Housing

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I refer noble Lords to my declaration of interests and declare that I am an elected councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, on securing this important debate today.

In my brief remarks, I say that housing and the various issues surrounding this whole subject is something to which we will return again and again in this House, and that is to be welcomed. The underlying issue is that we need to build more good-quality homes of a variety of tenures at much greater speed. We can all trade a variety of statistics about who built what and when, but the underlying issue is that we have a serious housing crisis and current levels of housebuilding are nowhere near enough.

I was pleased when I read the comments by the new Housing Minister, Mr Gavin Barwell MP, when he talked about the importance of building homes of every type of tenure, not focusing on one. I vividly recall our debates in this House during the passage of the Housing and Planning Act in the previous Session and never being able to get a straight answer from the Government when they talked about this cohort of people who had to be helped with the starter homes project at the expense of all other tenures. Any move to a more realistic, balanced policy in respect of addressing the housing needs of the country is very much to be welcomed. To make our communities work in both urban and rural areas, we need a mixture of housing types that a variety of people and families can afford to rent or buy, to make where they live sustainable.

For most of my life, with the exception of 15 years in the Midlands, I have lived in south London. I grew up in council housing, first on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark. When moving to the Midlands on being promoted at work, I lived in the private rented sector, and then I bought my own home. I suspect that that is the sort of journey that many people take when starting out, moving from renting into home ownership; a lot of people aspire to own their own home. Government policy must be to support and create the conditions for communities, families and people to flourish, with good-quality housing in a variety of tenures.

I agree with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, about the average housing cost ratio to household incomes. I am alarmed when I look in estate agent windows where I live in south London to see that, often, rent for properties in my street and neighbouring streets is far in excess of what people pay on their mortgages—£2,000 and £2,500 a month in the private rented sector to rent an ordinary three-bedroom Victorian terraced house. That is a huge sum of money for struggling families to pay.

As I said, I serve as a councillor, and I am a member of the planning committee. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, raised some important points, but as councillors or officers there is often little we can do, because powers to scale things back have been stripped away from planning committees and councillors. He made some very important points about the quality of development we see now.

My noble friend Lord Sawyer spoke about the space standards of properties, and I agree very much with his comments. It is regrettable that the Parker Morris standards for social housing were removed, to which my noble friend Lord Beecham referred.

The noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, was right when he spoke about the need for retirement housing. I serve as a trustee of the United St Saviours Charity in Southwark, founded in 1541. We are building a new almshouse—an almshouse for the 21st century—in Bermondsey and hope to provide good-quality, supported housing to help free up much-needed family accommodation in the borough.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, raised the problem of developers effectively banking land with planning permissions for development and seeking to hold that back and benefit from increased values rather than get on and build the properties we need. I am a councillor in Crofton Park and we have an unsightly plot of land that we can never get developed. We have had numerous planning permissions that are never agreed. A sign goes up saying, “With full planning permission for various developments”, but it never actually gets developed. We need to look at how we can get these sites developed. It is not councils holding them up, but they just sit there with nothing happening, so we need some action from the Government.

My noble friend Lord Beecham pointed out the unaffordability of many of the so-called affordable rents. That is a huge problem in London and in other parts of the country. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, made some important points regarding family break-ups and pressures on families. I certainly think that the unaffordability of housing is a huge pressure on families, as was the destruction of the Sure Start programme on young families. It is regrettable what the Government did there. These are all very important points that we need to look at.

This has been an excellent debate and I look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, responding to the points raised. We shall come back to this issue again and again.