Lord Best
Main Page: Lord Best (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, as this is my first intervention in Committee, I draw attention to my various housing and planning interests on the register.
Amendment 33B, to which I am pleased to note that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has added his name, seeks to address, in a modest way, the key issue that arises in this Bill. That issue, for me and I think many others in your Lordships’ House, is that the Bill seeks to do good things in increasing the supply of housing and supporting first-time home buyers, but it neglects, indeed disadvantages, those who simply cannot become owner-occupiers. While there is widespread support for the Bill’s measures to help more young people to buy, there is also widespread alarm that this is not additional to helping the less affluent but is in place of doing so. We are worried that the options for poorer households are being closed off. Councils and housing associations, as we will be exploring in later amendments, are likely to be doing less for those on average and below-average incomes. Where, then, can these families and single people go?
This amendment seeks to put in place one small but significant opportunity for the Government to assist those who, with all the good will in the world, are not going to be buying a property anytime soon, yet are most unlikely to obtain council or housing association accommodation. It would give the Secretary of State the power to underwrite a national scheme that enables organisations like Crisis—the leading charity in this field—to give private landlords a guarantee against damage, rent arrears et cetera. Where there is a bond guarantee, the landlord does not need the usual month’s rent as a deposit. As well as overcoming an insuperable barrier for a tenant with very little money, this approach avoids the administration in collecting, chasing up and returning deposits.
Now that social housing is so hard to come by, this is seldom a possibility for single homeless people since they are unlikely to get classified as in “priority need”. Even where the local authorities have a legal duty to find accommodation for homeless households, the majority of councils now look to the private rented sector to discharge that duty. This sector may be far from ideal for many people in terms of security, affordability and quality, but it is now the only answer in so many cases. The problem is that, since private landlords are not charities and are running their businesses, they do not want to take risks so even this avenue is blocked for many applicants.
The latest survey commissioned by Crisis from Sheffield Hallam University shows that 55% of landlords are unwilling to take in anyone in receipt of housing benefit, not least because the local housing allowance does not cover all their rent, and 82% of landlords were unwilling to rent to homeless people. So numbers are growing of people in bed-and-breakfast hotels or hostels, or indeed living on the streets. This is vastly more expensive than finding a place for them in the private rented sector.
With a rent deposit guarantee in their armoury, local PRS access schemes have something concrete to offer private landlords. There are currently over 280 of these schemes, many supported by Crisis with funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government. I should say in passing that the future of this grant aid is now unclear and I hope DCLG is minded to renew it. An evaluation by Sheffield Hallam University found that in four years these PRS access schemes had secured homes for 8,000 people who had been homeless and these tenancies were shown to be sustained in 90% of cases.
Bond guarantees mean these local groups can overcome the huge and understandable reluctance of landlords to take any risks in whom they house. What is needed is watertight government backing which local PRS access schemes can deploy. Only that part of the guarantee which gets called down actually costs any public money. Experience shows that in only about 15 to 20% of cases is the bond called upon at all, and in many of these instances the amount claimed is relatively modest. Compared with the bricks-and-mortar cost of a new home, this government subvention is miniscule and it achieves immediate revenue savings.
This amendment, therefore, paves the way for a national deposit bond guarantee scheme, along with a set of quality standards for the organisations who could draw upon it. As so many doors close on housing for those in the most acute need, this arrangement would give Government the chance to be helpful in a modest but important way. Since it also saves public money into the bargain, I hope the Minister finds it appealing. After all, we will shortly be discussing the very generous guaranteed support for home buyers that to date requires underwriting to the tune of £9.7 billion—hundreds of times more than this guarantee scheme that would enable much poorer people to get a roof over their heads.
Lord Beecham (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, and the noble Lord, Lord Best, on their practical and sensible amendments, which I hope the Government will accept. In terms of difficulties for people, we are dealing with a sensitive area because their homes are at stake. It is quite reasonable to adopt the proposals that we have just heard outlined in detail, and we support both amendments.
