Building More Homes (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I add to the plaudits raining down on the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, and his colleagues on the committee. It was forensic in its analysis and commonsensical in its conclusions, and the report was remarkably well written by the standard of such reports. It also received in this debate today the ultimate accolade: the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said that he could not find a single thing to disagree with. Those of us who have listened to the noble Lord on housing over the months will recognise that that is the ultimate compliment. The report also cheered me up, because it came out in July at the tail end of that prolonged period, that endless night, when we discussed the then Housing and Planning Bill. It contained many good things, but it also contained—my noble friend on the Front Bench is now looking at me rather pointedly—some rather dubious things; indeed, in some areas, it seemed to point decisively in the wrong direction.

Since then, much water has flowed under the bridge. We have a new Government with a new Prime Minister, a new Chancellor of the Exchequer—very important in this context—and a new Minister, Gavin Barwell, who is not only an outstandingly able politician, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth alluded to, but happens to be the MP for a Croydon seat next to my old constituency of Orpington and therefore understands the problems of London housing which are at the epicentre of the housing difficulties we face. I am delighted that he is there. We have also had the dafter ideas in the Housing and Planning Bill dropped along the way, or at least not appearing as we go on. We have also had a modest Neighbourhood Planning Bill, which I think has been generally welcomed, an Autumn Statement which led to more financing for housing associations—which I very much welcome—and, finally, a recent White Paper which had many good things in it and got housing policy pointing fundamentally in the right direction. Whereas previously it focused far too much on tenure, it now focuses on supply—which is what the committee thinks it should do; therefore, we are at one on this.

The problem—I am afraid there is a “but” in all this—is that policy is hopelessly underpowered. It is like a Rolls-Royce that has a Mini engine and is therefore unlikely to catch up with the traffic around it and to make progress at the sort of speed we will need if we are to meet the target not only of 200,000 houses a year but the 300,000 houses a year which the committee says is necessary, and may well be so. In that respect, I give two examples. First, as the committee said—my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft also alluded to it graphically—we need to take the cap off local authorities. We need to take the constraints off their ability to use their surplus resources, which I know they have—my noble friend cited Bromley; Portsmouth, I know about. They have a lot of resources which could be used. We should incentivise local authorities to be entrepreneurial in a way they are not allowed to be at the moment. By curious chance, the Government should look across the Channel to France, where local authorities do not have such restraints and build more than 300,000 houses a year, a lot of them social housing. That is precisely because they are encouraged to be entrepreneurial. I remember the famous story of President Bush saying, “The trouble with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneur”. It is rather amusing that the French should be being entrepreneurial in their council housing and we are being markedly less so. It is also quite astonishing.

The other issue is the one raised by the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who has disappeared from the Chamber momentarily. It was brought home to me at the breakfast meeting this morning organised by Shelter to promote its idea of new civic housing. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, was there along with others. In a nutshell—as he might agree—Shelter said, “It’s the land, stupid”. That really is the fundamental problem. If we allow land to be priced out at its maximum value in every possible circumstance, we will not get enough housing. We will get poor-quality housing and poor infrastructure as well. Unless we tackle that problem we are really going nowhere. I am pleased to note that the Government say, rightly, that they wish to consult on this issue and begin to have some ideas about it but we know what to do. It is a question of whether we can do it.

I see that Gavin Barwell is now going round the country talking to people about our housing problems. Apparently, he is meeting very large audiences. Perhaps some people think he is Gary Barlow and not Gavin Barwell; I gather that is a bit of a problem. However he is getting his audiences, he is going to the people in different parts of the country and I welcome that. My noble friend Lord Forsyth said, rightly, that he should be a Cabinet Minister. My noble friend may have been thinking of the famous case of Harold Macmillan, who was a Housing Minister in the Cabinet and therefore able to produce, with his particular authority as a Cabinet Minister, more than 300,000 houses a year—a famous part of Tory history which we all remember.

If that happens, Gavin Barwell should employ the noble Lord, Lord Hollick—just as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is employed by the Government—to help achieve this task. I would diplomatically suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, that that might be a better use of his time than trying to renovate the Labour Party, which is a rather Herculean task at the moment. Whatever the Government do, they should get together and, given that we all know what needs to be done, get on and do it.