Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
Well, yes, it would not be difficult. Perhaps that is why he was never in the same party as me.
Lord Greaves
He came very close. We had our times together.
Then I heard the noble Lord talk about unintended consequences, and it seems to me that this proposal is full of the threat of unintended consequences. I go back to the point I made previously, which was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Best, that this Bill is trying to fit everybody into the same pot. It is one size fits all, when what we need is a series of different answers to the problems of the housing market in different parts of the country.
When I spoke previously, I said that there are lots of different housing markets—perhaps 100—around the country. The person who first gave me that idea is now in his place and is my noble friend Lord Stunell, who gave us a talk when he was a Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government in which he kept hammering home the point that you cannot have one rule for everybody. That means that there have to be local mechanisms for finding solutions. The only people who can legitimately do that and set out to find those mechanisms and policies are the elected local authority.
Having said that, I will ask the Minister the following three questions. One relates to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Horam. In 2001, owner-occupation in this country reached a peak of 69%. By 2011, it had gone down to 64%, and it is now somewhere in the low 60s. I suggest that that is an unintended consequence of a number of different policies. I believe that owner-occupation is the best form of tenure, although there are people for whom it is not appropriate and people who would not want it. I first got involved in politics at the end of the 1950s, joining the Liberal Party when “Ownership for all” was a Liberal slogan. It is still a good slogan, if a little on the extreme side. My question for the Minister is: do the Government have a target of what they think is a reasonable level of owner-occupation in this country? Are they content for the level to continue to slip until it gets down to perhaps 50%, or do they want to boost it again, and if so, how far do they think we can reasonably get the level to?
The second question is totally unrelated to that and is just a question I realised I did not know the answer to. Is a person or a young couple who buy a house which is a starter home, and therefore get the 20% discount on the market price, also entitled to the 20% Help to Buy discount if they qualify for that? That is just a straight question, because if that were the case it would have an interesting impact.
My final question goes back to the kind of area which I know best, which covers a lot of the north of England outside the most rural areas and the big cities—and perhaps some of the big cities, too—as well as a lot of the rest of the country as well. What is a local authority supposed to do if it cannot find anybody who wants to build starter homes? That may seem a ludicrous question in some parts of the country, but it is not a ludicrous question in the part of the country where I live. It is quite possible that local or big housebuilding companies will not want to build any starter homes, for a whole series of reasons.