out of touch the Government are, and how irrelevant these measures are to the real problems that face most people in this country.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I am delighted to speak in support of the Bill, which makes housing a key priority for this Government. I was interested that the National Infrastructure Commission also laid out that it is a key priority. Housing is infrastructure. Homes are the physical structures we need for the operation of our society and our economy, but we are not building enough—140,000 homes a year, when we need another 70,000 homes a year.
I wish to take issue with the shadow Secretary of State’s numbers. He seemed to think that there had been a decline in the numbers being built. There has actually been a 58% increase in the number of new starts annually since 2008, and starts are the key measure.
I also welcome the Minister’s commitment to deliver 1 million homes by 2020, which will have a huge direct and indirect economic benefit. There is a still greater prize: 25% of all people who live in poverty do so because of housing costs and a third of those in poverty live in the private rented sector. We have an opportunity to lift 3 million people out of poverty and give them the pride and security of owning or renting a home of their own.
However, we need to deal with two questions: who is going to build these homes, and where and what will we build? The larger developers are probably building enough homes to provide a return for their shareholders, so it is left to the small and medium-sized house builder to fill the gap, but also to local authorities and housing associations. Small and medium-sized house builders used to build 100,000 homes a year in this country; now they build 18,000 homes. Some 62% of small and medium-sized house builders say finance is their principal concern in their ambition to build more homes. Also, the banks have virtually closed for lending to small and medium-sized developers. The Government have tried to help, through the Housing Growth Partnership and the Builders Finance Fund, but do we need to go further, perhaps by establishing a help to build fund to help SMEs to get back into the market?
Local authorities and housing associations used to build 100,000 homes a year, but they are currently building only about 25,000. I believe that the extension of the right to buy will deliver more homes, as does the Chartered Institute of Housing, which believes that it will increase the number of homes sold and delivered by 30,000 a year over the next five years. Housing is infrastructure, and we have committed to spending £100 billion on infrastructure by 2020. If we were to allow just a small portion of that—a £2.5 billion annual grant—to be used for house building, we could deliver up to 120,000 new homes.
Where would we build those homes? Ideally, we would build them on brownfield land. There is to be a move towards a register of brownfield land, but I would suggest the establishment of a national land commission and a national register of brownfield land. We cannot build all those homes on brownfield land, however. Such building is complex: it requires remediation, there can be access difficulties and it is expensive.
So we also need to reform the planning process, which is slow and often under-resourced. The move towards compulsory local plans by 2017 and requiring local authorities to make more timely and more appropriate decisions is absolutely right, as is the granting of “permission in principle” for brownfield sites and for sites allocated to the local plan and the neighbourhood plan. We need developments that will meet local and national needs, and designs that we can be proud of which will improve the lives of those who live in them.