Lord Campbell-Savours
Main Page: Lord Campbell-Savours (Labour - Life peer)Housing and Planning Bill
Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, most of the relevant points have been made and I do not want to repeat what other noble Lords have said, but I have a simple question for the Minister.
Amendment 48A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Best, refers to the need to take into account,
“those over pension age, … those on below average incomes, and … those to whom it owes a statutory housing duty”.
Amendment 50, tabled by my noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark, refers to an exemption requirement for housing for,
“younger people; … older people; … people with special needs; or …people with disabilities”,
or where there is a proposal to build,
“a homeless hostel; … refuge accommodation; or … specialist housing”.
We have, this evening, repeatedly heard the case that starter homes are to be given priority over everything else. How will those that I have just listed be protected in the new regime which the Government are promoting? In other words, how can we be assured that the groups referred to and embodied in those two amendments will be provided for under a system which gives priority to starter homes? If the Minister can answer that question, she will be able to answer most of the issues raised in this debate.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, we have had a long debate. Though I am reluctant to detain the Committee for too long, I want to speak in favour of these amendments, particularly Amendments 48A, 50B and 50D, to which I put my name. I again draw the Committee’s attention to my interest as chair of Housing & Care 21.
We have to ask the Government: are we in this together on housing? The need to build more homes is something we all agree on but I contest the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Young. I accept that a commitment has been made in the Conservative Party manifesto; I respect that, although I do not think it is right and I have some suspicions as to how that figure was snatched out of the ether and arrived at. The question is whether we will build more homes than we would have without this extra policy initiative.
I think the Government have—certainly the Conservative Party has—a problem with social housing and affordable housing for rent. That is why we have had a setback. We had a problem in the early years of the coalition in getting the Government to put more money into social housing investment. It happened only when the Chancellor became worried about the state of the economy, as far as I could see. At that point, we at last saw some initiatives that encouraged the building of social housing.
As has been admitted in this debate, we have now gone backwards. If we were really setting out to build more houses we would be building more for private ownership and more for social housing. We had begun to make progress on that at the end of the coalition Government—not enough, I accept, but we had made some. Frankly, we are now going to hit the buffers because of all the initiatives and impetuses behind starter homes and the promotion of home ownership. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, starter homes will be at the expense of other forms of housing, and that will include social housing. The consequence is that we will build fewer houses than if we had really been in this together and planned to increase home ownership while maintaining a balance by being committed to social housing as well. As a consequence, there will be problems in terms of the design of homes and the communities we build, which will be lopsided and unbalanced. Future generations will come to regret that.
It has been made quite clear by the noble Lord, Lord Best, that there are other areas of need which the Government seem to be ignoring. We know that the retired population is increasing and we want to have more rightsizing. What initiatives will the Government use to encourage that process? Only this week, we have seen initiatives from the National Health Service, which recognises the importance of housing in health policy. I do not see where the Government will get the extra housing for the retired population.
It remains the case that homelessness is getting worse. I am sad to admit that it increased during the last years of the coalition. Which of these initiatives address that? Local communities should surely be given the flexibility to address some of those problems rather than go down a route that puts all the emphasis on home ownership. The other consequence will be that the people in real need will be driven into the private rented sector, which will compound our problem with the housing benefit bill because we will be paying out more.
I would also like to draw attention to the rural area, which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, covered in his remarks. I cannot think of a more critical area where community needs have to be very carefully planned and provided for if we are going to have balanced communities which feed into the social life of those communities. We have to give more attention to providing affordable homes to local people—we need to make that distinction. As he says—and this is another argument that we are not actually going to increase the number of homes that are going to be built—I know that landlords in my area will be very reluctant to give up their land at a reduced price if they think that in the future people will have the opportunity to make a profit out of that, rather than what they thought, that these homes were going to be used for local people in perpetuity for their social needs and those of the communities in which they live.
