Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Tope Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

I remember that when I was a young councillor in Southwark in the 1980s I got this exposed in the South London Press. These firms were going around council estates offering people all sorts of inducements to buy their council house in order to, quite legally, get part of their discount. What my noble friend has discovered going on is disgraceful, but unfortunately there have been problems with this right from the start.

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, is referring to a situation that the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and I fought very hard over during the passage of the Deregulation Act. We fought very hard to resist the change to the requirement in London to get planning consent, for exactly the reasons he describes. I think the company to which the noble Lord referred a number of times is actually Airbnb. We should record the name correctly in case there is an Airbub somewhere. Airbnb is probably the biggest company—but not the only one by any means—in a rapidly growing industry in inner London, and is causing the considerable problems that he described. If these provisions go through, the situation can only get even worse. We had a lot of very strong representations from community associations and residents’ associations, particularly around central London, who said that they no longer had any idea who their neighbours were for exactly the reasons the noble Lord gave, as those people were changing literally on a daily basis because the properties were let out to tourists and visitors on an industrial scale.