Housing Supply and Homelessness

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register and my membership of the previous Government’s London housing task force and the Older People’s Housing Taskforce. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for securing this very important debate on the genuine housing crisis that we face. I also thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the great work he has done in this area. I really appreciated his speech.

There have been many statistics, and normally I throw out lots of statistics, but I am going to try to curtail that today. Homelessness is a genuine scourge for this country. For most people, that is perceived as rough sleeping, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, mentioned, is a very complex issue. But I want to deal with the rest of the iceberg that people do not see—the temporary accommodation, the sofa surfing, the overcrowding and the cost to families and their budgets, limiting their ability to pay for their energy bills and food bills and support their children. This is a genuine housing crisis and it is simple: we are not building enough houses in this country.

I shall compare us to, say, France. Between 1983 and 2021, the UK built 7.3 million homes. France built 13.5 million homes. It is no surprise then that the real increase in house prices in the UK since 1970 has been 400%, whereas in France it has been 170%, and elsewhere in Europe prices are now substantially lower. Build more houses and houses will cost less. It is relatively simple. This is exacerbated in the UK by our very uneven demand. Demand is very much focused on the south, particularly in London. London is the issue I want to focus on. It is where we have the biggest housing crisis, with 300,000 people on the housing waiting list, 70,000 children living in temporary accommodation, local authorities spending more than £1 billion a year on temporary accommodation and rents representing more than 50% of average gross earnings. House prices are approaching £20,000 per square metre in central London. In my authority or the authority of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—Stevenage—the figure is more in the region of £3,000. That has a massive impact on availability. The ripple effect of London is impacting homelessness and the cost of housing outside.

London is not doing well on delivering houses. It is down at 32,000 in the last 12 months, 30% below the figure of a few years earlier. The rest of the country is also down, but only by around 10%. The risk is that, this year, London will deliver even fewer houses. The London Plan suggests that we should build 52,000 homes. The latest government figures suggest it should be 80,000. The previous Government suggested 100,000. Whatever the figure, it is genuinely far more homes than are being delivered today. And it is not because of a lack of opportunity. The GLA identifies that there are sites for more than 1 million homes in London. Anecdotally, this could be increased significantly through regeneration of housing association and council housing estates, densification and the use of industrial land. It is not unreasonable to suggest that we could build 2 million homes in London.

Why is this not happening? As I speak to developers, they constantly tell me that it has got harder and harder to build in London. There is more and more regulation, more and more legislation, more and more consents: it is just too difficult and the planning system is incoherent. Many housebuilders are no longer prepared to build in London unless they have the full co-operation of a local council.

The London Plan is one example of this, and while there are many admirable aims in that local plan, its 133 clauses were described to me by one developer as “133 reasons not to build”. There is not one clause in the London Plan that actually makes it easier, faster or quicker to build a home.

That is why, when I was on the taskforce, we recommended that there should be a strong presumption in favour of granting planning permission on brownfield land where the local authority in question is not meeting its housing targets. This was adopted by the previous Government. Will the Minister also commit her Government to this?