Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fine and correct point. I do not blame the developers, either. In a market situation, they sell what they can at the price they can get. In my community, one in seven homes are not lived in. I am talking not about holiday lets, but about second homes bought by people away from the area who earn significant incomes and can afford to buy several properties as investments or boltholes, and good luck to them. In such a marketplace, it is blindingly obvious that there needs to be intervention. That is why there is a role for social rented housing and why our amendment to improve the Government’s starter homes proposals is completely wise.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I say gently to the hon. Gentleman that it was regrettable that the Liberal Democrats did not provide anyone to sit on the Bill Committee. He may need to review that. He probably views policy through the prism of South Lakeland, which I would have thought is a unique place in the north-west of England. The information we were given by expert witnesses was that the cumulative impact of the Bill would be to deliver a larger number of affordable homes. We received no evidence whatsoever that the new starter homes would not be affordable to people on average incomes on the line between the Bristol channel and the Wash

[Tim Farron]

If I thought there was no merit whatsoever in the proposal, I would have tabled an amendment to scrap it altogether. The point, however, is that in different parts of the country, including in the north of England—not just Cumbria, but Northumberland and parts of the Yorkshire dales—in the west country and in London, which are significant proportions of the country, the homes are unlikely to be affordable to anybody on anything like an average wage. They may be affordable in other parts of the country, in which case the Government have nothing to fear from accepting my amendment.

In moving towards a conclusion, I am genuinely deeply concerned about the effect this Bill will have not just on those areas I have mentioned, but on others as well, particularly with regard to right to buy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Streeter]

My hon. Friend puts the case much more eloquently than I ever could. Indeed, he used the favourite word of the moment: pathway. We heard it a lot earlier this afternoon and it is a very commendable word. I agree entirely with him.

The point of the schemes that I am promoting is not that they give an option to buy, nor that that there is a wish or aspiration that the incoming tenant will perhaps buy one day. The whole basis on which the schemes are set up is that the incoming tenant or occupant of the property will buy it and, within five, 10, 15 or 20 years, will be a homeowner. These products help to fulfil the aspirations of people who cannot get there right now and help the Government to meet their targets over a period of time. As far as I am concerned, they are a win-win.

There are new rent to buy products on the market. Rentplus has its headquarters in Plymouth, which is why my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) and I support it so strongly. It has brought forward a product that has attracted a lot of private investment. It is interested in setting up schemes that attract people in bands C and D on the housing needs register. We know from our constituency surgeries that people in bands C or D do not often get the house that they go for. This product is helping people who are on the homeless register to rent their property to begin with, but to agree at the outset—here is the beauty of the scheme—that within five, 10, 15 or 20 years—whatever they think they can manage—they will buy that property. They are gifted a 10% deposit by the scheme to make that purchase possible. It is a very innovative scheme and the kind of product I am sure the Government would want to promote.

[Mr Jackson]

Like me, my hon. Friend will support localism. However, it is currently within the gift of a local planning authority to introduce a local plan or county structure plan, or the capacity to develop staircasing or intermediate tenure. With all due respect, the amendment is slightly onerous.

[Mr Streeter]

I do not agree because it is important that these schemes are given the kind of Government backing that the amendment would ensure. Developers will not need to negotiate and explain their case to every individual planning authority, because they will know that they have the backing of someone as significant as the Housing Minister. If that wording is included in the Bill it will give those schemes a flying start and help us to meet the Government’s challenging targets.

In conclusion, I believe that this amendment is a win-win, and I hope the Minister will think seriously about adding it to the Bill. If that cannot be done on Report, I hope that serious thought will be given to including it in another place. I do not see a downside to this; I see only more young people meeting their aspirations to own their own home in our country in years to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I need to bring in another four speakers before bringing in the Minister at 10.37 pm.

[Mr Jackson]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) and lovely to hear her dulcet tones, which brought back flashbacks of 17 sittings looking in detail at the 145 clauses and 11 schedules of the Bill. As I say, it is lovely to see her in her place and not having been subject to the night of the long knives as a result of the Labour reshuffle, if indeed the reshuffle is concluded, as someone suggested on Twitter, by 4 o’clock tomorrow—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I am sure you do, Mr Jackson, but I can assure you that I do not want to hear the history of the reshuffle. Come on, we could be here all night!

