Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 48F and 50B, to which I put my name. I am aware that in this debate we are going over the same ground we covered in the debate before the dinner hour but my excuse is that I will look at it from a largely rural perspective.

I must first declare an interest, for the purposes of the Committee stage of the Bill, in that I am a farmer and landowner. I am also a farmer who donated land to a housing association for the purposes of building affordable homes on an exception site in our village—half for rent and half for shared ownership. I believe that the latter is by far the best way to get people of limited means on to the housing ladder, especially when they can gradually staircase, within their means, up to an 80% maximum—which after all puts them in much the same position as a starter home owner without the distortion to the marketplace involved in the whole starter home programme.

I cannot endorse enough the Government’s ambition to build more homes and to help our young people into home ownership. I really hope that the starter homes initiative will provide the long-term beneficial solution that the Government’s faith in it deserves. As I said, shared ownership or shared equity is more of a proven route to me and, in my view, more worthy of government support. Thus, I support these two amendments because I worry about the overriding priority the Government are putting on the starter home agenda, as many noble Lords already said. In rural areas, that could mean that the requirement for truly affordable housing—housing for rent, shared ownership and supported housing—will take an inferior place, if any place at all.

The majority of properly affordable homes in rural areas come from commercial sites, usually in or on the edge of market towns, which have a percentage of affordable homes as a result of planning conditions—Section 106 agreements and so on. In my part of the world, this can be as high as between 20% and 35% or even higher, depending on local need and the site involved. You can imagine that a 200-house site, for instance, provides a vital supply of affordable houses. Without wishing to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, I would say that in my experience these planning conditions are usually arrived at as the result of a tripartite agreement between the developer, planners and a rural housing provider or housing association.

Before the Government compelled housing associations to reduce their rent by 12% over four years, the housing associations used to buy these affordable houses at virtually cost price. No one made any profit on these particular plots; the profit for both the landowner and developer came from the commercial housing on the rest of the site. Thus, the houses filled the need as cheaply as possible. Now, with the 12% reduction in rents, the sums do not quite add up for the housing associations, and I know of two examples where they are starting to ask the developer for a discount on these houses, below even the cost price. I have heard of discounts of up to £30,000 per house being asked for, although I have not heard of them being accepted.