Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

To conclude, we should be honest with the public; words matter and to call something affordable when it is patently not is misleading. Worse, it erodes trust in both government and developers. If we are serious about tackling the housing crisis, we must return to clear, robust definitions that are understood by all and linked to local incomes and not the inflated market, which is what my Amendment 171 seeks to do by giving local authorities more power to be more specific about what “affordable” means in their area. I know the Minister shares our passion and recognises the need for more social housing, as do her Government. I therefore look forward to her reply.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 122 in this group, along with others that relate to the provision of social housing. This group and the next are of major interest to those of us who are concerned about housing provision.

There is not actually very much in the Bill itself about housing. If you look through the first few pages of the Bill, headed “contents”, the word housing appears nowhere. In the whole 21 pages of Chapter 2 on spatial development strategies, I found the word housing twice on page 73. That was it, apart from a reference to the definition of affordable housing on page 74. The amendments in this group are not actually amending anything in the Bill, they are all inserting additions after Clause 52. Apart from future debates about housing for the elderly and modern methods of construction, this group of amendments and the next will have to do much of the heavy lifting on housing provision.

Amendment 122, ably moved by the noble Lord, Lord Best, will hold the feet of developers to the fire when it comes to the provision of social housing under Section 106. We have heard debates in the past about ensuring that social housing does not miss out by being built out last, and the developer then pleading extenuating circumstances for so-called financial viability assessments. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, since nearly half of all affordable houses are now provided under Section 106, we simply must maximise this resource.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, explained what happens in practice. The developer will tend to build the affordable houses last in order to maximise the cash flow by selling the market houses first. Then, towards the end of the development, when the developer finds the sums do not quite add up, the last thing he wants to do is anything which impacts on the value of the market houses. He will not want to touch the green spaces, the playgrounds or the car parking, so he will try to squeeze out the affordable housing.

Research by the CPRE shows that developers and land promoters have used viability assessments to get out of building almost half the affordable houses required; in its sample, 18% was achieved instead of 34%. The system at the moment favours the big developers, which can overbid the smaller developer and then use sophisticated financial viability assessments to outwit the under-resourced local authorities.

More recently, we have had the opposite problem: developers providing social housing but there being no registered social landlord to take it over. I raised this before the recess, on 3 July, and the Minister kindly wrote to me on 9 July. She told me that the Government set up the Homes England clearing service last December, and we can judge the scale of the problem, in that 113 housebuilders and 114 local planning authorities registered. The Minister told me in that letter that “more action is needed from all parties to ensure Section 106 homes are built to a good quality, are marketed at a reasonable price, and are purchased quickly and efficiently by social housing providers”. Can the Minister tell me what that further action might be and what progress has been made? Last December, the HBF estimated that there were 17,000 affordable homes stalled due to a lack of registered providers in the market to buy the homes. How many are there now?

Amendment 141, to which I have added my name, refers to social rent housing. It is worth asking why we need social housing. The market can provide most of the essentials in life—food and clothing—but no country in the world has a market that has met housing need. Worldwide, social housing provides affordable homes for families and individuals. Looking at the more prosperous European countries, they have a higher proportion of social housing than we do. All Governments have supported the housing market in this country: by supporting home ownership, initially through mortgage interest tax relief and then Homebuy in 1999, the starter home initiative and Help to Buy, or by supporting social housing—which is what this amendment is about—through Section 106, housing association grants or the affordable homes programme.

We did try an alternative approach—a market approach—under Nicholas Ridley. He wanted to move local authority rents up to market rents and let housing benefit take the strain. Under that scenario, there would have been no social rents; it was an explicit shift from bricks and mortar subsidy to personal subsidies. I am happy to say that Margaret Thatcher removed me from the Government before the Housing Act 1988 was introduced, because the experiment simply did not work. It did not work because it meant an annual increase in rents, which was unpopular, and the price was paid in local elections; it had an impact on the retail prices index and so on public expenditure, so the Treasury was concerned; and it assumed that the DHSS, as it then was, would be happy to finance an ever- growing housing benefit bill, which it was not— I remember Tony Newton complaining that he was funding the housing programme. We have reverted, rightly in my mind, to the traditional method of providing rents below market rents, with capital subsidies, Section 106, or surpluses retained by social landlords.

