Housing and Planning Bill (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Peter Dowd

Thursday 26th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton made a perfectly reasonable point about getting back a tenancy, but at the end of the day he is a perfectly reasonable person. The amendment is not about dealing with perfectly reasonable people; it is partly about dealing with rogue landlords. We welcome the proposals on rogue landlords that the Government and the Minister put into the Bill, but it is a shame that they are counterbalanced by the rogue landlords’ ability to use the clause to kick people out of their own homes. Those people will not be able to resort to legal process, which is a fundamental capacity in this country.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Does the hon. Gentleman concede that, as well as rogue landlords, there are also tenants who do not pay their rent? That is what the clause is trying to resolve.

[Peter Dowd]

Again, that is a perfectly reasonable point, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead said, perfectly reasonable landlords, or rogue landlords, for that matter, can already use legal measures—section 21 evictions, for example, take about three months. These proposals will take eight to 10 weeks, anyway. The difference between eight to 10 weeks and the three months it takes to go through a section 21 eviction is fairly minimal. People in that situation already have that capacity and the protection of the law. There is potentially going to be a post hoc recourse to law. How many of us would like to be in the position whereby if someone does something to us or takes something off us, we have to go to court to get it back? Who would want to go through that process and face those challenges?

Given the retrenchment in the legal aid budget, people will not have access to the courts. The Government have not taken action about that. I am not going to comment on legal aid—that is for another debate—but we are where we are. We should be trying to protect tenants through due process in the way that we protect everybody else. In fact, the fundamental responsibility of this place is to protect people’s rights in law. We want to protect the rights of tenants in law that already exists. Let us not introduce some cack-handed method that allows landlords to throw people out of their homes.

Housing and Planning Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Dowd]

So you are giving us the assurance, yes?

Brandon Lewis: Yes.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Q 285 Going back to starter homes and affordable rents, you talked at the Select Committee about local authorities and developers still being able to negotiate arrangements to suit local needs. Will you expand on that to say how that will happen in practice?

Brandon Lewis: At the moment local authorities negotiate with developers and we see different types of development and different viability issues in different parts of the country around what works and what the mix will be. Yes, we want to see starter homes. We think there is a real need to deliver homes that are affordable for people to buy and we want to put a clear focus on that, but local authorities will still negotiate what is right for them locally, what the viability is locally, and they are ultimately the ones who make the planning decision locally.

I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding by the TCPA representative today about how planning permission works in principle. Actually, it is ultimately driven by a democratic, locally focused scheme. They support the RSS, so I suppose I should not have been overly surprised by their evidence. Ultimately, local authorities have the final decision as to whether a planning permission is approved. Even when a plan is there in principle, the detail is for the local authority, and part of that will be the negotiations around what is viable.

At the same time, as I said earlier, I think we will continue to see developers working with housing associations to deliver mixes of housing, not least because that is how the financial modelling works for the developments that they are putting forward.

Housing and Planning Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Q 117 This Bill, taken in the round, is designed to tackle the fundamental problem in the housing market, which is lack of supply. And the lack of supply is partly about who is going to build the houses of the future. I am thinking particularly of SMEs, Mr Berry. SME house builders used to build about 100,000 homes a year in the UK. I think that at the moment they are building about 18,000 homes every year. Is there enough in the Bill to help SME house builders?

Brian Berry: You are absolutely right. The number of house builders has declined rapidly over the last 25 years. In 1988, two thirds of all new homes were built by SMEs; that fell to 30% last year. There is a desperate need to get more SMEs into the market if we are to deliver those homes. The challenge, of course, is that there are barriers to SMEs coming into the market. Those barriers fall outside the scope of this Bill, but access to finance remains a concern for SMEs—62% of our members say it is a barrier to bringing forward developments—so it would be useful if the Government considered some form of help to build, perhaps underwriting homes. That would be very beneficial.

The other key issue that affects the house building sector is the growing skills crisis and how we are to address that, because if we do not have the skilled labour, we are going to have a serious problem. It is already an issue. We know this from our own surveys: 60% of our members are having problems recruiting bricklayers, and 50% are having problems recruiting carpenters. It is right across the board. There are a number of issues that are outside the scope of the Bill, but that are absolutely fundamental to delivering the number of homes required and that we all need to work with Government on.

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

Q 118 Could I get a clarification from Mr Fletcher? I think you referred to the issue of local authority plans being out of date with regard to industrial use.

Ian Fletcher: That is a recent piece of work by one of the big planning consultants, Turley, which has looked at the evidence base that local authorities are using. More than 50% are pre the introduction of the national planning policy framework. Significant periods of time have passed and significant changes in policy have passed since they put their evidence base together on their requirements for industrial land.