Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, and my noble friend Lady Thornhill on two excellent maiden speeches.

As we have heard from many people in this debate, we simply have not been building enough houses and yet we need to build around 300,000 a year. The coalition Government took some important steps; for example, scrapping the regional spatial strategy and speeding up the planning process by scrapping some 1,000 pages of central policy. Noble Lords may be interested to know that for a period I was a junior Minister at the DCLG and played a small part in one or two other important measures, such as bringing empty houses back into use. In that regard, I welcome the Bill’s proposed changes to the process for compulsory purchase. I also welcome the introduction of neighbourhood plans. I am delighted that already 1,600 neighbourhood plans have been adopted or are in production, and I welcome the measures in the Bill to speed up and simplify the process. There are also measures supporting self-build and custom build, so helping hard-pressed small building firms, which, again, I welcome. I am pleased that the Bill strengthens measures cracking down on rogue landlords.

However, some of the measures of the previous Government, such as the bedroom tax, may have been right in principle but were wrong in detail; for example, seeking to levy the tax on people where no alternative smaller property was available in the same area. That is what I believe is wrong with many aspects of this Bill—often right in principle but so very wrong in the detail.

Few of us would challenge the idea of promoting more starter homes. We certainly need more homes for people to buy, just as we need more social and private houses for people to rent. But the starter home provisions are riddled with problems. The starter homes that the Government have in mind will not, however much they try to change the definition, be affordable to families on ordinary incomes. That has been clearly demonstrated by the figures from Shelter that we have all received. They will simply be out of reach for most middle-income families needing help to buy a home. The worry, therefore, is that these homes will be bought by people with far bigger incomes, not in need of help and not necessarily even local people. The people who will benefit most will be those who need help the least. As the plans stand, they will then be able to sell the property after five years and make a huge profit, and a so-called affordable home will have been lost.

With developers exempted from paying a community infrastructure levy, the planned 200,000 starter homes will place additional pressure on local schools, roads and other infrastructure, creating an additional, unfunded burden for already hard-pressed local councils. Worse, these starter homes will be built instead of, not as well as, the affordable homes that would previously have been required to be built under Section 106 agreements. Given that there has been so much attention tonight on the importance of local plans, one wonders how local councils are going to be able to plan, as they are currently required to, for mixed housing types and tenures to provide the sorts of integrated communities that the noble Lord, Lord True, referred to. If implemented, the Bill could see the end of genuinely affordable housebuilding in this country as the planning obligations which have delivered 250,000 truly affordable homes for purchase and rent over the past 10 years are abolished and replaced with a starter homes-only obligation. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, social housing is being written out of the script.

Another area where the principle is right but the details are wrong is the right to buy housing association properties. Some of my noble friends may be concerned about this but I am not opposed to right to buy. Indeed, it was the Liberal Party back in 1947 that first proposed right to buy. But the details matter, such as ensuring at least a one-for-one replacement, where there is a need, in the locality of the sold house. I am pleased that the originally proposed compulsory scheme requiring all housing associations to offer right to buy has been replaced by a voluntary scheme. However, it is of great concern that part of the funding for it will come by requiring councils to sell off vacant high-value council houses, and to do so with no like-for-like replacement and certainly not in the area where they are sold. The National Housing Federation, which negotiated the voluntary scheme with the Government, does not agree with this means of funding it. The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry says it is likely to lead to a reduction in housing for those on low incomes. The independent Chartered Institute of Housing goes even further, saying that this measure could mean the loss of 195,000 genuinely affordable socially rented homes in the next five years. It is deeply worrying.

There is much else to be worried about, including: the failure to address the need for tougher “fit for human habitation” rules; the lack of consultation on many of the measures, including the 60 pages of new legislation laid at the last minute; the centralisation of decision-making, with more than 30 new powers for the Secretary of State; and the absence of much detail, with many measures to come through regulations, many of which have not been seen and, worryingly, may not be seen even before we complete our deliberations in this House.

As I have said, there are measures in the Bill that should be welcomed. But far too many, such as those I have already mentioned and others, such as the threshold for pay to stay or the application of permission in principle for rural sites, require far more detailed consideration before they should be allowed to pass your Lordships’ House.