Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a farmer, a landowner and a chartered surveyor.

I congratulate the Government on attempting to grip our housing crisis, both through this Bill and other measures. We are making progress and the Bill is part of that. However, it does not provide all the answers and I hope we can work on how to improve the situation. The key is to provide adequate housing across all sectors of society and all forms of tenure to suit as many people and as many levels of income as possible. It is essential that we do not reduce the amount of housing available to the less well-off, which is what I fear we are doing.

The Government have a moral obligation to step in where circumstances upset the normal supply and demand and, to me, that means rural England, where 80% of the population want to live—at least, in southern England they do—but where society rightly decrees that there should be a limited number of houses built. Supply can never meet demand.

I am struck by how similar the problems are between the countryside and London: the unaffordability of starter homes to the majority of locals; the near impossibility of finding space in the immediate neighbourhood to replace affordable homes that are being forcibly sold off; the desperate need to find housing for key workers and the impossibility of doing so; and even the tendency for vacant houses to be bought up by outsiders at prices that no local could possibly afford—and then sometimes left empty for large parts of the year by their new owners, who are foreigners in London and second home owners in the countryside.

Let us begin with starter homes. These add to our repertoire of ways of making homes more available for ownership by the young, especially when combined with Help to Buy. We all know, however, that these particular young people will have to be earning well above the average wage in at least 40% of local authority areas, according to research by Savills. The real problem with starter homes is their transiency—here today, gone tomorrow. Can we continue to build more and more starter homes ad infinitum to cater for the continuous waves of aspiring young? Can we afford to? In the countryside, you cannot just keep on building. In the Commons the Minister said that,

“we want to see rural exception sites being used for starter homes to enable thriving rural villages to grow”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/11/15; col. 185.]

This must not happen. It is a complete misunderstanding of what exception sites are for: they are put in place for all time. Actually, it will not happen. No farmer is going to donate land to house locals if it can be sold to anyone in five years’ time. No village will agree to an exception site for the same reason, unless the limited planning permission and the discount remain in place for all time. That might help.

I turn to the voluntary right to buy. I hope rural housing associations recognise the urgent need to protect the mixed nature of rural communities. It is dangerous, however, to introduce the concept—or the possibility—of the right to buy in rural communities. Farmers and communities will have to grapple with new safeguards to protect their sites in perpetuity and will naturally be suspicious, making these much-needed exception sites less likely than ever to come forward. I would, therefore, like to see a blanket protection in law from this right to buy for communities of under 3,000 people. Let us face it: the Government are going to have trouble funding these right-to-buy discounts anyway, so why not make it clear to rural tenants from the beginning?

Turning to local authority sales of high-value stock, do the figures really add up? I leave that question to others. More importantly, however, will the replacement houses be built in the same communities? Even if they were built within the same local authority, where I come from that could mean 20 or 30 miles away, roughly the distance between Hackney in London and Sevenoaks in Kent. I worry that rural villages will lose their last remaining public sector affordable houses, never to be replaced, and that the next generation will have nowhere to live.

Moving on swiftly, “pay to stay” is a good idea in principle, but the figures of £30,000 to £40,000 are too harsh, even with a taper. Do not forget, furthermore, that rural families below the poverty line often make ends meet by being self-employed, with variable incomes, and through temporary labour, by taking summer jobs and so on. Some years it works well, but some years the income is paltry. So over what period does, for instance, the £30,000 minimum apply in the countryside? A three-year average would be fairer.

In conclusion, this is a very bold Bill. It is a huge social experiment. I am in favour of a lot of things in the Bill, such as starter homes and even “pay to stay”, provided we can tweak both of them so that they do not have disastrous knock-on consequences. I support home ownership. I can see the argument that continuous letting from generation to generation holds back the social mobility of the aspiring young. I do not agree, however, that we should pay for the dream that the Minister referred to by selling off and reducing the number of affordable homes, which remain vital for those living at or below the average wage. I hope, therefore, that we can work with the Government to avoid the dangers inherent in the Bill, and to raise the percentage of affordable homes from the current 12% of housing stock in the countryside nearer to the urban average of 20%.

Finally, the monitoring of this social experiment must be rural-proofed, for both villages and market towns, so that we can adjust and adapt to the inevitable problems that will arise over time.