Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Young of Cookham
Lord Young of Cookham
My Lords, it will come as no surprise to my noble friend when I indicate that I have some support for these two amendments. What we are basically seeing is two worthwhile government initiatives coming into contact. On the one hand, there is the rural exception sites policy and on the other hand the starter homes initiative. I quite understand why the Government take the view that they do not want to deprive rural communities of the benefits of starter homes. However, the interface between the two policies is quite difficult. If I did not conceive the rural exceptions policy, I was certainly one of its midwives when it was brought forward in the 1980s. To use an analogy used earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Best, the real risk about this is that the cream will disappear in the form of the sites becoming available.
I know from my own experience of representing a rural constituency in the other place that there were villages where a benign local landowner made land available under the rural exception site policy, in the confidence that the homes provided would be available in perpetuity, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has just said, and at affordable rents. If the landowner feared that those homes would disappear into the market, I am not sure that those sites would ever have been made available.
The features of the rural exception site policy were that, first, you have to do a survey to establish a local need for affordable homes for rent. Secondly, those homes have to be available in perpetuity—normally, for rent through a housing association. In some cases, they are for sale but with a lock such that the discount has to remain there in perpetuity. The starter homes initiative is different in that 80% of market value will still be beyond the reach of many local people, who would have been able to afford an affordable rent under the rural exceptions policy. Also, under the starter homes initiative, after the first time the second purchaser need have no local connections at all.
I understand that the Government are aware of the sensitivities on this. The briefing that we got says that their proposals included,
“using rural exception sites to deliver starter homes in rural areas”,
and allowing,
“the flexibility to require a local connection test on these sites”.
That is an important concession and, as we heard in earlier debates, it is not a requirement for the starter homes initiative anywhere else. None the less, some extra flexibility is required by either giving discretion to the local authority, as in Amendment 50C, or exempting sites below a certain level from the requirement to have starter homes.
When my noble friend replies to these amendments, I hope she can indicate that the Government are aware of the risk of losing the additional supply which the rural exception sites can provide and of the sensitivities in local areas to the change in the occupancy of these sites via the starter homes initiative, which were well represented by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. I hope that there can be some flexibility in response to these two amendments.
Lord Deben
My Lords, as another of those involved in getting this policy in the first place, I remember the battle to try to get townspeople to understand the particularity of the problem in the countryside. Just in case—although I look at your Lordships and realise that all will have understood it—I want to repeat the fact that many of our villages, and some would say most of them, are in danger of becoming middle-class, middle-aged and middle-income groups, with hardly an opportunity for anyone else at all. This is a serious social problem. It also creates a community unable to sustain itself. Communities are about all sorts of different people doing different kinds of things and contributing in different ways.
In my former, very rural, constituency, one of the biggest difficulties is that, because there is a large number of older people and a need for a large number of carers, the social mix having been altered because people buy up houses in the countryside, it is more difficult to get carers in those circumstances than it often is in the towns. This never used to be true, but it is true now and it is to do with the social mix that has now been reduced for so much of rural England.
There is a bigger issue here, which hangs round this individual concern for the protection of exception sites. When we had the argument originally—this really is history—we managed to convince people that, because of the planning system itself, we had created a particular kind of shortage in the countryside. Every little house that used to be the house of a farmworker is, once it comes to market, an ideal, bijou residence for the part-time—very often for someone who will retire there. I am not suggesting that second homes are necessarily a bad thing, merely that such houses are so attractive that the price means that they are well out of reach of people living on agricultural wages or the lower wages in the countryside. I do not think that this is something that is bad just for that section of the community—it is bad for the whole community. It creates an artificial community of the kind that many of us deplore in the towns, and it is becoming more and more true of large areas of the countryside. I therefore think that this is a social problem for all of us.
The one way that we managed to get people to be able to gift and to sell at an agricultural land price, or something of that kind, was, as my noble friend Lord Young and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said, because they were convinced that we meant it when we said that it was in perpetuity, for local people, and that it would not be changed. It was not only a concept but something that we felt we had committed ourselves to. I am concerned, as are others, that once you undermine people’s trust—and I think that the present circumstances without the amendments does undermine that trust—there will be no more land provided in that way. I put it to my noble friend that, if the land does not come forward because we were hoping to have some extra starter homes, what we will have done is to reduce the number of homes all over, not just starter homes but other opportunities.