Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Naseby Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, the Bill is highly aspirational, but I am pleased that I have on the Front Bench someone who has worked in local government and been a representative and therefore knows a fair amount of the subject matter we have before us and the depth of what is in the Bill.

I want to concentrate on housing, not least because I was once a junior housing spokesman. I sat for a new town, Northampton, and was chairman of the housing committee and leader of the London Borough of Islington. Inevitably, I want to start with the macro. I am not quite sure what we call the target for the moment—it is not a target, it is an aspirational figure. As I understand it, it is 300,000, and in the last year we completed 175,000 nationally, according to the figures from the Library.

If we look at affordable housing, which is the crunch area at the moment, in my judgment, the National Housing Federation is looking for 145,000 homes to be built. In the last year, the figure is 31,200 and 1,590 built by the local authorities on top of that. The important part is that 50% of those were financed by the Section 106 agreement, which is going to be replaced by some new form. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who is not in his place at the moment, mentioned the West Country situation. As I holiday regularly in the West Country, I took the trouble to find out that it needed 17,000 and last year built 4,159.

I looked up the figures for London, and even there Mayor Khan was given £4.8 billion in 2016 to start 116,000 houses by March 2023. At the moment, according to my calculation, he is jolly nearly 20,000 short, with about two months to go. So I ask the question: what happens to the money that is not yet spent? Surely, if money is short, that should come back into the main pot and be sent to those who are producing homes.

I wonder slightly about the County Councils Network, but others have mentioned their concerns in that area. I do not think anybody has raised the issue of the construction industry yet. It is very important that the major developers continue. There is a big row going on about Grenfell and who should pay for what. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that there must be some banging of heads and a decision made. We as a country need the major developers, and it is no good somebody sticking their head in the sand and saying that they should pay even more; after all, that cladding was approved by a government authority.

Small builders have not yet been mentioned, either. They are disappearing. Back in the period around 1980, they did 40% of construction. Today it is 10%. Yet they are the people who understand the local community. They understand the sensitivities; they probably live there. So we should have a closer look at that, and I hope my noble friend will talk to the Federation of Small Businesses.

I have already mentioned new towns. I believe we need a little bit of creative thinking there. I wonder whether we should not look for a current equivalent of the original work that was done on Welwyn Garden City. For want of a better term, I call them “new garden towns”, rising alongside our small towns that need to expand. There may well be bigger options like Milton Keynes or Northampton, or indeed Stevenage.

Wherever they are developed, one thing is certain: we still need policies to encourage owner occupation. That market is a private enterprise market. It is vital because every young couple in this country want their own home. We therefore need continual creative thinking about incentives. For those of you who read the Metro today, it may have been interesting to see the insert about a new solution from Fairview. I do not know Fairview, but it has a scheme for buyers to save for a deposit while actually living in their new home. That is good thinking. Shared ownership was a success, with just a 5% deposit. Deposit Unlock was another good scheme, while the Government’s First Homes scheme seems to have gone well too. There is a continual need, and we have a role and a responsibility to ensure that young couples, wherever they are in the UK, can own their own home and have the life that they wish to live.