Autumn Statement 2022

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I look forward shortly to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Lea of Lymm.

The disastrous mini-Budget in September, with its unfunded tax cuts, led to inflation at 11%—its highest since 1981—and high and rising interest rates. We face the worst fall in living standards since records started with a 7% drop in household incomes over the next two years, as forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Homelessness is set to rise further because of the increasing unaffordability of housing. Council tax will rise by up to 5% in April. Yet again the Government are shifting the tax burden for social care to poorer people and areas, which collect lower revenues from their tax bands but face higher demands for social care. Council tax is a regressive tax. Why do the Government continue, year after year, to misuse it in this way?

I understand the need to restrict rises in business rates and I support the action the Government have taken. The introduction of the new valuations is the right decision. I welcome the fact that online distribution centres can face higher business rates in future, which should help retail centres. But could I ask the Minister about business rate increases for public buildings? What impact assessment has been done on the costs of those to the public sector? Will those increases, which may be significant, be reimbursed?

Chapter 2 of the Autumn Statement, on page 26, relates to “protecting vital public services”, but there is little reference to the housing crisis. There is a lot on health and education but no apparent understanding of the impact of poor housing on the costs of the National Health Service. I have spoken many times in this Chamber on the need to build more homes for social rent. In the last 10 years, house prices have risen by 50% but wages by only 20%. There is a serious shortage of new homes, as the Government fail to deliver their promise of building 300,000 a year.

There is now a huge drop in numbers of home owners under 35. Help to Buy led to increased demand without an increase in supply, and so to higher prices. We must increase supply. A way of finding more money is to share the land value increase more when a planning permission is granted between the owner and the local authority. I suggest to the Government that the time has come to look at that seriously.

Following the mini-Budget, interest rate rises in mortgage costs to 6% have made home ownership too expensive for many aspiring first-time buyers. This is making home ownership unaffordable for too many people who currently own their homes. In both cases, that leads to greater demand for rental properties, with rents inevitably rising, certainly in the private sector.

The rise in interest rates has impacted home owners right across the country, but is more acute in places such as London and the south-east where house prices are higher. Some households face increases in their monthly payments of several hundred pounds, which they have not planned for. Some will not be able to afford it. Some will lose their homes, unless government support is forthcoming. What plans do the Government have to help people in that situation?

There is now a worrying increase in private landlords seeking possession orders under Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988. The practice of no-fault evictions was banned during much of the pandemic, and lifting the ban has seen a big increase in threats of no-fault evictions. As an example, analysis by the Northern Agenda shows a 143% rise, compared with the same period a year ago, across the north of England. This is significantly higher than in London and the south-east. When will the renters’ reform Bill be considered? When the Government published the White Paper in June, it included a commitment to ban Section 21 evictions. Is that still their intention?

The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities was in Rochdale last week, after the dreadful tragedy there, to see for himself the unhealthy state of some homes. I welcome his decision to amend the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill to set mandatory requirements for inspections and action. Official advice on removing mould seems to be to open windows to bring in cold air and keep spores from settling, and then to turn up the heating to kill off the spores that do. This is unaffordable when people have to reduce their energy use. It is unacceptable and it is not levelling up.

We need to build more decent social homes. There is now a very serious problem emerging where a household is not earning enough to meet a private sector rent increase but is earning too much to qualify for social housing. Such households end up having nowhere to live, other than temporary accommodation. That, too, is unacceptable.

Finally, over a million households are already on social housing waiting lists. Those lists will grow as people are forced out of the private rented sector. We have to build more. As the Secretary of State said in Rochdale in an interview with the i newspaper last week,

“we do need to make sure that we do have more homes built, and more social and affordable homes built along the way”.

That does not quite amount to a policy, but it does at least sound like a step in the right direction. It is just a matter of regret that the Autumn Statement does not mention housing at all.