Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Tope Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

My Lords, perhaps the Committee will indulge me for a few minutes. I benefited from the right to buy in the 1980s, so unusually I have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Best, because I think that that was one of the mistakes this House has made in the past 30-odd years. The number of people who could have had access to home ownership was reduced, and as a country that is something we should be ashamed of. Why should the tenants of a registered social landlord have been precluded from an offer that had been made to the tenants of a council? There can be no justification for people living in two identical houses in the same street and in exactly the same personal circumstances where one has the right to buy and the other has not. If we had wanted to fight the battle on right to buy, that should have been done as a point of principle, full stop, not according to who the landlord was. Tonight’s debate is really a pretty poor show for the 1.3 million people who will be expecting the Government to deliver on their commitment to give them the right to buy.

There are issues with the right to buy that I strongly disagree with, as well as ones that noble Lords on the other side would not want me to disagree with on the basis that it should not have been a voluntary deal. I do not think that RSLs should have been able to do a voluntary deal; they should have been compelled to do the same deal as councils. Given that it is a voluntary deal, all of the amendments that noble Lords are talking about this evening are a waste of time because we have to trust our RSL friends—there are a number of them in this Chamber—to deliver what we expect them to deliver. If we put it on the face of the Bill, we will scupper the voluntary deal and the Government will have to make it a mandatory one. RSLs will then be treated the same as councils.

From my point of view that is a good thing because I do not see why my members should have to pay for the failure of RSLs to deliver the policy properly—which this is. If RSLs were forced to do what councils have done, we would get more homes and home owners and it would cost us less money. We all know that the only difference between a home owner and a home renter is access to capital. Why does it matter to us if a house is sold in five, 10 or however many years after it has been bought? The house does not disappear; it is still there and someone is living in it. If a person has managed to get capital out of it, they have not disappeared with that capital; they have bought another property somewhere else that someone else was paid to build, so it has created more jobs.

I do not understand what the fetish is around expecting someone to exercise the right to buy and then die in the same house. I was 24 when I bought my registered social landlord house. My father is 96. Do we really think that it would have been a good thing for the country if I and my family had lived in the same property for 72 years? Where would the benefit of that have been for anybody? The capital I put back into the system was freed up so that another home could be built and future generations were able to live somewhere. As my life moved on into better circumstances, I was able to move out of that home with my family to a better area where my children’s life chances increased no end. Who lost out on that? Nobody. What we will do by restricting access to the right to buy is prevent other generations getting the same thing.

With all respect—I know that noble Lords have good reasons for doing this—the exceptions needed to be built in at the start to reduce the cost to councils. Now that we have a voluntary scheme, councils are going to end up having to pay for it anyway, and that is what is wrong with this. I think that the money should come from central taxation, and that central taxation should be taken, probably, from the hidden profits that RSLs generate. They do generate them but they will not admit to it. Their business model could be reshaped and that would get us out of this, in particular on things like borrowing—£800 million a year too much on their borrowing requirements. That should be restructured and the money put into the pot before any councils are forced to pass over money. I will talk about this later when we reach the amendments dealing with the sale of high-value assets. Again, I do not disagree with the principle of selling them but I do disagree with the money being taken away from councils to be given to inefficient RSLs.

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, we have been going for nearly two hours, so I will resist the temptation to reply to the noble Lord, Lord Porter—but it does take a bit of willpower to resist. Forty years as a London borough councillor does not obviously qualify me to speak in a debate that has been largely about rural housing, but I have added my name to Amendments 56A and 57C in the name of my noble friend Lady Bakewell about community land trusts. I did that because much of the debate has been about the role of CLTs in rural areas, but of course they are present in urban areas as well. Indeed, the London part on Sunday’s “Politics” show devoted considerable time to a community land trust in the East End of London which is doing a very good job of enabling people in the area to acquire properties that are genuinely affordable at the level of income they have. In London that is a rare achievement and certainly one that is worth taking note of. As CLTs burgeon at a rapid rate, let us hope they also burgeon in London and other urban areas. That is why I support the amendments.

I rise at what I hope is towards the end of the debate to remind the Minister of the point made by my noble friend some time ago about community land trusts. They have a discretion not to sell CLT homes, but having spoken at their conference a couple of weeks ago and in fact the day after it was announced in the other place, I know that they still feel rather vulnerable about something which is simply a voluntary agreement. They fear for their longer-term future as regards homes that have been provided on a long-term lease to a registered provider because their needs may change. I hope that the Minister can address this point and try to give some further reassurance to CLTs because I do not think we want to see them going down this road.

Finally, I will simply point out that Amendments 56A and 57C are two separate amendments rather than part of a whole. If the Minister can find the time, I hope that she will address them as separate points, although I do not envy her the task of replying to a debate that has now lasted almost two hours.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I may add just marginally to the Minister’s burden in that regard. I want to pick up on some of the rationale that has been advanced for the voluntary deal, which does not seem to me to be fair. We are calling it a voluntary deal but of course it is underpinned by a mandatory portable discount—so how voluntary is that? For once in my life I must take exception to what the noble Lord, Lord Best, said. He pointed out that this is different from the 1980s because housing associations are getting paid the full value for the property, but in the next sentence he said that this has nothing to do with housing associations because they have not lobbied in any way for councils to pick up the tab.

I accept that there is no formal link, but when housing associations made their judgments, they must have known full well that the tab was going to be picked up by local authorities. It was already a manifesto commitment, and indeed the briefing note sent to us by the Minister stated that this measure—the high-value local authority housing provision—was announced as part of the Conservative Party manifesto where it stated that local authorities would be required to,

“manage their housing assets more efficiently, with the most expensive properties sold off and replaced as they fall vacant”,

in order to help fund the extension of right to buy to housing associations. It was clear that that was the intent and therefore, with respect, the housing associations must have known that the hit was going to fall on local authorities.

I accept that it was a difficult judgment and that they were between a rock and a hard place and trying to carve the best way through. But we ought to be straight on the rationale for this. The result of that voluntary association is that local authorities will have to sell off more high-value housing than they otherwise would, because that is how housing associations will be kept whole.