Housing and Planning Bill

Michelle Donelan Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I do not accept most of what the hon. Gentleman says. What we must do is build lots more council houses in this country.

Lords amendment 55 would introduce a taper of 10p in every pound of a social tenant’s income above the minimum income threshold. This sensible measure would ensure that tenants would not face the cliff edge of a small rise in income leading to a huge rent increase. We know—the Minister confirmed this earlier—that the Government are planning a higher taper. I am pleased that he will keep the taper and the level at which it is set under review, and that changes will be subject to the affirmative procedure. We will need to look at that very closely indeed.

[Michelle Donelan (Chippenham) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her response to my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry). Will she remind the House of the average earnings of a person in the UK, and then tell us whether social housing is for everyone or for those in genuine need, as there does seem to be a bit of confusion?

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Buck]

No, I do not welcome that at all. As we heard in the superb speech from the Front Bench by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods), we do not know what tenure those homes will have or where they will go. We have no guarantees whatsoever that they will be local. Therefore, they will simply not provide an equivalent level of accommodation or meet need. I cannot remember who said this, but that could result in rental properties for low-income households in inner London being sold to subsidise homes for sale somewhere else, thereby meeting a totally different kind of need.

Westminster City Council also points out—this has not been brought up this evening—that, in order to deliver the two-for-one requirement, the increase in housing delivery would have to be dramatically increased from its current rate, but there is no indication of how that will be achieved. The council has a long list of asks as to how the high-value sales programme will be organised and how inner-London authorities, including itself, would be protected. The Minister has given no answers whatsoever.

The council has also provided further context and it is interesting, given some of our discussions about pay to stay. Government Members describe anybody with a household income of £40,000 as rich, and the council has pointed out that the Government are imposing a higher pay-to-stay requirement on such households while at the same time cutting rents. They are cutting rents for everybody, including working households. People are being asked to pay a higher rent if they have a household income of £40,000, but they get a 1% cut in their rent at the same time. I simply do not understand the logic of that.

In my local authority, the implications are a loss to the housing revenue account of £32 million over the next four years and £237 million over the next 30 years, which will mean, as the local authority says, major cuts to the quality of existing properties or plans for new affordable house building. Yet again, the Government are giving with one hand and taking away with the other—indeed, they are taking away with a third hand, in this case—the capacity to provide additional homes. All that can be fairly summarised as meaning that the council that gave us homes for votes in the 1980s—the biggest scandal in modern local government history—is saying, “Even we do not like this.”

The council does not like the Government’s proposed starter homes policy either. The consultant who advised the council on the Housing and Planning Bill pointed out that a starter home capped at £450,000 in inner London, where the average open market property is going for £2 million, lavishes a gain on a particular small cohort of first-time buyers. Westminster Council states that

“the potential tax-free capital gain, after eight years of occupation…is very considerable (depending on the number of bedrooms) and wholly to the benefit of a first-time buyer”.

[Michelle Donelan]

It is interesting to hear about the housing market in London, but does the hon. Lady recognise that in Wiltshire, one of the fundamental reasons why we have an above-average ageing population is that young people cannot afford to buy in the area, and so they are leaving it? Does she agree that for the long-term health of communities such as mine, initiatives such as starter homes are a very good and reasonable policy that will enable people to enter the housing market?

[Ms Buck]

Funnily enough, that is almost the thrust of my argument. Things that are applicable in the hon. Lady’s constituency are not necessarily applicable in mine, so we want to have local flexibility and the freedom to develop a strategy that meets local needs. Also, I do not see why my constituents who are in housing need should fund home ownership for her constituents. We absolutely have to meet local needs; that is intrinsic to the idea of a local authority having statutory duties to meet housing need. I am afraid that I do not accept her point at all.

I know that other people want to speak, so I will not dwell on the issue that has already been raised—I have also raised it previously—about the income that people need to afford starter homes in places such as central London. It seems extraordinary that, on one hand, we think that social housing is a rare good that has to be rationed because we have to speak the language of priorities, but, on the other hand, our priorities are such that we can afford to give a 20% discount to people with incomes of up to £77,000 in central London. My colleagues and I, and Westminster City Council, make it absolutely clear that the strategy, as it is being imposed across the country, will have a very serious and negative effect in central London. It will provide a windfall gain for a very lucky and small cohort of people—good luck to them—but that, critically, will be bought at the expense of others.

I remind the House of what we have seen in recent years as a consequence of the Government’s catastrophic housing failure. In my area, we have 600 fewer social housing units than we had in 2009. We have 2,414 households in temporary accommodation. The number of people in housing need on the housing register has doubled to 4,500 since it was redefined, and reduced, in 2012. We have 1.2 million people on the housing register across the country. There has been an 80% rise in homelessness acceptances in London. We have seen a soaring housing benefit bill in the private sector, and a time bomb of housing benefit expenditure is coming down the line as low-income households are forced into the private rented sector. That is all before the Government cut housing benefit still further.

I end by going back to the point about the lottery. Good luck to those people who get the benefit of high value starter homes, but why should that be at the expense of people such as my constituents: the healthcare assistant I met last week, who is bidding for housing association homes where the monthly rent is more than her take-home pay; the family so overcrowded that their little son, who is suffering from skin cancer, has to share a bed with his siblings; the family of six—two parents and four young adults, two of whom are severely disabled—in a property so small that their wheelchair-bound son is unable to do his required physiotherapy; or the mum with two young children who was moved from Westminster and her local job to the edge of London, from where she has to commute in, getting her children up at 5.30 in the morning and returning home at 9.15 in the evening, who is weeping with the stress of her experience—it is duplicated in hundreds of other families—and who tells me that her daughter does not want to live with her anymore because she cannot bear the stress of homelessness? The Housing and Planning Bill, unfortunately, says that those people and their needs do not matter, and that housing will not be provided for people like them.

Much as I applaud initiatives to support affordable home ownership—and I do—I do not think that it should be achieved at the expense of people in housing need. That is what the Bill does, and that is why it is so pernicious. That is why I hope that we will be able to secure progress on at least some of the amendments that were achieved in the other place a couple of weeks ago.