My amendment, Amendment 28, is rather different. It would require the Secretary of State to undertake a review of the tenancy deposit scheme, which was introduced in the Housing Act 2004. One reads from time to time of difficulties experienced by tenants, in particular, although it could also, I suppose, be landlords who have difficulties, in recovering deposits they have paid. Very often, one reads that allegations are made that the tenant has damaged the property and so forth. Given that usually not large sums are at stake, it seems to be the case that some tenants give up the ghost rather than pursue the matter. There is a scheme for dispute resolution, which is operated by the relevant agency without charge. However, it is not binding on both parties to accept the scheme’s involvement, so if a landlord, or it could arguably be a tenant, is at the wrong end of a claim, the other party would have to seek redress through the courts. We have already had a reference to the small claims limit this afternoon, and it is probable that most deposits would be within the range of up to £5,000. No legal aid is available and no costs are recoverable on a successful claim. This is going to make it less likely than ever that tenants will exercise their right to recover a deposit which is being wrongfully withheld.
I have only one relatively direct experience of this matter inasmuch as the daughter of a Newcastle City councillor colleague of mine and her two friends were living in accommodation in London and had paid a deposit. Issues arose about to whom the deposit had been paid and so forth. It dragged on for a considerable time. It was clearly necessary for these three young people to get some legal advice—fortunately for them, they were not seeking it from me—but it got a little too much for at least two of the three tenants, and they decided that they would rather move on and forget about it. However, they lost a modest sum of money, by most people’s standards, but money they could ill afford to do without.
This amendment is calling only for the Government to review the operation of the scheme. It has now been in existence for 11 or 12 years. I do not know whether it has been reviewed before, but given the pressure on the private rented sector, which has grown considerably with the proportion of private rented properties in the market in the order of, I think, 20%, whereas a few years ago it used to be 9% or 10%, it is a growing area and the issue of deposits potentially becomes a matter of growing concern.
I hope the Minister will indicate the Government’s willingness to inquire into this. There are various agencies and interest groups which would no doubt be willing to collaborate. It would be as well to institute such a review at an early stage and then, if necessary, to amend the scheme or amend the 2004 Act, in particular, to see that proper accessible protection can be afforded to those who might be at risk of unscrupulous landlords, in this case, taking advantage of them and relying on them to give up the ghost before seeking redress, which is difficult and potentially expensive to obtain.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 36B, just moved, and refer to Amendments 47A and 53A in my name. I draw attention in the register of interests to my unremunerated position as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, which is a group bringing together those people who wish to support development in the area in which I live—an area which exhibits many of the characteristics that are most at the heart of this debate: a very high level of demand for new homes and a relatively high and accelerating price for new homes in and around Cambridge.
By virtue of the order of consideration, we are having this discussion ahead of what I would have preferred, which is a discussion about the definition of a starter home. We will come to that in a later group and I will talk to that later, if I may. If we had the clarification of the definition of a starter home that I am personally seeking—not least in an amendment I have in a later group—the requirement for amendments to Clauses 3 and 5 would fall away. I very much support the Government’s intention to promote starter homes and give young people the opportunity to buy their own home. I mean it as simply as that: building new homes with the objective of giving young people an opportunity to own their own home. The question is how we go about that and whether we should have not only a general duty but specific requirements for it. I am in favour of that and support the Government.
However, the definition of starter homes is narrow. In the context of this group of amendments, the issue is that in places such as Cambridge and the surrounding area, where I live, it is extremely difficult for many young people to afford a new home. Across the country generally, we have seen the amounts that young people have to acquire for deposits accelerating—perhaps doubling—in the last decade. We know that to buy a house outright with a mortgage, they are very often looking not only for a substantial deposit but for family help. The Council of Mortgage Lenders suggests that more than half of young people buying their own home now need family help to make that happen. Almost by definition, therefore, it is exceedingly difficult for young people seeking to buy their own home rather than rely on other forms of tenure to succeed in doing so if they do not have family income to support them or, certainly in my area, incomes in excess of some £70,000 for a couple trying to buy a home together. That is one of the reasons why the Government have made it very clear, as they did on Report in the other place, that they,
“strongly support the need for a range of products to improve access to homeownership”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/1/16; col. 151.]