Everybody agrees that there is a problem with supply. If we are going to build more homes that actually meet the demand we have, we need more diversity, mix and balance. As well as helping private ownership, we have to give more attention to social housing. If we do not, we will have all the problems I have mentioned in terms of increasing pressure on homelessness and the encouragement to older people to rightsize being diminished, and therefore we will end up with a worse and unbalanced housing situation, when there was a real opportunity for all of us to be in this together.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, I will address a number of amendments together. These are Amendment 37 from the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy, Lord Shipley and Lord Beecham; Amendment 47 from the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Greaves; Amendments 48, 49 and 50 from the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Beecham; Amendment 48B from the noble Earl, Lord Listowel; Amendment 48A from the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Beecham, Lord Kerslake and Lord Stoneham; Amendment 48C from the noble Lords, Lord Kerslake, Lord Best and Lord Kennedy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell; Amendment 48F from the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Cameron, Lord Kerslake and Lord Beecham; Amendment 50B from the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Cameron, Lord Beecham and Lord Stoneham; and Amendment 50D from the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Stoneham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews.
Together these amendments give me the opportunity to make clear that the Government are committed to increasing housing supply across all tenures. Earlier I stated that repeatedly and I went through the spending commitments of £4.1 billion for 175,000 shared-ownership homes, £1.6 billion for 100,000 affordable rented homes and £8 billion for 400,000 affordable homes, including £2.3 billion for the 200,000 starter homes. Taken together, the spending review will deliver a million new homes by 2021, and starter homes are at the heart of this new ambition for the reasons I have outlined. Home ownership is particularly out of the reach of this group of people. As part of this, we are doubling the investment in housing to more than £20 billion over the next five years to support the largest housing programme by any Government since the 1970s. We will build on our track record for housing delivery. More than 639,000 new homes have been built since April 2010. There are now 887,000 more homes in England than there were in 2009. That is fact, and that is what has been delivered over the past few years. Before noble Lords think that nothing but starter homes will be built, more council homes have been built since 2010 than in the 13 years up to 2010. An important statistic is that the number of new homes in England rose by 25% over the past year, which is the highest annual percentage increase in 28 years. For those who are in any doubt, that shows not only this Government’s commitment to building housing but their record over the past few years.
However, we know that we have to do more. These clauses are about something new: a new approach to address the pressing problem of young people and home ownership. There have been slight suggestions that in some places young people might not need to own homes. There has been a huge drop in the number of young people able to access home ownership. The Bill will help deliver our manifesto commitment and will place starter homes at the heart of new developments, which is a welcome addition to our growing package of support for future home owners.
As I said earlier, and as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham reiterated, 86% of people want to own their own home. As a Government, we should try to meet that aspiration. We need a radical shift in the way the housing market supports young first-time buyers.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Can I take the Minister back to the previous debate, where we were talking about the cost of mortgages and the price of houses? When she refers to £26,000, what does she actually mean? Some of us cannot really grasp what she is driving at, because when I looked up mortgages with a 20 or 25-year term, it was 40% of a post-tax £26,000 income. I relate that to what the Minister was saying.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
What I said earlier, and I am sorry if I did not articulate it terribly well, was that the average wage in this country is £26,000. For a couple on £26,000 each—
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, if I take both noble Lords’ figures, a median wage of £21,000 and £24,000 respectively, and add them together, that is £50,000 on a combined wage. Sorry—the hour is late—it is £45,000. On a combined salary of £45,000 and quoting £145,000 for a starter home, that would not be out of the median couple’s reach.
Lord Campbell-Savours
The Minister is assuming that these households have two people working full-time. That does not follow. In my former constituency, that was certainly not the case.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I was simply giving an example of an average working couple. There are many households in which both people work.
Lord Campbell-Savours
This whole policy is predicated on the fact that both people are working. All the facts that we are being given all the time are based on two people working full-time.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I was simply giving an example of two people working within a household. It may well be that both people within a household do not work and one person is earning £45,000-plus. I was giving an average example, which I intended to be helpful to the Committee, but clearly I have confused everyone. However, I can write to noble Lords about median and average wages; this was simply trying to take the average couple on an average wage and apply that on a basis which I thought would be helpful to the Committee but which clearly was not terribly helpful.
Lord Campbell-Savours
So, basically, the point being made is that unless you both work full-time, you will not be able to buy one of these houses.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
No, my Lords, I was simply giving an example of a couple who work and who are on the average wage. Every single case is different; I was simply giving an average scenario. We can make all sorts of different assumptions—for example, about a scenario where one person works in the household and they earn £50,000, and so on—but I was simply giving the example of an average working couple.