[Mr Jackson]

It was longer than one of Britney Spears’s marriages—that is what I wanted to say, Mr Deputy Speaker.

What was depressing about our Committee sittings was the conservative nature of the debate and the stasis of what we got from the Labour party, which did not move on. If there is a housing crisis, we need to find radical ways forward to deal with it. It is not as if we are leaving it simply to the private sector. This week’s announcement of the building of 13,000 units on public sector land provides an example of where we are using the might of Government to work with the private sector to deliver. To appreciate that, one needs to look only at Help to Buy, Help to Buy ISAs and other Government initiatives to help small and medium-sized builders, for instance.

The fact is that we have a mandate for starter homes. The hon. Member for City of Durham asked what changed between March and May. With all due respect, let me tell her that we won the general election and her party lost it. We have a mandate to deliver starter homes, and the hon. Lady does not do justice to the wider issues in housing, planning and development. She fails to take into account some pertinent issues. When in power, her Government failed to deliver infrastructure planning properly. We had housing information packs and we had eco-cities. All those things failed. We had density targets. We had regional spatial strategies, which were a disaster and did not deliver homes. Under that Government, the smallest number of homes were built since 1923, there was the largest increase in young people in temporary accommodation and housing waiting lists increased massively.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

The hon. Gentleman needs to accept that we built 2 million more homes.

[Mr Jackson]

It says something about their priorities that, in five years, the previous Government built more local authority houses than the hon. Lady’s Government did in 13 years, with a much more benign financial regime. She fails to take into account how difficult brownfield remediation is and that about a third of local planning authorities do not have a local plan in place, despite the Government’s encouragement—the local plans have not gone through the inspection process. It is not either/or. Starter homes are a radical boost to ensure that more young people in work who need homes and are languishing in band 4 and band 5 council housing and housing association lists get the opportunity.

If a local authority has produced a decent plan—a structure plan or a deposited local plan—it will, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), be in a position to effectively put in place intermediate housing and social rent provision working with registered providers. We are not in the business of squeezing that out. It is up to local authorities to do that.

The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) was right. We are not here to discuss the London housing Bill. This is about the whole of the country. In fact, this is a historic Bill because I think it is the first Bill that is subject to EVEL, so we did not have the dulcet tones of our Caledonian friends helping us on the Committee or on Second Reading.

The starter homes policy is about delivering homes to people who need them. If the hon. Member for City of Durham remembers, when the expert witnesses were challenged in Committee, they could not produce the figures, either on the day or afterwards, that showed definitively, beyond any reasonable doubt, that, from the Bristol channel to the Wash, in Chorley—Mr Deputy Speaker’s seat—in Leyland, in most parts of Lancashire, in Yorkshire and Humberside and in the east and west midlands, for most people on an average income—I accept that there is a difference with the national minimum wage and that the city of Durham is perhaps a different example—the homes would be affordable. Conservative Members on the Committee were not indulging, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) said, in some ideological pursuit. We were looking at the evidence brought before us. The evidence did not demonstrate, with all due respect, the hon. Lady’s position.

This is a radical Bill. I was disappointed by the lack of coherent, cogent alternatives from Her Majesty’s Opposition. May I end on a slightly cheeky note? I listened with interest to the hon. Lady’s plaintive cry that she was badly treated by the programme motion. My understanding is that the usual channels came to an agreement but, because of the incompetence of Her Majesty’s Opposition, they truncated or elongated various new clauses because they had forgotten to table the appropriate amendments. That is why they had to pad it out—which I am obviously not doing.

This is an excellent, radical Bill. It will deliver. It will complement other forms of tenure. We won the election. We have a mandate. I look forward to many more starter homes in my constituency and others throughout the country to give young people in particular the start in life that they deserve in the property-owning democracy that we should be building.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

I want to raise three concerns about the Government’s proposals on starter homes. Obviously it is right, given the aspirations of many people to own their own home who currently cannot afford to, that we should look seriously at measures that enable that to happen. What we should be concerned about is whether those measures are good value for the taxpayer and have any unintended consequences. If it is such a good idea to help people on to the housing ladder, why do we not help the next group of people on to it by ensuring that the discount, or assistance, continues in perpetuity?