Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is appropriate that Second Reading of this Bill is sandwiched between the two days on Report of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. I see this Bill as the other side of the coin on housing supply. The welfare Bill, with its imperative of containing public expenditure, includes a number of measures that could impact on housing supply. This Bill has a whole battery of measures on housing and planning to drive up supply, which I heartily welcome.

If we are to meet the backlog of demand and future demand, we need roughly 300,000 new houses per year. Over the last 10 years, we have averaged roughly half that, so we need a step change in performance if we are to meet our obligations. I welcome the priority given to housing by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor in recent announcements, as well as the initiatives recently announced by the Secretary of State and his Ministers.

I am also glad that, while they are focusing on new supply, Ministers have not taken their eye off the need to regenerate and modernise some of the difficult-to-let estates we have in our community. As they drive that initiative forward, I hope they will learn from the experience of housing action trusts in the 1990s—a voluntary partnership between local authorities, residents and the Government, which turned round estates such as Stonebridge Park, Castle Vale and North Hull. Many of the pioneers of the housing action trust movement are still around. They would like to be re-engaged in that initiative to regenerate and diversify some of these challenging estates.

On planning, I welcome the incentives in the Bill to complete the local plan and to remove the no man’s land we have in many parts of the country, occupied by default by the Planning Inspectorate. I welcome the housing provisions, not least the proposals to recycle the proceeds of the sale of high-value local authority properties and housing association right-to-buy properties into new builds. The properties that are sold of course remain part of the nation’s housing stock, but the proceeds of the sale increase the supply of affordable homes.

For me, Clause 58 and the right to buy is a bit like Groundhog Day. Noble Lords may remember that in 1982 the Government introduced a Bill to give tenants of charitable housing associations the right to buy. I took it through the Commons, and it then met what I think is called a headwind in your Lordships’ House. They deleted the offending clauses. But before we could play ping-pong, Margaret Thatcher dissolved that Parliament and the Bill fell. I had to take it all the way through the House of Commons in the next Parliament, but by that time the Government had removed the clauses giving the right to buy to housing association tenants.

To meet the very real disappointment of those tenants, I introduced something called HOTCHA—home ownership for tenants of charitable housing associations —which gave them in cash the discount they would have been entitled to had they bought. Of course, they could then buy what they wanted. In housing policy terms, that had much to commend it. In a fraction not only of the time, but of the price it took to build a new social housing unit, one got a re-let for somebody on the waiting list. There was something in it for the tenant, in that he was not constrained to buy the property he was in; he could buy wherever he wanted. The housing associations were happy because it did not dilute their housing stock. Everybody liked the scheme except the Treasury, where many good housing initiatives have come to grief. It did not like the scheme because it did not see any money come back in return for the money going out of the door. Over the years that scheme became rationed and marginalised. It was converted into the transferable discount scheme. It now reappears in the voluntary agreement with the National Housing Federation. I commend Ministers for their negotiating skills.

Clause 58 alludes to the new right to buy, which noble Lords referred to. My party’s manifesto says:

“We will extend the Right to Buy to tenants in Housing Associations to enable more people to buy a home of their own. It is unfair that they should miss out on a right enjoyed by tenants in local authority homes”.

That implies a scheme that mirrors the right to buy for council tenants, which is enshrined in legislation. If one looks at the voluntary agreement with the National Housing Federation, this is a right to buy on the one hand, qualified by a right not to sell by the landlord. In which case, we are back to our old friend, the transferable discount scheme. In housing policy terms it has much to commend it, but it would be worrying if those who want to buy who read my party’s manifesto were first told by the housing association that they could not because of the exemption, but were then told that they had to wait indefinitely for a transferable discount scheme because the scheme had become rationed. I urge my noble friend to ensure that the hopes raised by my party’s manifesto are not dashed by the Treasury.

The five pilot schemes my noble friend referred to will shed some light on the uptake of the scheme. I contacted one of the pilot schemes. Without advertising the scheme at all, it was within 20 of the 200 pilots allowed to go ahead. I have two questions about these pilot schemes. First, the agreement with the National Housing Federation says that if the association will not sell it will give the discount in cash. That is fine, but it has to be used to buy a house owned by that association or another social landlord. I simply do not understand this restriction. It means the erosion of the social housing stock—which social landlords do not want—and it fetters the discretion of the tenant. I very much hope that this restriction might be lifted for the proper scheme, as I believe it to be not just unnecessary, but actually undesirable.

Secondly, I understand that, at the moment, houses built by housing associations under Section 106 are excluded from the pilot scheme—possibly for legal reasons. A huge number of properties have been built under Section 106 and I hope that that exclusion will not be carried through into the main scheme, when it takes off. If there are legal problems, I hope they might be addressed in legislation.

Having said that, I think this is the most important Bill in the Queen’s Speech. It is a very ambitious Bill which lays the foundation for the revival in housing starts which the country desperately needs. On that basis, I warmly welcome it.