Lord Horam
Main Page: Lord Horam (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)
My Lords, I should draw the attention of the House to various interests that I have around development and with local councils, and in other respects in this area, as set out in the register of interests.
I want to start by saying something which I do not think has yet been clearly articulated, which is that I welcome the Government’s emphasis on the need to provide new homes and to address the issues of affordability. There has been a big change in government understanding around housing need; the issue has risen rapidly up the list of the priorities of the public, as is shown directly in opinion polls, and not only the Government but all parties have sought to respond to it. We should therefore debate this matter in the context of understanding that the Government are attempting to address some very real issues, not least the fact that the group of people most excluded from the housing market—or at least the ability to buy into it—are those without substantial capital. The key thing about first-time buyers is that, having not been part of a housing market that has seen rapid capital increases, they struggle to put together a deposit. Indeed, when I stood down as a Member of Parliament, my wife and I with young children looked at living in London, which was an obvious place in terms of the way in which my career would go, but the sale of a home in Cornwall would not provide the capital to buy a family home in London. That illustrates the scale of the problem. However, I have strong concerns about the way in which the Government have designed their starter home initiative as part of the work they are doing to address it.
First, we need to understand that the need for this measure arises only from a massive undersupply of homes. The starter homes initiative does not address undersupply: it only changes who has access to the limited supply coming forward. We can perhaps take some potentially affordable homes for rent away and turn them into starter homes with a discount for first-time buyers but, in doing so, second-time buyers who are perhaps moving from a flat to a two or three-bedroom house because they are having children do not get the benefit.
I am afraid that housebuilders may well react to this part of the market being addressed through starter homes by shifting other parts of their mix higher up the market to return the discounts. More importantly, they will not look to sell into the low-cost sector because they know that that is being eaten away by starter homes. Why would anyone buy those products if they could buy a starter home otherwise?
I emphasise that the big issue is to provide more homes—we can have other debates about how to do that—but this policy will not do so. Indeed, it may have the opposite effect. I have spent some time talking to large housebuilders and lenders about this policy and, although the Government have made some adjustment in the phasing of the discount period, there is no question that both are concerned about it. The large housebuilders who have targeted relatively low-cost homes now see a product that effectively rips out the possibility of any certainty in their market for it. Many of them have also relied on pre-sales of affordable rents to housing associations to help fund early development phases. Therefore, relying on future sales to replace those rented products which can be pre-sold to housing associations to provide capital to enable development may make it harder to fund development going forward.
In many respects the concerns raised by lenders should alarm us more. They are concerned not about the inability to lend to people buying these properties—self-evidently, they are a relatively low risk; if they have a 20% discount they can then make back later they are not a high-risk lending proposition—but about those they have lent to previously who are in that part of the market with which this policy will directly compete.
Let me explain what I mean. I live in a poor community where there has been rapid housebuilding because land values are low and houses are sold at low prices. The large numbers of people who have bought those properties in the China Clay district, a relatively undesirable part of Cornwall for many—I do not agree with that view but it is reflected in the house prices—are young people, young nurses, young teachers and first-time buyers, exactly the group this policy is targeted at. When they come to sell, they would expect to sell to first-time buyers again, but how will they sell their property at the kind of prices they previously paid if now people can buy a brand new home at a 20% discount in exactly the same market? That is why the lenders are worried. They are concerned that this will have a dramatic distorting effect on the value of homes that people of the same group already live in but which were simply bought previously without the advantage of the discount.
I started by saying that I think the Government are trying to do the right thing—they are trying to address housing issues and the issues of young people who are unable to raise capital—but there is a simpler solution, and that is to offer the 20% discount in perpetuity. Why would that be so much better? For precisely all the reasons I have just mentioned. It would no longer distort the market because the people who would buy these homes with an in-perpetuity discount of 20% would be those who could not afford to buy a home at full cost. They would participate in any rise in the housing market that happened over time and they would be able to build up capital for when they move on, but this would not distort the market because anyone who could afford to pay the full price would do so and would then benefit from the whole capital appreciation of the value of the home. It would target much more precisely those with limited capital who could not otherwise afford to buy and it would not have the same distorting impact on the wider market because there would still be a market there to sell into for those who could and would afford more.
Perhaps what is most important is that it would not distort people’s decisions about when to move on because I am worried about what we are doing for those who are buying into this proposal. Let us take a young couple who are thinking about buying their first property. They do not yet have children. They cannot afford a lot, so they buy a small flat. But they will have to give up the discount when they have a child in order to get the room they will need for the baby. How can that be right? Or do they delay the purchase and rent for longer because of the possibility that in a few years’ time they will have a child? What do they do if they have had one child and now want another one and therefore want to move on?
People will hold back from their sale, and it is because of that worry that frankly I understand absolutely why Amendment 1 has been brought forward. It addresses some of the issues for lenders and encourages people not to see the discount as a short-term investment, thus creating a new asset investment class with a view to getting it back in five or eight years. On the whole, the amendment is worth supporting because it is better than the status quo, but do we really want to lock people in to thinking that they have to stay in the same home for 20 years in order to get the full benefit of the discount? I cannot see that that is the right thing to do.
Some time ago Cornwall pioneered the principle of homes being given an in-perpetuity discount—not affordable homes, but simply properties built by local housebuilders with a covenant on resale that is tied to local wages. They would always be below market levels and would always be affordable to people on low incomes. There has been a really strong demand for those homes. Housebuilders like them because if they can get land at relatively low cost they are not too costly to build and they know that the sales will be there. Buyers like them because they know that they can then afford to get into the housing market and see the commercial uplift that comes as house prices rise, but they can then sell on again when it is right for them as a family to do so—perhaps when they have a child, the relationship breaks up, or things change because an inheritance comes through.
Making the discount in perpetuity would create a market for those who cannot afford to get their first foot on the ladder. As it stands, the starter home policy creates a very different vehicle: it is an investment vehicle with a 20% bonus at five or eight years. In a market for housing that is distorted by undersupply, which this policy does not address, and a market for housing that is even more distorted because it has become an investment market rather than one for the purchase of a home, the last thing the Government should be doing, in genuinely trying to address this issue, is introducing a product that is even more finely tuned as an investment product aimed at producing a return rather than providing a step towards the security of a home that meets people’s needs.
Lord Horam (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said graciously that there has been a sea change in Government policy towards housing in the past year or so that recognises that there is obviously a severe problem in London and the south-east in particular, but also in other parts of the country. In debates on housing, we have heard occasionally from the noble Lord on the Liberal Democrat Benches about the different perspective of Pendle in the north-west, but broadly speaking it is recognised that there is a real crisis in housing throughout almost all the country. The Government should be congratulated on this imaginative proposal. I do not suppose that anyone will want to stop it going through in its broad shape, given that it has gone through the other place, but we are here to improve things and I think this proposal can be improved.
As the noble Lord, Lord Best, pointed out in his speech moving Amendment 1, it is a very expensive proposal that will cost £8.6 billion if it achieves the full panoply of 200,000 results. That is a lot of money. Even though some of it is offset, it is offset in ways which housing experts rather deplore. For example, less Section 106 affordable housing will be built if this development goes ahead. As the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, pointed out, there will be fewer Build to Rent proposals, which is one of the most imaginative things on the housing horizon. I also get the impression from talking to housing associations that they are concerned about the shared equity homes into which they have put a lot of money, and which are fully supported by Government grant. Those are just three areas that may well be adversely affected by so much emphasis on starter homes.