Lord Cameron of Dillington
Main Page: Lord Cameron of Dillington (Crossbench - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts
Lord Shipley
My Lords, that is a very helpful intervention and it could well be one way in which we could proceed. However, we are in Committee on the Bill and I would have thought that the Government would be able to explain this to your Lordships’ House, as opposed to individual Members of the House having to come up with proposals for the Government to consider when the Bill has now been in front of Parliament for many months.
There are two approaches in terms of Amendment 46: our approach is the “in perpetuity” one and another one involves tapers. Some further thought has to be given to that. The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, rightly identified that the Government have not presented any options for consideration. There has been no cost-benefit appraisal and I am very surprised about that. If there has not been, there should have been.
The issue of avoiding dead weight also seems to be very important. I concede entirely that occasionally dead weight will apply, because the overall gain is greater than the loss on dead weight. However, if there is too much dead weight, it means that some are being subsidised at the cost of others.
I agree entirely with those noble Lords who have said that the priority should be affordable rented housing, as so very many people cannot participate in buying starter homes because they either do not have the deposit or do not have the ability to repay the mortgage. I hope the Minister will respond to what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, called a gift, and the noble Lord, Lord Horam, referred to using the words “government largesse”. We have to be very clear who is getting the financial advantage here. At the moment, I believe that we are driving a deeper wedge in terms of social exclusion.
Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)
My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 41. I was going to list the range of various abuses that I felt the starter homes regime would be open to, but that has been done with much greater expertise and experience by my colleagues, my noble friends Lord Best and Lord Kerslake, and, indeed, with greater eloquence.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Williams of Trafford)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for giving way. I just do not want to happen today what happened on Tuesday. Amendment 41 is in the following group, but I am very happen to listen to him and to respond.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
I do apologise; I meant Amendment 41A.
The point that everyone has made, including the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who I did not mention just now, is that the moment you falsify a market, there will always be someone looking to make a turn. If the Government are experimenting with a new product, I am certain that financiers and traders will be very quick to find new ways of taking advantage.
To my way of thinking, starter homes do little, in the countryside at any rate, to solve the urgent housing problems of those many families in real need. The other big shortfall of starter homes, when compared with, say, shared equity, is their transiency. Unless we continue to build, let us say, 50,000 starter homes every year in their currently proposed incarnation, not only until 2020 as promised by the Government but ad infinitum, then their very small benefit to society will in each case be lost after only five years.
The lack of affordable housing in this, our very crowded island, is not a short-term problem. I cannot see it diminishing, so we need something more permanently fixed in the affordable sector than starter homes as currently planned. By way of a compromise, to assist starter homes to give a little longer-lasting benefit and to avoid, as has already been said, some of the possible abuses, I believe that Amendment 41A is worth serious consideration by the Government.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, might I ask the Minister a question following the powerful speeches from the Cross Benches today? Can she explain why the financial instruments we currently have would not address the problems that she has identified? I think we all agree that we need to increase the supply of housing and that we want more people to have the choice of which tenure they occupy given basic affordability rules. We would also wish to avoid huge discounts being a one-off gain for a select few who then pocket them, with the gain being permanently lost to subsequent generations coming behind them. As the Minister has outlined it, those three objectives are incompatible with each other.
My question is to some extent triggered by the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake: why is the equity loan system not an appropriate way forward to be expanded? Why should government not assist people with an interest-free equity loan for the 20%, the equivalent of the discount? At the time of sale, that 20% would be repaid, and could then be made available to be attached to a new home or any existing home so that there is a continuing pool of money coming back from the 20% equity loan to finance the next generation? It may well be attached to a starter home, or it may be that, in some places, there are no starter homes but, none the less, there are modest Victorian terrace houses which would attract the same potential buyer. Certainly that would be the case in Oxford and Cambridge and so on.