I completely support the Government in this. However, the noble Lord, in moving his amendment, was clear that there are other schemes and significant government financial support to promote other means of securing home ownership. We should not dismiss those.
However, the issue in this legislation, especially in Clause 3, is whether a local authority should have a duty to promote the supply of a particular form—a subset as it were—of the homes that young people might aspire to buy, through various routes. We instantly get into difficulty there. The Government are clear, through the structure of Clause 3, that this does not impede the local authority from making its local plan in terms of permission in principle. However, once these local plans are in place and give access to sufficient land for housing need generally in an area, if local authorities, as a consequence of this additional duty, have a preferential or discriminatory duty in favour of planning applications being made available only for certain types of new housing, that will entail an opportunity cost for the provision of other housing. The balance of need in an area may not necessarily correspond with what young people in that area are looking to acquire, especially young people with local connections trying to access what I would regard as starter homes with particular support, if the definition of what a local authority must seek to promote is very narrowly defined and does not enable some of those additional products to be available to them.
That is rather a long-winded way of saying that in Clause 3, the Government are looking for local authorities to have a general duty to promote starter homes. If starter homes are properly defined, I am all for that; if starter homes are narrowly defined, a local authority must have the discretion to pursue other mechanisms for promoting home ownership and to help young people buy their own homes. Amendments 47A and 53A, which I have put down, bear on Clauses 3 and 5 but not on Clause 4, which we are going on to debate. There would be a duty on local authorities to promote starter homes or alternative affordable home ownership products, but that would not prevent the Secretary of State setting a starter home requirement. Local authorities would not be without a degree of specific requirements to meet the Government’s manifesto objective. I support the manifesto objective, and want us to achieve it, but starter homes, which we shall come to debate, are too narrowly defined in the Bill at present in the context of that requirement.
That said, the Government have a manifesto commitment and must, I think, have the right—which Clause 4 would continue to give the Secretary of State —to pursue it by setting specific requirements for local authorities. But the Government should do it in a more permissive context for local authorities, so that they could at the same time recognise that they have to be able to accommodate other schemes, which we all support, through the planning system—for example shared ownership and rent-to-buy schemes. That is why these amendments are there. I hope in a later group to be able to explain a better way of dealing with this, which is for starter homes to be differently defined.
Lord Best
My Lords, Amendments 47B and 53B follow on from the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, whose comments I much appreciated, and support the 12 amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tope. They would change the duty on local planning authorities from that of promoting starter homes exclusively to that of also promoting alternative home ownership schemes, with the added ingredient, in these amendments, that these extra home ownership products should be approved by the Secretary of State. The amendments in my name and the names of the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake, Lord Kennedy, Lord Beecham and Lord Stoneham, provide the opportunity for other—equally if not more desirable—home ownership products to be permitted in place of the one-club approach, the single option of 20% discounted starter homes.
The bright ideas of policy advisers may not always represent the only or the best approach and the starter homes initiative got its star billing without consultation with key practitioners or other politicians. In the event that a more creative, more beneficial route to home ownership already exists—or may be invented in the future—it seems wise for the Secretary of State to allow for alternatives.
My amendments would not help, sadly, the fledgling new sector of build to rent, where institutional investors are putting in long-term money to build decent market rental housing. This amendment is only about alternative home ownership products, and I am concerned that, as the British Property Federation has warned, the gradually evolving institutional rented sector is likely to lose out to its new rival of subsidised starter homes. Build to rent also addresses the demand from younger people who cannot raise sufficient deposits and/or a large enough mortgage. The sector helpfully draws in new resources from pension funds and other institutional investors, and several build-to-rent developers are now offering good-quality and longer-term security than is common in the PRS at large. But this newly emerging sector will not be able to take advantage of the grant of many thousands of pounds going to each first-time buyer of a starter home.
I am sorry these amendments will not be useful to the build-to-rent proponents. However, they seek to recognise the Government’s ambition that home ownership should take precedence over renting. Within the open market, this government priority is understandable. By extending the range of home ownership products to embrace schemes that may well prove more desirable than starter homes, these amendments and those in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, would assist the Government’s overarching aim.