I was struck by one sentence in the Shelter briefing for this debate:

“Today, social housing has lost its universal status as a home for everyone, becoming an overstretched ambulance service and relying on ageing infrastructure”.


Shelter is right. Nearly 60 years ago, when I first became a local councillor, if home ownership was beyond your reach, you put your name down for the council waiting list and, in due course, you would get an offer. Now, that is no longer the case: social housing is strictly targeted at those in the most pressing need under the provisions of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act, and local authorities are struggling even to meet those commitments, which will be accentuated as the asylum seekers are moved out of hotels.

It is the ambulance analogy—which is Shelter’s and not mine—that I focus on for a moment, at the risk of being controversial. The real ambulance takes you to a hospital and, when you are better, you are discharged. When the Shelter ambulance, to follow the analogy, takes you to social housing, and when, with the benefit of that housing, you put your life together again, you are not discharged, but there are still people in the Shelter ambulance. It raises the contentious issue of security of tenure for social housing and whether, given the pressure on social housing, there should be some incentives—I emphasise carrots, not sticks—to encourage those who have benefited to move on and to make way for someone who is now in the desperate circumstances that generated the original tenancy.

This is not to detract from the powerful case for more social housing made by the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Best, but it is to raise the question, given the changed circumstances over the last 60 years, of whether we need to have another look at lifelong security if we are to make the best use of the scarce resource that social housing is.

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[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I will say a few words in support of Amendment 132 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, concerning the purpose of planning. To my mind, there would be some advantage in following the precedent in Scotland, where a similar purpose clause exists in its planning legislation. It would provide a guiding light to remind everybody involved in the planning system what planning is for and why we are doing all this.

There are two advantages in practice to this. First, it would remind those responsible for planning decision-making that that is not only about those who shout loudest, who very often tend to be the vocal minority as opposed to the silent majority who may wish to live in an area, and work in the area, but cannot find or afford a home there. It would provide a daily reminder that planning is about long-term public interest and not short-term expediency. For reasons I outlined in a previous debate, it would—in combination with the proposal for a statutory chief planning officer that was discussed in the debate on my noble friend Lord Lansley’s amendment—buttress the independence of professional planning officers from undue influence. That would be all the more important in the world where the national scheme of delegation exists, to give full effect to that scheme and for it not to be undermined by undue pressure from members or officers. I have a few quibbles with the drafting—that is not for today, but maybe something we can take up later. I urge the Government to consider this amendment very carefully.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, would have been proud of the speech delivered on her behalf by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. I support the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and commend him for continuing a campaign that he has promoted for some time, through a Private Member’s Bill and amendments to then Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill promoting healthy homes, but the challenge that faces him is that health and homes are in two different government departments. Successive attempts to bring them together have so far failed. Paradoxically, 100 years ago, the Ministry of Health was responsible for housing and health, and between the two World Wars, that led to a more integrated approach to both health and housing. Indeed, my great uncle, Sir Hilton Young MP, was Minister for Health in the 1930s, and as Health Minister he introduced the Housing Act 1935, which set down standards for accommodation—something which the noble Lord’s amendments seek to build on.

Winding forward, the importance of bringing health and housing together was central to the Black report, published in 1980, about inequalities and health outcomes. It said:

“The consequences, and importance, of housing policies for other areas of social policy, including health policies, have received increasing recognition in recent years—as have the problems of co-ordination deriving in part from the location of responsibilities for housing and personal social services … and Health services”.


Then we had the Acheson report. What I found compelling was the Resolution Foundation’s recent report which said that poor-quality housing doubles the likelihood of someone experiencing poor general health.

I looked at the debate in the other place on this amendment—it was for new Clause 9. There were two Back-Bench speakers, and it was all over in under a quarter of an hour—I see a smile on the face of the noble Lord on the Government Bench—including two other new clauses. That underlines the importance of this House in scrutinising legislation. The Minister there dismissed the need for a new duty to promote health because he said existing policy was adequate. There may be a copy of what he said in the folder in the Minister’s possession.