Can the Minister explain what is wrong with the existing instruments? Why would that not help encourage demand in a way that strengthens the supply side, extends purchase to people who are currently struggling, and recycles that money into—as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said—continuous generations of would-be purchasers? What is wrong with that? Why should we not do that? Why is that not the simplest way forward to build on what we have? I have been studying this darned impact analysis: not a single figure about cost, number of people or the ultimate effectiveness of the discounts is anywhere to be found. Can the Minister explain why we need this way of meeting objectives that most of us share?
“( ) Through regulations the Secretary of State shall require that local planning authorities only allow starter homes on rural exception sites where these are subject to locally agreed “in perpetuity” arrangements and will contribute to delivering a significant increase in the supply of affordable homes to meet local needs, including those for rent.( ) Rural exception sites—( ) are small sites in or adjoining rural settlements of less than 3,000 people;( ) are used for affordable housing in perpetuity where sites would not normally be used for housing;( ) are sites which seek to accommodate households who are either current residents or have an existing family or employment connection with the community where the development is occurring.( ) Affordable rent is defined as a rent at or below 80% of open market rents in the locality of the development.”
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, the two amendments in the group concern exception sites and, for the purposes of clarity, they contain definitions of such sites. If you agree with the definitions of affordable housing in perpetuity to accommodate local households and so on, then the amendment needs little explanation. However, this is the House of Lords and so I shall proceed to give one anyway.
The key point is that these,
“sites would not normally be used for housing”.
They are outside the village envelope and are usually ordinary farmland or open countryside. In terms of planning, our countryside has two major conflicting pressures. First, there is the desire to keep England both green and pleasant—for the fifth most densely-populated country in the world, we do very well at that. Secondly, we need to resolve the biggest worry of many rural families, namely where on earth their children are going to live.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I think I addressed quite a lot of my remarks to the local test.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their participation in the debate and for their nearly universal support—especially the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Deben, who are both old hands in this area—even if they only assisted in the birth of the site, not being the rightful daddy, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said.
I was reminded when the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was speaking of a phrase that I believe he did conceive when he was Secretary of State at the DoE, “executive ghettos”, which is what we are all trying to avoid. I have heard another phrase recently in planning philosophy, which is “place making”. What we are trying to do here is place saving, because I hope that, mostly, we already have reasonably good places in the countryside.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, talked about Section 52 agreements. I am not too concerned how we organise the exception sites or homes for locals; the real point about the exception sites is that they are outside the planning system: the land would not normally get planning permission of any sort. It is the cheapness of the land and the way that the house can be built by the housing association which enables houses to be very good value for locals, not only the control of the marketplace, as the noble Lord rightly says, which the Section 52 agreement dictates. They start off being of very low value. I would be very keen on trying to maintain the houses being owned by a housing association; in that way, no one owns them outright so that they can sell them, whether at a low value or not.
I repeat that 45% of all rural affordable houses built in the past year are on exception sites. Without the amendments, the supply of exception sites will dry up; neither landowners nor parishes will accept them. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, said that, without them, we could easily kill the village. It depends what your definition of village is, but it would definitely kill the community, which is perhaps the major point, as they very possibly revert to the said executive ghettos.
I am glad that the Minister supported the sentiment behind the amendments, even if she did not totally accept them, but I was very dismayed when she said that starter homes could be allowed on exception sites, and would also still fall out after five years and be sold as homes. That very statement will kill exception sites stone dead. I cannot see parishes or landowners agreeing to continue on that basis. It is all very well saying that the landowner can place a condition of sale, but conditions of sale are very difficult and expensive to enforce, particularly after the first sale.
I hope that we can continue to discuss the arrangements between now and Report so that these executive sites will be able to continue to come forward, but at the moment I do not think they will.
Lord Best
Perhaps I may intervene and say that before we go home in a really gloomy state of mind, I did catch the point made by the Minister that below a certain number of homes on the site, there is likely to be an exclusion from this whole system. If that number is high enough, an awful lot of rural exception sites will still be possible. Before the noble Lord concludes his remarks, I should say that I cling to that hope.
Lord Cameron of Dillington
As I say, I have no doubt that we will be able to discuss this between now and Report. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.